Aberfeldy Reloads

How’s the new album coming along?

"The album is going to be fairly depressing, with break-up songs and things like that....ideally it will be out sometime this year, but I’m never happy with the lyrics."

You have a fairly new line-up as well…

"When Ruth and Sarah left they were hard to replace. Luckily we met Vicky (Gray), our fiddle player who found our way to us, who has been absolutely brilliant. So now we have a Shetlander instead of an Orcadian (Sarah)."

Your song Summer’s Gone [from the Young Forever album] was used on a TV advert for bingo recently. What’s that all about?

"They asked our manager if they could use it and he said yeah, but they tried to get it for nothing. I’m not having that, and I don’t particularly approve of online gambling. The first I knew about it was when my brother called me up and said the song was on a bingo advert on the telly."

It was used to promote other products too, wasn’t it?

"That’s now five adverts it’s been on – Diet Coke [in America], online bingo, a Pampers advert in Spain and Portugal – I don’t disapprove of nappies – a beer advert in Argentina and the latest one is an anti-smoking campaign in Flanders, Belgium. But I’m glad the Diet Coke one wasn’t shown here. That song [he sings The Caesars’ Jerk it out, used to painful effect on iPod TV adverts] was on all the time and people got sick of it. And there’s that other one too, [sings] 'At the link it’s eeeasy' [Shed Seven’s Speakeasy, infamously re-recorded by Rick Witter for a 1999 advert for a certain mobile phone firm]."

I suppose he had mouths to feed...

"Yeah. The only reason I wrote that song is because I bought this amazing sounding 60s kids’ organ at a car boot sale. It turned into a nightmare because it never stayed in tune. I drilled a hole in the bottom so I could reach it and ten minutes before every Aberfeldy gig I was crouching underneath this organ. It was like trying to artificially inseminate a gerbil."

Are you working at the moment?

"No, I just live off my Diet Coke fortune [laughs]."

You’ve toured with James Blunt. Tell us something about the great man.

"I’m not gonna slag him off… [pauses] he was alright and didn’t do anything terrible… [longer pause] but he wore a Ramones T-shirt and I looked on his iPod and he had no Ramones on it! I did slag him off a wee bit afterwards but then I saw the PRS [Performing Right Society] cheque we received after the tour and felt he did us a bit of a favour."

You also toured with The Beautiful South, which seems a more likely pairing.

"That was the first tour we did and it was amazing. They’re true to their socialist principles and run the band like a workers’ collective. And they’ve got nutter fans. Compare that to James Blunt – they just wanted You’re Beautiful. It was hard to win them over because his audience is like a massive hen party."