OLIVER HURLEY
EDDI READER
Eddi Reader is thinking about the future – as in, about five centuries into the future. “I think I’m probably hopeful that in 300 to 500 years, somebody will bring me back to life”, she says. “In that way where people rediscover things”, she clarifies. Indeed, rediscovering things is at the forefront of Reader’s thoughts at the moment. Unearthing old Scottish and Irish music books that had been hidden for 50 years played a major part in how her new album, Cavalier, came together. “My dad’s cousin, James, died. He had moved to Ireland with his father in 1934, when he was an eight-year-old boy”, she says. “And his father took over with him all my family’s books.” It was left to Reader to clear out the house. In doing so, she discovered a great stash of traditional music, originally collected by James’s grandfather, Charles Reader – Eddi Reader’s great-grandfather. (As a keen amateur historian, Eddi has a lot of stories involving convoluted family connections.) “So I have all these books and, within the books, significant little things would come out. I found one that’s on the album called Deirdre’s Farewell To Scotland. I had no idea of what it was all about, I just found this little sheet of browned parchment. I was intrigued by the title and, as I picked out the melody on the piano, I realised the whole thing just bounced between two sixth chords. The sixth of a chord is always my favourite… It’s almost like, ‘something is gonna happen!’ And the two chords went in between this tiny little lyric, just this woman talking about how Scotland was her sanctuary. The words it used invoked for me my childhood in Scotland.”