In the Wake of Neil Gunn

The book

In 1937 Neil Gunn left his job as a customs officer in Inverness, bought a 27-foot converted lifeboat in the north of Skye, and spent a summer sailing the west coast with his wife and his brother. The Thistle, he wrote, was “bought in ignorance and navigated by faith and a defective engine”. The book he made of it, Off in a Boat, came out the next year.

How it began

In May 2013 Vass fell ill with late-stage Lyme disease and spent a week in an induced coma. Recovering in hospital, he read Off in a Boat: a House of Lochar copy he had borrowed from his father months before and left on the shelf. His parents were staying in his Glasgow flat, and his father brought it in. Before he had finished it he had decided to retrace the route, with Gunn’s writing as his guidebook, and to see whether the sea would give him back the urge to write music.

The voyage

He sailed from Portree in May 2014 on Windsong, his father David’s 35-foot boat, with his father as skipper, a small crew and a different guest musician for each port: Jennifer Port on Skye; Sean Gray and Angus Binnie on Eigg; Tia Files and Eilidh Shaw at Arisaig; Innes Watson from Tobermory round to Iona. He had spent weeks beforehand in the School of Scottish Studies archive finding tunes local to each stop, so that every concert was a one-off.

Charlotte Hathaway, the project manager, blogged from the boat. Eigg and Arisaig were sunny and full of welcoming people; Mull and Iona came in drizzle, mist and gales. They sold copies of Off in a Boat at the concerts and ran out at Arisaig, so the publisher posted its last stock to the Iona post office. The book was outselling the CDs.

Iona was the reason for the trip, and Vass had never been. He and Innes Watson played in the abbey on 17 May, and the recording of that concert became Live at Iona Abbey. “With my fiddle sounding like it never had before,” he wrote. The route ran on to Oban, Kentallen, Fort William, up the Caledonian Canal and home to Nairn on 1 June.

The music

Back on land he gave himself a summer of writing, and when the pieces were done he went back to the book for their titles, lifting each phrase out of its context and letting it shape the mood. The opener, Settled in Clay, is the boat going out hoping for a fair wind and getting chop, then finding its way back to harbour. Sphere Music is built on two scraps of Stornoway Coastguard radio, the station’s own name and a forecaster saying a weather system will “lose its identity”: Vass heard in that phrase what happens to a person after a brain injury, and made a piece about grieving for a self that has gone. Fused Dark is the storm arriving, a gale warning in the samples, the band building to a raging climax before it passes overhead and everything drops back to tenor guitar and bass tapping a rhythm with mallets. Cold Iron sits in the water gurgling round the hull, on a strathspey rhythm. Heave and Roll is fresh weather. The Blue Fields of Paradise is the calm day, sun and little wind. The Lock Keeper taps out S.O.S. in Morse and hands it to the oboe. The last title is Gunn’s last line: all lands have one common bond, the sea.

The bell-like keyboard on the record is Vass’s own dulcitone, built in Glasgow in 1910 and bought on eBay. The found sounds came from the trip, flapping flags to the diesel inboard, and from round the house. Listen, he says, for a toilet seat lid, an office stapler and a paracetamol tub used as a shaker.

On stage

The October 2014 tour, with the Cairn String Quartet, Euan Burton, Innes Watson, Jennifer Port and Hamish Napier, ran film from the voyage by Salmon Films and readings from the book: the Byre in St Andrews on the 7th, Eden Court in Inverness, St John’s Cathedral in Oban, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on Skye, and the Lyth Arts Centre in Wick on the 11th. At Inverness, The Scotsman noted, Vass played only tenor guitar and mandolin, the mandolin struck with a felt drum beater, and added a tune not on the record, written for a nephew born around the time of the voyage. That tune is Arthur’s Jig, which later closed Notes From the Boat.