Hugh Carter - A Personal Tribute

Béla Alabástrom

I met Hugh Carter on what turned out to be a pivotal day in my life, the true significance of which only gradually revealed itself with hindsight. In the upstairs lobby of the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, by the merch desk at the Prog Before Christmas in 2022. He was wearing his trademark, slightly battered, brown leather jacket and scarf, with the lovely Maria wielding a white plastic bucket for donations to Maggie's. They had CDs of Hugh's solo album, Still, and I was the first person to purchase a copy. Little realising that this simple act would mark the beginning of a bond of the deepest admiration and respect. It has been my utter privilege to call Hugh a friend.

From there to sitting in his shed, his private haven for reflection in solitude and for strumming his ideas on what he described as his parlour guitar, surrounded by an eclectic collection of instruments, some broken, what may have appeared to the dispassionate eye as clutter, but each object imbued with meaning, a narrative as eloquent as tree rings recording the passing of the seasons, accumulated over decades. The heater occasionally punctuating our conversation with a metallic click. I exhausted my supply of Wilhelmina drops to help keep his mouth moist as he recounted the rich and fascinating story of his life in music. Each framed image on the walls of particular import, from the cricket grounds to the portrait of his grandfather.

Hugh Carter. Photo by Béla Alabástrom, used by kind permission.

Best recollected in Hugh's own words...

I was born in Scarborough in Yorkshire, and I spent many happy summer's days with my grandma, who was a nurse. We used to go to the cricket ground and Saint John's Ambulance for people in the crowd if someone fell ill. So I used to go along. Of course, by birth I'm a Yorkshireman, so cricket is in my veins. It's in my DNA. And the gentleman in the picture up there is my maternal grandfather, Claude Keaton, who was a composer, church organist and music teacher.

He was the youngest person ever to be granted the fellowship of the Organist Society in Great Britain at the age of 19. And he taught many people, the most notable being a chap called Eric Fenby, who was the man who transcribed all of Delius's work, Delius being blind. Well, in later life he lost his eyesight, and he lived in France.

And Eric Fenby transcribed all his work, hence the reason why there's a little short section of Delius at the beginning of the Glen Brielle album "On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, which I managed to get a score for, and Alan Hearton from Abel Ganz actually played it for me on strings. And I did the reed part, the clarinet and oboe parts, such as it is, a couple of notes. But Delius was always a favourite of my parents, who were big classical fans.

A Yorkshireman he may have been, but he embraced his adopted home completely. From the soft lilt in his accent to his perfect assimilation of our vernacular in all its colourful and earthy glory, of all progressive music composed in Scotland, his most beautifully incorporates that elusive quality of Scottishness, with its hints of folk and Celtic melancholy, the mists descending gently over the mountain slopes in the twilight, the silver birch bark mottled with lichen, the deer bounding through the bracken, the amber of the peat-tinted waters.

His music also articulates his love of nature. As he wrote to me: I guess my personality was shaped long before that with two loving parents who loved the arts, music and the great outdoors. My junior school in York, Poppleton Road Juniors, was a joy with lots of nature field trips and historical trips (city walls and castle/country abbeys) Our class teacher Mr Ridley was also the choir master at our church where I was a choirboy, lovely man and very encouraging.

This was further cultivated by the Steiner school he attended in Edinburgh: Our morning assembly, done in our classes, (the school was split into 12 classes from kindergarten to Sixth year) and took the form of non-religious hymns praising the earth/sun, etc. and a school prayer along the same lines. The passing of the moon would be marked, as were the solstices. Every summer solstice there would be a school walk to a spot in the Pentland hills, the kindergarten walking a few hundred yards, whist the upper school Class 9-12 would start a few miles away. All coming together for a bonfire with songs and maybe home baking.

Birdsong, the often barely noticed accompaniment to our lives, is interwoven into the fabric of his songs: Moving On was the first thing I actually recorded and wrote, and the Eider ducks were in there because where we lived, Maria, Woodside and Cove on Loch Long, there were flocks of Eider ducks, and we were right on the shoreline. I mean, we stepped out of the front garden, and we were on the beach, and the Eider ducks would be there all the time.

I don't know if you're familiar with the sound an Eider duck makes, but it's like a miniature Frankie Howerd. They go “Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh”, that's the sound an Eider duck makes. And when you've got a flock of 50 of them on the loch outside your door, and so they had to be in Moving On, which was a sad lament about me leaving Woodside before I moved in with Maria, and having to go back to Ayrshire to a house over there.

But the Eider ducks were in there, and so when we re-recorded it again, and rather than use the same Eider ducks, Malcolm [McNiven] went out with his portable recorder down to the harbour at Tarbert, and found a flock of Eider ducks. So they're genuine Tarbert, Loch Fyne Eider ducks.

All of Hugh's compositions are deeply personal, drawn from his experience, lending them authenticity and emotional resonance. Glen Brielle represented the ultimate distillation of Hugh's creative gifts, his gentle spirit and profound humanity shining through. Amidst the incessant cacophony assailing us, the endless clamouring for attention, Hugh's compositions invite us to pause, calm, unassuming, almost meditative, devoid of gratuitous flash, his lyrics wistfully poetic. An approach epitomised in The Thatcher, celebrating a traditional craft, a skill painstakingly acquired with patience and dedication, the antithesis of the instant gratification vaunted above all else by those who seek to commodify us. The abundance of tiny details contributing to his soundscapes, like the array of tiny dewdrops betraying the unconscious artistry of a cobweb in an autumn hedge.

And the photograph of Hugh's beloved Bryn Morganstar McAllister Carter in a boat on Ullswater. Bryn was our dog. Bryn was a Welsh Springer Spaniel, as opposed to an English Springer. They're very much like English Springers, but longer in body and a tan colour rather than chocolate that the English Springers are. And twice as daft, twice as stupid, but exceptionally loyal. And he couldn't be left. He was our constant companion. Came with us everywhere, absolutely everywhere. Couldn't leave him in the house at all. So he came everywhere with us, including the North Coast 500 in a campervan. And two weeks with a wet dog is no fun.

Hugh's illness did not define him, but like the noble salmon fighting against the autumn spate, airborne for a moment, tail thrashing to propel it upwards through the waterfall's fierce churning, he never succumbed to despair or self-pity. The embodiment of tenacity and resilience, Hugh transformed adversity into a force for the good, speaking in Holyrood on behalf of Maggie's and inspiring Denis Smith to organise the Prog Before Christmas to raise vital funds for the charity, bringing Abel Ganz's original line-up back together and reaffirming friendships.

Hugh, referred to within Abel Ganz by the honorific "Great Uncle Shug"'", loved his former bandmates and always remained a member in spirit. As I joked with him: "Once a Ganzer, always a Ganzer". And this mutual affection was never more touchingly conveyed than by Denis Smith and Mick McFarlane's trip down to Chepstow to surprise Hugh and Malcolm as they performed at Winter's End as Glen Brielle. It filled Hugh with great happiness.

So to Ventura, written from the heart, with lyrics of deceptive simplicity, capturing profound emotions with a striking image from the everyday, the beauty beneath the banality, timeless and imperishable. It's just about how you can rediscover love at any time, and I always think it's very pertinent to me and Maria, me having been a single man for 20-odd years, and having a succession of relationships during that time, but never finding the one. And then I met Maria, out of the blue, just at that point when you think in your life, well, you know, I'm kind of 55, I'm going to be a sad old bachelor for the rest of my life, and then boom, I meet Maria, and I'm going to do that thing again, that gulp emotional thing.

Love always comes round again,
when you think your life is a rollercoaster that never ends,
see, it's here again,
An old friend that you can't forget,
like your old worn shoes in the back of the wardrobe that you can't throw out,
it's here again...
Life has an element of surprise,
when you think you're dead and buried, it hits you right smack between the eyes,
and you never can tell what the future holds for you,
It'll turn you around in a blink of an eye,
as you wonder how low it could go from Ventura

Look, I'm crying again, I found the love of my life, Maria, and you never know, there's me at 55 thinking, that's me, I'm going to be a grumpy old man, sitting in the corner of the pub with a beer, but you never can tell".

For this is the fundamental truth of our existence: all that truly matters is love.

From the hillside, a muffled bark, ferns shaking, a glimpse of white and tan descending, the waters of the loch millpond still, the wagging tail, the guileless joy and abandon, they retreat together, swathed in the evening mist, never more to be parted.