In 1991 he was a TV producer and a fan of certain West African musicians who had put themselves in the hands of French record producers. With them they gained a grooviness that made their music palatable to listeners raised on western pop.
In those days he was spending a lot of time on the Western Isles making Gaelic television programmes and remembers: “I would think, oh God, what we need for this particular programme is music like that, but with Gaelic!” An encounter with Talitha MacKenzie, an American singer of Gaelic songs, in a village hall in South Uist led to the formation of Mouth Music, and the fusion of traditional Scottish songs with contemporary grooves.
The ripples spread out, catching a wave of young Scottish musicians who revered their native roots music but couldn’t deny their attachment to club culture. Chief among them was the piper Martyn Bennett, whose death earlier this year at the age of 33 shocked the music industry. Bennett played on some of the earliest Mouth Music recordings and once wrote: “As well as listening to DJs on the Edinburgh club scene, Martin (Swan) was probably the biggest influence for me.”
Afro-Celtic music is a genre that’s now so well established it almost counts as being a strand of traditional music. “There was a point at Womad in 1995,” Swan says, “and just about every second act described itself as Afro-Celtic. I couldn’t help but feel I’d had a bit of influence.”
Mouth Music has been through several incarnations since then. Currently comprising Swan, Kaela Rowan and Martin Furey, of the Irish musical dynasty, the band have ditched the samples and the beats, preferring to structure their songs around live vocals, fiddle, accordion and acoustic guitar. The stripped-down, more traditional sound reflects the changes in Swan’s life over the past few years, not least a move from the Scottish capital to the countryside around Peebles.
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“I ended up in Edinburgh a little by accident,” says Swan, who because of his Scottish father’s work as a consultant haematologist, moved around a lot. The family spent every summer in Edinburgh when Swan was young and finally located there permanently when Swan was in his twenties. “After a while I seemed to be spending most of my time trying to get out of the city. I thought: ‘This is stupid, why don’t I just move?’ ” Once settled in the Borders, he devoted more of his time to the fiddle, realising how much time he had invested in using computers and studio production as a way of expressing himself musically. The Order of Things follows a fiddle album called The Scrape, which even Swan calls “arcane”. Only half jokingly he compares his fiddle playing to learning how to use a chainsaw.
The African influence is less overt than it used to be. As part of his quest “to do something that’s really me”, Swan was wary of introducing musical ideas to this album that were too redolent of other cultures.
However, he still loves African music and is currently producing an album by Nuru Kane, a Senegalese musician. Once that’s finished he plans to produce a couple of unreleased Bennett compositions.
After Bennett’s death from Hodgkin’s lymphoma, it fell to Swan to gather together the artists for a tribute concert at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall in April. Months earlier he had written a song called The Territory, which now appears as the closing track on The Order of Things. Swan wrote it in an attempt to express his feelings about the final stages of his friend’s battle for life.
“I think he’d tried to maintain an optimism for a long time. In the last few weeks, when he was in the hospice in Edinburgh, I think it varied from day to day.
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“The first week he was there he sort of wanted to talk about the likelihood of dying and the second week he didn’t. This is difficult territory and that’s what the song’s about. That in order to try and ensure your survival you have to feel about yourself in a way that doesn’t allow you to prepare for death.
“That, I think, was what was difficult for him and for the people around him.”
Well aware of how artists’ legacies can be distorted after they’re dead, Swan is reluctant to talk about Bennett’s importance to Scottish music. “I think he was much more important than he was given credit for. What I would say is that he underestimated a lot of things that were very important about him, like his piping or his simple, practical musicianship. He never really put much of a premium on that.”
Alongside his appreciation of Bennett’s talents, Swan nurses a more personal regret, all the more poignant in light of the turn his own music has taken.
“I think my disappointment was that I was waiting for the day when he’d become a bit of a fuddy-duddy like me and bring out an acoustic album.”
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The Order of Things is out on Skitteesh Records tomorrow