Over the decades, Scottish musicians have made many classic, cult or under-appreciated albums that have stood the test of time. Today, we look back at Runrig's The Cutter & The Clan.

 

A COUPLE of years ago, BBC Alba made a brief but interesting documentary about a man named Johnny Iain Morrison, who is originally from Lochmaddy, on North Uist.

Johnny had emigrated to Canada in the Sixties, sailing there with his wife on the Empress of Canada. Among their fellow passengers were Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco.

He had in his day been a popular, well-known figure on North Uist, taking the local kids around on his lorry as he made deliveries to shops, and becoming something of a hero to them in the process. Two of the kids who remembered him fondly were brothers Rory and Calum Macdonald.

In later years Rory and Calum would co-establish the group, Runrig. And in 1987, on what turned out to be their breakthrough album, The Cutter & The Clan, they wrote an affectionate song about Johnny. The Cutter, it was called. And it became one of their most lastingly popular songs.

In the documentary, 'The Cutter – Seonaidh Beag Iain', the Macdonald brothers exchanged reminiscences with Johnny on a video call, and also recalled that Johnny would return from Canada every summer to cut peat for his mother.

The song about Johnny Morrison was just one of the many highlights on The Cutter & The Clan, alongside Alba, Pride of the Summer, Protect and Survive, and An Ubhal As Airde [‘The Highest Apple’].

The band had been perfecting its sound and gaining in confidence over the course of four studio albums: Play Gaelic (1978), The Highland Connection (1979), Recovery (1981) and Heartland (1985), the last three on their own Ridge Records label. By the time of The Cutter & The Clan, Runrig – Donnie Munro on vocals; Rory on vocals/harmonies, bass and acoustic guitar; Malcolm Jones on guitar; the newly-headhunted Pete Wishart on keyboards; Ian Bayne on drums, and Calum on percussion and background vocals – were mining a rich seam of creativity and inspiration.

“We’d never lacked confidence in our ability,’’ was how Munro put it, years later. “But there was something very special about that particular period. Suddenly we began to feel that all the effort we’d put in was going to be rewarded”.

The skyscraping sound of the songs on the album reflected the band’s desire to replicate their atmospheric live sound. Wishart’s keyboards work, influenced by the music of U2 and Simple Minds, was a key part of the formula. 

In the view of Richie Muir, lead singer and frontman with the popular group, Beat the Drum - The Runrig Experience, which pays tribute to the music of Runrig, The Cutter & The Clan is Runrig's Joshua Tree moment. As it happens, both that album and U2's Joshua Tree came out in the same year - 1987.

"I loved everything they did before", says Richie. "It's the album that changed everything for them. U2 were amazing before but then they did Joshua Tree and you're like, 'how do you put that many great songs on one album?'

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The Cutter & The Clan sold some 30,000 copies in Scotland in the run-up to Christmas 1987, and capped an epic year in the life of the band. Runrig were becoming big news; newspapers and music weeklies were keen to profile them (press reviews of the new album were enthusiastic, to say the least). The band’s touring schedule included visits to Canada and Denmark and, that August, an important appearance on the bill at a U2 gig at Murrayfield (an engagement partly brought about by Simple Minds’ singer Jim Kerr telling Bono how much he liked Runrig, according to Tom Morton’s biography of the band).

The new year began with big record companies circling around Runrig: the contest was eventually won by Chrysalis Records, which made a swift point of reissuing The Cutter & The Clan and, that same year, Once In a Lifetime, a live LP recorded at Glasgow’s Barrowland venue and the Eden Court Theatre in Inverness.

In all, Runrig would release another four albums for Chrysalis – Searchlight (1989), The Big Wheel (1991), Amazing Things (1993), and Mara (1995). For all their sales successes, sold-out concerts and growing reputation as a superb live act, however, Runrig didn’t break through with English audiences until the end of 1994. When it happened, it was due to a track from The Cutter & The Clan being chosen to soundtrack a lager TV advert.

“In Scotland, Runrig’s albums and shows outsell everyone, including U2”, as music writer Bob Flynn noted in the Guardian in April 1995. “They released their first album, Play Gaelic, in 1978 and for over a decade without a hint of hype or a major record company in sight, they created their own independent industry, the dark laments and high rocking reels occasionally catapulted into the UK album charts on the strength of Scottish sales alone.

“Yet the lyrical, Celtic force of Runrig has never gained more than a toe-hold with audiences south of the border, despite signing to Chrysalis records in 1989 and establishing a burgeoning audience in Europe.

“An Ubhal As Airde, a contemporary Gaelic psalm and the most Celtic of songs from The Cutter And The Clan, was picked up as the soundtrack to a Carlsberg campaign at the end of last year. Released as a single on April 24, An Ubhal As Airde is being tipped as the single-most-likely-to by chart and radio playlist tipsters”.

Read more On The Record

According to the head of Chrysalis records, the label, Carlsberg and retailers “were bombarded by phone calls from people looking for the music”. The single peaked at number 18 in the British charts. (The Glasgow Herald noted in April 1995 that the pop impresario, Jonathan King, tried to persuade the band to enter the Eurovision Song Contest with the single, An Abhul As Airde).

Bob Flynn, in his article, made the point that Gaelic language and the cultural identity of the band were raised by the single. “Coming from a downtrodden cultural area we have to face the fact that our social history left us with a legacy,” Munro told him. “An Ubhal As Airde comes from a time which was very important for us. We throw off the self-apologistic aspects that many people in Scottish culture have about themselves and we found a certain self-belief which we lacked before.

“We realised that being presented as something identifiably Scottish needn’t be limiting. We’ve never got into the mid-Atlantic trawl in the use of language and music. We sound like we sound, we are what we are. Britain is the only country in which the Gaelic language seems to be a huge barrier. In Europe, English is a second language anyway, and if you sing in Gaelic it’s no big deal, it’s just another language”.

The album to this day has a special place in the affections of the band and of many fans. Pete Wishart, now the SNP MP for Perth and Kinross-shire, speaking to Holyrood magazine in May 2022, recalled of his first days with the group: “They were stalwarts of the folk scene and getting good audiences in those clubs, student unions and village halls. They wanted to go more into the mainstream and I brought something a bit more rock and pop. The first album I worked on was The Cutter and the Clan, and that defined our sound. I loved it. What we had that nobody else had was the Gaelic, tapping into 500 years of songs and culture. We offered a rock perspective from the north. Pride of the Summer encapsulates that”.

Richie Muir, of Beat the Drum, said: "When we do our shows I think there are only three tracks on that entire album that we haven't done. That's quite amazing, really. We've done the other seven. There are so many great songs on it: Alba is enormous and so is Hearts of Olden Glory. Rocket to the Moon, Protect and Survive, The Only Rose, Pride of the Summer are all great songs, too. There aren't that many albums that bands bring out that have so many big songs on it. The soundscape on the album is just incredible. I just think it's perfect.

"We've just done a festival in Dunnet, in the north of Scotland. It was the first UK festival we've done, and we didn't know how it would go, because effectively you're not playing to a Runrig crowd. But most of the people knew all the words to between 50 per cent and 70 per cent of the songs, and when we came to Alba, and Hearts of Olden Glory, they were singing along to them, from the front of the audience right to the back. It was amazing.

"There's one song on The Cutter & The Clan that I think is the complete song, as in a perfect work of art. From start to finish, Rocket to the Moon - the way it's crafted and the way it's put together, and the absolute killer chorus - is such a great song".

Richie believes that Scotland owes Runrig a debt for turning a song not on the album - Loch Lomond - into an anthem, "especially with the change in tempo at the end. where everybody jumps around. We did that at the festival and it was like lighting the blue touchpaper. It was absolutely fabulous. I just thought, Goodness me - we're so fortunate to have this Scottish heritage in music form. We are just trying to keep the Runrig sound going. We're the messengers".

Read more On the Record

Donnie Munro was replaced by Bruce Guthro in 1998, and Pete Wishart, after he left for Parliament in 2001, by Brian Hurren. Several studio and live albums followed, but when the band was gathering material for their 2016 album, The Story, there was, the Macdonald brothers have acknowledged, “the feel of swansong about it”.

Runrig bowed out after 45 years in the business with two epic concerts, attended by some 50,000 fans, on the picturesque plains beneath Stirling Castle in August 2018, recorded and released under the title of The Last Dance as a triple CD and a cinema film. The set-list was an emotional, comprehensive run-through of their finest moments, including several tracks from that breakthrough album of 1987.

The band, sadly, is no more (Guthro himself passed away, aged 62, on September 5, 2023), but their music survives them, as does the collective memory of their vibrant gigs, whether indoor or outdoor.

As Peter Ross wrote in these pages in 2018, on the eve of Runrig's farewell concerts, "Their catalogue is sophisticated, complex, engaged with people, place, identity, faith ... Here is a band whose contribution to Scottish culture has been immense, even historic. Their true place is among a lineage that stretches through Robert Burns, Billy Connolly and the historian John Prebble; their internationally popular stories of Scotland and Scottishness have, arguably, had a shaping influence on the way we see ourselves and are seen by the world. In particular, as the first band to fuse the Gaelic language with rock, they remade an ancient tradition for a new age".

  •  A remastered double album consisting of The Cutter & The Clan and Once in a Lifetime is now on sale. runrig.co.uk; Runrig is also on Facebook.

  • Beat the Drum - The Runrig Experience play the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on February 7, 2025. Tickets on sale now. Website: therunrigexperience.com 

Next week: Out of the Storm, by Jack Bruce