King Creosote: Kenny Anderson says this will be the last album

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But in its potential for both distraction and renewal, the seven year thing has affected the acclaimed singer-songwriter plenty.

For a start, that’s how long it is since Astronaut Meets Appleman, Anderson’s previous album as alt-folk troubadour King Creosote. A period of time in which he has “fallen into dad mode,” as he puts it.

He also turned 50, which brought a typical amount of recalibration and stock-taking as well as an untypical response to the same: he decided to play 50 gigs in his local pub in Crail “as a present to myself”. And he was then “hammered” by the pandemic as venues shut, life ground to a halt and many things seemed changed forever, himself included.

True to his words – he tells me he has spent his career trying to “stem the tide of digitisation” – Anderson lives without wi-fi and has no mobile phone. We’re talking over Zoom, admittedly, but it’s only his third outing on any video-conferencing platform and he’s doing it from his manager’s house in Elie.

Other aspects of his career have been more successful than his attempts to defeat digitisation. To date, he has released 20 plus records on the iconic Fence label he founded in 1997 and which gave early starts to acts such as James Yorkston, Rozi Plain, The Pictish Trail and Withered Hand.

He’s also signed to London’s prestigious Domino label, home to Arctic Monkeys, and for whom he made the Mercury Music Prize-nominated 2011 album Diamond Mind, a collaboration with electronic musician Jon Hopkins. In 2014 he scored the documentary film From Scotland With Love.

The new album cover (Image: free)

It’s courtesy of Domino that this month Anderson finally returns to the world of recorded music, breaking his long silence with the release of a new album, I DES. And where Astronaut Meets Appleman was more typical of his folk-inflected and acoustic-based compositions, this one is notable for its use of synths, samples and occasional stomping house music beats. Its common themes are mortality, ageing, regret.

He did actually have four songs written and re-corded by 2018, he tells me.“But in my head I didn’t have the overarching umbrella, the theme I always like to be in place before I start … I always like to know that I’ve got a clutch of songs I could dip into and pick the ones that fit this overarching theme, whether it’s stripped back piano and guitar, or full-on electro. I didn’t have anything in place and I didn’t feel I had enough songs.”

What he had been doing was “messing around with tape loops” (he has an eight-track reel-to-reel recorder) and digesting music writer David Stubbs's book about German rock of the 1960s and 1970s, Future Days: Krautrock And The Building Of Modern Germany. Through that he was encountering the music of avant garde prog bands such as Amon Düül and Popol Vuh, and rediscovering his love of drone. The closing track on I DES, Drone In B#, is the result. It clocks in at over 36 minutes, which is “quite short compared to the sort of thing I listen to now – I listen to music that takes an hour to do nothing.”

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The deliberately ambiguous title, meanwhile, nods to his main collaborator on the album – Derek O’Neill, aka Des Lawson – and to the Ides of March, the day Julius Caesar was assassinated. Below the title on the album cover is the year of release rendered in huge Roman numerals.

Eagle-eyed readers may also clock that the title itself is an anagram of ‘dies’. It’s an Easter egg clue worthy of Taylor Swift and brings us neatly the theme of renewal: Anderson is claiming he is going to kill of King Creosote and start afresh. That, he adds, is the over-arching concept he finally alighted on for I DES. “This is King Creosote’s last record,” he says simply.

The idea came from producer and musician Paul Savage. “I thought it would be great. I could leave the weight of the King Creosote cape. I could take it off and just do something else.”

So is he serious? He is. “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.”

The way Anderson tells it, that 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.” His current concerns, he says, are 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, 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. “There’s no nostalgia, there’s no play on words. It’s very direct, the stuff I’ve been writing.”

Does he worry he’ll 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.”

The King is dead, long live … well, watch this space.

I DES is released tomorrow (Domino)

King Creosote is at Monorail, Glasgow on November 3, the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh on November 4 (1.30pm and 7pm), and the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow on January 28. He is also appearing in-store at Assai Records in Edinburgh (November 5) and Dundee (November 6)