Eddi Reader
EDDI Reader will play her first York show in seven years tonight, accompanied by her full band at The Citadel, the old Salvation Army building in Gillygate, now home to the York City Church.
“I’m really looking forward to it,” says the Glasgow-born singer, who fronted Fairground Attraction, topping the charts with Perfect, and has a dozen solo albums, three BRIT awards and an MBE for Outstanding Contributions to the Arts to her name.
“I’m excited to be playing there. I’m lucky enough to have audiences that keep turning up, and new ones turning up too. My journey has been really blessed, with lots of songs over the years, and my songwriting broadening. ”
Eddi’s Scottish folk band Fairground Attraction famously broke up after only one studio album, The First Of A Million Kisses, a year after winning the BRIT Awards for best album and single in 1989 to pursue solo careers.
That split came in January 1990 in the throes of recording their second album that instead took the form of B-sides and unreleased songs from ‘Million Kisses’ sessions on Ay Fond Kiss in June that year. Roll on to 2024 when, in the shadow of band member Mark E Nevin’s wife, Louise, having a life-threatening health issue, the group re-grouped.
“There was no pressure getting back together,” says Eddi. “We got together for only 14 days to try to get an album out, and we succeeded. I noted how things came back, like control issues that had been poisonous 35 years ago and were still there, but also how my experiences had expanded. When I thought ‘that’s not how you do it’, I sensed how diplomatic you have to be. I had to unlearn a lot of stuff.
“I think you have to accept a lot of things are just the way they are, and it’s OK to accept it, to forgive it and move on. My expectations are always very high, expecting it to be a family, but you can’t expect everyone to be a long-lost buddy, with me being the one who wants it to be happy ever after.
“It wasn’t as easy as it might have been, but I realised that with bands, you get together with another human being and you try to create something, and when you do, it’s lovely. People think it must be easy but it isn’t. You know that the love is there but you don’t know how to reach it, so all you can do is pour love on it.”
The album, Beautiful Happening, duly arrived on September 27 2024, coincidentally the day when Louise was given the all clear, making the title even more resonant.
Straddling differing musical styles and making them her own, from the traditional to the contemporary, and interpreting the songs of Robert Burns to boot, Eddi took on another role in 2023 when making her London theatre debut at @sohoplace, Charing Cross Road.
Headhunted by director Jonathan Butterell, she played the Balladeer for five months in a stage adaptation of Annie Proulx short story Brokeback Mountain, singing the folk and American songs of The Feeling’s Dan Gillespie Sells. Among those who attended were her fellow members of Fairground Attraction.
“I really, really enjoyed the experience, providing me with an acting role as a woman from the Mid West, leading a band,” says Eddi, who told one interview [by Caitlin Devlin, June 14 2023] that “in my head it’s Wyoming 1968”.
“I got some voice coaching for the role, had to play guitar as well as sing, and at the end I had to come on and play the dead young man’s mother.”
Eddi had previous acting experience, both on stage and screen. “I’d done a bit of that before, and I’ve always enjoyed playing a character, like in The Trick Is To Keep Breathing [as a psychic voice] at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow [in 1993]. The biggest was the John Byrne one, Your Cheatin’ Heart, playing Joleen Jowett [opposite Tilda Swinton’s Cissie Crouch in a six-part BBC mini-series about the Scottish country music scene in 1990].”
Whether re-forming Fairground Attraction last year, appearing in Brokeback Mountain, making solo records or never going on stage with a set list, authenticity drives Eddi. “It sounds like a cliché, but I don’t see any other way to do it. All alternatives are painful, because if you’re not true to yourself, you’re not authentic” she says.
“I’m just getting the dishes done, making the bed, but I did have a number one and I still enjoy singing it. I’m very grateful that it opened doors for me.”
Never under-estimate a singer’s skill. “It’s a mistake that people make when they say ‘just a singer’, because sometimes the singer hears things in music that not even the writer knows are there, so it’s like being the Columbo of music! Finding the feeling can make a song much more potent sung by a woman when written by a man!” says Eddi.
“You have to find the character in the melody as well as the lyrics; that gives the extra help to get the emotion across – and that’s different from acting, though I do see similarities.”
Eddi continues: “I’ll hear something that everyone else thinks is an old baggy hat on a coat stand, but I’m thinking, no, look at it, imagine making something with that. I see the movie!
“Like the Robert Burns songs I do. I saw him as being like a songwriter in his mid-twenties now; something of the young David Bowie about him, or Johnny Rotten or Tom Waits; there’s just something more of now about the songs, but being of then, so that didn’t matter because I could feel my way into Rabbie Burns’ words.”
Now 66, Eddi has “never felt unequal to any musician, male or female”. “I’ve never had a challenge in that way,” she says. “I’ve never noticed anyone getting in the way. I just plough my own furrow; I just do my own thing. I’m not difficult! I’m looking for jewels in the junk shop.”
What’s coming next from Eddi? “Me and John [husband John Douglas] are doing a little duo thing that we’re getting together at the moment,” she says. “We haven’t recorded it yet. We’ve got one song written so far. Eleven to go!”
Eddi Reader plays The Citadel, Gillygate, York, tonight, 7.30pm, with Alan Kelly, John Douglas, Boo Hewerdine and Kevin MacGuire, supported by Eilidh Patterson. Box office: ticketsource.co.uk.
