Weaver’s Bay
So my friend Les Oman had a lyric called Weaver’s Bay. A powerful, evocative, and very sad tale about the forced evacuations of approximately 150,000 Scottish people from the land they knew as home to the United States and Canada. It is one of those stories that is little spoken about outside of Scotland, and might may help some people (people like me, for instance, as an English fella living here) to understand a little better the antipathy many Scots felt and still often feel towards the old neighbour England - its fellow member of what is generously known as the United Kingdom.
These things, rightly or wrongly, get into the blood for generations.
Anyway the lyric felt related at the time to the collection of songs we were writing about the happenings over the Atlantic, in the shape of a certain Mr Trump. He himself grew up in the USA because of his mother’s emigration from the isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides.
Les had got a tune for the song, but didn’t like it and asked me to have a crack. I was happy with the subsequent result, and so was he. Which is maybe a lesson in keeping hold of material that has something going for it, even if it feels incomplete.
So, as I said previously, I’m avoiding politics these days, but that doesn’t mean it goes away….