'The Singer in the Band Made Me Want to Cry'

Mental health, Camera Obscura and me

Have you ever had a soul crush for someone you’ve never met? Whose work you admire? I have. Her name is Tracey Anne Campbell, the lead signer songwriter for the venerated Scottish indie band Camera Obscura.

Yes I know I am far too old and long in the tooth to have such silly crushes. As I type this I am pushing the big 5-0. Yes the ‘clock is coming down the stairs’, to quote from another favourite artist’s repetoire, but I simply don’t care.

‘Well you’re not a teenager, so don’t act like one.’

It’s nothing to do with her looks, you understand, though she is certainly not unattractive.

It’s her voice, her words and the band’s music. All three elements are brilliantly blended in some strange alchemy that really resonates with me and has stayed with me down the years.

She is the queen of Baroque heartbreak, best exemplified by their album My Maudlin Career. This was an album I listened to obsessively one bleak winter while living in Scotland, mired in a ‘mixed manic state’ which dragged on for months.

The title track is beautifully overwrought like some intriguing Art Nouveau doorway. The string arrangements are gloriously unrestrained. The emotion just gushes out.

This was long before I got diagnosed as bipolar at the tender age of 45. I had no clue as to what the hell was happening to me during the emotional tsunami I was experiencing.

This episode dredged up all sorts of painful baggage from childhood and adolescence. And this album was very much the soundtrack.

‘These days I’m well travelled. You can watch me unravel...’

I’d been depressed for so long it just felt natural to me, like there was no real other way of being.

I grew up with it, living in a fairly depressive household with an anxious father who was probably autistic and a mother blighted with both depression and paranoid schizophrenia.

Like a cosy, old, warm cardigan I wrapped myself in these feelings and soothed myself with melancholic, songwriterly music like hers.

I’d long turned to music to help process my feelings, from around the age of seven when I started to follow the charts quite obsessively.

In adult life this became something of a party piece. I’d ask friends to give me a major chart hit from the 80s and I could tell them how high it charted and which month.

People like Tracey Anne seemed able to articulate what I’d been feeling my whole life, and all without having ever met me.

Caledonian County Connection

For some reason bands from the west coast of Scotland hit this particular nail squarely on the head for me. I had a similar relationship with (still) my favourite band of all time, Ayrshire’s Trashcan Sinatras.

Many bands from this part of Britain seem to inculcate a particular brand of wistful, deep seated melancholy, often with a distinct country twang.

Is there a reason for this Celtic transatlantic connection? I could muse on the notion of these artists processing centuries of grief and inter-generational trauma. Grieving the loss of their forefathers who’d emigrated to America in search of a better, new life of opportunity.

Does all that sound a shade pretentious? Again, I don’t much care.

I suppose if you were being unkind you could say that the album My Maudlin Career soundtracked the onset of my midlife crisis.

I also like their origin story and the resonance of that. They were taken under the wing of fellow Glasgow indie darlings Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch who produced their debut album, 2001’s Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi and was very much their mentor. I think some kind of romantic relationship ensued.

In my view they have far eclipsed their mentors. As great as the latter undoubtedly are, they do not channel the same emotional undercurrents as Camera Obscura for me.

And is the song from this 2009 album My Maudlin Career, The Sweetest Thing, about her conflicted feelings for Stuart as indeed I have read online? I don’t know, but I dearly hope so. Anyway the raw honesty of the track shines through.

Of course I also love the unabashed, adolescent fervour that bursts out of perhaps their ‘biggest hit’ French Navy.

As a female vocalist she has very few rivals in my book. Maybe the Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler could keep her company in the pantheon of remarkably emotive singers. Kate Bush perhaps could give her a run for her money. But no, in my eyes and ears she is utterly peerless really.

Much like the Trashcan’s Frank Reader, her voice drips with passion, yearning and world weariness in equal measure. That’s no mean feat. At times she sounds brittle, cynical, hurt, desolate and witty.

There is light among the shade in their emotional chiaroscuro.

It’s in the way her voice drips with sardonic wit singing this line from Swans:

‘Oh you want to be a writer? Fan-tas-tic idea.’

Yes I can definitely relate to that one, having laboured to forge a career from writing over the past 30-odd years and counting.

I love the broad Caledonian vowels in the way she pronounces ‘murder’, on Away with Murder, the breathy despair of her voice on James, the histrionic passion in the title track of My Maudlin Career.

Then there’s Lloyd, I’m Ready to be Heartbroken, perhaps their best known song. This is a punchy pop ditty which deserved to be a sizable hit. It’s even been used as a soundbed on Scottish broadcast coverage of Rugby and it’s also possibly the best answer song ever, if you ask me.

Their later catalogue is studded with lesser-known gems too, such as Every Weekday, from their last album Desire Lines.

It’s an incredibly sweet song about female friendship, penned in tribute to their late, great keyboard player Carey Lander, who around this time was tragically diagnosed with an eventually fatal case of a rare cancer.

The song is delivered with a markedly jaunty and upbeat calypso arrangement which offsets some very touching lyrics imbued with a healthy dose of self awareness.

‘We’re gonna make a record, then sail around the world. We might not storm the charts completely but we’ll do our very best!’

Like many of their biggest fans I wondered if they’d possibly survive the passing of Lander, yet here they are with new material surfacing in the wake of a series of European dates, some 11 years after their last album, 2013’s Desire Lines.

As Tracey herself sheepishly sings, a chart storm seems unlikely now some six albums into their ‘maudlin career’, but I know I’ll be there, feeling little changed emotionally from the undiagnosed, manically depressed teenager locked in his bedroom with the likes of Lloyd Cole and the Trashcan Sinatras for company.

Yes I’ll be there, down the front, mouthing along to her words and fighting to hold back the tears when they light up Brighton’s Concorde 2 venue in May. You should come join me.