The CD’s catalogue of first-person vignettes that take in everything from tartan tat shops, odes to favourite jumpers and the mind-altering allure of late-night Leith more resemble the comic observations of Half Man Half Biscuit, but with added folk-punk growl care of Macrae’s vocals.
Elsewhere on the album, however, Macrae shows off his sensitive side. In terms of sentiment and execution, both The Ballad of Jonesy and Scrabble and Whiskey more resemble Dick Gaughan at his most low-key.
For anyone whose only knowledge of Macrae comes through his theatre work with companies such as Vanishing Point, that he has a voice at all may come as a surprise. Macrae’s tenure in ceilidh bands The Tattiehowkers and The Oatcakes similarly only hint at what Popstardombeckons contains.
For Macrae, however, the album and mini tour with his Macrazy Vaudeville Orchestra are a natural extension of both his other musical outlets. He dates this back to working on Vanishing Point’s production of the Edward Gorey inspired Lost Ones.
“I just started coming out with all these rhymes,” Macrae recalls, sitting in the dressing room of Tramway, where he’s just completed a stint as musical director on Vanishing Point’s much talked about production of The Beggar’s Opera.
“I’d written before and had always decided it wasn’t very good. But this time I plucking my banjo making these things up and thought, actually, they’re not so bad. I’d always been interested in clever wordsmithery, and had listened to a lot of Noel Coward. There’s a version of Mad Dogs and Englishmen that’s so fast it’s basically thrash metal, but you can still hear everything. That’s what I enjoyed about the Lost Ones stuff. They were stories about characters, which comes from my folky background, so in my songs there has to be a real storytelling element to things.”
Macrae seems to stumble on to inspiration in this way. This has been the case since growing up in Ayrshire with his parents, who both played in ceilidh bands and ran the local folk club.
He avoided piano lessons until he joined Kilmarnock Youth Theatre, and later took up the fiddle in his mum’s band, The Tattyhowkers.
Macrae eventually formed The Oatcakes with his brother, nicking the bulk of The Tattyhowkers’ set and adding electric guitar and drums to make them an altogether louder wedding band.
He studied drama at Glasgow’s Langside College and did street theatre with Borderline, but only integrated his music and acting after joining Vanishing Point’s production of Invisible Man when Matthew Lenton spotted him busking on Sauchiehall Street.
Popstardombeckons began life two years ago over a series of protracted sessions in a studio with Bal Cooke of A Band Called Quinn, singer Annie Grace and a Macrazy Vaudeville Orchestra made up largely of himself, with occasional assistance from his sister Eilidh and his uncle Kenny. Live, however, this will necessitate a band of between three and eleven.
“I just wanted to make it a real event,” Macrae says, “and try and do something like The Talking Heads film, Stop Making Sense, which must be the best concert film ever.”
The idea of event can easily be applied to The Beggar’s Opera, for which Macrae brought in Glasgow-based indie rock quartet A Band Called Quinn, who remain onstage throughout. When the play opened at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre, the shock of the new proved too much for some audiences.
In Glasgow, however, the show all but sold out regardless.
While The Beggars Opera has polarised opinion, it also demonstrated just how far music has come in terms of its relationship with theatre.
“There’s a lot that theatre can learn from live music,” Macrae points out.
“People say theatre is under attack from DVDs or whatever, and they’ve been saying that since telly and cinema started, but it’s surviving.
“Now, music is coming under so much more pressure with free downloads and everything, yet live gigs are going from strength to strength.
More people are going to gigs than ever before. If you can grasp that phenomenon and take it into a theatrical idea, then there’s a lot of people who want to see it.”
Aly Macrae featuring The Macrazy Vaudeville Orchestra, Victorian Bar, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, November 11, then tour to Aberdeen, Elgin, Ullapool, Inverness and Edinburgh.
Popstardombeckons is available now.
www.alymacrae.com
