The Pearlfishers are a Scottish, Glasgow-based band (among its contributors: drummer Jim Gash, Dee Bahl, Brian McAlpine, Mil Stricevic and Duglas T. Stewart, also of the BMX Bandits) and now the solo project of the singer and songwriter David Scott, its only constant member. The Pearlfishers mixes acoustic-based music with subtle orchestral flourishes, refined and broadened their sound while maintaining coherence and uniqueness. Scott began writing songs while a teenager in Glasgow in the early ’80s and, after founding Chewy Raccoon (!) and Hearts and Minds, formed The Pearlfishers (named after the Bizet opera), with drummer Jim Gash, featuring Brian McAlpine on keyboards and bassist Mil Stricevic. Their debut single, Sacred, was out in late 1990 and an EP, Hurt, followed shortly. The Pearlfishers’ debut album, Za Za’s Garden, was released in August 1993. Signing with the German label Marina Records, Scott and McAlpine released, in 1997, The Strange Underworld of the Tall Poppies and in 1999 The Young Picnickers. 2001’s Across the Milky Way  was the first (almost) solo album by Scott (with a dozen guest musicians), followed by Sky Meadows in 2003, A Sunflower At Christmas in 2004 and Up With The Larks, three years later. After a seven years’ hiatus, Your Colouring Book arrived in 2014 and Love & Other Hopeless Things in 2019. Another five years hiatus led The Pearlfishers to Making Tapes For Girls, produced with Johnny Smillie (Thrum), which was out in May, as usual via Marina Records.

What David Says: “Most of my music taste falls under the category of ‘something old’. Of course it does – I’m old! And when you get older, I think it’s natural to reach back as much as you reach forward. A lot of my new record with the Pearlfishers is directly about that experience of reaching back and connecting with music or the experience of making music. Not just through the lyrics but the sound of it too and the kinds of melodies I reach for.“

His Mixtape:

“So, I’ll use my album – Making Tapes For Girls – as a jumping off point for a six-song mixtape for you…“

On the title track of Making Tapes For Girls I sing ‘I didn’t know how to say the right thing, so I left it to Joni and Paul’. Can you guess who I might be talking about?

My first choice, then, is

Joni Mitchell – Chinese Café

I saw her perform this song in 1982 in Edinburgh. It was the clear standout song on her Wild Things Run Fast album of the same year, a magical moment in the show, and – for me – feels now like Joni Mitchell’s greatest song. Chinese Café is Joni’s attempt to understand her relationship with her estranged daughter and to reconnect with her through the words of a jukebox 7”, Unchained Melody. ‘Oh, my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch.’ As an observer of the craft of lyric writing I’ve always stood in awe of Joni’s ability to lay down an emotional trap in the line ‘my child’s a stranger, I bore her’ (which could be a description of any millions of mother and teenage daughter relationships) before transforming its meaning and impact by adding ‘…but I could not raise her’. The descriptions of the passage of time and the images painted – ‘Christmas is sparkling out on Carol’s lawn’, ‘grown up so fast, like the turn of a page’ – are not just pretty poetry. They are there to evoke space and distance. On the original record the arrangement and production rise to the occasion – not always the case with this period of Joni. It’s held back, held in and is more powerful for it; more sonically connected to Court & Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns than the following Dog Eat Dog. She writes so well about children and growing up. Cherokee Louise is another beauty in a not dissimilar mode.

And of course, the Paul I’m talking about in my song is Paul McCartney. He’s been by far the most important artist in my musical life and someone I think has a fair claim as the most important music artist of the 20^th Century. A lot of my favourite Paul songs are from his solo years – all eras have beautiful and creative wonders – so if I was making a mixtape for someone, I’d maybe want to give them something they might not have heard; something that might take them by surprise. So, I’d go with all ten and a half minutes of Secret Friend from 1980.

Paul McCartney – Secret Friend

This was the B-Side to Temporary Secretary from the McCartney 2 period. I was 16/17 when that record came out and it felt like suddenly Paul was making unexpected, creative, free art again. And they were hits too. It appears – with another great B-Side from that era Check My Machine – on the McCartney 2 Deluxe reissue, a must-have in my world. Secret Friend is a heady mixture of percussion, arpeggiated synth, top-notch bass playing, and McCartney doing one of his distinctive voice characters. Beautiful tune too. On my mix tape this one might be the closing track – it really takes you somewhere you might not want to come back from.

My song The Word Evangeline on Making Tapes For Girls is a song about someone called Evangeline of course, but it is also a song about words and the way words sound. And it’s also a direct reference to the song The Word Girl by Scritti Politti. Green Gartside has made relatively few records during a 40-odd year-career but every one of them is major and essential. On his Anomie & Bonhomie album he created an amazing, multi-perspective narrative piece called Brushed With Oil Dusted With Powder (some songs on White Bread Black Beer do the same kind of thing – Mrs Hughes, Dr Abernathy).

Scritti Politti – Brushed With Oil Dusted With Powder

As the listener you are never quite sure where you are or even who the narrator is. Is it a murder mystery, a breakup ballad, or both? So, I’d want that on a mixtape for two reasons: one to give my recipient something to keep puzzling over but even more so just for the gift of the sheer majesty of the music. It is widescreen, layered, full of golden LA light and dark London gloom with an epic playout section straight from any classic period of music. The sound of it tells its own story. I saw Green do his Cupid & Psyche 85 tour back at the end of the pandemic and it was extraordinary; one of the greatest vocal performances I’ve heard. It’s a voice you’d want to give to someone you love. So, it goes on my mixtape for you.

Green is from a line of vocalists that sort of underplay obvious emoting in favour of crystalline purity and a dedication to just singing the tune. I had someone similar in mind when making the Pearlfishers’ track Yellow & The Lovehearts, certainly in imagining the sound-world of the second part of the song, and that was Art Garfunkel. He manages to be at once a singer of intense emotion and almost not there at all. My favourite Art vocal is on the live version of For Emily Wherever I May Find Her that first appeared on Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits in 1972.

Simon And Garfunkel – For Emily Wherever I May Find Her (Live  in St. Louis, MO – November 1969)

No wonder they used this version. It is a quite extraordinary performance – uncanny tuning and dynamics – and a quite extraordinary use of reverb on the Roy Halee mix. Just give me that one reverb setting – whatever it is – and I’d use it from now to kingdom come.

I was also trying to tell stories on Yellow & the Lovehearts – something I do a lot. So that gives me a chance to put ‘something new’ on my mixtape. And that something new would be a truly great storytelling piece – Taylor Swift’s The Last Great American Dynasty, one of my favourite songs of this or any other era, from an album that lays out what a fantastic singer songwriter (particularly lyricist) Tay Tay is: Folklore.

Taylor Swift – The Last Great American Dynasty

I’d put this one right after Scritti Politti on the tape. That would be a playful and intriguing juxtaposition. Stefan Kassel from Marina Records made a good observation about TS which is how wonderful and hope-giving it is that so many kids are in love with someone who makes great and hooky pop records, can put on a multi-coloured, multiplatform live show but who is also a deeply serious and accomplished lyricist. I used to listen to a compilation album called Good Morning America that had things like At 17 by Janis Iain, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie’s City of New Orleans; I can really imagine this song in that context. It’s that good, that classic; a song that would repay multiple listens on a six-song list. American Gothic.

My last choice for the mixtape is something I refer to obliquely in the song The Wild Lives. The lyric ‘I can’t recall a word we said but I recall the songs’ refers to drinking wine and listening to records with my friends Edward O’Connor and Suzanne Harbison in Glasgow in the late 1980s. And the song I most recall listening to with them is Nina Simone’s version of Mr Bojangles.

Nina Simone – Mr. Bojangles

This comes from a 1971 album called Here Comes The Sun which I think many Nina fans might feel is quite minor compared with her more obvious genre innovations or political works. But for me Mr Bojangles is simply a great song, an intriguing story, a gorgeous performance and one of the more beautiful recordings I’ve heard. Everything here, the timbre of the vocal, the delicacy of the piano (including its little faux-chamber flourishes), the Memphis-vibrato guitar, and the gorgeous reverb that everything swims in, feels lonely and haunted. It’s just a beautiful space to breathe in.

And – like most of my choices on this mixtape whether embodied in lyric, sound, performance or melody, Mr Bojangles is about storytelling. To share music is to share meaning after all.

Making Tapes For Girls is out now via Marina Records. Look HERE for more information on The Pearlfishers. 

The Pearlfishers will be on tour in October and November:

Oct 19 Strathaven, UK Frets / the Hotel
Nov 1 Dundee, UK Beat Generator
Nov 2 Glasgow, UK King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut
Nov 8 Irvine, UK Harbour Arts Centre
Nov 9 Lindisfarne, UK Pilgrimage to the Islands
Nov 15 Falkirk, UK Behind the Wall