Twa Twisted Fifers

In November 2003 i went to the Crossing Border festival in The Hague with Ian Rankin, Ciaran Carson and David Thomas. Four men. It sold out immediately. None of these guys knew each other at all, and we did not rehearse - not because we were being heroic, but because it never occurred to any of us that you could.

That is, i think, the most interesting evening of my working life, and not for the music. Everybody in that room had arrived at the same place by a completely different road. Carson out of Belfast and the Irish language. Thomas out of Ohio and whatever it is that Thomas is out of. Rankin out of a Fife mining village by way of eleven million paperbacks. Me out of the coal fields by way of the gutter and the archetypal psychology seminars, which is a sentence i am aware of having written.

The Dutch filmed it and called it The Meeting of Remarkable Men, and for once a title was not a lie.

Rankin and me then made a record together, which came out of a story he wrote called Jackie Leven Said, which we first did on a Tuesday night in January 2004 in the Strathclyde Suite of the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow, at Celtic Connections. He read it in six voices. Michael Cosgrave and i put songs into it where the story needed air. Afterwards we could not stop talking, on stage, in front of everybody, the way only twa twisted Fifers can.

The album that grew out of it is about the lives and childhoods of three people from Fife - Ian, me, and a detective inspector who does not exist - and writing it changed how i wrote. The persona changed. i cannot put it better than that. When you are handed a second and a third man to speak through, the pressure comes off the first one, and things get said that would otherwise be too embarrassing to say in your own name, which novelists have known for about three hundred years and i worked out at fifty-four.

With David Thomas it goes differently again. We call it Ubudoll, and it is the world's slowest touring operation - our fifth date in five years, i announced once at the Borderline, and the audience laughed and i had not been joking. What Thomas does to a song of mine is roughly what weather does to a house. He recites Faces so beautifully that i have gone off and stood at the side of the stage.

Then there were the men i inherited from the poetry rather than the music.

Robert Bly i have written about. James Hillman - my friend the American thinker - gave me the sentence that got me out of years of bad dream work: don't say that the black snake in your dream is really your mother. Richard Olivier and i met making a hundred men cry for a week in the middle of nowhere with Robert Bly, which is the correct way to meet anybody.

Some years after my father died, i went up to Findhorn to do one of those weekends. And in front of the whole room Robert made all the men look hard into my face and eyes, and said, more or less: there. That is what the death of a father does to a man's soul. Look at it.

i have been the exhibit before, but rarely so accurately.

Liam Carson in Belfast sends me books in a language i cannot read and explains them to me until i can hear them. He runs the IMRAM festival in Dublin, where i once played a bilingual evening with Michael Cosgrave and a Gaelic jazz outfit, with Akhmatova and Mayakovsky and Tsvetaeva being read in Irish and English in a converted railway station. Liam then wrote his own memoir and called it Call Mother A Lonely Field, after my song, which is the single most flattering thing that has ever happened to me, including the Q magazine list.

Kevin Coyne i never got to work with. When somebody asked me for a Coyne cover for a tribute record i said no and asked whether i could write a song about him instead, and that is Here Come The Urban Ravens, the nearest i came. In April 2006 i played Nuremberg, which was where Kevin had lived, and when i said his name from the stage the whole room made a warm, affectionate noise - and afterwards his widow Helmi came and we talked about him. Outsiders get kept going by somebody, and mostly it turns out to be the person they are married to.

In Kufstein, in Austria, i did a double bill with Johnny Dowd, one of my heroes, who turned up with home-made absinthe, which tells you everything about that evening that i am prepared to put in print.

And in the summer of 2007 i went to Glasgow to work on a Willard Grant Conspiracy record that Malcolm Lindsay was producing, doing Russian-style choral work and guitar orchestras, and joined the band - thirty-eighth member, and proud of it.

Rankin, Thomas, Carson, Bly, Hillman, Olivier, Coyne's widow, Dowd, Cosgrave, Robert Fisher, Michael Weston King.

i have spent a working life being described as a solitary man who writes about loneliness, and i have never once in thirty years managed to make a record on my own. Modesty has nothing to do with it. i do not believe in the lone voice at all, i think it is a marketing category, and every song i have that is any good has somebody else's fingerprints somewhere on the glass - a poem in another language, a guitar player who argues with me, a dead friend, a man in a hotel bar in Münster telling me something he should not have told me.

Working with Robert goes much the way working with David Thomas goes, and the rule is the same for both: as long as you accept and remember that there is danger, you're safe.

That will do for a life as well, and it is about the only thing i have ever been able to hand anybody who asked me how to keep going….