Gareth Williams: Songs From The Last Page

Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 30) until today JJJJ

It sounds such a perversely odd project by composersongwriter Gareth Williams – to write songs around the final paragraphs of novels or short stories by notable Scottish authors, past and present. The last word, you might think, in eccentricity.

Yet these closing phrases, sung from the keyboard by Williams with a confiding warmth and passion, plus atmospheric violin and cello accompaniments from Aisling O Dea and Justyna Jablonska, can encapsulate

the essential nub, of truth or otherwise, of a story, reprising its drama, terror, poignancy or existential resignation.

Take, for instance, hoary old classics like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Valley Of Fear, ending with a frustrated Sherlock Holmes: his “fateful eyes still strained to pierce the veil”. Or the sinister cries of “Pieces of Eight!” that haunt the narrator’s dreams in Treasure Island, which Williams renders with a suitable degree of melodrama.

As he takes books from a pile by his keyboard, reading then singing their closing phrases, sign-offs from more contemporary novels see Ali Smith saluting old bones in How To Be Both and Alasdair Gray contemplating

maps and mortality in the epilogue to his mighty Lanark. In contrast, an exuberant treatment lends a note of triumph to the pithy station platform exchange closing Ely Percy’s Paisleyset novel Duck Feet while, in a Gaelic interlude, Deirdre Graham joins the trio to sing her poignant lullaby, Bà Bà Mo Leanabh, in response to collected letters from Gaels in the First World War trenches.

From the pathos of Jackie Kay’s Pink House to the pizzicato strings ticking away time in the bittersweet conclusion of Peter Pan, Williams’s music lifts words off the page, transfiguring them while at the same time re-focussing our understanding.