Duncan Harley

I was sent a copy of Hamish’s Railway a few months ago and it stood for a while on my dusty shelf alongside a few books and discs needing a review. I should have known better than to ignore the music. Various of the books amongst the pile will never make it onto either the Times list or the Waterstone shelves and god only knows why the publishers send me them. I must be on some difficult writers list. I digress. Hamish, or his agent, has been sending me his work for a few years and in the Leopard/Aberdeen Voice days, I reviewed positively alongside the music of other folk such as Thran Backwoods poet Gordon Duthie. Gordon makes music in his bedroom and broadcasts it all around the world. I've ranted on about his music many a time and in the course of ploughing through some glossy copies of Leopard Magazine dating from early 2015 I recalled that we met up in Kintore to have tea and scones before heading off to the local graveyard to do a photo-shoot alongside the Pictis...

I've ranted on about this man's music many a time and in the course of ploughing through some glossy copies of Leopard Magazine dating from early 2015 I came across this review of his quite splendid album Thran.  As I recall, we met up in Kintore to have tea and scones before heading off to the local graveyard to do a photo-shoot alongside the Pictish stones in the churchyard.  As for the bill - I think he paid it, but I cant quite recall to be honest. The review went along the following lines: "With the release of his third album Thran , NE singer/songwriter/musician Gordon Duthie reflects on the 74 year old event in which his great grandfather’s fishing vessel, Fraserburgh registered Steam Drifter SS Duthies was sunk in Montrose Harbour by the young men of the Luftwaffe. Alongside titles such as Whisky Disco and Feel Loon did a Wildpoepen , Gordon’s tribute to Sandhaven built FR106 Duthies is just one of ten provocative numbers in this new offering. ...

It’s been a funny old day. Firstly, I finally found an old photograph of Julian the Tank which had eluded me for years. I had been trying to find a review copy of Gordon Duthie’s early album ‘Thran’ and alongside Thran and his later ‘Dunt, Dunt, Dunt’ there, staring me full in the face, was Julian in all of his full glory atop the Broad Hill down by the beach. I mean, how serendipitous is that?  There are a very few on-line images of the steel monster but, until today at least, I had completely forgotten a folder headed war-bonds tucked deep within my research archives. Sounds grand really, but of course in reality the Duncan Harley Archives Collection comprise a three-drawer steel filing cabinet full of current projects plus a few dusty cardboard boxes of done and dusted folders heading for the loft to await, no doubt, my untimely demise in some forgotten year or other. Then there was the reading of the local paper. In amongst the piles of Auntie May and Theresa...