Reader makes her Crieff debut at last

Folk-pop treasure Eddi Reader’s been racking up Courier Country gigs in recent months. The former Fairground Attraction frontwoman returned earlier this year with her 12th solo album Light Is In The Horizon, a collection of outtakes from sessions for her previous two LPS.

Now she’s looking forward to debuting in Crieff to cap a UK tour marking four decades of live performance.

“It’s a 40th anniversary, but due to the pandemic, it’s now 42 years,” she chuckles.

“I’m not a big fan of time and watches and clocks, but it felt like a milestone to me. I was sitting one April, a couple of years ago, remembering how almost 40 years earlier I was on the side of a river in the south of France – I was busking and I’d decided to come home.

“So it was kind of marking that decision to take myself seriously – to be authentic about the gifts I’d been given and to try to use them to bring some kind of pleasure, if not just to myself but to anybody that wants to listen.”

It was the Covid situation of a year ago that led Eddi, 63, to revisit songs she’d put away after completing her 2014 release Vagabond and its 2018 follow-up Cavalier. “I couldn’t get into the studio and wasn’t really sure who I was in the world, then I realised I had all these extra tracks I’d managed to not use,” she explains.

“For me, the song and its moment is the thing. Putting them all together is another concept I’m really not all that clear about.

“I get involved with a song and it’s a whole universe, so I had all these little universes in a cupboard and I couldn’t fit them in.

“I just forgot about them until I got myself into a place where they sounded brand new to me.”

After playing Perth, Dunfermline and Stirling in April and Dundee’s Gardyne in September, Eddi’s pledging a set worth remembering at Morrison’s Academy Hall.

“I don’t want to make the audience sit for four hours – there’s a lot of albums to cover, but I just sort of get there and go,” she says.

“I love creating memories more than anything, because they’re fuel to the story of me walking about the planet – and singing has been my journey. I could be singing in front of the King or my granny’s pal at the bingo, it has the same import for me.”

Crieff may be just an hour’s drive from her Glasgow home, but Eddi admits her knowledge of Strathearn is rather sketchy.

“I certainly know that my dad used to take us on trips all over Scotland in his various broken cars,” she says.

“I’m the oldest of seven, so when we started it was a Morris Traveller, and by the end of it there was a big blue Transit van.

“He’d show us all the beauty of the country, but I didn’t clock all the names.

“When I get there I’ll go: ‘Oh I remember that chip shop, that’s right!’ It’s that way with me, I’ll recognise it once I’m in there.”

FOUR DECADES: Eddi Reader has been touring the UK to mark 42 years since her first live performance.