If prolific Fife folk singer King Creosote’s last major collaboration, with Jon Hopkins on Diamond Mine in 2011, earned him a Mercury prize nomination, his new one should win garlands from Scotland’s pro-independence lobby. From Scotland With Love, an audio-visual project for the cultural festival that accompanied Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games, had director Virginia Heath scouring the Scottish Screen Archive for footage of mid-20th-century life and industry. Creosote (AKA Kenny Anderson) then wrote a soundtrack of songs for the documentary, inventing lives and stories around these grainy faces snatched from history.
Played in full along to the 90-minute film, an old world gleams anew. Antique double-decker trams traverse the monochrome streets of Partick to the strains of a winsome accordion. Flat-capped shipbuilders hammer out the support struts of transport ships to a pounding drumbeat. There’s even, set to a stirring Celtic crescendo, rare black-and-white footage of Scottish football fans celebrating.
Despite looking like he’s been dragged backwards through Shane McGowan’s duck pond, Creosote and his chamber-folk band infuse these silent characters and far-away scenes with sumptuous, featherlight melody and a sympathetic grace. “Fisher lassies” gutting cod are given a piano-led nobility, families race towards the sea to a kiss-me-quick ragtime polka and jiving 50s beatniks tap their Gauloises to the upbeat weekend revelry of For One Night Only (a song originally titled, rather more stereotypically, Fighting and Shagging).
But the screen really bends when Anderson gives the characters their own narratives: the tearful emigrants “press-ganged overseas” to the anthemic swells of Miserable Strangers; the miner of Pauper’s Dough striking and rioting because he wants “better for my boy”; or Cargill’s trawler girl, who was “the finest catch you’ll land”. Scenes of soldiers marching to war and bagpipers on battlefields are made all the more chilling by Anderson’s mournful husk whispering “tell her she’s my favourite girl” as the war-bound kiss sweethearts on train-station platforms. It makes for an immersive, moving and, at times, truly magical window on the past, which fulfils folk music’s primary purpose: to evoke and celebrate lives long lost.
• At Thekla, Bristol, on 6 October. Box office: 0117-929 9008. Then touring.
