We’d like you to meet Sandy Wright, a longtime underground hero in his native Edinburgh, latterly championed by the likes of Eddi Reader, Kris Drever, Karine Polwart and folk/pop favourites Aberfeldy and last year nominated as Composer of The Year at the Scot’s Trad Music Awards. He’s been a civil service clerk, an army bandsman and a balloon-tying children’s entertainer. He’s played in covers bands, ceilidh bands, country bands and jazz combos, meanwhile building a reputation as Scotland’s finest undiscovered songwriter bar none. And now, at long last, in his 60th year, he’s made his first solo album.
That long-awaited debut, The Songs of Sandy Wright, is a treasure-trove twice over, firstly comprising a hand-picked selection - from a catalogue of some 250 compositions - sung by the man himself, recorded with half-a-dozen pals (The Toxic Cowboys) in the stone-built cottage outside Edinburgh that he currently calls home. The companion volume features a cr�me-de-la-cr�me array of fellow singers and songwriters, among them the aforementioned Reader, Drever and Polwart, plus the likes of Boo Hewerdine, Chris Wood, Roddy Woomble, New Yorker’s Gramercy Arms and Kendall Meade, Lau’s Martin Green with recent Bonnie Prince Billy collaborator Inge Thomson, upcoming talent such as William Douglas and Lori Watson and acclaimed duo Macmaster/Hay performing new versions of Wright’s material.
Wright was still a toddler when he first walked across the keys of his granny’s piano in Gilmerton, a down-at-heel Edinburgh suburb, and realised there was something interesting going on here. “My ears were just always tuned into music,” he says. His dad was “a beautiful singer; bring a tear to a glass eye”, and Wright sang pop covers in talent competitions during high school. After leaving at sixteen, he spent three years as a filing clerk for Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Taxes, meanwhile soaking up the sounds of Tamla Motown, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, and playing keyboards three or four nights a week in bands with names like Cameron’s Mustard, and The Movement.
Next came a four-year stint in Her Majesty’s Forces, after Wright discovered he could join up as a musician. “I was the unlikeliest recruit ever,” he says. “I had hair down to my arse. But I wanted to be playing more, and my parents wanted me to have a career, and this was a way to do both. It gave me the chance to really study music, so I learned what I wanted to learn, about things like notation and arranging and so on, then bought myself out.”
For most of the next decade or so, Wright the ex-soldier was better known as Spike the Balloon Man, a highly sought-after, Magic Circle-accredited clown - another career he stumbled into more or less inadvertently. “I’ve honestly never tried to do anything in my life,” he says. “Things just happen along, and then lead to other things. But that was certainly when I learned about stagecraft.”
The siren call of music was never far in the background, though, and by the late 80s Wright was gravitating into the vibrant melting-pot of Edinburgh’s resurgent grassroots scene, finding his voice as a songwriter amidst a new generation of Scottish folk and jazz talent.
Those twenty years’ worth of songs encompass the epic and the intimate, the outlandish and the everyday, the comical and the quietly scathing. Wright’s gritty, pawky, slow-matured genius resonates so widely that he can only usefully be likened to such freebooting legends as Tom Waits or Johnny Cash – but with a distinct Caledonian salting of Ivor Cutler and Michael Marra.
“I’ve tried out loads of different styles and ways of writing things in my time – and I still do,” he says. “But basically what I do now, corny as it sounds, is just write about my own experiences, or things they spark off, folk I meet – I love people’s stories. All the stories in those songs are kind of like my diary: there’s a thread through them that other people wouldn’t necessarily recognise, all these little markers and bus-stops where I remember when and why I wrote them.” As a chronicle of a life exceptionally well-told, The Songs of Sandy Wright is your introduction to a truly singular talent.
Sue Wilson 2009.
