Michael Marra - All Will Be Well

# The signs of life On the other side of Fife

# And the devil's tune

# On a dark side of Dunoon... #

I think he's a unique talent, a Scottish national treasure.

# You could be out on the street And on your own

# Just like another Rolling stone... #

A Republican, socialist,

Scottish bard of the highest level of quality.

# There's love in this world For everyone

# Every rascal and son of a gun... #

Michael is probably the cleverest person I've ever met.

# And maybe I saw a big Alsatian

# Fag in its mooth, a few tattoos

# Barkin' at the launderette

# And on its feet were pointed shoes... #

He'd wear baffies to his gigs.

# No more will I rove, no more

# It's done... #

He had his keyboard on an iron board.

It was kind of propped there as if

"Oh, where else would have his keyboard?"

He made me really proud of Scotland.

# All will be well

# All will be well

-# Underwood Lane

-Underwood Lane

# I hear your refrain

# And your voice I'm into pleasure and pain

# Pleasure and pain... #

The EP, Houseroom, was recorded in early 2012 by Michael Marra

and the Hazey Janes, the band

featuring his children Alice and Matthew.

We went in January and recorded six songs in just a few days

and it was amazing fun.

We really enjoyed the experience of getting to work with him

in the studio, but I think he also really enjoyed working with us.

He was quite impressed by what we were doing

and we were impressed by him.

And we had lots of laughs, as well. Lots of laughs, didn't we?

The few performances which followed would be Michael Marra's last.

From early days in Dundee's Lochee, this was a life filled with music.

Michael's older brother, Eddie, played piano.

Everyone always says he was the far superior piano player of the two.

And Christopher played guitar.

I know there was a lot of classical music in the house,

a lot of Duke Ellington.

He was obviously surrounded by music.

He was an altar boy,

and he has a fabulous song called The Altar Boys.

# Ad Deum qui laetificat

# Juventutem meam... #

He did talk a lot, didn't he,

about his experiences of being in the church and being an altar boy.

# Cogitatione

# Cogitatione... #

-They were for hymns, I think.

-Yeah, he loved hymns.

-Said they were hits.

-Sounded like hits.

-Sounded like hit songs. That's right.

I shall not die, but live and declare the works of the Lord

The Lord hath chastened me sore

but He hath not given me over unto death.

Michael himself had something of a hit with Psalm 118,

when he recorded it with techno-folk musician Martyn Bennet.

The stone which the builders refused has become

the headstone of the corner.

TECHNO MUSIC PLAYS

This is the Lord's doing, and it's marvellous in our eyes.

# I know I'm good at being poor

# But I thought you might have disengaged... #

I think the folk loves were where he first started.

Although if you'd called him a folk singer these days,

he would not have been happy.

I know that he turned up to the folk club at the Woodlands

and asked if he could play.

I think he played a song, and they said,

"Have they got any more like that?" He said, "Yeah, hundreds."

Michael and brother Christopher were, for a time, part

of a group called Hen's Teeth,

which featured musician Dougie Maclean.

The subject of this song, Niel Gow's Apprentice.

# I'll sit beneath the fiddle tree

# With the ghost of Niel Gow next to me

# Listen, Niel The apprentice has begun... #

Dougie was in Australia at the time

Michael wrote the song, so that experience and Dougie had threaded

through the lyric of the song.

But there's much more to it than that.

# I'll sit beneath the fiddle tree

# With the ghost of Neil Gow next to me

# Listen, Neil The apprentice has begun... #

And it's just got all those elements,

the strength of Michael's song-writing that's about something

very specific on the one hand, but is layered and has that kind of

blossoming that makes it resonate in a far, far wider context.

# Oh, no more will I rove, no more

# It's over. #

By the mid-'70s, both the Marra brothers were in Skeets Bolivar,

playing a blend of country, rock and soul.

# Oh, piece of shoulder Out my window

# Got to feed the world Keep away my blues

# I know I have to make a difference

# There's nothing left I have to lose... #

One of the first guys I was playing music with said, "There's this band.

"It's a big band, you know?

"They've got two saxophones

"and lots and lots of players."

# I woke up late when time began... #

Michael, he was a bass player in the band.

I can always remember where he stood and the dungarees he used to wear.

# ..my heart into plans... #

The Skeets were something very special.

There was a professional quality about the band that was very different.

The covers that they did were classic kind of songs.

Great material.

But what particularly was great about them was the original thing they did.

They did their own thing, and that was very different

in Dundee at the time.

# Talking about Perry Street... #

They all had a certain confidence, as well,

I liked about Skeets, as well.

They were all happy to be there

and I couldn't say that with every performer that I looked at.

Were you living there when you wrote that?

In Perry Street? Aye, yes. I was.

-You drink at the West End bar?

-I did a couple of times.

-But not if I could help it.

-It was rough?

-It was rough.

Yeah, but I mean, when you were staying there,

what, were you working at the time?

-No.

-So on the brew?

-Aye.

In 1976, the band won a recording contract,

after coming second in a competition run by the Sunday Mail.

The resulting single, of which the official title,

Streethouse Door, bears little resemblance to the actual words,

was not a commercial success.

# Shithouse door

# Shithouse door

# I hear you bang like a shithouse door... #

Commercial success needs so many elements

and it alludes the majority of people.

So it's not wise to actually go after that and that alone.

With the attractions of constant touring wearing thin,

and a second single no more successful than the first,

Michael was keen to pursue his song-writing.

Artistic success, Michael was always destined to something.

He was a unique voice right from the very start.

Skeets Bolivar played their final gig on Boxing Day 1978...

..and Michael followed a solo career in London,

releasing his first album, The Midas Touch, in 1980.

The early ones, I still like.

The Midas Touch wasn't really, fully him,

but there was an awful lot about that record I liked.

It was kind of like a record at a time,

people were doing a different thing musically.

One song from the album that has stood the test of time is

Take Me Out Drinking Tonight.

# When these shoes were new It was how do you do

# It was whisky And telling our tales... #

Everyone seemed to know the song and talk about it a lot.

It's been sung at weddings and funerals

and New Year parties and all kinds of things.

And we've been playing it with him in the past few years.

# Oh, restore to my eyes What was clear and was plain

# Oh, honey, take me out Drinking tonight

# Honey, take me out Drinking tonight

# Honey, take me out Drinking tonight. #

Michael had his own ideas about what the follow up to The Midas touch

might be, but his ideas didn't chime with his

London management and record company.

They wanted songs that they could sell,

that would be big hits and all the rest of it.

Didn't really want Scottish songs.

But Michael's idea was exactly that.

An album of songs inspired by, and about, Scotland.

They just threw the idea out, but I decided to move back to

Scotland completely and commit myself to the album.

Gaels Blue, it was called.

It's his take on the Scottish experience and bits of history

and there's a great song on it

called A General Grant's Visit To Dundee.

# A carriage was called to the Magdalen Green

# Before the darkness fell

# With a short stop-over For the lady's convenience

# At the Royal Hotel... #

General Ulysses Grant had visited Dundee, but the only thing

anybody could remember him saying was, "It's a mighty long bridge."

And Michael took that line and made this whole song out of it.

# Not a pretty little bandstand

# Or a lovely little steeple

# Or charming little houses

# Or cheerful little people

# But what a mighty long bridge

# For such a mighty little old town. #

I remember being really young and being in the car

and driving somewhere with Dad and asking him

what he thought the best song he'd ever written was.

I didn't really expect him to answer, but he did right away.

He said Monkey Hair.

# Monkey hair

# The turn to fair

# Scourge the brow With passions furrow

# This, she cries

# Let no man's lies

# Move through my womb

# And add to my sorrows... #

Because it was written for a woman to sing,

he never got to perform it live and as it's the best song

he thinks he ever written, I think we should be singing it a lot more.

# Send my love to distant hill

# All to raise his drooping shares

# Encasing my heart In monkey hair. #

One thing a lot of people say about the singers that come from

Dundee is that they are full of soul.

When they deliver a song it's given

with integrity and compassion and giving 100% commitment.

I think Mick was saying that life here is every bit as glamorous

and exciting and full of mystery and fun as it is in Hollywood.

# Gaels Blue

# We've been weighed up

# And found to be true

# Though we never had the Chevys Or the Baptist church

# We had a choice of colours for a broken crutch

# We'll do... #

That's really what Gael's Blue was about. It's saying that, it doesn't have to be London

or New York or the Deep South,

the same thing is true here.

# Gaels Blue

# We'll do. #

Gaels Blue was recorded in Dundee

on Michael Marra's own label

and all his subsequent albums were produced in Scotland.

Mick was always drawing.

He's a great visual artist as well.

It didn't matter what the medium was, Mick would be making pictures

out of sticks and branches and fishing line and things like that.

There's one house he built, a kind of boat out of sticks

and branches and all the rest of it is in his back garden.

It was a kind of escape for him.

He would come out here and spend hours placing these sticks,

some of them absolutely tiny, to make this boat.

These sticks are from all over, really, all over the country.

People would bring him sticks

cos they knew he'd be out in the garden, building his boat.

I think he imagined it was going to be a giant ship in a bottle,

so that's where the strings come from.

I think he imagined he was going to pull it

and the whole thing was going to rise up.

He lived his life creatively

and whether or not he was planting

out a football field in bluebells,

a kind of thing that Ian Hamilton Finlay

or George Wyllie would have been proud of, you know,

he was in a Scottish tradition of artists.

He just was creative every second that he was alive.

# Aye, aye, fit like, no bad... #

One of Michael's longest creative collaborations was with

one of Scotland's best kept secrets, Dundee's own Saint Andrew,

with and without The Woollen Mill.

# Keep on going... #

Andrew's very, very funny. It was a very simple thing,

he'd do American songs in Scots, Scots songs in American.

# Rendez-vous, we hit the bar

# At the Grange of Aberbothrie. #

You'd introduce Pinball Wizard saying,

"A song now from one of my favourite bands, The Wha."

With Saint Andrew, he was able to write with tongue in cheek kind of thing.

Ordinarily, it's much more difficult to do as a straight,

together, organised songwriter.

Mick was able to spot any kind of rubbish line in a song

or even melodic or harmonic line,

or anything like that, like in a heartbeat.

You couldn't throw anything past him that was sort of contrived.

It had to be genuine commitment to the work.

Michael's artistic world broadened into theatre,

where his songs, like this one for The Mill Lavvies

at Dundee Rep, raised production values and often the roof.

# If Dundee was Africa

# And Fife was Antarctica

# If Arbroath was India

# And Perth was Peru... #

Michael wrote the music for the Rep's wonderfully inventive

1987 production of Witch's Blood,

based on William Blain's novel.

Double deckers of Dundonians travelled the city to watch

their fellow citizens in a huge community cast.

Michael was the key to it.

He was the first person, with the writer John Harvey.

The three of us would go out

and we would talk to people across the city and slowly, slowly,

people started to kind of get involved, until we had, I think, six

rehearsal rooms in the north, east, south and west of Dundee,

running concurrently with Michael running from one rehearsal room

to another, to teach songs.

# O penitence

# O penitence

# O hell's eternity

# Though a monk may hear the devil's hands

# The deal himself He sprung for me... #

To be honest with you, I was led by him.

I was completely led by him.

If he was OK with things, then I was OK.

Because he had the complete authenticity

that I was searching for.

# O penitence

# Ah, penitence... #

You certainly act in the belief that,

to make great theatre, you have to have love

and you have to have roots.

And that's what Michael gave me, he taught me that.

You beauty!

-Yes! Here!

-There!

Michael considered A Wee Home From Home

his best theatre work.

This two hander was created together with dancer

and choreographer Frank McConnell.

The first time I saw Michael was ten yards from

where I'm sitting, right here.

Almost immediately, I thought, "I want to work with him."

# The man, the man it's nice to see

-# How's yourself?

-You're looking grand... #

People still kind of find it hard to believe

that that show was created in two weeks.

-I know.

-He wrote every single one

of those songs in a two-week period.

# If by accident Your dreams get spent

# Like there's no tomorrow... #

And just his vision of Michael in the shower afterwards,

standing in the shower with a cigarette.

The only man I ever met who could smoke while having a shower.

He was like this, like that.

"How's it going, how's it going?"

While just having a shower!

# In the second city of the Empire

# Mother Glasgow nurses All her weans

The famous song from it, Mother Glasgow...

-Which you wanted to ditch.

-Did I want to ditch it? I can't remember.

# I dreamed I took a dander With St Mungo

# To try to catch a fish that couldnae swim... #

We used Daily Record as source material every single morning.

And there was an article about a minister in the Western Isles

using the phrase, "We will not lead our own children up to heaven

"if we let them dance their way into hell."

Which, Michael being the wordsmith that he was,

managed to make it far more poetic than that.

# But he won't make his own way Up to heaven

# By watching all his charges

# Into hell... #

I think it's one of the great songs about cities

that I've ever heard and I've ever sung.

We've played it all around the country.

# Mother Glasgow watches All her weans... #

It's the song they all cheer for.

And a lot of the more intimate gigs that we get hired to do

anywhere in the world, it's always on the list.

Can the song be stripped down to one voice and one instrument?

And all of his work passed that test.

# Where Glasgow

# Flying. #

Glasgow may have been a wee home from home for Michael,

but he was first and foremost a Dundonian.

I read once, you know,

Ian Hamilton Finlay,

somebody asked him about Scotland

and he said that Scotland

was a shadow across his heart.

Well, Dundee is...

You saw the light outside, you know

what the light is like here.

Dundee is like a light across my heart.

I suppose I listen to Michael thinking,

or not even knowing, that he was a Dundonian, you know?

And I mean, once you start to realise that then that comes

through in the fervour of his writing and his character

and everything is so Dundonian.

But I suppose it transcends that.

It can speak to people internationally,

it can speak to people in Glasgow.

Where he was was as important as anywhere

and I think that was what was important to him.

There wasn't a hierarchy of places and it wasn't that Dundee was

some sort of provincial town, it was the centre of the universe.

Michael never, ever wanted to escape from it.

It was a real grounding place for him.

He had still had a pride in his heart.

He was unbelievably proud of being given

a doctorate by his university.

For a guy that left school with no qualifications.

Aye, he was thrilled with that.

We were both made doctors of Caledonian University.

I was really, really proud to share the platform with Michael Marra.

But the only thing I was really disappointed about was

I thought he might have worn his slippers.

Cos every time I've seen him perform I've always seen him

with these fantastic baffies, the real uberly baffies.

And so, when I saw him in the morning, I was going,

"Have you brought your slippers?"

And he went, "No, I thought I'd leave it." I went... "Oh!"

I would love, I would so have loved to have seen him with the very

distinctive hat like a pancake

and a very long gown in these baffies.

Now, that would have made me laugh.

But he had on a quite decent brogue, I think.

# We were all flooded With a scarlet light

# Came through the window With the rain outside

# It all went quiet And a vision appeared

# With a rose in her hair And a ring in her ear... #

Definitely, he sang beautiful words that belonged to where

he came from, but that just made it more enriched.

# Hitch a lift upon this falling star

# Make your way down To the Taybridge Bar

# There'd be no more lies

# And no more tears

# No more listening through The fat man's ears... #

He was a universal writer, just like Burns is,

just like Shakespeare is,

you know, just like anyone. Bernard Shaw...

He was able to help capture the human condition in very

succinct and clear ways, you know?

Just change the accent and you've got somebody from Manchester.

Change the accent and you've got somebody from Kentucky.

It's not beyond everybody's reach to get this.

# Green grow the rashes, oh

# Green grow the rashes, oh

# The sweetest hours that e'er I spend

# I spent among the lasses, oh... #

Michael Marra was always of that kind of Burns singer that

I really enjoyed.

Taking it away from the high-brow and making it a little bit

more of the ordinary, singing it. Not that he was ordinary.

He was extraordinary.

# Green grow the rashes, oh

# Green grow the rashes, oh... #

The final verse where he talks about God being a woman,

I find that just incredible.

# All nature swears the lovely Dears

# Her noblest work she classes, oh

# Apprentice hands she tried on man

# Then she made the lasses, oh... #

I mean, to say such a thing in his time,

the time that he was living

was very, very brave and he's a great man.

And I love the song, I just love it. It's full of love.

# The sweetest hours that e'er I spend

# I spent among the lasses, oh. #

There's a secret osprey nest in Angus.

He used to go to it daily and it would either be myself

or Andrew, Saint Andrew, that would go take him along,

sometimes the pair of us.

And we would go along and spend some time,

sitting, looking at this nest and looking at

the fledgling osprey as it grew over the time that it was here.

Right up until the point where the nest was abandoned

and the family migrated.

And there's the miracle of life happening right there

in front of your eyes.

I think, towards the end, life in any form became much,

much more precious and I think you could see that.

And I think there was a celebration of that through the ospreys.

"And there was silence, Michael.

"Not even a whisper of rustling leaves.

"The wind dropped and just one great leaf took

"and age to come spiralling to the ground in perfect silence.

"Till suddenly a honking and a ragged V of urgent birds,

"wings beating in double time,

"forming and re-forming as they went,

"their flock perfect travelling-shape

"as best they could,

"as they crossed the whole wide sky

"above the osprey's nest in no time.

"And I don't know if it was an optimistic sound or not,

"but anyway, it was the sound of being alive

"and they were making it.

"Wild geese,

"coming back from their far, cold wherever to winter here

"as if they were ospreys and Angus was Africa."

Apart from being a songwriter,

and a musician of incredible calibre,

probably the consistently highest that I've ever worked with,

I would say that he was a lot of fun to be with.

# With my hand on my heart

# And my heart in my mooth... #

One of my favourite things was just watching TV with Dad,

which was... Listening to him was more entertaining than what was on.

# My feet might be big

# But the insects are safe... #

Michael always used to cheer me up,

every time I heard him play and sing.

# Hermless

# Hermless... #

I'm just at the point of missing him and I think, eventually...

Well, he'll not be forgotten.

Just a privilege to have known him.

I'm sure his family are extraordinarily proud of him,

as we should be in Scotland and beyond.

# And then I go hame for ma tea

# Hermless

# Hermless

# There's never nae bother fae me

# Naebody'd notice that I wasnae there

# If I didnae come hame for ma tea. #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd