Constant Follower: Norman MacCaig and trauma on new album

Walking home from his girlfriend’s one night a teenage McAll was subjected to a violent gang attack by a group of older men, leaving him with serious brain injuries.

The group were caught, but eventually plea bargained their ways down to community service.

Mr McAll says: “They were taking turns jumping off a wall onto my head, which led to pretty severe injuries.

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“I lost the ability to do a lot of the things I used to be able to do; I went from being pretty much the top of my class to the bottom overnight.

“I didn’t remember any of the actual incident but I had the emotional trauma of this post head injury psychosis afterward.

“Although there was physical damage the emotional damage was far longer lasting. I had post head injury psychosis, which nobody diagnosed at the time. I kind of just accepted for some reason that it was how things were now.

“I was at such a low ebb. For example, I believed that anything outwith my sight just ceased to exist, so I’d sort of test that. I thought everything was put there just for me.

“I remember one time standing up in the middle of the bus and just shouting something crazy to see what people’s reaction would be. Then nobody reacted – of course they didn’t, they were all scared s***less – and I sat down going, ‘ha, see, it IS all fake’.

“It also led to these things called cluster headaches which doesn’t sound like so much but it’s the most painful condition known to man.

“I was misdiagnosed with that for six years, there was no relief given so you turn to ways of coping with the pain.

“I started self-medicating on different drugs, which nobody knew I was doing.

“I was doing it all on complete privacy because I wasn’t receiving any medical care, I didn’t get any therapy after it, no psychology sessions or anything like that and I wasn’t good at speaking to my family.

“I didn’t tell anyone what was going on because I wasn’t sure what was going on myself.”

Eventually Mr McAll had to pay for a private consultation to be diagnosed with post head injury psychosis, and even then says he had to battle to get the drugs he needed.

Treatments have included sumatriptan injections, oxygen and medical cannabis, but arguably the most effective came in the written form via the poetry of Norman MacCaig.

Mr McAll explains: “I had to re-learn how to process information. I’d try and read a book and I could still read the words but I’d get to the end of the sentence and I’d have completely forgotten the start of the sentence.

“I gave up for a number of years initially. I’m not sure what changed but then I just had this desire to get better and part of that was teaching myself how to read again, how to process information.

“My English teacher from many years before, the way any good English teacher should, would slip me certain books and say: ‘take them home, keep them’.

“One of them was this book of poetry by Norman MacCaig, and when I was looking for something easy to read and understand it was that book that I came across.

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“I realised I could read it line by line, and in poetry – especially MacCaig’s – each line is like a story in itself. So I’d just teach myself that, learn it, teach myself the meaning and try to learn what it meant and gradually, bit-by-bit I made my way through that little book.

“He writes about Scotland and his reaction to wildlife and nature and the wind, the wildness and the wilderness of Scotland.

“I try and capture some of that in my music. The most important thing in music, for me, is space.

“When I’m mixing it’s a process of deleting stuff and making more space rather than adding stuff, I love that about his poetry.

“He doesn’t use fancy words, it doesn’t feel like he’s trying to be clever it just feels like he’s trying to convey his experience of what’s going on round about us in a way that’s so vivid and real.

“I just connect with that deeply.

“Then he’ll turn and say something deeply profound. On ‘Summer Farm’ he says: ‘Self under self, a pile of selves I stand/Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand/Lift the farm like a lid and see/Farm within farm, and in the centre, me’.

“Everything about that resonates with me, there’s all this stuff going on with the farm but then… what the f*** IS all this, you know?”

Mr McAll spent 10 years on the windswept west coast learning to play guitar again, and Constant Follower’s first album Set Aside Some Time was nominated for Scottish Album of the Year.

New LP Even Days Dissolve is inspired by MacCaig’s work, and produced in collaboration with acoustic guitarist Scott William Urquhart.

Mr McAll says: “I’d found his music some years before when I was looking for a support artist and I just fell in love with it – if he’s not the best acoustic guitarist in Scotland he’s certainly up there.

“His stuff’s just really incredible, and he’s been through a lot of trauma too – he had the loss of his daughter and his music’s coming from that place

“It’s hard to put real emotion and feeling into solo acoustic guitar, not a lot of people can do it but I think you can hear the stuff he’s been through coming through in his music.

“So I just sort of connected with it and found it quite healing, so I wanted to make an album with him.

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“For a long time we said we would and eventually he sent me a guitar track, just him playing acoustic guitar, and I spent a few days in the studio messing around with it and adding some spoken word and electronics.

“The track is called ‘The Space Between Stars’ and it turned out really good. That’s kind of my way of working with most people, never say you’ll do an album but say ‘let’s do a track’ then see how that goes.

“Every song on the album stems from one of Scott’s original guitar compositions and I’ve just layered things up on top of them and added some vocals.

“I got in a range of different musicians who I love, most of the Constant Follower band play on it in some part.

“When we started working on it I felt it would be the ideal opportunity to kind of incorporate something to do with Norman MacCaig.

“Initially I was just going to say some of his poetry but it just didn’t sit right, so I started searching for recordings of his voice.

“I couldn’t find anything for ages and ages, until I came across these little recordings an Irish record label had made.

“We approached them, they gave us permission and we managed to eventually get permission from his publisher as well.

“Fortunately it was two of my favourite poems, ‘Basking Shark’ and ‘Summer Farm’. ‘Summer Farm’ is one of the first, if not THE first, poems of his that I ever read and I just fell in love with it.

“So we managed to incorporate that then built some songs around this important poetry.”

Even Days Dissolve, a sparse, haunting collection of songs is released on April 14 but Mr McAll has already completed the second Constant Follower album proper, having relocated to Texas to work on music ahead of an appearance at SXSW.

He says: “We had written and recorded the second Constant Follower album proper, and I like to work with someone else to mix it because then it brings fresh ears and new ideas.

“There’s this band I really like called Loma, and the guy who produced those records and was in the band, Dan Duszynski, was living out on a ranch near Texas.

“I’d asked him if he’d be interested in producing the album, he listened to the music and jumped at it. So I was out there for two or three weeks with him just mixing.

“I came away with an album I think is a massive step up from the last Constant Follower album. It’s hard to say it’s good but I’m super-satisfied with it and that’s the only way I know if it’s ‘good’ is if I’m happy and feel there’s nothing more to be done.

“The second album’s finished, recorded and ready to go we’re just talking to a really nice label at the moment about that.

“Then I’m going into writing hibernation where I’ll write the third album and start recording that as soon as possible.

“I can only work part-time on it, everything takes a lot long for health reasons. Everything takes twice as long so it’s about making sure that as soon as this album’s finished I’m quickly starting the next one because I know it’s going to take me twice as long as it would someone else.”