Music The Temple Of Folk Music
From its rural location in a former church outside Edinburgh, Temple Records has been preaching the gospel of traditional music for over three decades.
Temple Records’ Robin Morton producing a session for the new album by The Battlefield Band.
In a Scottish country kitchen more resembling a busy train station, members of one of the country’s most enduring folk groups are tucking into sausage butties and mugs of tea.
The Battlefield Band are taking a break from recording their new album in the adjacent studio, housed in a converted church in the Midlothian village for which their record label is named. In 2008 Temple Records turned 30. Formed by Ulster-born Robin Morton, Temple spearheaded the Scottish folk revival at a time when traditional music was an endangered species. Along with ‘the Battlefields,’ it has been one of Scotland's great success stories. As lunch progresses, Morton, a founding member of another legendary folk group, Boys of the Lough, holds forth on the state of traditional music and the changing face of the music industry.
How has the definition of traditional music evolved? I personally don’t think it needs to evolve. Traditional music is traditional music. It doesn’t evolve by following a fashion. When I started playing with Boys of the Lough in the early ’70s, folk music was either singing or playing tunes. We started to mix songs with playing music. The idea that folk music is static isn’t true. It never stops. Traditional music is alive and well. It’s not backward-looking music, it’s modern. But you don’t do something to consciously try to change the music, it just happens. It doesn’t evolve by putting African drums with it.
Does folk music still suffer from a lack of recognition? Folk music was never that popular anyway. People don’t understand what they’ve got here in Scotland.
You go into a folk session and everybody’s sitting around playing music. And it’s really nice, that democracy. This music is different from other kinds in that it’s community music. Anybody can get up and sing and play a few tunes on a penny whistle.
That’s the beauty of this music, but it’s also the unfortunate thing about it, because everybody who doesn’t know about it assumes that that’s what traditional music is. They don’t really understand it, because it all sounds the same, unless you really know what you’re doing. Everybody thinks that our kind of music is session music, that it’s supposed to be heard in a pub. But it’s concert music. These guys take their music very seriously.
The Battleband Band’s new album,
Zama Zama…Try Your luck, was
released in October and entered the
US Folk DJ Chart at no.3. it is available
in CD and download form. www.templerecords.co.uk
How has the music business changed over the years? The real problem now is with the recording industry. Does anybody really buy albums any more? They’re all buying tracks. Nobody is selling as many records as they used to. Warner Brothers will tell you that.
What’s happening now is that everybody’s got everything under one roof. For example, the people who are promoting Madonna’s latest tour are also putting the album out and selling the merchandise at the shows. There’s not all that subdivision in the music industry that there used to be. They think they’re doing something original, but they’re not. Small record labels have been doing that for years. I’m a band manager, an agent, a record company and a promoter.
Has the internet benefited traditional music? I would have thought that it would have enabled you to bypass the lack of media attention.
That’s a myth as well. You got all these nerds saying, ‘The internet’s going to change the world.’ It hasn’t. All it does is give me a shot. It’s exactly the same market and the same issues. It’s the way the economy works. I’m just the same as Warner Brothers, just smaller. They have to sell 100,000 albums and I have to sell 3,000.
The wee record shop round the corner never had a chance with HMV. Now HMV have hit the buffers and the High Street is owned by Sony and Amazon. The internet hasn’t made the great change in any marketplace that it was supposed to. It just meant that a big company like Amazon came along and took over. It’s not a level playing field.
Back in the studio, Morton is settled behind his mixing desk, enticing a better performance from his talented charges. “Let’s do another one,” he says. That was pish.”