Wildlife Charity Albums
In a nutshell:
two various-artists albums organised by me with the hope of raising
some money and general awareness for the Ulster Wildlife Trust and
the WWF, via its Northern Ireland office.
The Wildlife Album was released in
December 2004 and
Live In Hope: The Wildlife Album 2 was released in
November 2005. Detailed info on the content of each album and how
to obtain copies, securely by cheque or credit card, can be found
on the project website:
www.thewildlifealbum.com - created for
free by the excellent Rick Monro, and benefiting greatly by the
loan of secure credit card ordering facilities from contributing
artist Martyn Joseph. Here, though, are a couple of published
pieces, one on each album: the first a piece that I was asked to
write for the quarterly magazine of IMRO (the Irish
Musicians’ Right Organisation, membership of which I
recommend to anyone involved in making music in Ireland); the
second an interview for the Irish
News by my friend,
and co-author of
Irish, Folk Trad & Blues: A Secret
History, Trevor
Hodgett, whose features on jazz, blues and whimsical charity
projects appear more or less weekly in the paper.
Hear some tracks
from the two Wildlife Albums at: www.MySpace.com/thewildlifealbum
The Wildlife Album
The Wildlife Album 2
The Wildlife
Album
By Colin Harper,
for the IMRO membership magazine MQ,
Winter
2004
When I first stumbled into the notion of producing a wildlife
charity album of some sort, I had no idea that it would,
apparently, be the first since the Beatles gave ‘Across The
Universe’ to Spike Milligan’s WWF-benefitting
No
One’s Gonna Change Our World LP in
1969.
Towards the end of 2003 I was reading the salutory works of
extinction author/artist Errol Fuller, most movingly
The Great
Auk - the tragic
history of a Penguin-like creature hunted to oblivion in 1844 -
while also revisiting my own work as a pro music journalist in the
’90s for an anthology, subsequently published as
Irish Folk,
Trad & Blues: A Secret History. That process
made me unearth, dispassionately, some recordings I’d made in
the mid ‘90s, for no commercial purpose, with an array of
great musicians - from the then-unknown Iain Archer to trad icon
Martin Hayes and American guitar ace Brooks Williams.
There were four tracks, I felt, which might conceivably backbone a
project to benefit, in some small way, the dwindling wild of our
world. It was a start. Currently a librarian at a Belfast music
college, I was now fortunate in knowing some really wonderful
musicians from the classical world: one, Anita Mawhinney (wife of
rising Irish composer Simon Mawhinney), generously helped me
transcribe, for string quartet, a requiem dedicated to the Great
Auk and the Dodo while other colleagues, the Dennison Quartet,
dutifully recorded it. The game was afoot.
Cara Dillon, an old friend, immediately agreed to record an
exclusive track; Andy Irvine, with whom I’d been working on a
biographical project, was up for a duet. More remarkably still,
Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson, whom I’d often interviewed,
agreed to help - and asked specifically to play on whatever Andy
did. After months of seeking diary convergence (and
almost
managing it),
Cara and Andy ultimately recorded separate songs, at Enda
Walsh’s studio in Cullybackey, with Anderson overdubbing
flute on Andy’s track and Cara’s husband Sam mixing it
in Somerset - though trying to get a copy in time to Andy, by then
in Australia, to sign-off on was an eleventh hour nail-biter far
too complex to relate here…
By that stage it was September 2004. In between the Auk-strings and
Andy’s approval, and hence manufacturing, a lot had happened.
Errol Fuller, eventually tracked down, gladly gave an Auk painting
for the cover, while tracks had flowed in from Gordon Giltrap, Roy
Harper, Fairport Convention, Martyn Joseph (who also, incredibly,
donated the use of his secure credit card web facility) and others.
I’d organised sessions, at Novatech Studios, Belfast, for a
couple of my ‘local heroes’: astonishing young opera
diva Catherine Harper (no relation) with jazz maestro Linley
Hamilton; and former Tamalin vocalist Tina McSherry with a Belfast
‘supergroup’ including Brian Connor, Colin Reid and
Leya’s Paul Hamilton. I was also thrilled to have recorded
instrumental pieces with British guitar legend Bert Jansch (at my
request) and Dutch fusion god Jan Akkerman (bizarrely, at
his
request - and
this from a man who once splendidly turned down a tour with Sting
‘because I didn’t like his music’).
A member of the Ulster Wildlife Trust, I’d offered them the
project from day one, with initial stand-offishness becoming
qualified enthusiasm then wholehearted support - largely in the
course of one phone call. But I also wanted a global
co-beneficiary. The IFAW assumed I was a nutter and ended the call;
the WWF (London) responded similarly. But the WWF (Northern
Ireland), incredibly, turned it around. Thus, a year on: two logos,
two endorsements, 21 tracks, and just enough cash-flow from
feverish spare-time writing commissions to have made it
happen.
Launched on December 9 2004 - 35 years to the week after its sole
predecessor - web links to
www.thewildlifealbum.com are already
delivering worldwide custom to this 100% charitable release. From
February 2005 it becomes available nationally via a generous
distribution/PR arrangement with Peter Muir and Pat Tynan at Market
Square Records - more good friends from what I once foolishly
thought was my past life. Thanks to them, and to the many others
involved - musicians, studio guys, graphic designers and media
friends - the stoat, the red squirrel and the Irish hare (along
with the penguin, the polar bear and the tiger) might have that
little bit more of a chance in life. I very much hope so. And if a
few under-appreciated Irish musicians get heard all around the
world in the process, then so much the better.
Colin Harper
Interview
by Trevor
Hodgett, from the
Irish News, February
2006
Talk about the gift of the gab. If you or I were to approach
megastars like Roxy Music, Jethro Tull and the Mahavishnu Orchestra
and ask them to donate tracks to a charity album on behalf of the
Ulster Wildlife Trust and the WWF we would, I fear, find ourselves
out on the street pretty pronto with our ears ringing.
But Colin Harper - Belfast music critic, songwriter, promoter and
allround silver- tongued devil - is obviously made of sterner stuff
for he has miraculously managed to recruit all of the above and
sixteen others including Richard Thompson, Jan Akkerman and Steve
Hackett for the recently released Live In
Hope, a follow-up to
a similar venture last year, The
Wildlife
Album.
So how does he do it? Let Harper himself explain: “With the
first album I called in favours with musician friends like Roy
Harper and Andy Irvine.
“For this album I did get in touch directly with [Jethro Tull
leader] Ian Anderson because we know each other, but because the
first album was a success I had more confidence this time and I
could actually go to record companies and say, ‘Can I have
this track by this artist?’
“And this time I had a criterion of making every track
relevant to a nature theme, whether Bruce Cockburn’s
‘If A Tree Falls‘, which is directly concerned with
environmental matters, or Bert Jansch’s ‘Black Birds of
Brittany’ which is about an oil slick situation.”
Even Harper’s persuasive powers sometimes proved insufficient
however.
“I was rejected by the Who,” he admits. “But they
weren’t being obnoxious: I’m sure they get asked to do
charity albums a lot and have to pick and choose otherwise they
devalue their brand.
“And I tried Paul McCartney but the answer was that he never
licenses his tracks to any ‘various artists’
compilations. So he wasn’t just picking on me!”
One refusal was more quirky, as Harper explains: “A
well-known British blues artist who shall remain anonymous decided
not to contribute when he heard there was a Roxy Music track, given
that Bryan Ferry’s son is a prominent pro-fox-hunting
campaigner!”
The title Live In
Hope suggests an
optimism about the planet’s future that Harper admits he
doesn’t feel. “It strikes me as sad that the world will
be a less interesting place because all our diversity of life is
fast disappearing,” he sighs. “I am pessimistic.
“However, you have to try even though you can never do
enough. It’s taken a lot of effort to make this CD happen but
I like to think it might be the spark to something else, that it
might lead somebody else to do something really inconceivable that
will make millions. You never know: the next Bill Gates may be some
guy who’s bought a copy of this and when he’s made his
billions he can donate his money to save whatever wildlife is left
at that point.”
Live In
Hope is now
available. More information from
www.thewildlifealbum.com