The Kiss of Light collection is the most unusual thing I’ve ever released – a collection of Frank Ormsby poems read by the author, each selection followed by a guitar instrumental inspired by the poem that preceded it.
The instrumentals were mine, and I arranged them for solo guitar, with counterpoint from cello (Neil Martin) and flugelhorn (Linley Hamilton).
I had been a fan of Frank Ormsby for a number of years before I became his friend. His collection A Northern Spring has always been one of my favourites – at its best, those poems seemed to somehow leave the page and take on lives of their own – they were accessible without ever being ordinary, they moved me fiercely, and they didn’t hang around. They were like songs, in other words - when songs really work.
Having seen Andrea’s photograph (see above), I was reminded of the opening titles of Milos Forman’s film ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, and asked the designer to follow that look.
On March 6, 2015, I had a show at No Alibis bookstore on Botanic Avenue in the city, one of a number of gigs I had that year, promoting the album Miles & Weather. I arrived in the bookstore to set up, and was thrilled to find a table displaying Goat’s Milk: New and Selected Poems by Frank Ormsby. Not only only NEW poems, but Greatest Hits, too. This is fantastic, I told No Alibis owner David Torrans – I’ll read some of these between the songs tonight and maybe you’ll sell a few copies.
After soundchecking, I went across the street for a coffee and when I came back, David told me that he’d called Frank Ormsby to tell him I was going to read the poems, and lo and behold, he was coming down to the show himself. Which was wonderful – I introduced the book and asked Frank to come up a couple of times and read a selection of his work. I hadn’t seen him in many years - he was in the early stages of Parkinsons in 2015, but still really sparky, and he read with great wit and charm.
He returned the favour and asked me to sing a couple of songs at his book launch at the McMordie Hall a couple of weeks later, and the seeds of this album were sown. By this stage, I was deep into his work again, re-reading A Northern Spring and soaking up the new poems – Goat’s Milk is a tremendous collection. If you don’t have a copy, I urge you to seek it out.
We were already starting that ‘we should do some more things together’ conversation, so the doors were half open already. The first thing I wanted to do was get Frank recorded. I think the Parkinsons condition was part of that sense of urgency, but also I thought he deserved it. There’s an audio archive of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, I thought – why not one for Frank?
I made an arrangement that at some stage I would bring him to Clive Culbertson’s studio, we’d put him in front of a beautiful microphone, and we would record a selection of his poems.
Back at home, I was going through one of my occasional sulks with my instrument. Periodically, the acoustic guitar bores me to tears (coincidentally it’s happening right now as I write this – I have barely touched the guitar since the start of 2023, one of my longest ‘unacoustic’ periods yet). I usually have to ‘doctor’ the instrument in some way to make it interesting again – use a capo absurdly high up the neck, or employ a different tuning.
I know, I said to myself – I’ll LEARN something. I’ll set myself an actual challenge. I had sheet music for the haunting main theme to ‘Paris Texas’ by Ry Cooder, and I resolved to learn it. First challenge – it’s in Open D tuning. So you have to tune the whole instrument to an Open D chord – across the strings it’s D-A-D-F#-A-D. So the guitar lay around the house for a couple of weeks in Open D, and I found myself suddenly interested again. Not only interested, but I found myself composing little tunes – a couple of them ended up on the album that became Ink – ‘All the Winds’, ‘Train I’m On’ and ‘The Shepherd’s Daughter’ are all in Open D. At the same time I was reading the Frank collections, and the pieces seemed to… respond to the poems. I remember getting ‘Under the Stairs’ first, and then ‘Winter Offerings’. I began to wonder if there was an actual project in this – could we record the instrumentals with the poems…? I wasn’t sure.
A year intervened, when I worked on and released a collection called Ink, I had begun touring the UK as special guest of Barbara Dickson – our first show together had been at the Lyric Theatre in November 2014, but by now, I was part of her UK touring circuit. So looking back at the calendar, the wheels moved more slowly than I remember.
September 12, 2017 - Frank Ormsby (left) and producer Clive Culbertson at Clive’s studio in Coleraine, after Frank had recorded a collection of his poems - many of which were the basis for The Kiss of Light.
I did finally get Frank into the studio on September 12, 2017, and he recorded about 25 poems (all of those recordings are with his publisher Bloodaxe now), and with the poems now ‘in the bag’, I felt the time had come to step up and finish the instrumentals. In the process, I sensed there was some room for other instruments. I thought of the poems as mostly coming from a rural perspective, so I wrote a series of parts for cello and trumpet and invited Neil Martin and Linley Hamilton to become involved.
Most of the ‘foundation’ guitar parts were recorded at home, and Clive recorded the cello and trumpet – or flugelhorn, as it was mostly – at his studio. We then mixed them, ran the poems and instrumentals back to back and mastered them up. The whole thing was ready for release by spring of 2018. I’d secured some funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to help with the recording process, and they very generously also offered to send us – Frank and myself with Neil and Linley – to Paris to launch the CD at the Irish Cultural Centre in the city (there’s a slideshow of our visit below).
The album had a mixed reaction, to be honest – a lot of people didn’t know what it was, didn’t really know who Frank was, and why I wasn’t singing anything. So it didn’t really get reviewed – or even played on radio! And yet there were others who thought it was a ground-breaking, unusual thing. Looking back, I was wish I’d made it a bit MORE unusual, actually – possibly worked with some found sounds, drones, other instruments, special effects. But even as it was, it still felt like a leap in the dark.
Wonderful - Linley warms up in Paris…
In memory, I’m awfully proud of it – it was the first time I’d written for other soloists, and for the most part the instrumentals hold up pretty well. Some are stronger than others, of course. And I think it honoured Frank and his work. We did a series of live performances of the works, and it certainly put us both out in front of audiences we hadn’t encountered before – we played at the Aspects Literary Festival in Bangor, the Out to Lunch festival, we played at the Northern Ireland Office headquarters in Brussels, in Paris of course, at the Atlantic Sessions in Portstewart, quite a few times in Enniskillen and many other places. And as I told him, he’s one of the only Northern Ireland poets who’s on Spotify now!
We still meet occasionally for a bite of lunch and a quiet pint, but to be honest, those reunions got away from us in the pandemic, and we’re long overdue a rendezvous. Since Goat’s Milk, Frank carried on with a couple of amazing collections – The Darkness of Snow and The Rain Barrel, and was made Irish Professor of Poetry in 2019 for three years. Click HERE to order Frank’s books directly from his publisher Bloodaxe.
Click HERE if you’d like to stream or download the album on Bandcamp.
And click HERE if you’d like to order the CD from my own website – I still have some copies of the physical object. And physical versions of many of the earlier albums, too…