Inverness musician Paul John MacIver shares new album Connections – and band
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The last dying days of the year when people yearn for something fresh and exciting is a great time to introduce the world to a new band – and a new album.
Inverness singer songwriter Paul John MacIver has album Connections to launch at Hoots on Wednesday (Dec 28) – and he has a new band to do it with, though he already knows most of them pretty well from his past life.
The band are – Barry MacLennan on lead guitar, Calum Chisholm on drums, Caroline Truslove on bass and Martin Stewart on keyboards.
When he was younger, Paul was the charismatic frontman of The Now, before that band dispersed and The Parma Violets owned his loyalties.
But moving away to Glasgow with work before that also brought him back partly to Inverness came in between. Yet it sounds as if the music never really stopped.
“In Glasgow I was doing music for the first two or three years which culminated with support slots for Gerry Cinnamon, then work got in the way, I got promotion and that took a lot of my time.
“I don’t know if I ever made a conscious decision to get back into music again, though I was always writing,” Paul explained.
“I wanted to record more than get back into gigging and to record these tracks.
“I had done some recording with The Now and a wee EP with The Parma Violets, but I had ever done my own one, so that was the idea.
“I wasn’t really bothered about performing or trying to make it big, it was just to get recordings I was happy with of the songs.”
Deciding where and who he wanted to be the producer on the recordings was a dilemma until Paul spoke to his former The Now guitarist Paul Elliott, now with Iain McLaughlin And The Outsiders and Torridon.
“I moved back up to Inverness and I got put in touch with Marc Clement through Paul and Marc has done a great job on the album,” Paul said.
“When we started there was no Covid. Then Covid came and with the restrictions we couldn’t really do much. But once they eased, in the second stage of Covid when people could go back to work, we picked it up again.
“I wasn’t in any major rush because some of the songs on the albums are 10 years old.
“And I wasn’t stressed out by the delay, it was more of an organic thing and ‘It will be ready when it’s ready’.”
Paul enjoyed recording the acoustic and electric tracks with Marc.
“It worked! He is obviously a great musician and I felt we were in really good hands. He can hear the essence of the song because when you start, it is really the ghost track - just the acoustic guitar and vocals. But he can hear more to it and always seems to get the best out of his artists.
“I felt like he definitely got the best out of me performancewise.”
With some songs going back nearly a decade, as Paul said, was it difficult choosing the final set that worked together?
“I did find it difficult to whittle it down,” Paul said. “I really just went for the ones I know people would sing along to at parties and things like that. So it was almost like a ‘greatest hits’.”
He laughed: “It sounds funny to say your first album is your greatest hits album! It was the ones I felt connected with people most.
“I did a lot of playing with bands, but I always maybe had two sides, one that was bands songs and a side that was just acoustic songs.
“I’ve always had those two things on the go, so I wanted to make sure there was a mix of the two on the album.
“There are two or three acoustic tracks and some full band tracks as well. But I didn’t want it to be like two separate albums and the way Marc has done it, he has managed to make it one. It flows.”
In some ways, it seems as if the music might be more important to Paul than in his younger days.
He said: “I used to have that mad desire to make it when I was in The Now. But I know now that it’s an important part of how I express myself.
“It’s always going to be something that I do now, whether it’s as little as one or two nights a week. Music is a big part of my identity, seeing as I’ve done it for so long.
“But I don’t feel any pressure in it now, it’s a case of it’s just good to keep writing the tunes and the songs have always come to me. I write almost every day and play songs.”
The band play with Algorithm and Tuesday’s Regent at Hootanannys, Inverness, on Wednesday December 28. Connections is available at Paul John MacIver’s Bandcamp and will be on Spotify, Apple etc soon …
