RUSSELL LEADBETTER

SCOTS folk singer Rab Noakes has had to contend with cancer while recording his latest album.

Rab, a founder member of Stealers Wheel with Gerry Rafferty, was diagnosed with throat cancer last February.

He says: “I’m still undergoing the effects of the treatment.

"It has been affecting my mouth.

"Eating has been very difficult, and there has been fatigue and all the bits around that.”

For a while he was fed by means of a tube inserted into his stomach via his nostril and oesophagus.

The treatment regime took over his life but in time things began to improve.

“As soon as I could, I was eating, small and often, and still am,” he says.

“I use the phrase ‘fortifying myself’, and with good reason. I want to steer myself away from the terminology that gets used around cancer, that you’re ‘fighting’ or ‘battling with’ cancer.

"That’s not for me. It’s much more about acceptance and fortification, having a positive attitude to it."

Despite everything he has endured, the 68-year-old looks in good shape.

He’s been building his strength up, too. “All the signs are good,” he says. “There are still some scans and various other things to do yet, though. I’m dealing with things stage by stage.”

In part, his splendid new double album, I’m Walkin’ Here, is a poignant tribute to old friends who are no longer around.

Gerry Rafferty, for one. Noakes has not only interpreted a great Rafferty song, Moonlight And Gold, but has also written a song in his memory, with its beautiful, heartfelt line, “Feels like I’m gonna miss you/’til I run out of time”.

There’s a song in memory of Lindisfarne’s Alan Hull, another friend who died much too young. Michael Marra crops up, too, as do The Poets’ George Gallacher, and broadcaster Alastair Clarke, not to mention some of the bohemian, larger-than-life figures Noakes knew on the British folk-club scene five long decades ago.

He returns to live performance a week on Sunday, as one of the guests in Roddy Hart’s 70th-birthday tribute to Neil Young, at Aberdeen’s True North Festival.

Beyond that, he has scheduled dates in November in Inverclyde, Kinross, Stirling, Campbeltown, Glasgow Cottier’s, Strathblane and Arbroath.

His new record is one of his most accomplished to date – no mean feat when you consider the quality of his previous 18 albums, a career that stretches back to 1970, and his debut, Do You See The Lights?

The title of the new album, incidentally, comes from an inspired piece of improvisation by Dustin Hoffman while the cameras were rolling on Midnight Cowboy. Disc 1 contains Noakes originals; disc 2 sees him interpreting (he loathes the lazy word “covering”) songs by everyone from Beck (Don’t Act Like Your Heart Isn’t Hard) to Garbage (Only Happy When It Rains).

The bare bones of the new songs were recorded live with Noakes playing alongside double-bassist Una McGlone and drummer Stuart Brown.

Guests who added contributions ranged from Barbara Dickson and Roddy Hart to Jill Jackson and Emma Pollock.

In his liner notes to I’m Walkin’ Here he recalls how he and Rafferty “would drink, talk and sing from dusk ‘til dawn on many occasions without repetition”.

The opening line of No More Time, his song for Gerry – “The incident evaporates/the resonance remains” was actually a “pretentious” comment he made to a friend at a birthday party.

“It’s interesting,” he concedes now, “how a phrase like that, a little bit cumbersome perhaps in conversation, when you put it into a song, it can actually work."

If you think Garbage’s bleak 1994 hit, Only Happy When It Rains, is an odd choice for someone of Noakes’s vintage, bear in mind that he has previously done a high-quality reading of Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer. The Garbage song here gets a reflective acoustic treatment, but its essential message remains intact.

I ask Noakes about the band’s Scottish-born singer, Shirley Manson.

“I liked her with her first band, Goodbye Mr Mackenzie. Shirley was always really professional, down to earth, a bit forthright, an interesting person.

“That success of hers was one of those you really appreciated. Those guys in Garbage were looking for a singer and they picked her out. She grabbed that chance with both hands. She wasn’t just a front person for the guys’ ideas; she’s right in there, writing the songs.

“She’s an example of how to do a certain kind of pop music. An awful lot of pop is other people’s ideas and the people up front are dancing puppets of one kind or another. But Shirley is far from that.”

I’m Walkin’ Here is released on October 16 on Neon Records. Website: www.go2neon.com