Born in County Durham, MARTIN STEPHENSON is a gifted singer, songwriter and performer.  In the '80s, he found considerable fame and critical acclaim with his band, The Daintees.  However, when the band split in 1992, Stephenson’s disenchantment with major label politics led him to sever ties with the mainstream industry completely.

Stephenson retreated to the Highlands in the late '90s but remains as industrious and prolific a talent as ever.  MARCUS WILSON caught up with him in Tain.

Rob Ellen [promoter with Highland-based Medicine Music] looked after us back then – he used to put music on in the Phoenix, and he was living in Nairn at the time, so I stayed with him at first.  After that, Rob was really my main connection with the Highlands.  He’s a leftfield character, and really good-hearted.  I’ve seen him struggle to get money for food and all that.  He’d invest his money into doing some posters and putting a band on instead!  That’s what attracted me to Rob, he was nothing like the rest of the music industry, he was like a wild man who lived up in the hills, and I love that about him.

I was going through a lot of stuff then because, probably from around 1984, I’d clocked this cocoon around myself.  I saw it as a very oppressive thing, even though it seemed that a lot of people wanted to be in that position, I actually realised it was dangerous for my spiritual growth so, consciously, I started dismantling this quite early on, and I’d try and avoid certain things that put me in what I thought was a negative situation.  Maybe it was a more materialistic situation.

Gypsy Dave was also an important element in helping me in that - I went to smaller venues under apprenticeship with him.  I was a scary time, but I was very fortunate.  And I then kept gravitating up to the Highlands more and more until I felt cleaner.  The Highlands seemed to be the wrong way to go for a careerist and I think that’s why it appealed to me!

A lot of it was to do with drinking as well.  There was a drinking problem, so I faced it up here and beat that about eight years ago.

Although I would work with Rob and do little gigs around the Highlands and Islands – you know, go to Arran or wherever – I actually saw the Highlands as a haven where I didn’t really want to develop too much profile-wise.  I enjoy not having too much profile, so I’d quite happily go and busk or go and play in a pub and not think it was below me.  So I’ve enjoyed just being here and not worrying too much.  The most important thing to me is interaction with other musicians, friends and neighbours.  I’ve always visualised it like that, really.
 

The egroup and website have worked really well in providing this interaction.  You see, in the major part of the music industry, the manager works the artist and he keeps a veil in front of the audience.  The veil is there for control.  So, the way I work now, the manager has gone and I’ve formed a direct connection with the audience, and I think that’s a better level because the demi-god gets destroyed.

In a way, you have to go through ego suicide, but if you throw that away then there’s a growth, and I think that’s what’s happening with egroups.  Artists are starting to connect more with their audiences so you become one.  It’s like a band really – there are no chiefs.  I may be a catalyst for it, but there are many people within the group who are really talented and want to develop, and that’s the way I’ve worked with it.  For instance, there’s a guy that does my artwork, there’s another lad that does my website.  So we just work like a team.

I remember when people used to come to my gigs in the ‘80s, there’s always a tour manager that gets in the way of that relationship with the audience, but that’s not there anymore.  I think that whoever plays the music and the listener can get to connect in a way that wasn’t allowed before.  And it’s on a smaller, microcosmic level.  There’s a lot of wealth in that as well.

Many of the projects that I’m working on now have grown through just being open and allowing other people to have a go at doing things.  For instance, I’m going to do a tour in Ireland in a few days’ time, and I’m going to tour Australia in October, and this is all through just being on a clear path where you’re not cocooned.
 

Dolph had phoned me up in about 1989 when I was living in Tynemouth and he left a message on the answering machine saying [Martin puts on a North Carolinian accent] “My name is Dolph.  I’m a tennis player.  I want to come over to England and get my foot in the door in music – I’ll even carry your guitar cases for you…” – and that freaked me out!  At first I thought it was a mate winding me up, so I just erased the message.  And then about four years ago he got in touch again, and I found out that we had a common interest in old-time string music and bluegrass, and we actually just started interacting through email, and we spent six months planning this musical journey.

He wanted to show me North Carolina and to make a connection with finger-picking and all that stuff, so I just trusted him and went with it.  So, really, it was the same thing … you know, he was an Echo and the Bunnymen fan who’d stumbled across my album and it just came from that.  Again nothing to do with the business - just enthusiasm for music.  We started off playing porches and ice cream parties and just travelling around with a minidisc recorder.  And it’s just grown from that, and now he’s started his own label and he’s got other artists, so he’s actually finding a life in music now.  He’s become my main man in the States now.  He’s a good soul, and a friend.

I have a very small distribution situation right now, which comes from being outside of the major network.  There’s a guy called Rob Ayling who I think is really interesting.  He has a company called Voiceprint.  He was an electrician in London who just decided to change his life.  He started putting prog-rock albums out in the late ’70s and early ‘80s because no one else was putting them out, and he just developed his own distribution company from there. 

He was the only person that would take my album ‘The Church and the Minidisc’ on board [an album recorded over three-days at two churches in the Highlands using only a minidisc recorder], which was an important album for me, and he had no problem with that.  So I’m able to deliver an album to him myself and he doesn’t need to get involved in any recording costs – that’s my own problem.  So my choice is how much debt I want to go into when I record an album, which I try to keep to a minimum.
 

You see, when you’re with a major company there’s always a pressure that’s always there and they say “You can’t use this guy because he’s not good enough” or “You must do this because we want that”.  And the only reason this pressure ever exists involves money.  So if you’re away from that environment then you’ve got a free canvas.  That’s why a lot of great art came from people who, at the time, didn’t really have the funds.  And there’s definitely a sleep that comes in when things are too cushy, and I don’t feel comfortable in that environment.  I’d rather struggle a little bit – to work and fight for things.

The work I do with the Toerags thing is interesting too.  I suppose we’re a period-sounding thing from the ’50s, but the songs are a little bit leftfield.  Joe Guillan, the guitarist in The Toerags, amazes me – he’s a guitar genius.  He’s from Meadowell in North Shields, but it’s like he just landed here like some Sun Studio session musician from 1954, you know.  He’s brilliant.  He’s just in the wrong time, and I love that, so I work with him as an artist because he can take me to times that I can’t reach because of his guitar playing.  He’s like a classical musician in the rockabilly and rock’n’roll world.

So we can create ridiculous concepts like the song ‘Barbaraville’ together.  That came from when I had a cottage at Delny over the field from Barbaraville, just off the A9, when I first moved up to the Highlands.  My girlfriend and I only had one car, and she was working in Inverness, so I just started exploring the local environment on foot.  So I remember the first time I saw Barbaraville, I walked over the fields, and looked down to see a bus stop, a row of houses, and then I saw a llama in the field, so the song came from that.  I just threw a bit of David Lynch in there, and I was away!
 

There have been some memorable gigs up in the Highlands over the years.  Once, Rob Ellen and I were broke and we needed ten pounds to get petrol to get to a gig at the Crask Inn in Sutherland.  So Rob said ‘My daughter’s got twenty pounds in her TSB account.  We’ll hang around the school and see if she’ll lend us it’, you know!  So we were unshaven and hanging around the school.  Anyway, she came out and she was really sharp - she wanted to charge us interest!  It cost us twelve pounds fifty to get the tenner off to get the juice to get up to Crask!  And when we got up to Crask we got paid in venison pie and whisky.  Just things like that really stand out from my time up here!

Portmahomack’s a lovely village as well.  All the characters that live there.  They have there very own music scene there, you know, it’s amazing.  And if you give and join in with it, the rewards are amazing.  I can go up to Portmahomack now, and I’ve got friends there and I can play there.  There was times when I was skint and I could phone Phil at the Caley Inn and say ‘Have you got anybody on this Friday?’, and he’d say ‘No’, so I’d say ‘Well I’ll play for thirty quid and my food and a bed’ – which is huge when you’re skint – and he’d just chalk my name on the blackboard and stick it out on the path.  I’m a bit sick, but I love that - I think that’s great!

Because of past karma, there’s always weird things that happen to take care of you.  Like, I just played down in Newcastle and I lost eleven hundred pounds – the theatre were naughty and confiscated the money – and then two days later I got a gig in London for thirteen hundred pounds.  And it’s all about keeping free, because if you keep free then the karma can flow.  You have to let go and throw the sandbags out of the balloon to rise up above everything.  I mean, I love Buddhism – I wouldn’t even call it a religion.  It’s the only spiritual village I would trust at the end of the day.  And I think that the Tibetans… that they’re there to help us, you know.

And I’m not sure what the next project will be.  I was supposed to go and work with The Proclaimers’ rhythm section – the drummer and the bass player – and do something in Glasgow.  I might do that.  I’ve also got some new songs – simple songs – so there may be another album.  There’s also the possibility of doing some more recording with Virginia Astley.
 

Related Links

• Martin Stephenson / The Daintees Website
• Martin Stephenson Egroup