Wednesday 18 July 2001

This week's holiday has occasionally been interrupted (or embellished) by packages arriving from Linn Records. On Monday came the CD booklet proofs, which look great. Unfortunately, there's no room either for all the session photos or for glossing the texts of the Scots songs, so I think I'll put up a 'additional sleeve notes' page here with the photos, the glosses, and more informal notes on the music. Eventually.

This morning I sent off my corrections from the internet cafe in Port Ellen. The road east along the coast from there is amazing: within three miles you've passed three world-class distilleries: Laphroaig, Lagavulin and Ardbeg, and then a few miles further, just before the road peters out altogether, is the ruined chapel at Kildaton with its breathtaking carved cross, probably from Iona around AD800. Incidentally, the Port Ellen distillery itself is now only employed as a maltings, but if you ever come across a bottle of its product (it was in production from 1967 for a while) try it. Or better still, send it to me. 

Anyway, the CD premaster arrived from the saintly Ben Turner this morning, so I had the pleasure of listening to some of it on the beach across the road this evening, while taking in the view from the Paps of Jura right down to the American Monument at Oa. Mastering is a mysterious skill: I went to watch Ben work his magic on the McFalls CDs, and it looked terribly simple but I still don't understand what the hell he does, apart from make everything sound better. It's like the old rock cliche of 'What do you want in the mix then?' 'Everything louder than everything else'. Somehow that's what happens: you can hear everything much more clearly (including my dodgy edits, unfortunately). But what also struck me listening to the Ben-ed version is what a great cellist Alison is. When he mastered Colin's Kisses the same thing happened, his subtle EQ'ing really brought her sound out into the open. I'll ring him with my comments in the morning. 

It's good to be able to listen well away from the all-pervasive sound of the internal combustion engine - in a near-silent environment, my trusty listening kit of clapped-out old Sony Discman (made before the days of shock protection, so it skips if someone so much as sneezes in the next room) and Grado SR60 headphones (best £100 I ever spent) picks up things that I wouldn't hear in a very expensive studio. And it all fits in my hand and runs off two AA batteries.

The beach across the road has some picturesque natives: Sammy the Seal, who comes by most days and sits on a rock for an hour or two, and a pair of oyster-catchers. They were even more noisy than usual when my son and I went down there yesterday (he calls it 'the sanity beach'), and it wasn't until we were on our way back that I realised why. In amongst the pebbles were an egg and a tiny chick frantically flapping its wings, and the egg was so well camouflaged that I nearly stepped on it. Rather than scare you off directly, oystercatchers try to lead you away from their nest, and we'd ignored them and stumbled across it by accident. I hope we didn't panic them too much.