Interview: RAINTOWN, O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire (1/2)

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 21^st 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.