Scottish sound of Beth's folk roots

sun-dappled conclusions, so Beth Orton's conversational impulses tend to be rather wayward, but no less revealing.

And so it came to pass that the two of us this week strolled up a few by-ways before entering the golden gates of Nitty-Gritty City, which in Beth's case is located somewhere near Dunkeld. Eh? You'll see, you'll see.

Looking ahead to Beth's first professional visit to Glasgow next week - she supports the Beautiful South at Barrowland on Tuesday - we began by pondering why her wondrous debut album, Trailer Park, freshly released on the Heavenly label, hadn't been called what she'd originally intended to call it, Winnebago.

``Winnebago's a trade name and shortly before the album's release, I got paranoid about lawsuits. What I'd most liked about the name was the sound of it, and for a while I wondered about calling the album something like Minnebago, or Winnie Embargo.

``But Trailer Park conjures up the same kind of filmic American images, images of transience and dislocation . . . and funnily enough, when we shot the video for the first single, She Cries Your Name, in a trailer park in the Mojave desert in California, I had all these odd, rather desperate people coming up and giving me their entire life-stories in a second. Even though I didn't want them to.''

Beth's own life-story starts literally in 1970 in Norwich. Beth's mum worked as an administrator at Norwich Arts Centre, and so from a very early age Beth was taken to see a wide range of shows there. That led her to believe she wanted to act, although her spell at drama college in London only lasted a year.

Singing was what she was truly born for, it transpired. In her short four-year career, Beth has found herself at the centre of a mini-whirlwind of music-press attention, having accidentally attained much hipness-by-association. She sang on credible discs by a succession of quoted names: with William Orbit's ambient-techno project, Strange Cargo; with jazz-hoppers Red Snapper; with Primal Scream's Andrew Innes, and on the Chemical Brothers' critically-acclaimed and chart-friendly Exit Planet Dust LP. Why, those excitable London media-jockeys have even given Beth her own pigeonhole: trip-folk.

``At the time I started working with all these bands, they weren't known by anyone. They were just bunches of lads sitting about in studios, but of course now everyone looks at what's become a list of hot names and says: `Oh yeah, she's been very smart.'

``It wasn't planned that way, and I never expected to be offered my own recording deal. I wasn't even sure what to do when I eventually did get offered one.''

Beth's become better at looking ahead career-wise since then. She's currently bidding to arrange musical collaborations with guitar maestro Ry Cooder and vintage jazzer Terry Callier. ``I was only introduced to Terry Callier 18 months ago by Red Snapper . . . I'm not ashamed to say that I still don't consider myself very knowledgeable about music.''

Yet Beth's seen a lot of bands over the years. ``From the age of eight, mum would take me to see blues bands, reggae bands, whoever came to Norwich Arts Centre. I was incredibly lucky.

``When I got to 12, I started choosing for myself who I wanted to see. I remember the first band I chose was Discharge . . . at the age of 12! Punk was all everyone in Norwich wanted to be. But the folk thing, I'm not sure where that came from.''

Or so Beth says. Before she remembers the crucial Norwich-Dunkeld connection.

``Dougie McLean! He's the culprit! That's why! I went to see him in Norwich with my mum and my mum's best friend, Jenny, when I was nine. I remember Dougie appeared on stage, and Jenny said: `I'm going to marry that man!' And the three of us were up dancing the whole time Dougie was on, and at the end Jenny went down and gave Dougie a bottle of whisky and a kiss. And I remember he came back to our house that night - and Jenny did marry him!

``Me and mum would go up for holidays with them in Dunkeld, and I had all his records, and over the years I played them over and over till they were scratched to bits. Dougie's voice, that first album with him on the cover with really long hair leaning against a tree!

``I haven't seen either Jenny or Dougie in years. But that's where the folk thing comes from - he's the man!''

Make sure you're one of Beth's guests at Barrowland on Tuesday - and let's hope she has a couple of extra special ones.

n IN the course of his many and varied musical collaborations, guitar overlord Skip McDonald has certainly learnt the value of a spot of cultural cross-fertilisation. Having begun his career as a teenage jazzer in his native Ohio, Skip has travelled the globe for two decades picking up fresh stylistic inputs. Of these, the dubbier and bluesier elements will be to the fore tonight in Glasgow, at King Tut's, and tomorrow in Edinburgh, at the Venue, as Skip leads his esteemed Little Axe troupers through their latest album for the On U label, Slow Fuse.

To understand where Skip's headed, it would help to know where he's been. As a sessions man, Skip's playing has propelled 20 years of soulful funk on labels ranging from All Platinum to Philly International; Tommy Boy to Sugarhill. At the latter label, accompanied then as now by Doug Wimbish and Keith LeBlanc, Skip was in at the birth of Grandmaster Flash's The Message and White Line.

Skip's also played with acts as varied as James Brown, Bomb The Bass, George Clinton, Jesse Rae, Gary Clail, Wilson Pickett, and the O'Jays. Nevertheless, he'll admit that he wasn't always as healthily open-minded about music as he is now.

``There was a time in the late seventies, early eighties that the recession led to every musician getting sacked, and we all got replaced by sequencers and drum-machines. For example, in New York there was a bar called Small's Paradise where you could work every night, playing 40 minutes in the hour every hour from 9pm to 4am, and you could make a living doing covers.

``Then Small's Paradise closed, and suddenly - at first out of neccessity and then out of love - I went from being a musician to being a record-maker and someone who knew about computers. And it's a fact that until 1984 when I met On U boss Adrian Sherwood, I never knew reggae was anything other than Bob Marley. I'd never heard dub, or Prince Far I or Lee `Scratch' Perry.''

Skip has always known about the blues, however. He is sure that recent reports of the genre's death have been premature.

``There's always rebellion against the music you grew up with in your parents' house. I know as a kid in the sixties that most of us back then saw the blues as oldy-timey music. We were into Sam Cooke, James Brown, the Temptations.

``But with the blues, while it seems like you're a long way from it, you never are. At street-level now in cities in the States, there's no sign

of the blues, yet the one-

time supposed devil's music has become academically accepted and is being studied by middle-class college kids

at colleges.''

Will his yearly Scottish visit give Mr McDonald time to check out his family tree's

tartan roots?

``There are still too many things ahead of me that I want to know!''

Hail funky Skip, chieftain of the clan McGroovy.

I still don't consider myself very knowledgeable about music