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Luke Sutherland

Luke Sutherland ex-member of Long Fin Killie, now a member of Bows and author of the acclaimed novel Jelly Roll....

Luke Sutherland was for a large duration of the nineties the saxophone, violin and guitar-playing vocalist of the culturally conscious Long Fin Killie. However after a hectic eight years of recording and touring the group disbanded and Luke moved from his home on the edge of the Highlands to London, where his current recording project Bows was to elaborate.

"The thought behind Bows," explains Luke, "was that it wouldn't be a band proper, it'd just be a series of collaborations with different people. On the first record there were like eight people playing but because I'd just moved down here I didn't know that many people and it wasn't quite as collaborative as I'd hoped. The second record is much more so, there's ten of us playing on it this time and it's just keeping the whole line up molten and fluid, just doing different things with different people so there's no fixed line up which is something that's really appealing to me having been in a band for that length of time," The second Bows album, Cassidy, released on the 16th April, develops the submersed regality of the debut Blush and expands with further slumbering break beats and shimmering intimacy.

"I think it's much more live this time around. With Blush it was all new to me, working so much on my own I felt I had to rely a bit too heavily on all the machines whereas this time it more organic - it's a really over used word - but it is much more organic and its much more live and there's some really, really nice live beats on there, which was just fantastic, it was really lovely to be playing with real drummers again. That was the most exciting thing."

"I think the most successful thing about the first LP was the overall sound, the overall atmosphere, the overall feel. It was really quite narcotic, really laid back and that was the thing that I was most pleased with rather than necessarily the songs themselves if I can say that. This time around I felt much more confident and I think there's a definite shift in mood."

This shift in mood has clearly infiltrated the Bows sound and the positive vibe from Cassidy is potent, all a far cry from the days of Long Fin Killie and their elegantly bruised, often personal and occasionally violent reaction to modern lifestyles and attitudes, tackling subject as serious as racism and homophobia with poetic intellect.
"When I was in Long Fin Killie I was going through a lot. There are a lot of things I really love about Scotland, there are a lot of things I really hate about it, know what I mean? And there is definitely a lot of that anger in the three Long Fin Killie LPs. When I moved here to London in 1997 I think, mainly because it was a different terrain, different place, different ways of being to get used to, there was a sense of, yeah positivity and certainly now, having finished Cassidy, I feel as positive as I've ever done."

With this latest release Luke revisits his fondness for attaching people's names to his LPs, the Bows debut Blush his only exception right from the earliest Long Fin Killie album Houdini.
"There was a reason for Houdini. Houdini was an escapologist, an illusionist and someone had suggested to me that there was some kind of slippery, for want of a better word, quality to Long Fin Killie's music i.e. they found it really difficult to categorise and they were saying that in this respect they thought it was a really appropriate name. Although I think that at first I just liked the sound of the name and also the romantic associations of the myth surrounding Harry Houdini another guy who died young, the same with Valentino and the same with Amelia - how she went missing over Papa New Guinea somewhere on her attempted flight around the world. So it was really just the romance surrounding the name in the first instants and the reason the others were called Valentino and Amelia was just to show that there was a continuation in terms of attitude style mentality and so on."

Luke has also proven himself a talented author having achieved critical acclaim for his Whitbread nominated debut novel, Jelly Roll.
"I've been writing for as long as I've been playing music, it just so happens that music took off for me first in terms of getting signed and what have you. I've been trying to get published for years and years. I got really serious about trying when I started university. At that time Tom Leonard was the writer in residence, I'd just got hold of Janice Galloway's first book of short stories Blood and we were being taught stuff about James Kelman. I always absolutely loved literature, I loved stories but here suddenly were voices that were completely native, people writing in the vernacular and that to me was tremendously exciting."

"People always say to me, 'Yeah... well you're the black Irvine Welsh' and I'm like, well no, you've got Janice Galloway's book of short stories, there's a story in there called Scenes from the Life No. 29 Dianne that's completely in vernacular and so much of what I was reading at the time from things like Chapman, West Coast Magazine, Cencrastus and so on, these periodicals were absolutely full of it. A Disaffection by James Kelman to me was like a revelation, an absolute revelation and of course as I mentioned before Tom Leonard's writing, it was all there, that was a big spring board."

Since its success Jelly Roll has been optioned for production by Antonine Films who are at present working through a second draft of the script.
"These things tend to take a long time but things are still very much on the go. If they get it right I think it'll be really good, the guy who's going to be producing it is someone I was at University with, he knows me and I trust him so I've handed it over. I didn't want to be too much in the position of getting really precious about things that would have to go because they didn't fit the format of film and so I've stepped back a bit.

The thing that I worry about most is that in the book there were a ton of clichés that are built up and then absolutely knocked down or immediately circumnavigated and I just hope the spirit of the film keeps that."

While the Jelly Roll's screen debut may be some time away Luke's second novel, Sweet Meat can be expected a lot sooner.
"It's supposedly coming out, all things being well, in August. We're just trying to sort out the cover now and I think there's possibly going to be one more edit and that'll be us ready to go. The themes are similar to Jelly Roll but the story couldn't be more different, symptomatic again of this change in mood. It's like I read bits of Jelly Roll now and I think 'Were you that angry? Were you really that angry?' This time around it's like yeah, it's still angry but it much more humanistic, it's less bleak and better for it. I think it's very, very different, it's basically a modern metropolitan fairy tale."

And if you can't wait for Sweet Meat or even until the 16th April for Cassidy you can always acquire yourself the Pink Puppet EP, (out now) which combines Luke's love of both music and literature with the aid of a diverse selection of composers, from Mike Paradinas to Papa November. Interestingly though, the final results, however good, differ from the EP's original conception.
"I was asked by Susanna Grant, Too Pure's old press officer if I would give her a spoken word piece that she would pass on to four bands who would basically interpret the two and a half minutes of spoken word. They could accompany it, pull it apart, do whatever they liked basically and it wasn't going to be a Bows thing at all and it wasn't going to be this Luke Sutherland in the central role thing. It was to be much more like a collaborative thing but in the end she couldn't see it through because she left Too Pure and she didn't have the money to put it out on her own label. So Too Pure grabbed a hold of it and thought 'Yeah, this'll make a really good lead into the LP'. It's left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth because it didn't really turn out the way that I'd hoped it would."

"Having said that I think some of the things that worked out have been really good. If things, as they are set up in the first place are carried all the way through, if what I've been told is going to happen happens then I'd be quite happy to do it again."

Unconvinced that publication and a record contract equate success Luke keeps his goals a step ahead while wholly aware of what will bring him level and why he's where he is today.
"It's just determination really, know what I mean? Also it's like this is all I've got really, writing words and making music is all I've got. It's like its just in me. I've always written things down, I've always written music, always played instruments, it's like a reflex and I think because it's a reflex, because it's a part of me, I never really considered doing anything else, I've just pursued it."

Andrew
April 2001

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