Eddi Reader has run the gamut from pop stardom in the 1980s to a morecomfortable niche as a singer of contemporary folk, writes Tony Clayton-Lea
So the truth is out: Eddi Reader, one of Scotland's national treasures and a singer whose voice is sweet but hardly ever saccharine, lied to get to where she is today. As if this wasn't bad enough, she was once known as Ever Ready due to the fact that if anyone called for her to sing with them in her session-singing days in the early 1980s, she'd be there in a flash.
"Ever Ready? Someone wrote that! I was doing a gig in King's Road, London, in a wine bar/pub and they chalked that on the board because they had misheard my name on the phone. But people didn't actually call me that."
But the lies, Eddi, what about the lies?
"When I answered an ad in Melody Maker, which turned out to have been placed by the Gang Of Four, I did basically lie to them. I figured the logical answer at that time was to tell people that you were someone you clearly weren't. I told them I'd sung for loads of people - Simple Minds and the like, but I was talking to them from a phone box frantically pushing 10p pieces into the slot, pretending that I was my secretary - 'ooh, I'll just get Eddie for you now, hang on'. I was only 18 then, down from Irvine."
Born in the tenements of Glasgow on August 28th, 1959, Eddie and her family moved initially to the Glaswegian suburbs and shortly after, in a council housing social experiment, to Irvine, which was then a new town less than 30 miles from Glasgow - "on the coast and much more romantic and beautiful than where we used to live".
Reader recalls this particular move as being a pivotal moment in the development of her burgeoning folk singing career. She remembers the weather in Irvine as nicer than that in Glasgow, the air cleaner. The town's folk club was better, too, in that it informed her of something deeper than what she had experienced in Glasgow - which was a more strident folk music that broadcast its political and socialist leanings loudly and at any given opportunity.
"That was good and I was very interested in it, but my teenage head wasn't really developed enough to take it all in. When I went to Irvine, I was introduced to the romanticism of Robert Burns and other traditional music that I had never heard of. Glasgow exposed me to the possibility of standing up with a guitar and singing in front of people, as long as I pretended I was the right age. In Irvine, it was about unaccompanied singing to the backdrop of the island of Arran, the sun setting over it every night. Quite beautiful."
An important aspect for her at the time was that Irvine was peaceful, a far cry from what Reader says she experienced (not necessarily first-hand) in Glasgow. "Well, Glasgow was a bit tough - a bit of wife-beating, alcoholism, Catholic/Protestant stuff. It was the value system of 'if you can beat me up, then you're okay; if you can't, we're going to get you'."
Yet, not even the beauty of Irvine could hold her. Ambitious for more than just playing the same series of folk clubs on Scotland's west coast and busking in Glasgow, Reader realised the time had come to leave. Hence the teenage lies and the 10p-piece pushing in the Irvine phone box.
"Singing in the streets transformed me," she says, "because I had to reach and attract people. But, yes, I eventually wanted to find like-minded people, I also wanted to start writing properly and not have to continue singing songs that I felt I had to sing whilst busking in order to induce people to throw money at me."
Moving to London in the early 1980s, working as a backing singer for Gang Of Four, The Eurythmics and Alison Moyet (not forgetting a stint singing the praises of Tesco), Reader discovered to her shame that she was doing "too many oohs and aahs". Despite the advantages of earning decent money and being put up in hotels, she began to feel trapped.
"Everyone was getting pissed off at my backing-singer dancing, which was erratic and overshooting. Gang of Four and Annie Lennox were asking me to contain that and my singing to what they wanted. So, I was bit like a caged bird. They had a thing to sell, and here was me doing something for them, to be something for them, but I wasn't professional or sussed enough to realise that.
"I wanted to write songs, too, and while at the time my writing was of the Woman's Own variety, I still feel better singing my own lyrics. Yes, I can sell a song to anybody if other people write it, but only if I can relate to the lyrics. Yet, there's something really special about getting inside my own gut and pulling something out. I used to have a problem with my own songs, but now I value what I do, and am no longer apologetic or embarrassed about it."
For a short while in the late 1980s, she became a bit of a pop star through her work with Fairground Attraction (two Top 10 UK hits in 1988, Perfect and Find My Love, and then the rollercoaster ride ground to a halt), but from the early 1990s she has found herself a somewhat more mellow niche as a singer/songwriter of quite beautiful contemporary folk, most of which is co-written with the songwriting partnership of Boo Hewerdine and Neil and Calum MacColl. It's a role that seems to suit her character trait of being an essentially assertive person and of not wanting to adhere to the more mind-sapping sensibilities of the music industry.
"There is a lot less hassle to do things that I'd rather not do," she says of the difference between her pop star days and what she does now. "It seemed to me that at every stage - even when Fairground Attraction 'made it' - we always seemed to be on the brink of not making it or losing it if we didn't do this or that or something else."
Reader talks of running up bills the band didn't really need to run up, and how difficult it was to alter how other band members behaved. "There seemed to be lots of agendas going on that distracted from the enjoyment."
Work these days is as pleasurable and light-hearted as she can make it. Her music might not reflect her outward celebration of life (highlighting as it does the travails of love and interpersonal relationships), but it still shines with a brightness that can make you blink.
"If you don't have any light in what you do, very few people will be attracted to it," she says. "It's also important to love what you do, otherwise you fail. I have faith that the world is abundant and that opportunities will come up on a regular basis for money to come in and to go out. That sounds romantic, which I know sounds dumb to some people, but nowadays I'm more self-assured about what I do. I put that down to realising I was wasting my time worrying about certain things. People are in the audience because they genuinely get off on what I do. That's a blessing, such a positive thing."
Eddi Reader starts an Irish tour next Monday, July 22nd at Whelan's, Dublin. Subsequent dates are Tuesday, Radisson SAS Hotel, Galway (as part of the Arts Festival); Wednesday, The Forum, Waterford; and Thursday, Talbot Hotel, Wexford. She will be accompanied on the tour by guitarist, singer and co-writer Boo Hewerdine, and by Irish guitarist Colin Reid