Scotland’s Colin Clyne steeped in roots music

Scottish singer-songwriter Colin Clyne makes his Galway debut with a show in Monroe’s Live next Wednesday, February 24. After spending ten years living in San Diego, Colin is now living in Aberdeen. Being overly familiar with the Galway climate, which is not too unlike Aberdeen’s, the Groove Tube has to ask – why?

“A question I ask myself many mornings, I assure you of that!” Colin laughs. “The reality was basically family. Myself and my wife had a little girl back in 2012, and we wanted to bring her up here. We had another girl last year. My wife was offered a job back here, and she wanted to be near family.”

Colin’s Monroe’s gig will be a solo show and that’s something the Scotsman, whose music is a mix of folk, roots and Americana, has been doing more of since he moved home.

“I’ve been playing solo a lot more again,” he says. “It’s just reminded me why I’m doing this, what I love about it. The whole pageantry of dealing with four or five other musicians, that’s great fun as well, but it’s nice to come back to just one man and his song.  And I only have to argue with myself!”

While living in California, Colin recorded two albums – 2012’s Doricana and last year’s The Never Ending Pageant. Both records were produced by Alan Sanderson, who has also worked with The Rolling Stones and Ryan Adams. How did Colin end up working with him?

“I was working with another producer. He met this girl, and her boyfriend was an engineer who’d worked with the Rolling Stones,” Colin says. “He said ‘he’s Scottish’. You hear that all the time over there: ‘Oh, he’s Scottish’, ‘he’s Irish’. Then I turn up to Alan’s studio, and he actually was Scottish! He’d lived there until he was 15 or 16, his parents were from the Borders, and they moved to California.”

Alan and Colin struck up a friendship that was to fuel their artistic collaboration, with Alan being struck by Colin’s lack of rock star pretensions.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.