McGonagall inspires

A composer and writer from Arbroath, Cairney launched a website last week – Scottishanthem.co.uk – for people to vote for their favourite among his 13 compositions, or suggest another song. “It’s early days,” he sighs. Yet he is following a well-worn path: that of the single-minded Scottish enthusiast. It seems apt that he is a devotee of William McGonagall, the much-derided Dundonian poet.

“He’s an inspiration to me,” Cairney says. “If you can imagine going into the boxing ring with Mike Tyson and he knocks you down every 10 seconds, but you keep on getting back up and you last the 12 rounds, that’s McGonagall. He had this unbelievable self-belief. I like his poetry because it’s unpretentious.”

Cairney was the vice-chairman of the McGonagall Society six years ago, during the centenary of the poet’s death, arranging a festival celebrating his work and writing a musical that he hopes to stage at the Edinburgh Fringe. He does not consider McGonagall’s work as a direct influence, but admits the writer of such memorable compositions as The Tay Bridge Disaster will have had a bearing on his own creations.

“I have worked with McGonagall’s rhyming structures, when I wrote the songs for the musical, and everything rubs off on you,” he says. “Writing is an unconscious thing, you never know when you’re rhyming or not, you just do it by feel, by instinct. You mostly wake up in the morning with the thing written in your head.”

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Times Online, UK - Apr 14, 2008

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