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Sandy Wright And The Toxic Cowboys

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Those in the know regard him as Scotland's finest undiscovered songwriter. And at long last, in his 60th year - after previous careers as a civil service clerk, an army bandsman and a balloon-tying children's entertainer - he's finally releasing his first solo album.

We'd like you to meet Sandy Wright, a longtime underground hero in his native Edinburgh, latterly championed by the likes of Eddi Reader, Kris Drever, Karine Polwart and folk/pop favourites Aberfeldy. That slow-matured debut, The Songs of Sandy Wright, is a treasure-trove twice over, firstly comprising a hand-picked selection - from a catalogue of some 250 compositions - sung by the man himself, recorded with half-a-dozen pals in the cottage outside Edinburgh that he currently calls home. The companion volume features a crème-de-la-crème array of fellow singers and songwriters, among them the aforementioned Reader, Drever and Polwart, plus the likes of Boo Hewerdine, Chris Wood, Roddy Woomble, Kendall Mead, Dean Owens and William Douglas, each performing new versions of Wright's material.

Wright was still a toddler when he first walked across the keys of his granny's piano, inadvertently kindling a lifetime's passion: "My ears were just always tuned into music," he says. His dad was "a beautiful singer; bring a tear to a glass eye", and Wright sang pop covers in talent competitions during high school. After leaving at sixteen, he spent three years as a filing clerk for Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Taxes, meanwhile soaking up the sounds of Tamla Motown, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, and playing keyboards three or four nights a week in bands with names like Cameron's Mustard, and The Movement.

Next came a four-year stint in Her Majesty's Forces, after Wright discovered he could join up as a musician. "I was the unlikeliest recruit ever," he says. "I had hair down to my arse. But I wanted to be playing more, and my parents wanted me to have a career, and this was a way to do both. It gave me the chance to really study music, so I learned what I wanted to learn, about things like notation and arranging and so on, then bought myself out."

Over the next decade or so, Wright the ex-soldier became better known as Spike the Balloon Man, a highly sought-after, Magic Circle-accredited clown - another career he more or less stumbled into. "I've honestly never tried to do anything in my life," he says. "Things just happen along, and then lead to other things. But that was certainly when I learned about stagecraft."

The siren call of music was never far in the background, though, and by the late 80s Wright was gravitating into the vibrant melting-pot of Edinburgh's resurgent grassroots scene, finding his voice as a songwriter amidst the new generation of Scottish folk and jazz talent then emerging via near-nightly sessions in the city's pubs. This was when he first met Drever (whose covers of Wright's 'Steel and Stone' and 'Beads and Feathers' would become highlights of his own debut album, Black Water, in 2005) and members of Aberfeldy, whereby word eventually spread to the likes of Polwart and Reader.

Encompassing twenty years' worth of material, The Songs of Sandy Wright spans the epic and the intimate, the outlandish and the everyday, the comical and the quietly scathing. Wright's gritty, pawky, long-distilled genius resonates so widely that he can only usefully be likened to such freebooting legends as Tom Waits or Johnny Cash - but with a distinct Caledonian salting of Ivor Cutler and Michael Marra.

"I've tried out loads of different styles and ways of writing things in my time - and I still do," he says. "But basically what I do now, corny as it sounds, is just write about my own experiences, or things they spark off, folk I meet - I love people's stories. All the stories in those 250 songs are kind of like my diary: there's a thread through them other people wouldn't necessarily recognise; all these little markers and bus-stops where I remember when and why I wrote them." As a chronicle of a life exceptionally well-told, The Songs of Sandy Wright is your introduction to a truly singular talent.

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