Return to Y'Hup: The World of Ivor Cutler review – tribute to surreal poet's fantasy island
A self-described “oblique musical philosopher”, Ivor Cutler was the Glasgowborn surrealist who wielded whimsy like a dagger. He bewitched everyone from the Beatles to John Peel with his absurdist eye and deadpan delivery, usually over the Bagpuss wheeze of a vintage harmonium.
Cutler was born in 1923 and died in 2006. Despite the lack of a roundnumber anniversary, his legacy was recently reaffirmed by a new double album, spearheaded by the drummer and academic Matt Brennan and saxophonist Raymond MacDonald. The Return to Y’Hup project brought together a murderer’s row of indie and folk talent to revisit Cutler’s earliest work set on his fantasy island – pronounced “ya-hoop” – where triplehorned creatures roam and green rain falls upwards.
This launch gig at the Celtic
Connections festival is as populous as that crammed double album. Twenty musicians are scattered around the stage, although the guest of honour is arguably Cutler’s own rather batteredlooking harmonium – which is, in fact, a world war one-era field organ, as Brennan relates. While the atmosphere is laid-back, this appealingly scruffy supergroup rattle through an astonishing amount of material, clocking up 40 Cutler originals across two one-hour sets.
Folk singer Karine Polwart, Mogwai guitarist Stuart Braithwaite and BMX Bandits bandleader Duglas T Stewart are among the guests who successfully tackle brief comic monologues, while Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch nails the punchline of Gruts for Tea, one of Cutler’s most beloved bits. The core band of Brennan, MacDonald, guitarist Malcolm Benzie and keyboardist/flautist Sarah Hayes create some wondrous chamber-pop backing, but live it is the darker-hued songs that really crackle: Heather Leigh’s swooping take on The Boo Boo Bird is Lynchian and unsettling, while Chris Thomson of cult band the Bathers finds a supremely anxious timbre for Who Tore Your Trousers?
Before a suitably strange audience singalong in morse code conducted by Polwart, the entire ensemble – led by MacDonald and Emma Pollock – com
bine for Cutler’s 1983 single Women of the World. It is a strident song about overturning the patriarchy to subvert a global apocalypse that suggests this perennial oddball was far ahead of his time.
Celtic Connections, various venues, Glasgow, until 2 February.