Robin Laing is whisky’s muse.He’s recorded three CDs of whisky songs and has just completed a quite excellent book on Speyside,called The Whisky River. Dominic Roskrow spoke to him
Typical. You wait years for some new Robin Laing whisky product, and then two come along at once.
And the arrival of a new whisky compact disc and a new whisky book come complete with rather a large dollop of irony. For just as the 55 year old musician is starting to look for a quieter life he’s pr...
By Dominic Roskrow
from Issue 65 published on 20/07/2007
What would make the ultimate whisky rock album? Rocky McCabe dreams up the perfect compilation
If you were of a mind to write off the better part of a day, it would be fun to grab a bottle of something rather splendid, head off with some pals, and while away an afternoon, evening and night considering how our old friend whisk(e)y gets treated in the arts.
See it’s my view that on British tel...
By Rocky McCabe
from Issue 64 published on 01/06/2007
The Arcade Fire are on the verge of superstardom.Lew Guthrie III checks out their credentials and reviews new album The Neon Bible
March 2007 and The Arcade Fire are coming in like lambs and will leave like lions. As I write this feature they are playing small churches in England. By the time you read it, they will be selling tickets for arenas across the world.
It’s rare we get to see a band in a state of metamorphosis, but t...
By Lew Guthrie III
from Issue 63 published on 20/04/2007
Our music guru showcases one of the bright new talents to break out of America. More perfect whisky music
You’ve just got to love a band who start one of their tracks with the lines (and please note the lack of capital letters): I’ve been trying to get people to call me freddy knuckles. people keep calling me right said fred. it’s hard to keep trying when half your friends are dying. it’s hard to hold s...
By Dominic Roskrow
from Issue 62 published on 01/03/2007
Are we getting old or is it really the case that most of the great album music is coming from older guys? Our man looks at Golden Smog’s Another Fine Day
Well what the hell was all that about? 2006 – a year when British bands produced some of the best power pop singles you’re ever likely to hear but the great albums all came from the American pensioner party.
Peruse just about any music magazine’s albums of the year and you’ll find a posse of old fo...
By Rob Allanson
from Issue 61 published on 19/01/2007
Roddy Woomble is a superb Scottish songwriter and he deserves discovering says Rocky McCabe
In my record collection there is a disturbingly large collection of albums by artists that have never quite made it commercially.
This either means I have rubbish taste or that I have great taste and the public don’t. Take your pick, but as Ant and Dec, MacDonalds, the Porky’s films, Cliff Richard ...
By Rocky McCabe
from Issue 60 published on 10/11/2006
What makes great whisky music? Our new
music brain Rocky McCabe ponders
the issue and recommends a Mercury
prize nominee
I used to spend many a happy hour debating with my predecessor, the late Lew Guthrie III, about the link between whisky and music.
We were poles apart. He reckoned music was only relevant when it was specifically about whisky. For me, though, there are whisky moments that pass better with music, ev...
By Rocky McCabe
from Issue 59 published on 11/10/2006
Jim White goes to some pretty out there places,both in his mind and in the American Deep South. Lew Guthrie III walks the line between good and evil
American troubadour Jim White isn’t so much a new country singer as its beat poet. His landscape is the great American south, the forgotten parts of America made up of one pump gas station and two store towns. Places where white picket fence churches stand guard over an impoverished people who survi...
By Jim White
from Issue 57 published on 21/07/2006
Few bands have captured the exuberance of drinking whiskey in the way The Pogues have. Lew Guthrie III looks back to their first two albums
When The Pogues burst on to the music scene at the end of the punk era, nobody could make head nor tail of them.
Fronted by a toothy pug-eared drunk and their ranks swollen by a bunch of sweaty boisterous youths who poured The Clash’s London all over traditional Irish music, the initial view was th...
By Lew Guthrie III
from Issue 56 published on 01/06/2006
Fountains of Wayne are not your archetypal whiskey band. And, says Lew Guthrie III, they’re all the better for it
If you’ve been reading this music page for the last three issues or so you’ve probably spotted a trend. Lots of songs about sad lonely guys sitting in depressing bars crying in to their whiskey, reminiscing over what might have been and dreaming fruitlessly of making a fresh start.
And as Hunter mi...
By Lew Guthrie III
from Issue 55 published on 14/04/2006
Hard rock and whisk(e)y have been bedfellows for 40 years.Dominic Roskrow lets his hair down
It’s become the iconic rock star image: hair long and flowing, leather trousers or jeans, shirt open to reveal muscular torso and chest hair, jewellery, sunglasses. And there, in the right hand, a halffinished bottle of Jack Daniels.
It’s a look that was invented by Keith Richards but perfected in ...
By Dominic Roskrow
from Issue 55 published on 14/04/2006
Ryan Adams has produced a huge volume of great music. Lew Guthrie III casts his eye over it, particularly last year’s Jacksonville City Nights
When Ryan Adams came crashing out of the American South he did so with the swagger of a guitar slinger and the talent of a troubled troubadour. Fearless, unpredictable and highly prolific, he’s never made it easy for himself and we’re all the better off as a result.
Take the name. He wasn’t christe...
By Lew Guthrie III
from Issue 54 published on 03/03/2006
Lew Guthrie III on Southern Rock Opera by Drive-By Truckers – an epic concept album on the life and times of Lynyrd Skynyrd
Being a heavy rock fans has always presented a moral dilemma for anyone with a social conscience. Too often chauvinistic or downright sexist, politically insensitive and sometimes reactionary and right wing, metal and its sub-genres were particularly held up to ridicule in the late 70s when politica...
By Lew Guthrie III
from Issue 53 published on 12/01/2006
Glasgow restaurant Arisaig is fast becoming a whisky venue of some note.Ian Buxton visited it
What do you get if you blend a lawyer and a graduate in International Relations? Well, a stylish, trend-setting contemporary Scottish bar restaurant with a rapidly growing reputation seems to be the answer here.
Arisaig, the place, is a small village in the West Highlands. Devasted by the Clearance...
By Ian Buxton
from Issue 50 published on 09/09/2005
Martine Nouet profiles two talented singer/songwriters in the world of whisky:
Robin Laing and Norma Munro
Robin Laing’s first encounter with whisky came well before his idea of capturing its poetic essence on a CD. As a student, he spent a summer in the ‘70s as a barman in the Arisaig Hotel on Scotland’s west coast. The conscientious young Robin carried out research by sampling the whole stock of singl...
By Martine Nouet
from Issue 30 published on 7/4/2003
Roby Lakatos and his band are redfining Hungarian gipsy music with the help of malt whisky. Ken Hyder reports.
Gipsy influence is everywhere in music. Flamenco and central European classical music would not sound like they do without the tribes who headed west from India. And can you easily think of a Hungarian restaurant without seeing guys in ornate waistcoats playing soaring violins at breakneck speed ov...
By Ken Hyder
from Issue 12 published on 16/11/2000
Whisky is rock's decadent badge of credibility. Dave Broom rhapsodises about the bohemians whose primal screams reveal an inspired but tortured relationship with the bottle.
We’re at a party following a Primal Scream gig in Brighton. A friend presents guitarist Robert Young with a token of his appreciation, a 40oz bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Robert proceeds to spend the rest of the evening/morning dispensing huge draughts from his bottle to anyone foolish enough to empty t...
By Dave Broom
from Issue 9 published on 16/4/2000
In a new series on whisky in rock music,Lew Guthrie III looks at American alternative country rock band Richmond Fontaine
Nashville is the home of country, the place that has done more to sully the genre’s reputation than anywhere else. Conservative, reactionary, predominantly white and male, the country scene has long been dismissed by many as the last bastion of redneck cowboy values.
Travel out of Nashville in to m...
By Lew Guthrie III
from Issue 1 published on 12/1/1999
