Alasdair Roberts
Although he’s been recording for over a decade under first the alias Appendix Out and now his own name, Alasdair Roberts’ rich blend of traditional song and avant-garde thinking still remains an undiscovered pleasure to many. A previous Green Man Festival headliner, the Glasgow-based musician has worked with Will Oldham, Isobel Campbell, Gerard Love (Teenage Fanclub) and members of the High Llamas and with every release receives hyperbolic praise across the music press and broadsheets. When listening to his unique take on traditional music it’s easy to hear why.
In a world where musicians rush to lay bare the secrets of their songs on blogs, and continually mine the same historical sources – the Sixties, the Eighties – for inspiration, this Scottish folk singer is an anomaly. His appropriation of antique songs calls to mind the prospecting of Daniel Day-Lewis’s oilman in There Will Be Blood: he performs the subterranean, hardscrabble toil of research, then plunges his drill down deep, coming back with black gold.
And it is black. Roberts has confessed to being so “troubled and depressed” by these ancient death ballads that he has to record them so that he can get on with writing his own material. That his own songs are as dark and deeply odd as the Elizabethan ballads makes you worry for his mental health.
“Brilliant, utterly transfixing”
The Telegraph
“Utterly unprecedented”
The Times
Alasdair Roberts is performing on Sunday September 6th at the ‘Across The Borders’ festival.
Vist Alasdair Roberts’s MySpace page http://www.myspace.com/alasdairrobertsofficial
Click here for tickets http://www.seetickets.com/