David Heavenor: Press

RICKY ROSS interviewed on The Iain Anderson programme on BBC Radio Scotland 2nd March 2007 keying up David's song Sign in a Stranger from The Automatic Eye

This an artist you play regularly. Happens to be one of my best friends. It’s wonderful because I knew David Heavenor way back in the 70’s and we were friends then and I’ve kind of learned everything I ever really thought I knew about songwriting from David. He sort of missed the boat that I was on, to use that metaphor, and then went off and made a couple of solo records which I know people listening to on this programme have just loved. It was great to get him together with Davy Scott and I think he made his best work on this last album. I was over skiing in France just a couple of weeks ago and there’s a great line about snow and France in this song and it’s a real pleasure to play this stuff.

The Automatic Eye
On Sign in a Stranger

'Gorgeous sounding as you would expect from producer David Scott

ROOTSTIME RADIO
Review of The Automatic Eye by David Heavenor Produced by David Scott.

David Heavenor, singer-songwriter from Edinburgh, a.k.a. "The Mystery Man of Scottish Music" received a fabulous review of his second CD "Winter's Children" only two years ago. 10 years earlier he released his first album "Private (The Night Visitors)". His incomparable lyrics and extraordinary guitar playing get stuck in your mind and can also be found on "The Automatic Eye" with typical Scottish sound. Just listen to the beautiful "Boys With No Love" or "Oxford Street In The Blackout", which gives you the feeling you're walking through this street with the singer and you can actually see the girls (of joy) in the door openings. The beginning of the titletrack "The Automatic Eye" is very original and sets the pace throughout the song. The final song "Linger & Go" rightly receives the label "masterpiece of songwriting" from the Scottish press. Listening to this album you're in Edinburgh on a winter's night, close to the fire with David Heavenor as your personal entertainer. From time to time you wander off to comparable artists like Nick Drake and Al Stewart from "The Year Of The Cat". Two members of the Glasgow-bands The Pearlfishers and Teenage Fanclub assist David Heavenor: David Scott on f.i. keyboards, bass and piano and Stuart Kidd on drums. In some songs Iain Barbour adds pedal steel and electric guitar, which completes the atmosphere of the opening track "Sign In A Stranger". A tremendously fresh and unique piece of work in this genre, with an excellent vocals of home-made music and lyrics by a singer who is 100% into his work. A renowned BBC producer simply described The Automatic Eye as "a beautiful album in every respect…". We could not have described it any better. Enjoy the album.

Sunday, November 05, 2006
AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE
My mother travelled from Scotland to Hong Kong a few weeks ago, and she brought with her a CD by a Scottish singer/songwriter, David Heavenor, called "The Automatic Eye". This was a more personal gift than it sounds: David is a family friend who used to spend time at our house in the 70s and he is one of those figures from the past who I remember through the filter of summer gardens and heat on the tarmac with the strumming of a guitar as backdrop; he seemed to like spending time with the kids, the price for which was always a story; and the tales he used to tell us ("and the captain said, tell us a tale!") , including the legendary story of the hut in the woods, with its genuinely terrifying denouement, still burn in my mind. The gentle, unmistakeable Scottishness of his voice and its clear timbre contain so many things that I can't even name which are all to do with my memories of childhood, and my undeniable nostalgia for the place where I come from, which, at the risk of sounding sentimental, often seems even further away than 6,000 miles.

I've always been distrustful of people who sing unnaturally, in an accent other than their own, as if ashamed ("Brown Sugar! Just like a young girl should!") ; and I love those voices which in song are no more than a gear shift away from the spoken word: like David's.

The best track on the CD (what cheesy radio DJs call "the standout track") is called "Sign In a Stranger" and lines keep recurring to me, sitting at my desk in the office in the glass edifice where I spend my day, or lying awake at night worrying about work:

building up like storms,
bursting in mid-air

When David sings, in a hush, "I'm walking behind you, I'm climbing the stairs", I'm in a darkened, damp Edinburgh close with someone I can't have. It's strange being transported by something as simple as a song, but I realise that that's what I love about good music, that it can speak to you on so many levels: even though I now know nothing about David, his experiences, his life, I feel as though I know everything I need to know.
posted by LottieP at 3:01 AM

On Jenny & the Cold Caller

'Of all the love songs we've played tonight I wish I'd written this one...'

On Sign in a Stranger

'It's fantastic!..'

FAIRLY UNKNOWN IN BELGIUM AND THE NETHERLANDS, BUBBLING WITH MELANCHOLY ~ JOY AS WELL
Ten years ago David Heavenor made his debut with the splendid album "Private". In spite of the fact that it was so good a tremendous album followed. David Heavenor remains fairly unknown in Belgium and The Netherlands. Scotland, however, regards this singer-songwriter as one of its biggest talents of the moment. His second album "Winters Children" contains cleverly modest rootsongs, which can be classified between the works of Al Stewart or Nick Drake. These songs are bubbling with melancholy, yet they bring joy as well. They immediately stick in the mind, yet they´ll not cease to surprise you. David Heavenor and his guitar form a special entity. He is a master performer who uses various moods paying little heed to any of the laws of music. He manages to find the perfect balance between voice and instrument. Piano, bass, percussion, acoustic guitar and the backup vocals of Steven Butler
(Heavenor´s producer) complete the songs on Winters Children. The discreet accompaniment enhances the melancholic character of the songs.
While Private (1993), with frequent performances from Simon Jaquet, might be known as his best album, Winters Children certainly is his most impressive one. Once again David Heavenor has proven to be unique.

Wed 30 Jan 2002

TOM MORTON on a potent reminder of his own musical past
THE CD arrived, bubblewrapped, potent with names from the past, another life: 20 years ago, I remember, they were all consumed by music, addicted to religion, juggling faith and fretboards; they were agonising over art and spirituality, politics and poetry. And I was there too, the fingertips of my left hand calloused by Gibsons and Guilds, hustling a creaking belief and a love of The Great Twang. Somewhere between the Rolling Stones and the Rock of Ages.

We were, for the most part, white middle-class boys, brought up in various permutations of evangelical Protestantism, obsessed with God and Bob Dylan, Jesus and Jackson Browne. Calvin and Marvin Gaye. We wanted to explore the divine, communicate it. Most of all we wanted to play music. And maybe get famous.

One or two did. Ricky Ross formed Deacon Blue, along with a bass player called Ewen Vernal. Graeme Duffin’s superlative guitar skills found a home in Wet Wet Wet and the charts. But two decades and longer ago, names such as Steve Butler, Brian McGlynn and David Heavenor were of equal status at events like the Greenbelt Festival and Dundee’s Street Level. Charlie and Dot Irvine’s band, Talking Drums, was signed up with Miles Copeland, manager of The Police. It was all are you a Christian musician, or a musician who happens to be a Christian? Are you an entertainer or a propagandist? Does the Lord really approve of punk, blues progressions, or on-stage pelvic thrusting?

I remember David Heavenor as being slightly, quizzically apart from all that overheated huffing and puffing. Always friendly and around, but somehow more inward and intense. And there were songs many recognised at the time as masterpieces, some of them captured on the CD he made with Simon Jacquet a couple of years ago: Linger and Go, and the shocking, for evangelical lads who lacked David’s artistic bravery, examination of depression and doubt, Wildcat. They were songs made to last. Delicate and full of a diffident power.

Now David is a weel-kent face in Edinburgh’s and Scotland’s artistic circles, thanks to his senior administrative role at the Queen’s Hall. But the music never stopped, and the CD which dropped through my letterbox at the weekend is his latest collection of songs, Winter’s Children. There were those names: Steve Butler is now an Episcopal priest in Edinburgh, still singing, who released his own excellent album last year. But he has produced and recorded Winter’s Children for David, playing and singing on it along with old pals Charlie and Dot, Ewen Vernal and some generous, deserved accolades from Ricky Ross.

It’s an inspiring, emotional experience for me, listening to this album. Because it retains the questioning, deep belief and the eternal doubts I remember, matured in a hard, hard world. The cool delivery remains, somewhere between Al Stewart and Nick Drake, the unexpected guitar runs. The lyrics you can’t quite pin down, but which echo around your brain, shifting meaning, ornate yet direct, complex and with an overwhelming sense of Edinburgh in winter.

Twenty years ago, we thought all that stuff mattered: music, faith, art. Listening to Winter’s Children, you could almost believe it still does.

This article: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=110882002