Lisa-Marie Ferla: My year in music

Under the Radar writer Lisa-Marie Ferla looks back on her transatlantic adventures of the past year and the music that soundtracked it...


Like many such stories, this one starts with a boy.

His name? Dan Willson. Quiet, unassuming and I doubt he noticed me that night in the 13th Note. The man behind Withered Hand (pictured above) was dishevelled and delirious and concentrating on his songs, these intensely personal, angst-ridden ramblings at once beautiful and profane. Eyes closed, he probably didn’t even notice the girls in the front row singing their lungs out to his 'Religious Songs' like another kind of hymn.

The thing is though, there was another boy. In the dying days of the job I lost earlier this year I saw a message on Twitter that Nick Mitchell and Under the Radar were looking for writers and, armed only with a promo CD by a Glasgow-based electronic act called The Lava Experiments who had seen my own blog I thought I would give it a bash. Nick knew who I was, vaguely – one of my photos of singer-songwriter Beerjacket had actually ended up on the site a few weeks previously – and the interview I put together was good enough to merit me being taken on.

2009 has been a bit of a rollercoaster year for me, but as I have struggled to come to terms with my changing place in the world the opportunity offered to me as a writer for UtR has opened my ears to a whole new world for a girl who, musically, has always looked towards the horizon. That’s not me saying that my taste is expansive, incidentally – more like the music I listen to tends to sound like roadtrips and car chases and epic American sunsets.

There has been a lot of navel-gazing, on this site and others, recently – talk that the Scottish music blogosphere “bigs up” its own undeservedly. It made me laugh because, for years, I turned away from the local. Scottish music was, to me, Texas and my much-loathed Belle and Bloody Sebastian, and the fact that half of Sauchiehall Street wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for MySpace and everybody’s kid brother in some dreadful Britpop tribute band. So focussed was I on my limited edition US import alternative country vinyl that I was oblivious to the wealth of talent on my own doorstep.

This year I saw a US legend older than my father go down a storm at a rainy Hampden Park, and punched the air as my new favourite band rocked a basement in Cincinnati, Ohio. I cried along to my favourite song in the world, live; and blew a kiss at Elvis Presley’s grave (after having my photo taken in front of the plane that bears my name and that of his daughter’s). But among all of these adventures, two moments stand out: both of which were punctuated by Scottish bands and both of which couldn’t have taken place further from my blustery Glasgow home.

It was February, as London ground to a halt in the middle of the sort of snowstorm we turn our noses up at north of the border my best friend and I fought to make the train that would take us away for a birthday week in Bath. As I tried to drag my little wheeled suitcase along a particularly treacherous pavement, cheeky voices in rough harmony poured out from my earphones. “Don’t go outside in the rain and the snow!” warned the Second Hand Marching Band (above), but while it was too late for us at least we made it to Paddington in time.

Halfway across the world, another friend and I crossed the Wolf River from Memphis into Arkansas just to say that we did. As we turned around for the drive back into Tennessee a tremendous crack of lightning split the sky in half, and I caught my breath even as the in-car playlist hummed along with some live version of Frightened Rabbit’s 'Good Arms vs Bad Arms'. What I went to America to find, the sound of my soul, was reflected in a band with its roots not a hundred miles from my home.

What a ride. Joyous, life-affirming and essential. In 2010, I continue my education, and I can’t wait to hear what’s out there. An album for Julia and the Doogans, hmmm?

Withered Hand: No Cigarettes


The Lava Experiments - The Release


Second Hand Marching Band - A Dance to Half Death


Julia and the Doogans - New York