The fantastic
Glaswegian country duo Raintown were kind enough to chat to me after their show
at the O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London on July 21st 2016. Read
on to find out their thoughts on playing sell out venues, their latest album,
and the truth behind their lyrics!
Ciara’s Country (CC):
I’m here with Paul & Claire from Raintown after their show with Runrig
at the O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London. And what a show! The Scottish duo
have been performing together for around 7 years now, including headlining
tours, top spots on festivals like Buckle and Boots, and multiple performances
at the UKs biggest country music festival, C2C, and it was great to see them
play live again tonight. So to start off, Paul and Claire, how’s your year been
going so far?
Paul Bain (PB): Well,
firstly thanks for having us, we really appreciate it, it’s been fantastic, and
still really on a high after coming off stage with just an amazing crowd with
Runrig tonight, we’re so grateful to the guys for giving us the opportunity,
but for the crowd to really come with us and get involved. And as years go,
it’s been a pretty good one, we’ve got a lot going on, and obviously at the
back end of last year we released our latest album and a couple of singles off
of that – Nineteen Again’s done
really well.
Claire McArthur-Bain
(CMB): And also we’re expecting a new baby as well so life’s already got a
whole lot busier for us, and it’s already busy, so it’s time to get even more
organised!
CC: Fantastic! So
I know you play a number of festivals as well as some more intimate gigs –
which of the two do you tend to prefer?
CMB: We
absolutely love playing, honestly if it’s to any crowd. We just love to get out
there, play our songs and just connect with the audience, so it doesn’t really
matter if we’re playing Shepherd’s Bush O2 or we’re playing a nice 60 seat
theatre somewhere.
PB: Yeah, for us
it’s about performing live, and we feel really comfortable there, because we
feel great up on stage with our musicians, our band’s really incredible, and it
allows us to just go on and do what we love. And there’s nothing that we can
really say to put it in perspective how grateful we are to get to do that every
single day. I wish we could perform live every single day, but we get to be
Raintown, we get to write songs, we get to explore new ideas, and at the end of
the day we get to do it together which is great. But you know, playing live for
us is where it’s at, we absolutely love it.
CC: Do you have a
favourite gig that you’ve ever played?
PB: You know
what, right now it’s that one! We saw Lady Antebellum here the very first time
they came to the UK, and we stood at the
front barrier and said we’d love to play this venue and in truth, it’s been a
few years now, but when the opportunity arose tonight, when Runrig gave us the
opportunity, we really jumped at it. So that’s been fantastic.
CMB: You always
have a bit of pre-show nerves when you’re playing in front of someone else’s
audience – they don’t really have to like you, they’re not here to see you, so
when they were responding to our songs and singing back melodies, that’s just
an amazing feeling.
PB: Yeah,
obviously they’re here to enjoy themselves, and hopefully we gave them that
warmup that was good, and people maybe go away now and look us up on Facebook,
but like Claire said to say we’ve a favourite – there’s aspects of all gigs
that we’ve done that we’ve truly loved. We’ve literally played to the fabled one
man and his dog – but whether it’s one person or thousands of people that we’ve
played to, like our gig at Wet Wet Wet, Runrig, or in Canada, or C2C, you know,
we’re so grateful for the opportunity, we love it all.
CC: Well it
certainly seemed like people were enjoying themselves tonight.
PB: Ah, it was
good – it’s great when you go on stage and there’s that wee couple of minutes,
maybe thirty seconds, where they’re going ‘Am I going to enjoy this or not?’
and by the time we got to the second song – Claire hits that note in Nineteen Again – and people started
whooping and hollering, and you think ‘These guys are up for a good time’ and
we hopefully gave them that.
CC: So let’s talk
about your latest album, Writing on the
Wall, which was released last October. I know I just asked you about your
favourite gig, but now I want to know do you have a favourite track on that
album?
CMB: Haha, that’s
just like asking you if you’ve got a favourite child! Because when you write
them, you love them in all different ways, and you love them for different
reasons as well because they’ve come from different places of your experience.
But if I had to, I’d probably say Forever
Isn’t Long Enough which we sang tonight. Myself and Paul wrote that song
probably a couple of years before recording the album, and it was pitched to us
by a movie director who’s shooting a film in Scotland – it’s a Hollywood movie
being shot in Scotland – so he pitched to us an idea about a song and it’s a
very different way of writing for us because we usually write from proper
personal experience and this was ‘I’m going to give you a scene and emotions
and everything in it’, and we went away and sat down and were writing all these
emotions and picturing ourselves in this scene in this movie which is being
shot in Shetland, so isolation and loneliness, and we wrote a song and were
really proud of it, proud that we could put ourselves into that position that
doesn’t have to be about us. Although we did take the song and relate it to
someone we knew, so yeah, probably Forever
Isn’t Long Enough.
PB: And for me,
you know I love Forever, and on a
really personal note, See You Again was
written after the death of my gran, literally the actual song comes from a
diary entry, like the days after she passed away, so those days are in the
first two verses of the song. And we worked with Brian Hughes on that and he
brought something different – his experience to it, and that was something
really interesting for me, which was that’s three different people’s perception
of grief, and believe you can see them again, that person who’s passed. So that
was amazing. And of course, we love playing the upbeat ones as well, especially
live!
CC: Seems like
the album was a long time in the coming then.
PB: It was, I
mean for us it was probably too long. We had a real catalogue of tracks that
we’d been working on, because we never stopped, Ciara, we never stopped
writing, so already, we’re down the road on a new project as well. It was a
long time but it had to be right, there were a few false starts over the course
of the three years where there was a couple of things on the table and they
didn’t quite work for various reasons, and then, if I’m being honest, Claire
decided after a week with her management down here in London to try and do the
Pledge Music, and that was a huge risk at the end of the day, but thankfully,
and very gratefully we hit the target.
CC: So one of
things that I really love about country is that it’s songs are often used to
tell stories, and you just mentioned how you wrote See You Again, and I know that you guys are from Glasgow – have you
used your background in Glasgow to help you write any of your songs?
PB: I suppose
it’s inherent in everything you do, whether that’s deliberate or not I’m not
sure, I think there’s an attitude in Glasgow that’s in equal measure very much
about hard-working, hard-loving people but they like to have a good time, and I
think that’s quite true in terms of country, you know from Nashville, and from
the South, but very specifically the song Missing
You on the album was written in the aftermath – I must underline this, it
wasn’t written about the Clifford tragedy when the helicopter unfortunately
crashed and killed a number of people – it was written about an interview we
saw with one of the relatives, and they were saying that they’d had a message
on their phone from their dad, and it got us thinking about the whole situation
and how after any of these really terrible tragedies there are people that have
messages, and what do you do with these messages after that, you know, do you
keep it? So that, Missing You was
about that, and it was about somebody having to deal with loss.
CMB: We wanted to
leave it up to the listener to decide if it was a burden or a blessing to have
that message in the aftermath of somebody passing away.
Don’t worry – that’s
not all! Keep your eyes peeled for Part 2 of my interview with Raintown on
@CiarasCountry soon, and read my review of their concert at the O2 Shepherd’s Bush
Empire here.
