EDDI READER
What are your earliest musical memories?
A lot of my early memories of music are around other adults singing. My aunties used to babysit me, they were full-on into all that 1960s beehive pop and there was a lot of that going on.
There would also be a lot of Catholic hymns - Star of The Sea, and also Sweet Heart of Jesus which has this beautiful, country lilt. I was never into gung-ho jingoistic melodies in hymns.
Are there tunes that remind you of anyone special?
My aunts and uncles used to talk about my mum singing a song called There Goes My Heart. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her singing it, but I went looking for it on YouTube a while back and now I can’t put it on without crying. I don’t know why. There’s another one she used to sing at parties called Friendly Persuasion by Pat Boone and that does the same to meInside I start churning over, weeping. It’s a hidden memory. I don’t why. I knew it innately.
In a lot of cases I never heard the originals of these songs, it was all Glaswegian adults at parties or in church. There’s something about childhood rhythm and mother’s song, which is imprinted on there forever.
There’s a part of my live show when I tell the story of a family party and everybody singing. Really, it started off as me wanting to sing It’s Magic or Moon River. I didn’t realise how powerful these songs were or how much of them I had soaked up until I was an adult and started singing to other people.
How have you have acquired these powerful songs?
It’s all oral tradition. I even have snippets of songs in my head that I don’t know the rest of. There’s a folk song with a lyric, ‘I am the ghost of Stirling Castle’ in it. I don’t know what the song is, but it’s in there.
When you create music, it’s as if you are talking to yourself. You’re giving yourself a bit of advice from a part of the brain you’re maybe not quite conscious of. I sometimes listen to stuff I’ve done and think, ‘where did that come from?’ Sometimes some of the things that were told to me when I was younger have come out in song, and these were told to me by people who are long gone. I like the comfort of that, of feeling that they are still around in that sense.
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