I'm not morbid, says King Creosote. I am 55. What is there to lose?

The band in question was indeed small: King Creosote (Kenny Anderson) on acoustic guitar, with his long-term collaborator, Des Lawson, on keyboards, and Smith’s guitarist, Tony Shanahan, guesting on electric bass. The song – Circle My Demise, which Anderson introduces as “a sort of a promise to do better” – is without doubt one of the highlights of the evening. It was taken from his 2005 album, Rocket D.I.Y.; later in the concert, Anderson joined Smith herself in singing Pauper’s Dough, from his superb 2014 offering, From Scotland with Love.

King Creosote (Image: free)

Though a fan of Anderson’s work, I’d never seen him in concert until that night. That Pathways to Paris show – thought-provoking though it was, Patti Smith and all – was the cue, later that week, for King Creosote CDs to be retrieved from shelves and for others to be re-listened to via streaming services. He has, as you will discover, covered a wide range of musical genres, from folk and indie rock to ambient.

M y favourites, for what it is worth, remain Diamond Mine, his gorgeous, Mercury Prize-nominated collaboration with Jon Hopkins (“the songs”, said NME, “are sprawling, pastoral and freeform, like a Celtic take on Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden”; the manager of the indie record label, Domino, is said to have cried when they played him one completed track, John Taylor’s Month Away); the re-issued KC Rules OK; and From Scotland With Love, whose songs, laden with striking melodies, soundtrack the director Virginia Heath’s vivid documentary of Scottish archive footage.

Anderson, long one of Scotland’s more captivating musical talents (to say nothing of most prolific) is about to take the road again, this time with songs from his latest album, I DES. The ‘Any Port in a Storm’ tour, which starts on April 5, will take him to such places as Troon, Portree, Findhorn, Stornoway and St Andrews; to no-one’s great surprise, many of the gigs were quick to sell out.

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I DES, which was co-created by Des Lawson, comes seven years after Anderson’s last album, Astronaut Meets Appleman. In the view of author (and Anderson’s fellow Fifer), Ian Rankin, it “might just be his best album. Catchy, quirky, unutterably moving”. The album is notable for its poignant meditations on ageing and mortality. But bleak? Not necessarily.

Interviewed by David Pollock for the Dundee Courier last November, Anderson reflected that a previous interviewer had asked him why his songs were so bleak, “He picked out a line from the chorus of Blue Marbled Elm Trees,” the musician added, referring to one of the songs on I DES. “That’s actually one of the most uplifting lines. What’s morbid about it?

“The verses are morbid, I get it. I’m singing about my own funeral in a tongue-in-cheek way. To my mind, though, the chorus is really uplifting.

“It’s about a life well-lived, I’m happy with my lot, I’ve got my girls, I’ve done things, I’m delighted. You’ve read that as morbid? Oh s***.”

Later, referring to that same prior interview, he observed: “[The journalist] asked, ‘is there a theme through the record?’ “Yeah, the songs were written approaching 50. Write me your thoughts as you approach 50, and I do not think they will be any less morbid than that.

“I’m true to my age, I hope. I’ve never tried to be younger, but at the same time I think I’ve hit on something universal.

“I tried to do it on From Scotland With Love, I looked at that panoply of people (in the film) and thought, somebody like me has to be in there. The guy that goes, oh god, there’s a camera, or somebody who’s smoking, who thinks, oh god, the wife might see me!”

In an interview with the Herald’s Barry Didcock, also last November, Anderson said that I DES was King Creosote’s last record. The idea had come from the producer and musician Paul Savage.

“I thought it would be great”, Anderson continued. “I could leave the weight of the King Creosote cape. I could take it off and just do something else.”

King Creosote (Image: free)

Was he serious, Didcock asked? He was. “I hope that subject-wise these songs still chime, obviously I do. But in terms of where I am in my head they feel like an older version of me. If you had asked me in 2019, had I changed that much since 2016, I’d have said: ‘No, I’m kind of the same’. But from 2020 to now? I’m a very different animal, and I suppose internally I’m struggling as to see how this fits my music life”.

H e alluded to I DES being the last King Creosote album in yet another chat with a journalist, this time in The List. He was asked about the album’s closer, an adventurous 36-minute-long drone entitled Drone in B sharp, and conceded that “for fans of the pop single, our drone might be more annoying than the sound of their neighbour’s lawnmower”. He added: “I don’t give it much thought anymore, for I can’t even please everybody that plays on my records, let alone everybody else!

“I DES”, he continued, “more than any previous record, was worked on as the last KC record in the belief that things would never get back to normal. I’m 55: other than a dunt in star ratings, what is there to lose? Lucky to be putting out a record at all”.

So where now for this most perceptive of songwriters? Barry Didcock, in the Herald, writes that Anderson’s music life now needs to accommodate an outlook which has shifted, and concerns which have changed, become distilled or sharpened. Naturally his lyrics have altered accordingly.

“In the last three years I’ve been writing lyrics that are very politicised, and I’ve never done that. That’s never been a King Creosote thing”, Anderson told him. His current concerns were with “the sort of stuff that gets censored. It’s like you can have an opinion these days but it has to be a very certain [one]. It’s very narrow. If you agree with this, it’s fine, you can say what you like. But if you don’t, it’s nu-uh.”

Put bluntly, Didcock wrote, Anderson is angry. He has a finger to point and plans to do it with a new set of songs, a new format for his music and, presumably, a new moniker. As Anderson put it: “There’s no nostalgia, there’s no play on words. It’s very direct, the stuff I’ve been writing.” Did he worry that he will end up being cast as some kind of libertarian, right-wing oddball? “Yeah, of course. Because I’ve always been a critical thinker. I’m the guy that asks the awkward question.” It will be fascinating to see what he comes up with next.

At the moment King Creosote has some 121,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. His most-listened-to track (nearly four million at the last count) is Bats in the Attic, one of the tracks on Diamond Mine, that wondrous album he made with Jon Hopkins back in 2011. If you’re new to the pleasures of King Creosote, that album is as good a place to any to start.

In 2006 Ian Rankin wrote the liner notes for the reissued KC Rules OK. His sentiments are as valid now as they were then. Anderson, he observed, “transforms simple song lyrics into some of the most haunting wee stories around. Snapshots of loss and redemption played out against small-town backdrops”. A line in one particular song summed up “so much of the (especially male) Scottish psyche, while also tapping into the Gothic tradition of writers such as James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson”.

Concluded Rankin: “There’s certainly something special about the music of King Creosote”.

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