Siobhan Miller: Artist of the Week
November 07, 2024
Colin Randall writes: each Thursday-ish, as visitors familiar with Salut! Live and/or its Facebook group will know, one of the three regular contributors chooses his Artist(s) of the Week. My selection this week is a break from the unintended norm: she’s a folk artist who is not closer to 80 than 20. Siobhan Miller is a fine Scottish singer-songwriter with a healthily varied repertoire and a clutch of awards to demonstrate her outstanding quality ...
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Familiar songs and a captivating but unfamiliar voice brought Siobhan Miller to my attention.
Once I had chanced upon her music (quite by accident; I'd been listening in the car to Julie Fowlis and Miller popped up next), I set out to explore further.
And the results of my trawl through online routes to Miller's work not only showed up my ignorance of the folk scene north of the border.
The experience was rewarding enough to convince me to make her the Artist of the Week at the Salut! Live Facebook group.
Siobhan Miller bu Dee Christensen
That first song I heard her sing, not knowingly having heard her perform previously, was The Rambling Rover, which I associate with Bob Fox though the Dubliners have also recorded it.
The lyrics evoke in jolly fashion a life lived to the full by a free-spirited and adventurous character who ends up philosophical about catastrophic health issues:
If you're bent wi' arthiritisYour bowels have got colitisYou've gallopin' bollockitisAnd you're thinkin' it's time you diedYou've been a man o' actionThough you're lying there in tractionYou may get some satisfactionThinkin', "Jesus, at least I tried"
I should add as a wretched aside that Silly Wizard’s Andy M Stewart, who wrote the song, was struck by paralysis after failed surgery in 2012 and died three years later aged just 63. I suspect he would have liked Miller's interpretation as much as I do.
A winner four times of the best singer category in the Scots Trad Music Awards, the only artist to boast such a haul, Miller has recorded lots of other folk classics, including I’m a Rover, Bonny Light Horseman and January Man. There have been BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, too, in 2008 and 2018. She has also written many songs of her own, more lately influenced by 1980s pop sounds from bands like Human League and Dépêche Mode.
Her dad was an enthusiast amateur folk performer and Miller grew up immersed in music; the family would listen with pleasure to Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and the Beatles a well as traditional songs. But the young Miller's mind and her ears were already open.
“I would go off to folk festivals for the weekend but that wasn’t the music I was listening to with my friends,” she told The Scotsman. “I was mad into Take That and the Spice Girls.”
Siobhan Millar is only 36 - or 37 if this year’s birthday has already happened - so is as young as it tends to get, more by accident than design, in Salut!! Live’s Artist of the Week awards. She plainly has plenty more to offer in the years before she even reaches half the age of some of our choices.
Image: Ewan Robertson
Here’s an idea of the songs shep writes or helps to write. Let us start with All Is Not Forgotten, co-written with her husband Euan Burton and her fellow Scottish singer-song writer Kris Drever. The clip appears to have been filmed at some point in or around lockdowns, since Miller comments on the changes in the way we were living that gave the lyrics added meaning.
Another of her own songs - again co-written by her husband, with an additional composing credit for Matthew Herd - is called The Club of Squandered Youth and has been described as an "anthemic ode to Glasgow", so that Scotsman article tells us.
It’s an excellent if hardly uplifting song. Miller's delivery is faultless, notably with an explosive flourish midway through to lighten an otherwise dark depiction of Glaswegian life. Raw as the theme may be, it has more than enough to challenge my initial preference for her songs from or closer to the folk tradition.
But this is how I first encountered her, singing The Rambling Rover. Here is one of many of her many versions available online, recorded live in Australia.
Siobhan Miller is a thoroughly worthy addition to the roll call of Salut! Live Artists of the Week.
And although I’d forgotten, I am the second Salut! Live contributor to say so. My deputy editor Andrew Curry - see his comment below - expressed his own admiration when reviewing a 2022 festival at which Miller and her band played: https://www.salutlive.com/2022/09/inverness-dandelion-and-a-world-of-fizzy-music.html
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** Siobhan Miller’s website, which include information about live performances, is at https://www.siobhanmiller.com/
And finally, I think a tribute to Andy M Stewart is in order. He must have written The Rambling Rover around 1980 and I know from the indispensable Mainly Norfolk site that he sang it with Silly Wizard live in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1983. This splendidly raucous version was included in a later album but I have chosen a rarer clip, from his 1982 solo album By the Hush ...
Andrew Curry adds: We also covered Siobhan Millar’s appearance at the 2022 Dandelion festival in Inverness on Salut Live at the time: https://www.salutlive.com/2022/09/inverness-dandelion-and-a-world-of-fizzy-music.html
And we’ll be reviewing her November concert at King’s Place in London—it’s part of the year long Scotland Unwrapped series at the venue—in due course.
Posted by: Andrew Curry | November 07, 2024 at 07:27 PM
Anyone enthused by my piece about Siobhan Miller should follow the link in Andrew Curry’s preceding comment. His festival review discusses her work in much more detail.
Posted by: Colin Randall | November 08, 2024 at 10:36 AM