I’ve chosen North Coast 500 as my song to introduce for May.
In case you don’t know, the North Coast 500 is a popular campervan/driving route around the north of Scotland’s mainland. It’s an incredibly beautiful route, but there’s been some controversy around it due to the infrastructure being inadequate for the number of vehicles and the fact that a lot of folk pay scant regard to the rules and codes of campervanning, doing things like dumping their rubbish and waste in laybys.
This situation got worse during Covid with so many more people staycating. When I first started on the lyrics back in spring 2022, they were a bit more negative, possibly even misanthropic, as a result. But that summer I went on holiday with family in Poolewe in the North West Highlands of Scotland, which the NC500 passes through. Even though the weather wasn’t that great, it reminded me of how amazing the Scottish Highlands are and why so many people love to head there. After my holiday I felt less cynical about the NC500 and made the song more balanced.
The lead guitar makes use of a wah-wah pedal, which I borrowed from a charity called Music Broth. Discovering Music Broth was a music-changing experience right up there with lockdown (like a lot of people, lockdown gave me a chance to get right into recording and mixing). Music Broth charges a £60 per-year subscription which enables members to borrow any donated instrument in their library. Members like me are an additional source of support for the charity which does a lot of free workshops and activities with kids and other groups.
The Epiphone Les Paul guitar which I used for the lead part was also from there, and I’ve recently borrowed an Epiphone Dot hollow bodied electric which I loved playing. An accordion and autoharp are high on the list of instruments I plan to take out in future, although I’ll have to learn to play them. In general, there’s a mix of real and ‘sampled’ instruments in my songs. The sampled ones are played on my keyboard using midi or, as in the case of the drums, programmed.
With so many options, it’s easy to go overboard, something I’m thinking about more as I go forward. I’ll leave it to others to judge whether I got the balance right in songs such as North Coast 500.
