Feature: Don McGlashan - Loneliness of the Long Distance Strummer

As far as live work goes however, it was amicably agreed that after 15 years of working together it was time for the pair to have a break from each other, so Ross won't be seen in the Seven Sisters, the live four-piece that evolved out of the recording process. That role has been taken by Chris O'Connor (early TrinityRoots, Cloudboy), who played on the re-recording of This is London, plus a late addition in the form of an SJD track, I Will Not Let You Down. Interestingly this song failed to make the 'Southern Lights' cut - but only because it didn't quite sit with the rest of the album. It looked likely to miss out on 'Warm Hand' as well, until a new version recorded on Christmas Eve 2005 when O'Conner bought a stay of execution.

"I got the idea of transposing it to a different key and changing the instruments around. It only took a couple of takes and it was just really effortless - I'm really pleased with the way it sounds on the record."

It has to make you wonder how many potentially great songs get chucked simply through lack of that sort of perseverance. Willy Scott (Anika Moa, Dimmer) helped out post-Bethels but pre-O'Conner, contributing drums to another twice-recorded enfant terrible - Harbour Bridge. With Donnelly on bass, John Segovia - the slide and pedal steel maestro, makes up the fourth core member of the Seven Sisters (a constellation, a geographic curiosity at the White Cliffs of Dover or a bunch of shadowy ancient Greek dames - take your pick). Accordion player Tatiana Lanchtikova's contributions were eventually whittled down from a constant thread to an occasional feature as the nature of the album became less acoustic/folk-oriented.

Don speaks enthusiastically about his relationship with his new record label Arch Hill, something that he would have found difficult to do towards the end of The Muttonbirds' contract with the giant Virgin company in England.

"I've always liked the kind of community they (Arch Hill) represent. There seems to be a lot of really good music on the label and it's really small but perfectly formed. I guess if you talk to Ben (Howe, the label boss) about something, he's going to tell you what he thinks. He's not going to have to go and run it past a committee. I suppose my last experience with major labels was in England where the committees were all over the place and you never knew whether somebody was just being polite, or whether they really had an opinion about your material."

He goes on to describe a situation where Howe asked if he would consider doing a structural edit in the interests of better presenting a song, Miracle Sun, to radio.

"I think if a major label person had asked me that I would have come back with a full head of outrage and told them where to stick it. But the fact that it's Ben and I know where he's coming from and he wouldn't ask me if he didn't think it was a really good idea, meant that I went and tried it and I actually like the results."

Now that he can finally and irrevocably say he has put the album to bed, Don talks of a weight being lifted and how he is again walking around with a notebook, starting new songs.

"For a big chunk of last year, where this thing was a bit stalled and I didn't know whether it was finished, and I didn't know whether even if it was finished anybody would want to listen to it, I actually wasn't writing much new stuff. I wrote new stuff when somebody needed it, like the song for the film 'No. 2' Bathe in the River. That was great because it was a very clear brief and I could kind of pour all that frustrated energy into it over a really short space of time."

Frustrated energy clearly did the trick in this case, because as I write Bathe in the River is perched comfortably at number two (oh the sweet irony) on the national charts.

As to the question of whether he should be able to knock out his next album in better time than the first he has this to say. "There's a number of people in my life who, if that doesn't happen, they're going to take me behind the bike sheds and give me a good seeing to!

"I think maybe a simpler album (next time) that just comes from what is turning into a really good band - I think that should be a lot quicker."
So it is true that bands make albums faster than solo artists. Don starts out agreeing, but then changes his mind.

"I don't think making a solo album per se is necessarily slower, because if you're somebody who had a touring schedule and management hassling you to finish stuff, then that would be impetus. All your various collaborators would feed into you, and so you get things done as fast. I'm not in that situation - I mean I am now, now that I've got something to release I have got a manager (Roger King who previously managed Dave Dobbyn for almost a decade) and I've got a record company.

"But for all the time that I made this album, if I'd just sort of said, 'I don't actually feel like making a record', I don't think anybody would have found out for a long time!"