Adrian McNally's name crops up in both the Mudcat debate on Rachel Unthank and the Winterset and my interview with Rachel for Salut! Live. The exchanges at Mudcat prompted him to offer these thoughts of his own:
I was watching a programme about JK Rowling recently, and she was asked whether she felt lucky that all this had happened to her. She gave it some thought and said that she felt lucky that she'd had the idea in the first place, and that when you have a really good idea, all the details just fall into place. This is very much how I feel about the Winterset. The vision I had of the band, from before we even started working together, was such a eureka moment, that every decision and direction since has been easy. All we have to do is look at the blueprint and ask if it fits. That pivotal, central idea was to afford Rachel and Becky a soundscape that they could sing completely independently of. I wanted them to be able to sing just as they would unaccompanied, as traditional singers do, without having to worry about staying in time with other players. Rather than seeing the music as accompaniment, I wanted to create a reflective, musical alter-discourse to their songs. Two narratives running side by side. Eerily detached accompaniments, at once abstract and unobtrusive. The result is hopefully something that sounds at once traditional and progressive, honest and abstract, simple and complex. But the blueprint also took in the scope of music listeners we might reach with this approach to folk music, which was where the real excitement came in. I don't mean that in a commercial sense. I'm very interested in the health of folk music and frequently feel frustrated by the way it is perceived from the outside, which for the most part I feel is the responsibility of some on the inside. Communicating folk music with a traditional core to the wider music listening public is what it's all about to me. A former director of the South Bank Show spoke to me at a show recently. He was into leftfield music, like Antony & The Johnsons, Jim O'Rourke and Robert Wyatt, while his partner was a Dido/KT Tunstall fan. The Winterset was the first band they had ever agreed on. At our Folk Awards warm up show last week, there was one of our biggest fans, sat there with his Winterset obsessed eight-year-old daughter. Emails of support and encouragement come from the Elliott Family at one end (the Elliotts of Birtley - probably the most respected and important carriers of folk music in the North East) and from Robert Wyatt at the other. Playing in your local folk club one night, and then to London's culture vultures the next, getting unaccompanied mining songs broadcast on cutting edge 6 Music, didn't ought to be possible, but it's possible to communicate anything with honesty. Though there are many reasons why the band works, the gold at the centre is the natural honesty in Rachel and Becky and their commitment to music and songs first and foremost. They are innocence without ignorance, sincere without sentiment. We can be bold and experimental with the arrangements, because there is always something very true at the core of it. Charlie Mingus said you can't improvise on nothing. You have to learn and understand a musical genre, history or discipline, before you improvise with it. In much the same way that Peter Kay’s satire of the working class is underpinned by pathos and the sort of deep understanding it’s only possible to have by being one of them, Rachel Unthank and The Winterset subvert folk music with love and authority. Truth be told, Rachel and Becky would much rather be sat in a singaround than on stage at Glastonbury, and I hope their sincerity towards folk music breaths through the records, no matter how leftfield the arrangements. I came up with the people to play for Rachel and Becky, I've spent the last three years of my life working for peanuts around the clock to provide a consistent artistic vision from arrangements through to marketing (and to allow them to grow without having to find money for professionals!), I challenge and push them artistically and emotionally, to turn good music into great music, I bring production and narrative ideas to the table, born out of an obsessive love for music, I write whole arrangements like Felton Lonnin, and do my best to protect and nuture them as emerging artists in a quickly changing industry.... but it's all as servant. Whatever I've got to give, I want to spend it on Rachel and Becky. I am in awe of, and inspired by their basic nature, and it a genuine honour and privilege to work for them, and to be entrusted to oversea their musical soundscape. All I'm here to do is to try and capture them, and provide the environment for them to express themselves most truely. For me, the idea of the band was so strong, it was only a matter of time before reaching an optimum creative period such as The Bairns. In Belinda, we had someone with great technique and a very quick mind capable of transforming ideas into reality. Niopha was the key element that gave The Bairns a harder edge than Cruel Sister, and she was instrumental in preventing the playing from sounding too classical. She is also the best band team player I have come across in 20 years of doing this. During the process of making Cruel Sister and The Bairns, Rachel and Becky have developed a open-mindedness and sense of imagination that will ensure that whatever we do in the future, it won't be dull. Their sense of adventure and preference for direct and powerful music has as much to do with being brought up on no nonsense singers like Sheila Stewart, The Wilsons, Dick Gaughan and the shanty singers of the North East, as it does the contemporary music they have become interested in over recent years. I wanted to comment on the EMI/folk puppets assertions too, which I'll do very briefly. This band has a manager, agent, label, sound engineer, producer, publicist and tour manager who is one person. That person is also Rachel's partner. We couldn't be more homemade. Realistically, there was only so far I could take them. Some people are lucky or astute enough to have enough infrastructure around them to stay independent. Kate Rusby has stayed independent with half her family working behind the scenes, which is a tremendous show of will power and tenacity. We're not in that sort of position. Teaming up with EMI is a simple matter of delegation. They have the infrastucture to sell the album. We don't. By the time we had teamed up with them, we'd already made The Bairns, on a shoestring budget. The album might be licensed to EMI, but we recorded the vocals under our stairs, and the whole thing was recorded on a simple portable Fostex multitrack, and for six months, none of us earned a penny. The irony, given people's assumptions about selling out, is that we are making and stand to make less from this album than on Cruel Sister. But we'd rather make £x from selling 50,000 albums than make the same from selling 5000. Communicating music is our main motivation. Although we made the album before EMI's involvement, I don't feel any need or desire to play down our relationship with them. They have been just great with us, they haven't meddled a bit, and have been supportive on a personal level, as well as business, in all sorts of ways. Clearly, EMI aren't going to make their millions out of us, and in general, it depresses that people are so often ready to slate anyone in the industry who comes between the artist and the fan, as if any of this could be possible without the hard work of many people. It's like going into a shop and resenting everyone who stood in between you and the hen that laid your half a dozen eggs. Sure, the record industry is in trouble, and much of that is down to a disparity in fairness between labels and acts that goes back decades, but that relationship has always allowed many a brilliant artist to grow and flourish. In the end, our only motivation is to find ways of communicating our music to as many people as possible, or at least to generate the opportunity for them to hear it.
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