n The Asylum Dance, his work of singular liminal poetry, John Burnside lifts then quickly drops an element he all-but-calls the “weekender’s idea,” the outsider’s inaccurate map of the quayside or the skewed romance of tourist postcards that raises disdain, disgust and pity (equal measures) in locals looking on. The weekender’s idea, for Burnside, is that you happily project away from yourself, the local, onto the passing unsuspecting. Its use is as much a tool of judgment (by locals of weekenders) than as one of actually adjudging perception; it’s as much a perceived perception. The weekender’s idea, in large, depends upon a cached cynicism of the actual real felt insiders’ existence of the place that the other is only able to glimpse from his (lack of) perspective and ultimately denies. That denial bringing the rise (nursed grudges, hurt, grumbles into late evening malts, glances, evil). This is Burnside at his most lovingly poetic, marshalling the stalled perceptions of the outsider (“S E R E N I T Y” emblazoned foot-high on his boat) against his authentic town-dwellers; as such a doggedly poetic image it hardly presents as a concept that’s useful as part of an “efficient interpretative strategy”.


“...And yet. ” There is something maddeningly compelling about this idea when discussing music - especially folk music with its trials of authenticity, trails of history and its contingent specific debts to place and time. I’ve gone a long way from hating this album to understanding it to loving it in unpacking this sinister notion of Burnside’s.


Stumble first on the album’s title: “Farewell Sorrow” is a phrase that doesn’t offer up any easy clue to which word is leading the other. Ali laments “the sorrow of good-bye” or Ali bids “good-bye to sorrow”? And there, in the gaps holding the letters together, is the cauterised residue of history: these words are lamentably medieval (farewell, sorrow), they fall short of the Scotland I know, the Scotland I love. Then, choke on Ali’s affected voice, like the soft sleep between dreams, muted and illuminated by something inward. This alien throat belies the stern frame that’s lived through Fife! Finally die the death the language here has lived: “carousing,” “winching,” “thy,” “unveileth,” “doth,” “whither.”


Whenever we think of Home, in humble deference to its capital letter, its importance, our mind rests on the handful of neighbours we know by name, the stairs up which with sodden voice we sing through a weekend’s dark, the stranger’s usual faces, the light that settles in the comfort of the corners, the familiarity. Roberts’ record sits in stark relief, then, to this (or, my) cultural memory of Scotland, it’s an album characterised by, made special by its lack, its refusal, its withdrawal from the modern. So awkward too when placed aside the folktronica of Four Tet’s Rounds or Manitoba’s Up in Flames. So awkward to be listened to, to be made even, in 2003. The weird, old Scotland suddenly enlivened (or awoken anew?) in the grooves of Roberts’ steady retreat (trace the arc through The Night is Advancing, The Crook of My Arm into Farewell Sorrow).


What does all this have to do with the music? This is an avant folk record, right? Lutes and flutes and bonny lasses? Well, sure, yes: Farewell Sorrow is the apparent heir to Ali’s 2001 album of interpretations, The Crook of My Arm. No new depths are being explicitly plundered here. Shirley Collins, Sandy Denny, Julie Covington, Judee Sill, Pentangle, Fairport Convention - by investing so strongly in this tradition Roberts’ settles comfortably into a place in a rich continuum thought lost, though recently revived (the avant folk of Tower Records, Jackie-O etc). Roberts’ magic(k), however, isn’t to be found in the simplistic “breaks & continuities” rhetoric of musical tradition but in the refusal to cede defeat to a living he can’t feel, won’t sing.


I haven’t said too much about the album, agreed, but what’s to write about it that you won’t already be able to glean from a quick internet search? Farewell Sorrow is full of implied and expressed sadnesses, gentle guitar playing, “gaelic” instrumentation, it’s a Sunday morning gentle-lilt-while-reading record, an extraordinarily quiet “hello, goodbye” slink in the shadows etc. More than anything, however, it is a diary of lack and want and awkwardness, a weekender’s idea “no more or less correct than anything we use to make a dwelling in the world.”