Getting Away From Loud Pop Music & Motor Cars

My Love Is Like A Red, Red Rose Have you ever listened to that? Finbar Furey, of the Furey Brothers, does a great version, mainly due to his banjo. It's a Robbie Burns rewrite of an old ballad.

That would make it Scottish. Words like Fair art thou, my bonnie lass should be a clue. If it was Irish it would've been something like You're a bleedin' ride, young one.

Ivor Cutler was born in Scotland in 1923, and six years later won a prize in school for singing My Love Is Like A Red, Red Rose. It took him almost thirty more years to realize he should sing the songs he had written himself.

One of the things about emigration is that you can talk to people five thousand miles away, and visit all the wesbites you want while listening to countless online radio stations, but you're still five thousand miles away, and you miss things. Like your heroes dying.

You would've found it hard to know what words to use to describe Cutler. For a man who loved the sound of words, gibberish even, that's possibly apt. Poet, songwriter, humorist, performer, just didn't seem to work. Ivor Cutler died last month:

When I do die I shall be glad to get away from loud pop music and motor cars, but I shall miss - insofar as when one is dead one can miss anything - the beautiful kindnesses of those people to whom courtesy comes naturally. Unfortunately there are fewer of those people than of the other kind who deal with their problems in a very anti-social way