[img]http://www.musical1.com/image.php?band_id=1&image_id=204&mode=photo_image&height=128[/img] Bard attitude: Michael Marra in trademark beret. The Dundonian, who is supporting Van Morrison and touring with Liz Lochhead, has 'the best job in the world', although he has a fatherly concern for his children, Alice and Matthew, in the Hazey Janes Photograph by Robert Perry Read Chitra Ramaswamy's piece from Scotland on Sunday dated 21/05/06
[img]http://www.musical1.com/image.php?band_id=1&image_id=204&mode=photo_image&height=128[/img] Photograph by Robert Perry Guilty secrets from the nation's gravelly voice CHITRA RAMASWAMY MICHAEL Marra recently wrote a song about Shirley McKie. The Dundonian songwriter, poet, musician and actor was advising a student doing a degree in political song about how to channel anger into poetry when it occurred to him that the McKie case had made him "angry" and "upset" and he hadn't done anything about it. When he was in the United States last month performing with Liz Lochhead as part of Tartan Week, Marra had his fingerprints taken in Washington. "I'm not a troublemaker but I just didn't like it," he says, in a rolling growl that sounds as though it's been filtered through a funnel of cigarette smoke. "Then it struck me - I didn't do anything for Shirley McKie. I felt guilty. I admired the woman because she just kept telling the truth. I did it in one full shift overnight and I started the chorus..." he stops and his voice becomes even more gravelly as he recites quietly. "I am Shirley McKie/ She is me and I am she/ You are too, and Shirley is you/ We are she because Shirley is we." He falters, suddenly shy, and mumbles that the rest of the writing experience was a blur. This month Marra is supporting Van Morrison at Perth's Festival of the Arts. It's all in a day's work for this gentle man who is often referred to as the Scottish Tom Waits. In the past 30-odd years he has worked with Lochhead, Barbara Dickson and John Byrne and been covered by the likes of Hue and Cry, Kiki Dee and June Tabor. Marra has retained best-kept-secret status, despite being hailed as Scotland's greatest living songwriter and releasing 11 albums. But that's how he likes it: "I didn't know what Burt Bacharach looked like until I was in my 20s. I liked that - songwriters were names in brackets. I would have liked to be invisible and have everyone else doing my stuff." Invisibility may be a peculiar wish for someone in show business, but Marra has always wanted to have it his own way, shutting himself up in his studio at home and shunning the industry to work with his brother and local artists, producers and labels. He was signed to Polydor early in his career in London only to flee back to Dundee when they tried to tone down his Scottishness. Leaving all that behind requires a doggedness, he says, that is very Dundonian in spirit. Marra played a gig with Morrison, a couple of years back, at Stirling Castle, and he's been a fan ever since he heard Astral Weeks in Blairgowrie in the 1960s. "I love him," he says. "I think he's one of the great examples of what you can do with a guitar and three chords. The great ones are simple. I try to be too clever, you know." MARRA ARRIVES at the DCA cafe in Dundee from the home he shares with his wife of 34 years, Peggy, in Newtyre, a small village "20 minutes away on the bus". He's a willowy man, his only robust feature being a set of wiry, creature-like eyebrows that shift around on his wrinkled forehead, his beady eyes lurking beneath. He's sporting a rucksack full of CDs, papers and books, as well as his trusty black beret that he is rarely seen without. "It's the only remaining one and it's been on my head a very long time," he says. He has spent the morning worrying about this interview. "I hadn't met you before," he says, by way of explanation. Marra's children, Alice and Matthew, are following in his footsteps, forming the Hazey Janes and releasing their debut album, Hotel Radio, earlier this year on a small label. Surely its traditional folk meets Americana sound is influenced by their father? "It's got nothing to do with me," he says. "I fear for bairns in show business, you must be protected from it." But when he talks about performing with them, his face lights up. Marra recalls performing with Patti Smith at Ayr's Burns An' A' That! festival. Both Scots bard and punk poet were nervous. "Neither of us had ever done anything with a full orchestra before," he says. With the RSNO giving them the jitters, Smith dragged Marra away for an impromptu practice run; she had written her own music for Burns' 'Afton Water', to which Marra was playing guitar, and she wanted to sing it to him. "She whispered it into my ear," says Marra, "and it was beautiful." He has lots of stories like this, small moments in which the ordinary becomes strange and rather wonderful. Like the time when he told a school friend in the playground that he wanted to be a songwriter and it turned out his friend's uncle was Stephen Sondheim. Many of these incidents find their way into Marra's surreal songs, which see Frida Kahlo sinking a few at the Tay Bridge Bar and King Kong invading Glasgow. Marra will be performing with Glasgow's poet laureate Liz Lochhead at Edinburgh's Festival of Scottish Writing this month with In Flagrant Delicht. Marra's piano and guitar accompanying Lochhead's poems, as well as singing his own songs, makes for a winning partnership that has lasted 10 years and taken them all over the world. Next stop is Melbourne later this year. "Normally when I'm touring it's just me and a keyboard, guitar and two bags," he says. "If I'm with Liz, it's a completely different way of seeing things. She has a sense of humour, I think it would be fair to say, and a nifty turn of phrase." He also recently acted in Alison Peebles' Home production in Aberdeen for the National Theatre of Scotland. Peebles contacted him to say that writer Rona Munro had created a monologue for him. "It was a piece about a fisherman who's in this flat in Aberdeen comparing his life to the life of a cod," Marra says. It is easy to see why Munro thought of Marra, with his weather-beaten skin, air of solitude and, of course, that voice. When he's not acting and performing, Marra is working on a new album. It has no name as yet - "I should give it one and it might become more believable" - but some of the songs are starting to take shape. He finds the process of songwriting agonising though, and says it's "like drawing up huge lists of choices and panicking my way into one of them". When Marra wrote Nan Garland, an opera for Dundee Rep, a couple of years ago, he had his head down for nine months straight and in the end Peggy ordered him to go out and see people. "'Go and eat where the humans eat,' she said. I was lost, in the forest, immersed in it. That's a wonderful thing though - it's the best job in the world." Copyright Scotland On Sunday 2006
