The Rowantree

Everybody says i moved to Oban. i did not move to Oban. i was living in London, so first i had to fly to Glasgow and then get across to the west coast, and i did this again and again over several years, first with friends at Christmas and later on my own, and i stayed at the Rowantree Hotel, which is not at all the same as moving somewhere, whatever it looks like from the outside. You move somewhere once and then you are there. i kept going back, which took longer and cost more and meant that every single time i had to decide again.

Argyll in winter. You want me to be lyrical about this and i am going to disappoint you slightly, because what i chiefly remember is being cold, and the particular quality of a west coast hotel radiator, and long afternoons with nothing in them whatsoever, the first afternoons of that kind i had had since about 1976.

You go down to the slip for the Kerrera ferry and there is a board propped up there, and you turn it round so that the painted side faces the water, and that is how the ferryman on the island finds out that a human being is standing on the other side wanting to come over. Then you wait. He comes in his own time, because he is not a bus. Across the sound at the south end, up on the rocks, Gylen castle, and both the castle and the man with the boat ended up in a song eventually.

i turned that board round a good few times and something went quiet in my chest every single time. You are announcing yourself to the sea. Here i am, come and get me if you're coming.

And that is where the songs came back.

i had not written since the Doll days. Not a line. Nine years, if you sit down and count it, which i did not do at the time, because the part of a man that notices things had shut its shutters and i was walking about seeing nothing worth saying and blaming the world for having gone flat.

Then one afternoon in that hotel, in the rain, i wrote The Crazy Song. And then i wrote Gylen Gylen. And then i wrote Heartsick Land. Three of them in an afternoon after nine years of nothing, and i have never been able to explain it and have stopped trying. It was less like weather arriving than like coming back to a house you have been away from for a long time and finding that somebody has been keeping it aired.

i did not play them to anybody. Not for a long time, and if a young person ever asks me anything, that is the part i tell them.

i had no idea whether they were any good - i genuinely could not tell, i had lost the instrument you judge with - and rather than find out, i simply wrote more. It was fear, plainly. It also turned out to be the most useful thing i ever did, and after enough years i can no longer separate my fear from my discipline, and neither, i notice, can anybody watching.

What i built in those months without knowing i was building anything has kept me alive ever since, a sort of killer instinct about the writing. No matter what else is happening in your life, and a great deal has happened in mine, some of it in public, be assured that this writing must be done, and done well. The phrasing comes out of committee meetings at the Trust, where an old hand used to destroy his opponents by asking, very mildly: yes, that's the principle - but what's the process? Being a songwriter is the principle. Sitting down is the process, and nobody in forty years has managed to do that part for me on a wet Tuesday.

The drinking had quietly taken over from everything else by then and i was not calling it a problem, because next to what it had replaced it looked like a hobby. In Glasgow i could put away whisky with lager behind it for an entire evening and call it research. i had gone off drugs and violence for a while, and that 'for a while' is doing a great deal of work in the sentence, and i knew it even as i wrote it.

One more thing about that coast. A magazine sent me one of those questionnaires where they ask for your happiest moment and expect you to say the birth of a child, and what i put down was sitting alone on the beach at Ganavan Sands, near Oban, watching the ferry steam over. On my own, on the sand, watching other people leave, and pleased about it in a way i could not have defended to a committee. Make of that what you will. i have had thirty years to make something of it and i mostly make songs….