Ever since we started filming sessions there have been a couple of local bands we wanted to shoot more than any others. One of them is Meursault. Having tried to arrange this many times over the past year, we finally found ourselves with a free afternoon, a plan hatched over too many beers, some brand new songs from their forthcoming new album, and some extra people to provide handclaps.
And so it was that we ended up in Craigentinny in the ‘burbs of Edinburgh, as Milo explains below, and then Portobello beach for stripped down renditions of two brand new songs from their new album, All Creatures Will Make Merry.
Our roving reporter Milo was in attendance for the first part of of the shoot:
“On a beautifully sunny but freezing cold February afternoon in Edinburgh, Meursault, one of the city’s best up and coming bands, arrive at a little known location ready to film a session with Off The Beaten Tracks.
The place in question is the William Henry Miller Mausoleum in Craigentinny. An imposing block of stone, raised on a concrete plinth and adorned with intricate biblical friezes, the memorial seems thoroughly out of place from its surroundings in this otherwise non-descript suburb north of Portobello. To one side, a small car park, for the patrons of the bowling green at the back. And all around, suburban houses.
It turns out that when the mausoleum was built after Miller’s death in 1848, it was surrounded by fields that were part of what was then the Miller estate. But it’s now hidden away by the effects of urban sprawl, with very few people even aware it exists.
Neil Pennycook, Meursault’s songwriter and frontman, discovered it on a trip while an art student, and was inspired to write a song about the unlikely burial place. It is this song that the band play today in the shadow of the ornate tomb, accompanied on handclaps by a bunch of eager friends, fellow musicians and enthusiastic fans.
Afterwards, I ask Pennycook why he chose Miller, a man who though Scottish born was most notable for being an MP for Newcastle, as the subject for a song. “There isn’t so much a coherent story about him, there’s just all these little chunks of information. It got my imagination going because I came to see this spot 3 or 4 years ago and it seemed like a really grand thing to have for just anybody. So I figured if there wasn’t any information about this person that I would try and create a bit of a folk story.”
Pennycook tells me he took the bare bones of what’s known about Miller and created a myth around it. “There’s lines in the song that aren’t based on any concrete facts, but that’s how stories develop really isn’t it? These tiny fragments of truth that people in the area add their own mythology to.”
But the facts that do exist are strange enough. Apparently, as eluded to in the song itself, Miller himself specified he be buried 40ft below ground, and that the “magnificent tomb” be erected in his honour – for which he set aside a princely sum in his will. So bizarre were his requests that they led to the rumour that he was a “changeling”, a concept with a rich folklore of its own. This unlikely suggestion was even published in the book ‘Old & New Edinburgh’, published in 1890 (see edinphoto.org.uk for more info).
No doubt Miller’s ghostly ego would be delighted, should it ever escape from the ground, that his memory has now been immortalised in popular song, with a lasting impact which can never reduced by the close vicinity of residential properties or bowling greens.”
The new Meursault album is available to pre-order from Song, by Toad Records. You can also purchase their first album, EP and two 7″ singles there.
