Bird songs chirrup to serious themes

Former guitarist with The Beautiful South Dave Rotheray is back with a solo collection - and it emerged from an unlikely inspiration, writes TONY CLAYTON-LEA

FROM COVER-versions of the Sex Pistols to songs with such titles as The Sparrow, the Thrush the Nightingale, it has truly been a long and folksy trip for Dave Rotheray. If you're not familiar with the name, then you most likely have heard of the band he was a member of for more years than he cares to recall: The Beautiful South.

With “The South” (as he terms them), Rotheray had a hand in co-writing and co-singing some of the best pop British songs of the past 20 years, but these days a version of the band (now called The New Beautiful South, which is also without Rotheray’s former partner in rhyme, Paul Heaton) means “nothing” to him.

“I’m not one for looking back,” he says cheerfully as he walks along the streets of his hometown of Hull, on the way to the train station. “Most of the time I’m thinking of the next thing to do.”

Which brings us to his recently released debut solo album, The Life of Birds. This is indeed an album nominally concerning our feathered friends, with song titles such as Crows, Ravens Rooks, The Hummingbird on your Calendar; and The Digital Cuckoo. Rotheray being Rotheray, however, several serious topics are placed alongside the chirruping melody lines: betrayal, Alzheimer's disease, sexual awareness, serial monogamy, life, death and many points in-between.

“There was no theme to it at very start,” he reveals. “But then I took ill with a problem that I get on a regular basis, something to do with the inside of my ear. I get it for about two weeks, it goes away for a year or two, and then it comes back.

“When it arrives, I have a fortnight where I can’t walk properly; it’s a bit like being seasick, so I have to stay quite still until it goes away. So I sat in my garden for a good while, and that’s where all the references to birds and nature came in.

“Obviously, I realized half-way through the writing of the songs that a theme was emerging.” If the bucolic avian theme is nominal, then so, arguably, is the “solo” album tag, for Rotheray has devised a way in which his songs are delivered in a voice that isn’t his own: he has called upon the services of a range of vocalists (including Eliza Carthy, Alasdair Roberts, Kathryn Williams, Bella Hardy, and the Irish trio of Eleanor McEvoy, Camille O’Sullivan and Jack L) to transfer his musings from garden to stage.

Choosing the right person to sing the right song proved to be the biggest problem. "Some of them were quite straightforward, mind. The song The Road to the Southis about being homesick in Yorkshire; I felt I had to get someone from Yorkshire with a Yorkshire accent to sing it, and so I asked Eliza Carthy. Draughty Old Fortressis quite an eccentric, lonely song about people who buy very large houses, so I asked Alasdair Roberts to sing that one because it suited his personality."

The preponderance of Irish singers on such a singularly English record is noticeable, and we can thank Eleanor McEvoy for that, as she has known Rotheray for some time, firstly in his Beautiful South offshoot band, Homespun(now defunct), and then as a reasonably regular co-songwriter.

"Eleanor and I are pals," he says. "It was she who introduced me to Camille O'Sullivan and Jack L, neither of whom I was overly familiar with. The song The Best Excuse In The World (Is The Truth), is an ambiguous story about a middle-aged gay man, and it needed a dramatic voice, a man's voice, I felt, and so Eleanor suggested Jack."

The resultant work, where the cream of UK folk and a sturdy contingent of Irish singers come together to sing thoughtful, well-wrought songs is a thematic, left-of-field (or garden, even) gem. Rotheray, in his mellow, unpretentious and egoless way, has created an alternative soundtrack for the Indian summer.

“Did I regret that I didn’t sing any of the songs myself?” he remarks as he reaches the train station. “No, not at all.”

The Life Of Birdsis out now. See davidrotheray.com for more details