The search for a new Scottish national anthem has been in the news since well before the Scottish Independence referendum. So how did an independent proposal that came out of nowhere captivate all those who heard it? AE’s music editor Charles Ormrod interviews the song’s composer, Alan Tomkinson.
To say that Alan Tomkinson enjoys ambitious, quixotic projects is something of a considerable understatement. In fact, I don’t think there’s a single ordinary job or hobby he’s done in his whole life. He designed a new type of mattress; raced karts directed a 32-piece youth jazz orchestra (it became the best in the country within its first year); befriended a lion; conducted at the Albert Hall, and founded and built up the UK’s biggest boarding cattery franchise from scratch. Then, after he retired, in his early seventies, he built his own house. And now he begins his biggest and most ambitious work: promoting the song he hopes will become the new Scottish national anthem.
We meet in a cafe in Macclesfield, round the corner from the Artistic Echoes studio. “They don’t give you much sugar in these little packets”, Alan says as he helps himself to eight sachets. It’s always a pleasure to chat to him. He’s packed a hell of a lot into his ninety-odd years and looks much younger for it. And he has a devilish sense of humour. As the best man at the wedding of two of his friends, he made an anagram of their names with which to introduce them in his speech: Mr. Suckertit.
Alan spent most of his working life performing and writing music. A self-taught sax player, he composed tunes for Eartha Kitt, performed with Matt Monro, worked with Ronnie Scott – a whole list of enormous names in jazz and popular music. He led and performed with a vast number of other bands, including directing one band made up of BBC players temporarily out of work and won a civic award for his teaching. He is now writing his memoirs, a book which will make tremendous reading: some of his antics are so bizarre they’re almost unbelievable. Despite the most incredible bad luck which has thwarted some genuinely promising projects, he has an incredible list of achievements “for someone who started out bottom of the class” – for anyone, in fact! “All my wife wanted was a quiet life. And she married a musician!” he laughs.
I never had the pleasure of meeting Mary, Alan’s wife of sixty-four years. She passed away a couple of years before Alan and I met. Mary must have been a wonderful lady, from the way Alan and his friends talk about her. “If the world was full of people like Mary,” Alan tells me, “I just think about what a lovely place it would be”. “And she was beautiful: she was the runner-up in the Miss Chester beauty competition!” She does look astonishingly elegant in the black-and-white photo taken outside their Dundee cottage.
Their marriage was in a registry office, just the two of them and a witness, with the wedding expenses totaling just two pounds fifty for two cups of tea (presumably one with plenty of sugar). “Everything we owned we carried in one small suitcase, and my alto saxophone”, he tells me, tearing open six more sachets as our waitress tops up the coffee. His music career began immediately, working almost every night to earn a living. “I was paid ten pounds a week. Living away from home, supporting the two of us!”
You need a good space in the diary
Alan is a master songwriter. He knows just how a melody should sound; he crafts the music based on feeling. Some of my most enjoyable work has been arranging and recording his works. The melodies are clever, designed as they are in tandem with the lyrics and when composed for particular singers, deliberate and careful to bring out the best qualities of the vocalist’s abilities. Interestingly, the chord progressions rarely stray out of one or two keys, based on the feel of pop and jazz standards of his time. But what he does with them sounds so natural, it’s as if each is already a hit tune, and infectiously catchy. Each note behaves as if no other would do.
He is also a perfectionist. He only worked with the best musicians and would dismiss anything that wasn’t quite right, albeit always courteously and professionally. He’s not difficult to work with by any means, but you do have to make sure you have a good space in the diary to embark on one of his projects. I have a couple of e-mails from him, apologising for the trouble, asking for me to record another version of composition because one note, in particular, was played too loudly.
All of this ambition and talent (he charmingly denies possession of the latter but delights in acceptance of the former) gives Alan excellent credentials for creating something as bold as a national anthem. The lyrics were co-written by him and Mary, who was from Muirkirk, Ayrshire. The two of them consulted the opinion of as many Scottish people as they could, asking for themes and ideas. They didn’t want anything about battles or wars; but they did want the scenery, the contribution to global technological advancement, and artistic achievements. The resulting lyrics are immaculately patriotic, and very carefully fitted into the melody – as you would expect from Alan’s work. Sometimes the couple could spend days deliberating over a single line: “O this land we made our own” is the only way they could reference the country’s military successes. And the final line? “For Auld Lang Syne”! What could be more fitting?
An invitation to the castle
There is the unfortunate potential for these patriotic ideas to sound a little twee in this age of globalization, but This Land of Scotland is unlikely to receive any of that kind of criticism. The Scottish charm fills the first sixteen bars, and the passion and pride makes up the rest. The tune begins in the style of a Scottish ballad (completely original, but undeniably authentic), winding its way through the scenery, describing the country’s natural beauty and a warm sense of belonging. Then there’s a two-bar pause to bring in the pipes, the drums, and the volume. The feel changes abruptly to a striding march before the tune climbs up the scale to a momentous and moving chorus, and into the finale of Auld Lang Syne, timpani, and a very Scottish “AY!”. It’s a theme that gets wedged in your head immediately.
Having finished the composition, Alan recorded several demos with pipes, drums, different singers, different arrangements, with the help of a studio in Dundee. They pressed a couple of hundred CDs to send to an enormous list of Scottish personalities: MSPs, sportspeople – even nobility. Alan received a hundred and eighteen replies – every one of them favorable. Sir Alex Ferguson, Sir Jackie Stewart, John Higgins, Alex Salmond, the Duke of Argyll, the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo… the page reads like a guest list to Edinburgh Castle.
And, in fact, an invitation to Edinburgh Castle was the result. Alan and Mary attended a dinner to celebrate the anthem – “A fairytale dream for Mary!”, says Alan – Mary had come from a poor family, and her father had died when she was very young. And to think she’d one day be dining as a guest at Edinburgh Castle!
The next step was to get the endorsement of the Edinburgh Tattoo. Michael McDermott, arranger for the Tattoo, offered to arrange the music free of charge, saying in a letter to Alan that “The song has great merit as a patriotic song and I fully endorse ‘This Land of Scotland’ which I believe would certainly appeal to a very wide Scottish audience”. There was, however, some disagreement over how the song should be arranged. The piece was set to be played at the Tattoo a couple few ago (and again more recently), but due to the most tremendous misfortune, the arrangement was rejected at the last minute because the demo was too slow. “Just my luck!”.
So, where does it all go from here? “Get them to press the Like button!”. The newspapers have been interested for a while, and there are new social media accounts and a website, recently set up in-house at AEP. Alan is now looking for an arranger who can arrange for bagpipes and a Scottish singer who can perform for another recording that he can take back to the Tattoo – and, as importantly, to show to the people of Scotland.
In this time of political uncertainty, and the debate around independence, the search for a new anthem seems to unite the people of Scotland regardless of political inclination. Well, that’s what anthems are for. It’s what music is for! So far, support for This Land of Scotland seems to be unanimous. It looks like the song is already doing its job.
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For musical enquiries about This Land of Scotland please contact Charles Ormrod directly at charles@artisticechoes.co.uk
