Rab's reasons to be cheerful ahead of Northern Roots
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Rab Noakes’s 2017 has been a year stuffed with milestones.
The last few months alone have seen the folk troubadour celebrate his 70th birthday and the 50th anniversary of his first concert as a professional musician at the Glasgow Folk Centre.
They’re two milestones that are definitely worth celebrating – and Rab is ready to celebrate them with the country, as he sets out on the aptly-titled 70/50 tour.
“They just seemed like it was worth kind of celebrating – let’s mark the year with that – and those two round figures seemed to go together nicely,” he explained.
“I’m calling it a tour, but it’s more sort of little bursts rather than sort of big long tours that we used to do in the past! But, y’know I’m out and about for a week at a time and stuff, here and there and it’s great!
“I love to get out and sing, it’s essentially what I do, it’s the bedrock of everything I do.”
That first gig saw him perform with Robin McKidd, the two formed a banjo/guitar duo – a style popular with a lot of people around the folk centre at the time.
“We used to see Billy Connolly a lot,” Rab said. “That’s how we made friends with him because Billy and Tam [Harvey] were ploughing a similar furrow with the songs that they did from that sort of repertoire,” Rab said.
“The Glasgow Folk Centre was just one of those marvellously eclectic places – you would get some traditional singers, you’d get some American visitors, you’d get some revivalists singing Scottish songs and then you’d get sort of the American stuff and the songwriters were emerging – Ian McGeachy who became John Martyn, was around at that time.
“It was all sort of like building blocks from the previous generation, if you like.”
And 50 years later, with half a century of performing and songwriting experience, Rab’s prolific and prodigious talents have shown no signs of stopping – or being tamed. “Songwriting is something that I CAN be disciplined about when I need to be but more often than not, it’s more a kind of activity,” he said.
“Things will happen when I’m supposed to be rehearsing, I’ll get new tunes and my wife Stephy will be walking past the door when I’m in there and say, ‘Stop coming up with these new tunes, get rehearsing!’”
But while his inspirations may continue to come from the blue, his process has changed. Ish. “It has and it hasn’t. I mean you do evolve within yourself and I think the more you do it, the more you sort of get a confidence and ability – your bottom line, your worst is still pretty good if you know what I mean.
“The joy in that aspect is that from that bedrock sometimes a performance can really be engaging and really really fly, and that builds up a certain confidence in your abilities.
“I would just like to think that things have evolved towards, in terms of songwriting and lyricism, I used to write as a 20-year-old, 30-year-old, and now the songs I write are the songs of a 70-year-old, and I hope that they kind of reflect that experience in a positive and useful way.”
It’s that aspect of Rab’s life evolving along with his songwriting that has informed the most recent record – the Treatment Tapes EP, out last November.
The collection of six songs chronologically details Rab’s battle with and recovery from tonsillar cancer in 2015 – last month marked two years since the end of the treatment period.
“I feel fine, thankfully,” he said. “I don’t have any anxieties about it either – I’m not going to let it beat me up or get me down.
“Eating was troublesome for a while, a lot of weight dropped off and things. I’m pretty skinny and light anyway, I was only about nine-and-a-half stone and I’m sticking at about the nine stone mark, but I’m eating well and feeling quite healthy.
“I’ve got plenty of energy, and I’m working and living well and enjoying life in that regard, there isn’t any point in like I say getting into any negative places about it.”
And that attitude infuses the Treatment Tapes EP. It’s a collection of songs that refuses to wallow in pity – it’s at times angry, at times blackly comical, and always honest about itself.
It was a conscious choice, Rab said. “I can understand if somebody comes up to you and says, ‘Hey, I’ve just written half a dozen songs about getting cancer, do you want to hear them?’ you’re looking at your watch and going, “Nhhhhh I don’t know, maybe tomorrow, is that the time, I’ve got to go!’ So, y’know, I wanted to do something that wouldn’t be prone in any way to scaring people off.
“And I’ve got to say, I’ve had some positive responses to it from people who are going through similar experiences. They’re finding it quite an uplifting and heartening thing to come across, and I like that aspect as well.
“That’s what songs are for anyway, you hope that songs will resonate with other people and resonate with their experience. It’s not terribly important what it means to me, it’s more important once the song is out there what it means to the people who are going to listen to it and experience it – that’s what gives a song its life.”
Looking back on his own life – two years on from his treatment, and looking back at two massive anniversaries – Rab is honest and reflective. “It’s just, well, life dictates to you sometimes what you’re going to have to deal with, and sometimes you can dictate it yourself, so you just take the rough with the smooth and like I say get up and get on with it in the most positive way.
“But I must say, being able to sing and singing has been a great thing to do in my life in general, it underpins a lot of my favourite activities and I’m really glad to be able to get out and do that and share that with the folks as a performer as well, because I like the sort of craft, skill and the art of performance and performing too.
“It keeps life interesting and enjoyable, really.”
Rab Noakes plays at the Ceilidh Place tonight, and Northern Roots Festival on Saturday.
