I have fallen well short of my aim to publish the monthly playlist on the first of the month this time around. The past two weeks have been packed with music festival shenanigans ahead of travels from southern Dorset up to the Inverness coastline of Scotland via stopovers in Cumbria on the way up and the Galashiels borders area on the way back down. Then the return road trip was delayed by a car breakdown scenario seeing me stranded for the best part of a day on the Scotland/England border viewpoint, which would have been a lovely spot at least if not for the fact that it was depressingly wet, cloudy and grey. On top of that the so called famous Carters Bar that gives the viewpoint its name was nowhere to be seen, so I had to pass the hours nibbling on a half finished bag of nuts, stretching out the bottle of water I had with me and running the car battery down playing the playlist attached to this post. Luckily, the recovery vehicle sorted that out when it arrived after five hours and diagnosed that I had misfiring cylinders and needed towing back into Scotland to wait for repairs. The borders garage was pretty cool, run by a beardy dude called Dougie who appeared to work alone whilst blasting out Radio 4 and sharing stories of the local musical glitterati whose motors he has fixed. For example, there was once a day some years back when he introduced the drummer from Shooglenifty to the legendary folk guitarist and former Pentangle member John Renbourn while they came in for repairs. It also turned out Mike Heron used to live nearby and the Incredible String Band would rent a local house to get their mystical freak folk together in the hilly Scottish landscape.

I had actually seen Mike Heron at the start of this two-week excursion when he appeared with the Broadside Hacks at End Of The Road festival playing a set of ISB music. I am not going to say too much about the festival here because I wrote a full review for another publication which I will link to here when it is published. It was a great weekend though, awash with great performances and new discoveries. In particular I would highlight a track called ‘Broke’ by Scott Lavene that appears in this playlist; he was a real find, especially in terms of his live presence, that I had previously been unaware of. The cover stars for this edition too, The Bug Club, came over like a band that are really on a roll, getting better and better every time I see them. Still, this was all just an opener to a full on two weeks that included a miserable, for the locals, night in a Cumbrian pub on transfer deadline day where the words “Isak” and “vermin” could be frequently heard in the same sentence and then a number of nights drinking in the Shore Inn at Portsoy. A pub that feels delightfully unfazed by the passing of time, wherein locals cheerfully mock the visitors unaware of doric dialect and the difference between a ‘quine’ and a ‘loon’ (turns out ones a girl, the others a boy). The walls are covered in framed Peaky Blinders photos as a lot of that TV series was filmed in this scenic location. Anyway, it was a refreshingly real experience and by the time a local fisherman came in late one evening handing out freshly caught mackerel for free it was hard not to dream of a Scotland relocation sometime.

After a welcome catch up with some dear friends on the borders, including an unscheduled extra night while the car was fixed, Dougie was able to get my “horrible Honda” back in a drivable condition. The only issue was, at such short notice, he could only get his hands on four cylinders and the engine actually has eight. None of them looked that healthy either but he fixed the faulty ones and got me going. By the time I was around an hour away I hit difficulty climbing a very steep hill, the engine warning light came back on and the car felt disturbingly wobbly at certain speeds. Having no appetite for another roadside wait and rationalizing that the car is still driving, I decided to do the remaining five hours of the journey only ever tickling the accelerator and never raising my speed above 50mph. Luckily, I mean extremely fortuitously, I managed to do it with no more than just one stop at Scotch Corner. I may never use the car again, but I made it back, although my nerves are shot. I might have written this piece last night, but I could not unclench my tension filled hands until today. Still, at least I can say this month’s playlist is properly road tested.