EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW by Trevor Baxter
TALENTED singer and songwriter Eddi Reader has thrilled audiences over the decades with international hits that have topped both the album and single charts. Here, she takes time out of her busy schedule to talk to Trevor Baxter about her upcoming gig at the Civic Hall in Uppermill…
WE WERE 20 minutes in before mention of the ‘F’ word came up and really there is no way of interviewing Eddi Reader without referencing it.
For sake of accuracy it was actually the ‘F’ and ‘A’ words – Fairground Attraction – but you get the picture.
However, don’t pitch up at Uppermill Civic Hall on Friday, April 1 expecting to hear all of the small but perfectly formed ‘F A’ back catalogue. That’s doing a massive disservice to this eldest daughter of a Glaswegian welder.
Eddi has spent most of her 56 years singing: as a child folkie, hippy teenage busker, a backing vocalist for some of the 80’s biggest acts, the distinctive front woman for the short-lived Attraction and a solo artist of many musical strands to the present day.
She’s lived a full life. “I don’t know what to compare it to or if it is anything more than anyone else,” she insisted. “But there seem to have been a few adventures.
“I was pretty wild when I was 18,” confirmed Eddi, married to John Douglas – her second husband – of the excellent Trashcan Sinatras.
“I was the oldest of seven and left home to go busking in the South of France, Germany, Switzerland. I went off with a circus troupe, lived with fire eaters in caravans.”
Divorced from the thriving indie scene in Glasgow, championed by Alan Horne’s Postcard record label, she looked for an alternative musical direction and found it among the classified ads.
“I had a friend in London I met while busking and who suggested I reply to ads looking for backing vocalists,” explained the 1989 double Brit Awards winner.
“I wrote to three and got replies from two. One was from Shakatak (an 80’s jazz funk group, best known for ‘Night Birds’) and the other from the Gang of Four.
“I think Shakatak thought I was a hippy from Scotland but with the Gang of Four, I lied and told them I had worked with Van Morrison and Simple Minds. It worked and I got an audition.
“The next thing I’m going on tour to America. I was found out almost immediately because I was such an idiot. I had never been on a plane before.
“I thought you could get cocaine in supermarkets, I was just so gullible. I remember being very drunk one night on top of a high rise skyscraper in New York. I was wild, I was rock ‘n’ roll.”
Eddi continued to eke out a living as a “BV” and vocalised with Alison Moyet, Annie Lennox, Eurythmics and the Waterboys. There were plenty of others.
“If you looked at a lot of really duff 80’s singles I was probably on them. I just tried to earn more than what I got on the dole.”
Now living in pre-fabricated accommodation in Lambeth, Eddi looked to change direction.
“I loved people like Edith Piaf so I wanted to find those kind of songs; songs that told stories. As with all things if you want it, it comes to you, you just have to recognise it.”
‘It’ turned out to be Welshman Mark Nevin – a partnership that crashed and burned almost as quickly as it fired and flourished.
“Mark had a friend who had a club at the back of the Goldsmiths Tavern in New Cross. You paid a £1 entry and it was like a folk club except jazzier. There were a lot of gay guys snorting amyl nitrate at the back.
“Vic Mortimer and the Joan Collins Fan Club (Julian Clary) would get up and do alternative comedy but there some real duffers. We became the musical interlude.
“Mark would bring me a song. Most of them were about being murdered by your pimp or dying in St Pancras Hospital. But what I adored about his work was he had a sense of story.”
Out of their partnership came Fairground Attraction with Eddi funding a demo tape and Nevin supplying the bulk of the songs, including ‘Perfect’ and for the platinum album, ‘First of a Million Kisses.’
Midway through the second album, ‘Ay Fond Kiss’, and with Reader, newly married and a new mum, Nevin quit.
Eddi continued to sing and write songs, working with the brothers of tragic star, Kirsty McColl, and “going back to the folk traditions I knew. I didn’t sing ‘Perfect’ for about 10 years.
“And I was scared. Any advance I got out of Fairground Attraction went on a deposit for a house but suddenly London didn’t seem friendly anymore.”
She eventually returned to Scotland in 2001 but only after a third Brit Award in 1995 and succession of solo albums: ‘Mirmama,’ ‘Eddi Reader,’ ‘Candyfloss & Medicine,’ ‘Angels and Electricity.’
Once ‘home’ she recorded the classic ‘Songs of Robert Burns’ album in 2003 to great acclaim and followed up with ‘Peacetime’ and ‘Love is the Way’ while featuring on a 2015 Christmas album, the ‘Phil Cunningham’s Christmas Songbook.’
“Songs, to me, seem to communicate a sense of peace within human beings,” she explains. At every family occasion everyone seemed to be happy when they were singing.
“Even if they were unhappy, the singing seemed to help comfort or shift any stuck feeling of sadness.”
With such an extensive and diverse back catalogue what has she lined up for Uppermill?
“Someone surprised me the other day by revealing I am completely spontaneous. I don’t have a set list. I have never done that.
“When I do gigs, I treat it like a party which is where I learned to sing with my family. It was just spontaneous.
“If I panicked and was worried about how I looked, if my teeth were white enough or my hair was not grey I would have given up years ago.”
She hasn’t and you can see for yourself at Uppermill Civic Hall on Friday, April 1. Tickets cost £22.50 in advance. Doors open at 7pm for 7.30pm concert. For more information go online.
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