Sean Connery, Sex and the City, a classic song and me
Sean Connery, Sex and the City, a classic song and me
Plus: Creative Edinburgh Awards honour city's most exciting talent
2008 was a rather bullish year for Hollywood films. There was a string of blockbusters, including The Dark Knight, but one of the most popular films of the year was Sex in the City. It was a tale of four metropolitan women, Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte, living in New York City and their quest to find suitable partners. It was based on a enormously popular television series, from 1998 to 2004, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin David.
But this story also involves a piece of Scottish music which emanated from a living room in a Marchmont flat in Spottiswoode Street. Two Edinburgh musicians, who now live in Portobello High Street, were working on an album of their folk music and their interpretation of the Robert Burns classic, Auld Lang Syne.
Mairi Campbell and David Francis were known as The Cast. They made their living as traditional musicians, songwriters and purveyors of Cape Breton step dance music. Mairi was a classically trained viola player and became an exponent of Canadian fiddling.
Their version of the Burns’ classic would become a seminal moment in the film when the four New York characters were all on their own on Hogmanay. As the camera panned to each character Mairi’s soaring voice rings out with a most beautiful and haunting version of Auld Lang Syne, with David’s mellow chord progression played on acoustic guitar. If you haven’t heard it, you must catch it on You Tube.
It remains a magical part of the film, yet Mairi and David had little idea that it would be so prominent in this Warner Brothers’ mega-production. It was only after the film’s release that they discovered that their song had been given such a prominent position in the film. A movie which took in more than $400 million at the box office. When they inquired about royalties, they were told that they would be getting a fee for the soundtrack. And, at first, they shrugged, and simply accepted this.
Then, when Warner Brothers were pressed, they agreed it was a central part of the story. It resulted in an unexpected windfall for Mairi and David which allowed them to build their recording studio beside a family croft on the inner Hebridean island of Lismore. To this day, Mairi uses her island studio to host musical events and workshops.
How did this all come about? Several years earlier, 30 years ago next year, at a studio called Cava East, behind Easter Road football stadium in Edinburgh, Mairi and David were recording their debut album called The Winnowing. Of course, Auld Lang Syne is a traditional Scottish song known around the world. However, David and Mairi set the words to an ancient tune, which many believe is the original setting.
Over the weekend, in the studio, this writer was also asked to join along with singer-songwriter Lorraine Jordan, to provide a backing harmony for the track. We spent several hours recording a number of takes to get the sibilance of ‘S’ and ‘Zee’ in Old Lang ‘Zyne’. But Mairi, who had been a classical music student at the Guildhall in London, was simply not satisfied. A decision was made. None of the harmonies we're really working. So she chose to sing the song unaccompanied with only the backing of David’s guitar. It was magical.
And so their album, The Winnowing was acclaimed among the aficionados of Scottish folk music. Colours of Lichen followed two years later, and Greengold in 2007.
SEAN CONNERY MOVED BY MAIRI’S SINGING
Mairi is now well-kent as one of Scotland's finest singers and this led to an invitation to the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC on 5th December 1999 for the 22nd Kennedy Center Honours, to celebrate the life and times of Sean Connery. Earlier in the White House, President Bill Clinton and Hilary Clinton presented the Scottish movie star with the Lifetime Achievement Award, jointly with comedian Victor Borge, dancer Judith Jamison, actor Jason Robards and singer Steve Wonder. The evening concert and retrospective was compered by the great Walter Cronkite while Catherine Zeta-Jones introduced Sean Connery. Mairi and David were on the bill with Halle Berry, Christopher Plummer, Smokey Robinson, Herbie Hancock, Scottish fiddler Alasdair Fraser and the City of Washington DC Pipe Band, and, at one point, near the end of the gala performance, the walked onto the stage and played Auld Lang Syne. It was captivating and quite brilliant, with Connery visibly moved, the duo received a rousing ovation.
Among the glittering audience in the Washington auditorium was the actor Matthew Broderick, recruited for the tribute to Jason Robards, who became Sarah Jessica Parker’s husband.
So when the movie was on location, there was a hiatus in the script when all the characters were lamenting their loneliness on the last day of the year. In an interview, Sarah Jessica Parker told Entertainment Weekly that while she and director Michael Patrick King were trying to figure out the perfect song to dub over the New Year’s Eve scene, she remembered Mairi Campbell’s cover. King said the moment was all about “this desperate need to connect to somebody that actually matters to you.”
It was a work of genius which suits the mood of the film.
“My husband had been a participant in the Kennedy Center Honors, and that year they honoured Sean Connery,” she said. “He came home and he said to me, I heard a cover of Auld Lang Syne. This Scottish singer stood on the stage and sang it, and he said it was the most heart-rending thing he’d ever heard. I can’t remember how we somehow got our hands on that CD, [but] I was undone by that. I could not get over that.
“I said to Michael, I want you to listen to something and I don’t know that we can get it and I don’t know if it’s available and I don’t know if it’s what you’re thinking, but I think you need to use this music in that sequence.“
As King said of his reaction, “She played it for me and I was like, ‘Oh yeah. It’s just spectacular’, because it’s more emotional than any other version of Auld Lang Syne. It’s not quite as sad, it’s more female. It is magical and mystical and emotional and weird, and it just is so much better because you’ve never heard it before.”
WARNER BROTHERS PLAY BALL
When the movie giant eventually conceded that this song was, indeed, an integral part of the script, it allowed Mairi and David to develop their island studio.
As a young couple, living in Portobello High Street, and bringing up their two daughters, Ada Grace, now a successful singer and clarsach player, and Ellen, pursuing a career in television production, and who attended local schools in Edinburgh, David and Mairi continued to play in various bands, both together and separately.
The Cast played several festivals around the UK as a duo and Mairi garnered a Trad award as Scotland’s Traditional Singer of the Year. Several solo albums came next, and then the creation of her one-woman shows, including Pulse.
In 2007, she founded Lismore Music Retreats and has been the musical director of folk choir Sangstream. The Warner Brothers’ money helped lay the foundation for the Lismore Retreat. And still there are royalties when the Sex in the City is streamed around the globe. Sir Sean Connery, born in August 1930, died on 31 October 2020.
To celebrate 30 years, The Cast are playing together again at Edinburgh Folk Club on Wednesday, 22 November. It is already sold out, but there is still a chance to hear their fabulous song on You Tube. And you can also watch the whole Sean Connery celebration too.
David Francis said: “We’re really looking forward to this coming week. It’s not very often that we get a chance to play together these days, so this is a special celebration, which is part of Edinburgh Folk Club’s 50th anniversary season, and also the 30th anniversary of the release of our first album.”
www.mairicampbell.scot
Celebrating the cream of the Capital’s creative community
The best of city’s dynamic creative industry has been honoured in style at the Creative Edinburgh Awards.
Christina McKelvie MSP, the Minister for Culture, Europe and International Development, joined 350 guests at the Biscuit Factory in Leith for a night of entertainment and celebration.
The Scottish Government Minister praised the diversity and spirit of the city’s creative industry. She told the awards ceremony of an opera singer who had performed daily through lockdown close to her constituency office in Hamilton, saying this was typical of the creative community who had “embraced a difficult time and made it a bit brighter for everyone else.”
Ola Wojtkiewicz, executive director of Creative Edinburgh, described the Capital as “the most creative city on the planet”. She told the cheering crowd how her organisation supporting mainly freelance and small scale creative practitioners has grown to well over 6,000 members and became a charity earlier this year.
Guests were entertained by the brilliant “drag king” Guy Liner.
Among the award winners were the Hidden Door pop-up arts festival, the community band for young people Brass Blast and the primary school outdoor activity programme Positive Imagining: Rowenbank Environmental Arts and Education.
Freelance photographer Anneleen Lindsay who has been working with the King’s Theatre, the spoken word poetry event Loud Poets Grand Slam Final which has grown from the Scottish Storytelling Centre to the Edinburgh International Book Festival and interior design company A Design Storie were also honoured.
Other award winners were Cutting Edge Theatre for their work giving opportunities to disabled people, Abi Lewis who provides affordable space for artists at Sett Studios, Leith, the social enterprise Imagine If. Space CIC which works with local communities to reimagine ways of sustainable living, and the student collective Gutter Punks from Edinburgh Napier University.
The 35 finalists came from across a wide range of creative industries and included The Tinderbox Collective and the Tinderbox Orchestra, who were one of the city arts projects who told the Inquirer last month of the impact of arts funding cuts, and Screen Education Edinburgh, one of the mainstays of the city’s growing film-making eco-system.
The award winners received beautiful trophies designed by students from Edinburgh College.
Congratulations to all the winners and finalists as well as event organisers Creative Edinburgh.