From tales of rural towns, the importance of the natural world and the universal power of storytelling, Robert Robertson talks Ed Nash through the pivotal songs in his life.
Tide Lines are storytellers. They care about the environment, thrive on connecting with audiences and doing things their own way, but their first, and lasting love, is the power of song.
The Scottish four-piece - singer and guitarist Robert Robertson, guitarist Alasdair Turner, keyboardist Ross Wilson and drummer Fergus Munro - formed Tide Lines in 2016, with a manifesto to blend their love of folk and pop music and to release their music independently.
In the nine years since they’ve been inducted to the Barrowland Hall of Fame, toured relentlessly and are now about to release their fourth record, Glasgow Love Story, the follow up to 2023’s An Ocean Full of Islands, which saw them break into the UK album charts.
The day after we speak, they play their first show of the year, as the opening act before the Scotland vs. Wales Six Nations match at Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh. “It's quite a crowd and we're literally on right before the teams run out, so there will be the whole 67,000 people there, it's going to be great”, Robertson says. “We did it a couple of years ago, so we know what we're facing and hopefully we’ll get a few new fans in the process.”
Following their experience of playing in a stadium they’ll be on tour until the end of the year, starting with a series of intimate shows to continue their close bond with their fans. “We're doing underplays around Scotland as a thank you to people that pre-ordered the album. We're doing a couple of big Scottish festivals over the summer and the album tour will come towards tail end of the year.”
Tide Lines are a rarity in the world of the charts, whereby everything they do, from recording, pressing and releasing their records, is done by themselves. “It's hard work, but it's good. I think we get a lot of benefit from having the control ourselves, there’s four of us in the band, and we delegate”, Robertson explains. “When it comes to the actual album release, we're doing everything DIY, in terms of ordering the stock and everything that goes with it. But we enjoy it, it’s a labour of love.”
I ask if they’d ever be tempted to sign to a major label, and he says, “We would never say never to anything. But we've done things ourselves for so long and we've enjoyed it, it feels like the machine works well. So obviously, it would need to be something that added positively to it.”
As we talk through his Nine Songs selections, several themes emerge - his love of storytelling, the importance of the natural environment and his pride in Scotland’s impact on the world of music. His fellow Scots Simple Minds didn’t make the cut, but Robertson gives them an honorary mention.
“They’re an iconic Scottish band. A few years ago, at the Scottish Music Awards, we were given The Rising Sound Of Scotland Award. It was a really nice night and Simple Minds played. It was a small audience of industry people, all of whom had the utmost respect for them, and it was amazing to see them play in that space.”
Robertson is fascinated with what makes artists tick and tells me he’s read previous Nine Songs interviews. “It's a great feature. It's a great way to get an insight into an artist from an audience perspective. Reading it you find out things about people that you wouldn't normally know.”
When he approached his own Nine Songs, he decided to make an afternoon of it. “It was a sunny day the other week, which is rare in Glasgow. I sat outside with a notepad, and I must have scribbled down about thirty songs. I was trying to go, ‘Well, those bands are all kind of the same genre, so I'll just choose one of them.’ I got there eventually.
As we finish talking through his song choices, he realises that taken together, the songs tell a story of the passions that drive Tide Lines, but ultimately, they come back to where we started, with their shared love of the power of a song. “They all seem to link, which was kind of a fluke to be honest. I really didn’t attempt to link them, but they seem to link OK!”
“The Whole of the Moon” by The Waterboys
ROBERT ROBERTSON: The Waterboys are an iconic Scottish band and I think they relate quite well to us, because they've got that folk influence whilst also being a rock band. I first heard them live when I was quite young, I was probably 17, at the HebCelt festival over in Stornoway, which is a pretty unique festival over on the islands in The Hebrides.
I remember the place went bananas when they played “The Whole of the Moon” and it felt like a really formative moment for me. I was looking at it thinking, ‘I really want to do that with my life’. Fast forward a few years and we’re headlining HebCelt this year.
We played a cover of “The Whole of the Moon” in The Barrowlands in Glasgow last year because The Waterboys are a big, iconic, Barrowlands band as well. As a song, musically, it really works for me because it's got that folk element, but it's so universally accepted as a great singalong, Scottish anthem.
BEST FIT: There's a lot of debate around what this song is about, and there was a rumour Mike Scott had written it about Prince or CS Lewis. Scott has said he started to write it in New York one night when his girlfriend asked him how easy it was to write a song, he was looking at the moon and it went from there.
Mike Scott is a genius songwriter. Without jumping ahead to the next song, I heard The Killers cover it at TRNSMT in Glasgow Green six or seven years ago, and Brandon Flowers said he often gets asked if he were to have written one song in the world, which song would he choose? And he said he’d pick “The Whole of the Moon” every time. Whether that's what he says to a Scottish audience, I don't know, but it's a nice story. He repeated the same story when he played The Hydro last year, so I can quite believe it, because it's such a complete song.
And as you say, there's all those questions about the story behind it. It's like Don McLean’s “American Pie”, everyone's got speculation as to what each line's about. And why would he ever tell anybody? Because that's the whole mystery of it.
If you look at his body of work, I’ve always thought Mike Scott’s songwriting ability has been underrated.
Definitely, and he’s also a musical talent as well as a songwriter. There's a great video where he’s asked to do “The Whole of the Moon” as a jig. It’s in 6/8 time, but he does a jig with a sexy rhythm on his guitar, it turns it into something that sounds like a couple of Irish guys sitting in a bar somewhere playing, and it transformed the song. It goes back to the fact that coming from the musical background we do, it inspires us that it's got that folk feel to it.
With their next record Fisherman's Blues, lots of people assumed they were Irish, but it’s very much Celtic folk and blues.
On our first album we had a guest artist, Anthony Thistlethwaite, who was in The Waterboys, he's a good pal of ours and we keep in touch him. Our first ever gig as a band was at Tiree Festival and the following year we returned there to launch the album and Anto came with us.
It was an incredible thing to do, to stand as a band that had only been around a year and to say, ‘We’re going to welcome onstage a member of The Waterboys.’ He played sax on a couple of songs, and then he got his guitar out and he played and sang “Fisherman's Blues”, and to play that with him was amazing for us.
“Quiet Town” by The Killers
I’m a big, big fan of The Killers. We’re set up quite similarly to them instrumentally and we've been inspired by them a lot. The last song that plays before we go onstage is usually “Mr. Brightside”, it's a great one to get the crowd going, they always go bananas for it and it's a great atmosphere creator. But this album, and this song, “Quiet Town”, are the absolute opposite of that, musically and lyrically.
When Pressure Machine came out at the tail end of lockdown it struck me right away, because it's more stripped back and acoustic. It’s The Killers as you wouldn’t normally hear them, and the songwriting is really exquisite. “Quiet Town” is about a guy getting run over by a train and it’s a tragic story, but that's not why I picked it. I chose it because of the insight it gives you - as the whole album does - into rural towns and communities.
It was amazing listening to the words, with Brandon Flowers singing from his experiences, and I was thinking how similar it was to our experience of coming from a Highland town. We come from various parts of the Highlands and the whole album really chimed with us, because I think people from rural parts of the world have a specific, shared outlook on the world, no matter what part of the world you're from, and that features a lot in our songwriting.
How does a rural outlook differ from a city one for you?
I've lived in Glasgow for 12 years now, but I still very much feel like I'm a Highland boy. We always write from the perspective of people that have been brought up by and surrounded by a natural environment, and a community where everyone knows each other and looks out for each other. There's a lot of lyrics throughout Pressure Machine that really chimed with me for that.
I’d forgotten what a good storyteller he is until I listened to this song this week.
I love the way he's looking back at his formative years; that's something we've done a lot on our previous albums as well, because coming from a rural area really does shape you. It's nice to see, because you think of The Killers coming by way of fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. You don't think of them as telling these really down to earth stories.
He grew up in Utah, which is the polar opposite of Las Vegas.
Exactly. Pressure Machine is a really nice glimpse into a different perspective of The Killers that most people wouldn’t have. There's a line in a song called “Leaving Town” which we released as a single, and the first line is, “It was a quiet town, and she would soon be leaving”. I think that was definitely inspired by that album.
“Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell comes up in this feature a lot. Why do you think artists are so drawn to her work?
I think as well as being a really, really special songwriter, she encapsulates that whole ‘60s folk music, singer / songwriter thing. My father is a big ‘60s music fan, he's not musical himself, but that was the music he listened to. And like everybody, when you’re growing up the first music that you hear is what your mum and dad are listening to.
It was John Denver for me, my Dad loved him and played his records all the time.
Funnily enough, my Dad’s a big fan of his as well actually, he had a John Denver cassette in the car. There was a lot of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, you could list all those names out, but I tried to think of something that encapsulated that, and I thought of Joni Mitchell.
“Both Sides Now,” is probably one of the most beautiful songs ever written. I love her performance on The Last Waltz as well, Gus and I enjoy watching that quite often. But I chose “Big Yellow Taxi” because, again, it's a song about the natural world, the importance of it, and coming from the parts of the world that we do, that really chimes with us.
We record in an old church, which was a former Baptist church, up in the Isle of Mull in the Hebrides, surrounded by this amazing environment. You're looking out onto the Atlantic and every day you look out of the window it's a slightly different scene. It's an inspiring place to record, and lot of our songs reflect on the natural environment.
A few years ago, just after lockdown, we recorded an EP of covers because we wanted to thank our fans for supporting us, and we covered “Big Yellow Taxi”. It felt it made sense for us to do that, because of the environmental nature of it.
She wrote it on her first visit to Hawaii. She landed late at night and when she got up in the morning, she opened the curtains and saw these beautiful mountains, but then she looked down and saw a parking lot destroying the natural environment.
I think we’re lucky enough to come from one of the few parts of the country where it feels like the paradise is still there, they haven't paved it yet. A lot of our merchandise is eco merch, so we try to do our bit where we can. It’s something we've always been passionate about.
“I'm On Fire” by Bruce Springsteen
From one incredible songwriter to another. What do you love about Bruce Springsteen?
If somebody asks me who my favourite artist is, I say Bruce Springsteen without a second thought. My favourite Springsteen song is “Thunder Road”, which is probably my favourite song ever written. It's like a poem with a melody rather than a song, it's absolutely stunning.
I remember when I first heard “Thunder Road.” I was quite a late convert to Springsteen, I didn't really listen to him when I was in school, I knew Born in the U.S.A.”, “Dancing in the Dark”, but none of my pals listened to him. It wasn't until I was at uni, and I remember one day I put on the Born To Run album, it was the first track with the piano intro to “Thunder Road”, and I was totally transfixed. I became a huge Springsteen fan.
Why did you decide to go for “I’m On Fire” instead?
When we’re on tour, we always like to stick a cover in the set, and I was really keen to put in a Springsteen cover. We played “I'm On Fire” and it felt like it fitted in with our set, it's like The Killers song, it’s more acoustic, and it’s easier to incorporate the Folk side of it. I've heard him do it live and “I'm On Fire” is a nice down moment in an otherwise pretty mad three and a half hours of going absolutely crazy, and then you get this really chilled piece of music.
I watched the video for this other day, and it’s quite strange, for the first couple of minutes he’s acting.
Is he a mechanic?
He plays a car mechanic, and the storyline is a female client picks him to fix her car and then she leaves the keys to her house with the car.
It’s almost like “Uptown Girl” by Billy Joel. I remember he slides out from under the car. It's quite a strange song, with “Hey little girl, is your daddy home?”. I remember when we started to play it in rehearsals, and thinking, ‘Thank goodness this song is world famous, because people in the crowd would be thinking, ‘Where's this song going?!’
But it's a great song to play live because you eventually get to the point where it’s just repeating ‘Oh, I'm on fire’. If you're doing a festival, a huge percentage the audience don't know all your own songs. It's a good song throw in, because everyone can join in.
He's absolutely brilliant. I saw him at Hampden, and Murrayfield. It was a scorching hot day and he was pacing up and down that stage for three and a half hours, it was absolutely incredible. I've read his autobiography, and it feels like he's the type of person that couldn't survive not doing it, if he was just sitting at home, it would drive him crazy.
“People Watching” by Sam Fender
So from Bruce Springsteen to an artist who has been compared to him a lot.
I love Sam Fender. I think he represents something that isn't that common in the charts these days and hasn't been for the last 10 years or so, which is a proper guitar band getting up and putting on a Rock and Roll show. I don't want to demean Sam Fender in any way by comparing him too closely to anyone else, but I think you're right, the Springsteen comparison seems pretty obvious. He’s obviously hugely influenced by him, and that’s probably why I love him.
There's something about the way he writes about Newcastle. Our latest album is called Glasgow Love Story, and I'm not suggesting for a minute that I write like Sam Fender, but he has an ability to find things about a city that he loves. You mentioned storytelling earlier and he writes individual stories of his upbringing, or of people that he knows, or people that he loves, or people that he's seen. I think it's amazing how he incorporates that into songs that travel the world.
Newcastle is a similar city to Glasgow as well in terms of the people. So there's a lot in Sam Fender’s lyrics that I think, ‘That could have been written about Glasgow.’
Do you think it's a blue collar, working-class thing?
Definitely. And I think the Springsteen thing as well, everyone thinks about Springsteen musically because there's a lot of single note melodies, but I think lyrically Springsteen is about working class, Freehold New Jersey, which is probably not a million miles away from working-class Newcastle or working-class Glasgow.
It's the whole experience, and the fact that that experience isn't always an easy experience. It's coming through in a poignant way, yet in a way that wants you to cram into a stadium and sing it. It’s so brilliantly done, and I could have chosen so many Sam Fender songs but “People Watching” is the latest example of an absolutely brilliant song.
When you've got an album coming out you do loads of social media stuff, and at the moment we’re doing stuff to see what sticks. I was in Glasgow Botanic Gardens just last week, I set up a camera and did a cover of “People Watching” and the amount of people going past shouting, “Mate, I love Sam Fender, keep it up!” Sam Fender seems to be chiming with Glasgow people, and people all over the world.
I think it's because he seems very authentic.
Absolutely, even with the whole, ‘I'm here supporting my football team’, nothing is contrived about him.
I read about this song and it’s about his close friend and mentor Anne Orwin who passed away. She was in palliative care, and the lyrics are about going to see her in the care home.
Even stuff like “I promised her I'd get her out of the care home”, which is the palliative care you mentioned and “Back in the Gasworks, screamin' the song”, goes back to that working class imagery and that's very powerful. I love that very first line “I people-watch on the way back home / Envious of the glimmer of hope” and I’m like, ‘What a line.’
It's the idea that you're sitting in a city looking at people, and I love that, because I love doing that, imagining people's lives. You look at that person and wonder what their hopes of fears are, what’s keeping them up at night, what's keeping them going? And I think Sam Fender nails it with so many of his songs.
“In My Life” by The Beatles
If there was a definitive list of the greatest songs of all time, this would be up there at the top of the tree for me.
It's funny you said that, because I almost didn't choose this song because of that. You were saying that so many people pick Joni Mitchell, and I wondered how many people chose “In My Life” by The Beatles?
I put it in because it’s a song that means something to me personally. As I said earlier, the first music you listen to is what your parents are listening to, and my dad has a big record collection, not because he's a record collector, but because he never threw them out after the ‘60s.
I was going through it during lockdown and there were some absolutely brilliant records in there. And of course, Rubber Soul was one of them, and I was ‘Oh, wow, Dad, you've got Rubber Soul, did you collect that?’ And he was like, ‘No. I think someone gave it to me for my 18th birthday.’ It was so cool and such a natural thing. It wasn't like he had to go out and get Rubber Soul, he seemed totally non fussed about it, but those records were a really early influence on me.
I think “In My Life” is about the effect that place has on your upbringing. Obviously to The Beatles it's Liverpool, but it doesn't really matter where it is, a place doesn't really mean anything, it’s the people that are important to a place.
I've managed to snaffle some of my dad's records down to here in Glasgow and when I play that song I sit and close my eyes and think about the Highlands. I think about the community, people that are no longer with us, people that formed you as a young man, and also musically as well.
I find it so poignant, but of course, everyone around the world finds that song poignant, and the beauty is that they all find it poignant for totally different reasons, everyone will have different memories about it. The way that The Beatles and McCartney and Lennon encapsulated that for so many people around the world, whose childhoods are entirely different, is brilliant. You're right, it's one of the best songs ever written.
There’s a theme emerging in some of the songs you’ve chosen. They're personal stories but they have a universality lyrically, where anybody around the world could listen and relate to them?
Yes, and it's funny, because I was aware that I really like that style of songwriting, but when you actually see this list of songs that I've written down, it really hammers home that’s pretty much the only kind of song that I love!
“Everglow” by Coldplay
Coldplay also come up in this feature quite a lot, what drew you to this song?
We've spoken a lot about a lot of these songs lyrically, but I look at this song musically. Since we started Tide Lines, Coldplay have always been an influence on us. Our music has got two different strands to it, there's the folk side and there's the pop side. Coldplay have always been where we tried to aim for with the pop side of it sound wise.
“Everglow” is from the album A Head Full of Dreams, and that album had just come out when we started Tide Lines. We formed the band in 2016, that album came out at the tail end of 2015, and they were touring it throughout 2016, it was on the radio all the time, and it's a brilliant, brilliant album.
The melody of this song is so simple. The bit at the start almost sounds like – and I know this sounds absolutely ridiculous - an old Gaelic melody. Gaelic melodies are based on simplicity, all those old Gaelic songs are so simple and the melodies move me without having to have any wonderful modulation or any wild chords.
When I write a melody I always try to start with ‘What is the most simple thing I could do here?’ I always go back to the quote from Keith Richards where he said that Rock and Roll was obviously influenced by the Blues, but he believed that the simplicity of Celtic melodies were equally at the heart of Rock and Roll.
Anytime I listen to a band in the folk sphere and I hear a really simple melody, I'm really guilty of thinking, ‘That sounds like it could be a Highland folk melody’, and “Everglow” is one of those for me. I mean, it's a bizarre thing to say, and I'm sure if Chris Martin ever reads this interview he'll be like, ‘What on earth is this guy on about?!’ I'm not saying for a minute that I think he was inspired by it, but to me, the simplicity of that melody is beautiful.
They seem to keep reinventing themselves. Not as in changing, but getting a new young fan base all the time. I could have chosen “The Scientist”, which is probably my favourite Coldplay song, but when they brought out A Head Full of Dreams, it was like, ‘Wow, there's Coldplay, and after all these years, they’re still the biggest charting band of the year and they’re getting 16 and 17 year olds going totally wild for new Coldplay songs, in the same way that they were 20 years ago.’
“Wages Day” by Deacon Blue
Why did you choose this one?
Again, a Scottish band, first and foremost. We spoke earlier about The Waterboys and Simple Minds and sometimes I think Scotland has punched above its weight with the bands that come from here.
I could go on forever about it, but Deacon Blue have always been one of my favourite bands. We were lucky enough to support them a few years ago in Edinburgh Castle, in The Esplanade, and it was an amazing gig for us. To stand and watch a Deacon Blue show with the whole Esplanade just going nuts was magic.
“Wages Day” is my favourite Deacon Blue song. I’ve already mentioned The Barrowlands, but they've got an album Live at the Glasgow Barrowlands and before they sing this song on the album, he explains that it's about the time when they were students in Glasgow, when they were living in Finnieston, which is the West End of Glasgow, and it's the same area of Glasgow that I live in.
He paints a great story of this old Glasgow guy going into the newsagents, buying the most expensive cigar, going out and standing amongst the neon lights of Argyle Street, lighting this cigar, and the smoke going up and up into the city sky. And then he says, “That's when you know it's wages day in Glasgow”, because he bought this big, expensive cigar. I love how Ricky Ross tells the story, he says “The smoke went up and it was wages day”, and then the drums come in and the track starts. It's brilliant.
Going back to Sam Fender, it describes someone’s individual story, but in Glasgow. It's a universal thing that people do all over the world. He's brilliant, he’s a great songwriter, a great singer, a great frontman, he holds the audience in the palm of his hand. They’re a great band, from Dougie Vipond on the drums to Lorraine McIntosh. It's such a unique sound, with the two voices complimenting each other and they're man and wife as well. I really love Deacon Blue, and I always have.
“Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” by John Prine
A John Prine song is your last choice, which for me, has one of the most amazing song titles ever.
It’s a funny story with this one. Despite talking about all the American folk songwriters earlier on and how they inspired me, John Prine totally passed me by for most of my life. He’s not a household name by any means, but he's so well thought of, Bob Dylan said he was one of his favourite songwriters.
How did you end up discovering his music?
A few years ago, we were playing in Denmark at Tønder Festival. It's a really massive festival; it's more roots than folk. John Prine was going to headline but our agent at the time told us that unfortunately he was taken ill and couldn't do the gig, and he sadly passed away not long after that. The festival decided to get every band that was playing on that stage to contribute one John Prine song, and they’d do an hour and a half of John Prine’s music in what would have been John Prine’s slot.
We were like, ‘Oh, that's a great idea’, but the problem was I didn’t know many of John Prine’s songs. So I went online and “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” hit me right away. I did know the song actually, but not very well, I knew a Nanci Griffith version of it.
There are so many cover versions of this song,
It's a really well covered song, Nanci Griffith does an absolutely brilliant cover of it, and going back to my dad, he was a huge Nanci Griffith fan, so I gravitated towards this song for the festival gig. Backstage with all the other acts, it turned out that loads of them knew John Prine personally, and they were saying they were really sad about John, and that he’d be proud of us for doing this. We felt kind of out of place, like we didn't really deserve to be there.
We went on and did a country version of “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness”, which is quite out of character for us, and my goodness, it went down a storm and I don’t know how. It's one of those weird things, it's up on YouTube, the festival filmed the whole thing, and there must be loads of people that keep listening to it, because the views keep going up and up.
I think John Prine is phenomenal, and after that festival I got really into him and started listening to him. One year my Spotify Wrapped came at Christmas, and I was in the top 0.05% of John Prine listeners. It's like any aspiring songwriter, you get your influences, and you try to emulate them as much as possible.
I love the way he tells stories, I love the nostalgia, and I love the songs, he's amazing. So I thought that would be a nice one to finish on.
Glasgow Love Story is released 25 April via Tide Lines Music
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