An interview with Mark Mulholland…and more about his new album

Alan Dearling chats to Mark

Alan: Thanks for taking some time out, Mark, to have a chat. You may remember that I reviewed your previous album, ‘Revolutions Go in Circles’ for International Times and Gonzo magazines. I much admire your incredibly eclectic range of musical styles – folk, country-rock, world, blues, African and more, including musical liaisons with the likes of Tony Allen, Kid Loco, Toumani Diabate and even Captain Sensible. But to kick off, can you think back to your Scottish roots…tell me a bit about what you started out playing…a bit of ‘where and when’, and who you really enjoyed and perhaps influenced you.

Mark: Hi Alan, first of all, many thanks for your lovely review of ‘Revolutions go in Circles’. I have been quoting it in press releases ever since!

When I started out playing, I discovered fairly quickly that you could make some money singing in the street, so as a teenager I started busking in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and hitching about to play in other places, along with my friends Tony Rose and Joe Armstrong, in parallel with starting bands together. I have always had these two sometimes contradictory urges: to travel freely, making music as I go, and to create musical projects that can develop beyond the purely ephemeral, momentary experience of playing. Although obviously all the music I listened to as I was growing up has had a huge impact on me, I would say that my biggest influences have been Tony and Joe, and other friends I hooked up with as I was learning to play. We discovered things together, taught them to each other, and there is nothing more likely to inspire you to write a song than your friends coming out with a string of good ones. We are all still playing, 40 years on from when we started out, we still get together whenever geography and commitments permit, and the music is still magical when we meet.

Alan: I lived for half of my working life in Scotland, both East and West Coasts. I was quite involved in helping put on gigs and especially enjoyed the singer-songwriters who were  very grounded in Scotland. Musicians like Dick Gaughan, Jackie Leven, Michael Marra and Tam White. Do those artists have any resonance with you?

Mark: I love Dick Gaughan. The others I don’t know as well. Another Scottish singer-songwriter who was a big influence on me was Bert Jansch, who I saw many times.

Alan: You’ve obviously been a real travelling troubadour…tell me some of the highlights, or, even some of the lowlights!

Mark: One that was both a highlight and a lowlight was a gig with Tony Allen and a selection of amazing musicians from Haiti and elsewhere, on the main square in Port-au-Prince, in Haiti, playing a pretty crazy combination of afrobeat/voodoo/psychedelic/electronica. We had 5 days to put a set together before a gig that was being broadcast live on national television, in a project that eventually became an album called The Afro-Haitian Experimental Orchestra. There was another gig going on nearby, which was not very well attended, and, with a view to nicking our audience, the organisers came and threw a tear gas grenade in front of the stage. We still did the gig, though, and people came back once the smoke had cleared. Another highlight has to be evenings spent jamming with Toumani Diabate in Bamako. The Celtic finger-picking stuff blended really nicely with the kora, and one night, after we had been playing together all evening, Toumani said, “This is wonderful. It reminds me of playing with Ali”, (Ali Farka Touré) which is the most amazing musical compliment I have ever had.

Alan: I especially like your forays into World Music. You currently live in France. Is that a good base and a melting pot for different musical genres?

Mark: France has a pretty lively global music scene, with musicians from all over the world either settled there or passing through. For example I recently did some work with a very talented young singer from Cameroon, who is now based in Ghana, Lor Golden, who came to France for a few weeks for a residency that we organised where we are based in central France. I also regularly meet up with old pals from Haiti, Mali and all round the world who are passing through on tour. I produced the last album by Samba Touré, the great Malian guitarist and singer, and caught up with him when he was on tour in France last summer.

Alan: Which of your albums, past/present/future is most indicative of your World collaborations?

Mark: I would say, ‘The Darkness between the Leaves’ by Alba Griot Ensemble. It is a blend of the British folk style of Jansch/Renbourn/Martyn with the Malian Mandingue tradition, with myself, my old pal Craig Ward, who was the guitarist in dEUS, the Belgian double bass player Hannes d’Hoine and the Malian n’goni and percussion player Yacouba Sissoko, and guests including Toumani Diabate, Tony Allen, Lassana Diabate and many others.

Alan: I’ve much enjoyed the recent track you’ve recorded with Kid Loco: ‘Playing With the Big Boys’. That seems like another musical ‘adventure’. It’s very modern, electronic, catchy as hell and exciting. Is there more like that in the can, or, in your plans, like that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3giBhIggriU

Mark: That was a lot of fun to do, and very different from anything I have done before. Kid Loco released it as a single, and it came out on my birthday. I was over in Tunisia, where my wife is working at the moment, and my friend Joe Armstrong was over visiting for the weekend, and we had a gig together. To celebrate the release, we worked out a rock’n’roll version with bass and electric guitar, and filmed it at the gig and sent it to Kid Loco. He loved it (he is known for his electro-pop/trip-hop music, but was also the co-founder of Bondage Records, one of the seminal punk labels in France), and said, “We have to record a version like that as well”, so I did, and it will be released as a ‘remix’ by his label. Usually it is the electronic guys doing remixes of pop-rock records, so I like the idea of doing the reverse. Kid Loco has also worked with me on one of my songs, ‘Another Sunset’, which he has arranged and produced, and will be released later in the year.

Alan: Your latest album, ‘Fighting with your shadow’ is more focussed in country-folk. Was that a conscious choice?

Mark: My roots are in rock’n’roll and folk, and I always come back to that, even if I do other things in between. Many of the most wonderful moments in my life have involved drums, bass and loud electric guitars, and I sincerely hope there will be many more.

Alan: The final track on the album, ‘A Country Song’, is a real show-stopper. I imagine it is a great crowd-pleaser live…it’s a wonderful pastiche of country music clichés…will you be able to get it plenty of air-play? It actually reminds me a bit of the witty, very clever songs by Loudon Wainwright III…

Mark: Obviously, the song is somewhat tongue-in-cheek (I may have to explain to some German audiences that I don’t actually have a problem with country music per se). I haven’t yet really had the opportunity to play it much to anglophone audiences, so I look forward to seeing how it goes down on the forthcoming tour. It was written after a long night accompanying a friend who was going through a bad patch, to try to gently push the idea that things were not as bad as they seemed. As far as airplay goes, I don’t know. The profanities are not as much of a total bar on getting on the radio as they used to be, but you still have to tick the ‘explicit content’ box when setting up the release. I had another scurrilous little ditty some years ago, ‘Tartan is the Colour of my True Love’s Hair’, which, as the title might suggest, was a parody on the traditional Scottish folk song, and it was covered by an American band, Barleyjuice, but they rewrote some of the lyrics to remove some of the more ‘colourful’ language to enable it to be played on American radio.

Alan: I think you are doing a tour in France and Scotland soon…tell me a bit about it. Are you playing at any festivals too?

Mark: Yes, I’m doing a tour of Ireland and Scotland, with a few dates in France on either side, with Stéphane Doucerain, a drummer and percussionist with whom I have been playing since the 1990s. I have been travelling a lot, and busy with recordings and releases, so I haven’t had time to book longer tours or anything on the festival circuit for this year, but I have started work on putting things in place for next year, so I plan to be a lot more active on that front in 2026

Alan: From your on-line web and Facebook pages, I think you have more projects and more albums in the pipeline…are they solo efforts or collaborations, or…?

Mark: I have another album just about ready for release, which I recorded with Chris Hughes, an Australian drummer and multi-instrumentalist that I played with quite a bit in my days in Berlin, who has worked with people like Mick Harvey, Hugo Race, Nina Hagen and Crime and the City Solution. That should come out around the end of the year. I have started working with some amazing musicians in Tunisia, so hopefully something interesting will come out of that. And songs keep popping out, which, once written, you have to figure out something to do with them.

Alan: Once again, thanks for your time…is there anything else you’d like to share with me of your future dreams?

Mark: Thanks a lot to you too, for your appreciation of music, and the time and effort you put into reviews and interviews. My future dreams are pretty much that I hope for more of the same: rewarding collaborations with great musicians, playing music to receptive audiences, making albums of which I can be proud. The only real aspiration is maybe to be a little better organised at it, to be better able to connect the music with the people who would like to hear it, whether live or on records.

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New album: Mark Mulholland

There are a considerable range of bluesy-country flavours that have gone into this musical concoction. Dylan, the Byrds, Mark Knopfler all come to mind. There’s a fuzzed guitar echoing through many of the tracks – it’s country psychedelic, often, indeed frequently, world weary. Many clever lyrics, for instance on ‘Somebody Else’s problem Now’, an after-the-break-up tale, edgy, a tad bitter, “Don’t bear you any grudges”, yet you sense a, “But”…

I kept on trying to get a feel for the overall message: Is it, glass half-empty, or, glass half-full? I’m still not sure. There’s some nice blues harmonica from Matt de Harp on ‘Nothing to Prove’, and ‘Face in the Mirror’ is perhaps Mark’s nod in the direction of the Band and Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’.  It’s a bar-room blues, with a soaring guitar sound. Throughout, the upbeat, catchy song lyrics and bouncy tunes alternate with melancholia. It all ends with ‘A Country Song’, which is great fun. All the country clichés are contained therein, “Christ, I’m worse than a country song”. “Poppin’ pills and cryin’ in my beer.” Memorable.

Can you have an album that’s an upbeat lament? Hum-along miserabilis? Mark Mulholland seems to have managed it…

‘A Country Song’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGeczS33KH0

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