Space, Shandy and Pressure

A few years ago I was one of eight songwriters who spent a week in a hunting lodge outside Castle Douglas writing songs and drinking shandy. There to represent the host organisation Burnsong was music industry veteran Ronnie Gurr who kicked off proceedings with benevolent assurances that we were under 'no pressure', that we were there just to find 'some space' and that we should just 'write what you feel' (to which he might as well have added 'if at all'). It was a beautiful dream and a big stinking lie. Songwriters may be in tune with nature and floaty things and spend hours going on about coffee shops and butterflies and all that malarkey but when backed up against the wall they can be fiercely competitive. No one in the Songhouse wanted to be the EEDJIT who came in for the free lunches and dinners having failed to write something. Therefore over the course of four days some 30 new songs came into the world. Many of them now exist on recordings and have graced stages across the globe. So that combination of space, shandy and that wee bit of pressure proved potent indeed.

When I put together a new writing module for our third year students I lifted the Songhouse format more or less verbatim (leaving out the shandy bit) and created the Advanced Songwriting and Performance Week. My partners today, Akira and Sarah Beth, are both veterans of the experience having attended the courses at Scotland St School and Film City Glasgow. Alongside the various music docs they and other BA Commercial Music students have chosen for the Zone we will be spinning some outstanding products of student work, some of it inspired by folktales (Adam Ross and Sarah Beth's The Monkey and The Girl), the poetry of EE Cummings (Kevin Lynch's Thank You, Colin Campbell's I Who Have Died and Jimmy Richard's Forgetting The Sea), the dissolution of a Sauchiehall Street Saturday night (Akira's Shite In The Night, yes you read that correctly) and yet more of it inspired by just being young and fabulous (Callie Rossi's Face To Face, Finn LeMarinel's Mothers).

It's a pleasure and a privilege to work with young artists in any capacity but also strangely comforting in as much as it reminds you that the world turns and nothing much changes. During a discussion surrounding what musicians liked to talk about most Sarah offered the following two things:

• Music
• Themselves

We promise to mostly let the brilliant music do the talking on The Culture Zone. Enjoy!

Davie Scott

UPDATE: watch Davie in the studio with Akira and Sarah Beth Brown