Soft Lowland Tongue

i started standing in front of people in 1964, aged fourteen. i only know the year because forty years later i worked it out on the back of something at an airport, and then had to call an entire tour Forty Years Of Missed Hotel Breakfasts and live with Germans asking me across a merchandise table whether i had really been at it that long.

The folk clubs were in the back rooms of hotels in small Fife towns, where the carpet was patterned to hide what happened on it.

Then Carlisle, for reasons that were mostly other people's. i lived in a flat so overcrowded that a man coming off a late shift would find somebody already asleep in the chair he had been planning to use for that purpose. Among the sleepers was a lad called Peter Forster who drew - drew properly, the way a plumber plumbs - and who once did a picture of three Tynesiders taking their caps off to a dead crow lying in the road. i have thought about that picture at intervals for forty years.

The rules in those places were beyond explaining to anybody who had not worked under them. i remember the Metal Box factory at the end of the Sixties - i got the sack there for not getting my hair cut, because apparently my long hair could catch in the immense presses and i would be sucked in and flattened to death. When i pointed out that my job never took me within sixty feet of the presses, the manager looked at me with something close to pity and said that it COULD happen. It is what the armed forces say about small risk: unlikely but not impossible. i have built a good deal of my career on it.

Later i carried the Christmas post at Carlisle station and had to sign the Official Secrets Act to do it. Me. In this country everybody has signed the Official Secrets Act except the drummer out of Blur and the woman who does the weather on Channel Five.

Berlin was 1971. A man i knew said there was work there and there wasn't, and it made no difference, because in those years the city did not require you to have a reason for being in it. i drank in a place called the Steve Club, out of which, on a quantity of acid that would now be considered an ambulance call, i stole a bottle of Jim Beam. i have felt bad about that steadily for thirty years, which tells you something about either my conscience or the Jim Beam.

Jesse Ballard and me used to end the night in an all night place called the Ascot Lounge, eating eggs and bacon with tequila and coke, which is a horrible drink and i would advise anybody against it. Everybody in there was American and had somehow not gone home - Wayne Grajeda too, and the pair of them are friends of mine to this day, and the three of us understood one another completely on the basis of almost no shared information whatsoever. One Sunday morning i came out of there into the grey and every bell in the city started at once, the churches and the cathedral and the ones nobody can account for, and i stood in the road and wept, and could not have told you why, and did not want it explained to me either.

The Gallaher came out of Berlin as well. i bought it in 1971 off a great American player called Galloping Jim Whitmore, who told me across a table that it had come down to him from his uncle, and that his uncle was Doc Watson.

i have told that story for thirty years and watched the faces while i told it. What i will say in print is this: that guitar is the acoustic on every record i made from Doll By Doll through to Creatures of Light and Darkness. A thing which sings for thirty years is entitled to some privacy about where it came from.

Somewhere in among all this i went round Britain on tour with Man, the Welsh band, as John St. Field - my name for a while, and by no means the worst i have had. One morning at Glasgow airport, waiting for something i have entirely forgotten, i looked up at the departures board and it said Tiree. Coll. Barra. Benbecula. Stornoway. Islay. i had known those names all my life the way you know the names of relatives you have never been in a room with, and they had never meant a thing to me until they were up there in yellow letters with times beside them and men in overalls walking past underneath.

It took me twenty-five years to get to all of them. i did get to all of them, and every time i came down out of the cloud onto one of those strips i was fourteen again with a borrowed guitar.

Control came out of that, or came out with me carrying it about - my first record, made with the Man lot and a Czech called Joe Kuccer who played saxophone and flute like a man sending messages out of a burning building. It was released in Spain, which nobody believes, and the company flew me to Madrid to promote it. The night before, i sat in the farmhouse in Dorset with a cider in my hand, not wanting to go. For the first time in my life i was somewhere quiet, and had begun to work out that the quiet was the thing i had been going towards rather than away from.

Thirty-seven years later i was standing in a field in Wiltshire at a festival when a man i had known since Exeter in the seventies came across the grass at me with his arms out, singing the first line of Soft Lowland Tongue, which is on that record, and i had to go round the back of a van for a minute and have a word with myself….