A cosy haven amidst Saturday’s overcast drizzle, James Yorkston, a talented author and musician from Fife, joined acclaimed Shetland author Malachy Tallack, for a warm and eclectic conversation with BBC Radio Host, podcast presenter and journalist, Nicola Meighan.
This event offered a celebration of the creative intersection between music and writing, championing a self-led, multidisciplinary approach serving as a welcome antidote to modern hustle culture. Far from taking it easy, however, Malachy Tallack explained how he juggled writing introduced his latest novel That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz and its accompanying new album of original songs alongside a career as a literary editor. His tale follows protagonist Jack, who lives a ‘lone’ but not ‘lonely’ existence on Shetland, adopting the parlance of his country music idols whose music colours his otherwise disconnected life. It is the unexpected arrival of a kitten on Jack’s doorstep that catalyses the beginning of a summer that turns everything upside down. When asked by Meighan about this narrative decision, Tallack explains that he wanted to explore what would be the ‘minimum pressure’ he could apply to transform Jack’s life as seemingly insignificant events accumulate to reshape his reality.
Introducing us to his third novel, Tommy the Bruce, James Yorkston described the tale of Tommy, the owner of a dilapidated Perthshire hotel. The noir follows how through a chance meeting with whirlwind-woman Fiona McLean, Tommy unexpectedly encounters a host of criminal forces and ghosts of his past.
As a touring musician, Yorkston explained that the inspiration from his novel arose from the many evenings spent on tour staying in eccentric, slightly ramshackle family-run hotels such as Tommy’s – places stocked full of character and story – right down to details of which condiments could be found in their kitchen cupboards!
Like Tallack, Yorkston is deeply interested in the experience of social isolation. It is Tommy’s loneliness and desperation for connection that causes him to look past signs of the danger Fiona poses in order to pursue her companionship.
Meighan inquired about the authors’ creative process, inquiring whether they had a routine or schedule dictating when they focused on their music, writing or various other administrative duties – such as booking hotels, Yorkston joked. For Yorkston, the answer was simply no, not really. He described an idyllic routine of a morning walk along the Fife coast, followed by a cup of coffee after which he settles into whatever work comes most naturally – often guitar first he admitted, ‘but I follow my muse’.
He noted that an almost symbiotic relationship had emerged between his writing and his music. Being able to alternate one with the other ensured that neither music nor his novel became arduous.
Yorkston moved on to say that due to his experience in the music industry, he understood the value of using genres such as ‘crime’ or ‘folk’ for marketing purposes but stated that fundamentally his novel, nor his music could be so neatly defined. Tommy the Bruce may not be a straightforward crime novel, yet praise from the audience during the events Q&A described it as keeping them ‘on tenterhooks’.
Tallack nodded in agreement, describing how the experience of writing the album to accompany the novel allowed him to switch to playing music when he got tired of writing, turning to his work as an editor when his creative juices dried up.
Through exploring Jack’s love of country music, Tallack enjoyed the opportunity to venture further into the genre himself, lamenting that he had previously written off much of the genre which was in fact so rich in its musical history and storytelling capacity. Tallack emphasises the way in which music and writing has the capacity to transcend personal experience, Jack is able to imagine the experience of love through writing songs about imagined relationships just as the stories from locals about whaling off Shetland in the fifties transport the reader through the history of the Scottish isles.
Yorkston notes the value that aging and experience has brought to his creative process, hinting that he is still not done exploring new mediums. He laughs at this attempt to write a novel in his twenties, suggesting its failure was that he simply did not have the life experience to give him anything to say yet. ‘I’ve always wanted to get back into painting’, Yorkston notes, struggling to find time to add yet another string to his bow.
Finishing off the literary event with a soulful performance of one of the songs on Jack’s album from Tallack and a beautifully raw cover of Planxty’s ‘Arthur McBride’ by Yorkston, the two musicians and writers demonstrated the magic to be found at the intersection of the arts.
These authors offer a refreshing look at the Scottish cultural landscape, both through their exploration of personal and social transformation in their novels but also through their celebration of embracing one’s own mosaic of interests. Instead of laboriously chasing efficiency and productivity, they stay true to the belief that creativity — in any form — is contagious, each new passion sparking growth across the others.
Bridget Stanger
