FROM Scotland With Love was written as an audio-accompaniment to Virginia Heath’s BBC2 Scotland documentary to tie in with Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games, and like 18 fellow Scots, King Creosote’s Kenny Anderson has struck gold.
After 45 albums, he has finally made the charts. Anderson’s songs acted as a commentary to match the themes of love and loss, war, resistance, emigration, work and play, and if they are a bitter-sweet love letter to Caledonia, they still have broader appeal. T
ake the blue-collar blues of Pauper’s Dough, where Anderson urges “You’ve got to rise above the gutter you are inside” as the strings surge behind him. Likewise Miserable Strangers, where Anderson’s sentiment, “At the back of my mind, I was always hoping I might just get by”, would resonate with anyone striving to survive in alien surroundings.
Elsewhere, the focus on a nation’s culture, history and school playgrounds may be more parochial, but never the music, whose flavours embrace rumba and Krautrock and not one squeak out of a bagpipe.
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