COUNTESS OF FIFE
All hail the Countess of Fife. You may know her better as Fay Fife, front woman of Edinburgh new wave icons The Rezillos, but she is captured here in rollicking cowpunk mode, beaming in for her Scotsman Session from the Macarts centre in Galashiels, accompanied by Allan Mcdowall and Dave Coyle on a new song, Hard Woman to Love.
“It’s essential to keep writing and developing,” says Fife, “and making three minutes of music for The Scotsman is a great opportunity to try out new ideas. Lyrically, it’s about a lot of things, but fundamentally it use san old-fashioned misogynistic-sounding idea and turns it on its head.”
When she’s not indulging in a spot of country subversion, Fife has been collaborating with Goodbye Mr Mackenzie front man Martin Met calf ea nd maria ru do na multimedia performance, Shamanic Live, filmed in the Pleasance Courtyard for online streaming during this year’s Fringe (as part of the Made in Scotland programme), while The Rezillos are scheduled to perform at Kirkcaldy’s Breakout festival in October.
Although it’s good to have dates in the diary, fife is feeling ambivalent about the past year. “I’ve loved hearing the sound of the birds, but the pandemic and lockdown has had a devastating effect on many aspects of my own and others’ lives,” she says.
“Without the opportunity to rehearse and play live, The Countess of Fife effectively ceased to be a working live band of core musicians. It just became a nun sustainable idea .” instead, the countess has maintained her fiefdom by pulling in a range of musicians to record a new Countess of Fife album, produced by Edinburgh composer Jim Sutherland, which is set for release early next year.
“I’m really excited about it,” she says.
Shamanic Live is online on 16-30 August as part of the Fringe, www.edfringe.com. The Countess of Fife and The Rezillos play the Breakout Festival,kirk c al dy, on 8-10 october, https://breakout-together.com/