Teenage Fanclub drummer turned classical star Francis MacDonald on recording in Hamilton Mausoleum

More recently however, it has been writing music for television that has put food on the table and shoes on the feet of his two young children. Soundtracks made at his home studio have featured on documentaries about the 20th anniversary of the Dunblane shootings and Scotland’s prisons and police force, as well as the Bradley Walsh-fronted quiz show Cash Trapped, The Beechgrove Garden, and actor David Hayman’s retracing of the steps of toorie-bunneted rambler Tom Weir.

But the most surprising development came with the release, in March of 2015, of his album, Music for String Quartet, Piano and Celeste. The eleven-track foray into classical composition, made with members of the Scottish Ensemble, gave Macdonald a hit album on the classical charts and made him a darling of Classic FM, where he was a featured artist. One track in particular, January Waltz, spanned the airwaves with champions on BBC6 Music including Gideon Coe and Jarvis Cocker.

His follow-up, released at the end of this month, both builds on that success and takes him back to his roots as a teenage member of the Uddingston/Bellshill diaspora whose music found fans across the United States and in Japan. The Hamilton Mausoleum Suite teams a quartet from the Scottish Festival Orchestra with harpist Sharron Griffiths on another 11 Macdonald compositions inspired by, and harnessing, the remarkable acoustic of the last resting place of the Dukes of Hamilton. The mausoleum stands by the M74 motorway on what was once the estate of long-demolished Hamilton Palace and was completed 160 years this year.

The long echo in the circular building has been harnessed before. America’s ground-breaking Kronos Quartet perfomed in it in 2011 with members of the National Youth Choir of Scotland, as part of a weekend’s residency in Glasgow, and a decade before that saxophonist Tommy Smith recorded a solo album, Into Silence, there. But Macdonald’s memory of the sonic possibilities of the tomb date back to his own childhood.

“I don’t remember seeing that someone else had recorded there and thinking ‘I’d like to do that,’” says Macdonald. “I was aware of the building for a long time.

“I remember going on a family visit when I was really young, and in particular the slamming of the old brass doors, which have now been removed because they were deteriorating. It took about 30 seconds for the noise of the door to fade to silence, and I remember that from when I was a wee boy of maybe eight.

“Later I went to school at Holy Cross High when it was right next to the Mausoleum and then after that, every time I was coming back from tours with bands on the M74, it was a sign that we were near home.

“But it was after I went on an Open Doors Day visit that there was this sort of gradual idea that it would be a nice place to hear music, and perhaps to perform music. Then the idea came to write music especially for it.”

Macdonald’s compositional style might be said to lend itself to an environment that requires long notes rather than fast figures that would pile up on one another because of the reverberation in the building. Tracks like Half Past Midnight and One Foot Then Another on the Hamilton Mausoleum Suite follow on from similar excursions on Music for String Quartet, Piano and Celeste, and fit less well with his work for television. Of the instructions he has had from programme producers, one was to lighten up a bit on music for a Channel 4 home renovation show, Best Laid Plans.

He says: “I was told: ‘Nothing bad happens in this programme. Although they might argue about the colour of the curtains, nobody dies. So keep it upbeat and light.’”

By way of contrast, of course, death is central to the Hamilton Mausoleum Suite, much of which was inspired by the building itself, the stone lions that guard it, and the sarcophagus in which the 10th Duke, who ordered its construction, is himself interred.

“By all accounts he was quite a vain, self-important man. To my mind the track The 10th Duke is a cross between a Haydn String Quartet and the Fawlty Towers theme tune, and in a way it shouldn’t work because it really should be heard in a more ‘dead’ environment. It is probably the spikiest, fastest piece, while the rest are all about space and long notes.

“David Byrne has written about working in different venues, why Talking Heads songs might sound good in CBGBs but not in Carnegie Hall, and how a two-minute punk song wouldn’t work in a stadium. He talks about music in cathedrals and how fast changes won’t work in that environment. So that was in my head as well.”

Macdonald’s previous album was recorded in Mogwai’s Castle of Doom studio, largely because of the fine piano there, which Macdonald played himself, alongside a celeste borrowed from the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. This time around he was not going to be constrained by his own instrumental limitations.

“By the time I had finished the quartet record, I’d learned so much by putting myself through that process. I didn’t want to use an intermediary, so that when the players sat down I wanted all the notes to be printed off from my printer.

“I also put myself in the middle of it by playing the piano on that record – and that stretched me. I recorded the piano first and by the end of the day I was knackered. With this one the change was that I could worry less about being a performer on it. That allowed me to write different music – it didn’t have to be music that was only as good as I could play or be part of.”

After the quartet record, Macdonald was asked to work on The Lost Songs of St Kilda album, which recorded the music of the abandoned island, as recovered from the memory of an elderly man in an Edinburgh care home, whose piano teacher had been one of those evacuated.

“I got an email from Decca asking if I’d like to arrange one of the songs, and that other composers are James MacMillan and Craig Armstrong. That was great for my confidence. We had one day in the studio with James MacMillan conducting the Scottish Festival Orchestra and all the composers in the control room at Gorbals Sound. To be sitting there in that company was a real ‘pinch me’ moment.”

“So I asked cellist and Scottish Festival Orchestra ‘fixer’ John Davidson to put together a group to record in the Mausoleum; I had to stress that it was pretty cold in there. When you do these things you want to have very good musicians and I’ve been lucky that whatever my efforts are, they’ve put a good sheen on it.”

Preparation was the key to the day of the recording, as well as learning to work with the acoustic, maintaining complete silence before the sound was captured and allowing every trace to die away in stillness.

“We had very little time once we were up and running and I had to speak very slowly and clearly to be understood. We had to have that concentration but we got whole album done in a single day in two three-hour sessions.”

Macdonald cannot speak highly enough of his quartet’s first violin, Justine Watts, who is the leader of Scottish Ballet’s orchestra. She, he says was “a lioness” at the session. Duvet coats, woolly hats, fingerless gloves and hot water bottles were the costume of the day, but he is convinced that all the musicians thought it was a great experience.

As for the composer’s own learning-curve, it was another school day in his multi-faceted musical curriculum.

“I’m beginning to realise that I like to have a subject. If you are free of a brief you wonder what direction to go in. The composer Eddie McGuire told me: ‘I like to write music that I know is going to be performed.’

“If you are a poet or a painter that’s not an issue, but if you are going to write a piece for 21 musicians it is kind of heart-breaking not to have a commission. What I need is a subject and once the Mausoleum curator Linda Barrett said; ‘Yes you can record here’, I had a subject and a focus.”

Francis Macdonald’s Hamilton Mausoleum Suite is released on Shoeshine/TR7 on January 26; a live performance of the music in the Mausoleum on February 19 is already over-subscribed.