King Creosote's sparked controversy but nothing can eclipse his music

The Herald Scotland

24-05-2025

In his concert review, Teddy noted that a list-style song, Dare I Hope I'm One of the Good Guys, reeled off a handful of 'controversial' characters, all of whom Creosote seemed to suggest qualified for the description. They included Van Morrison, JK Rowling and Eric Clapton, as well as Mel Gibson, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson and Neil Oliver.
In a follow-up piece, an 'open letter' from a self-confessed fan of King Creosote (real name, Kenny Anderson), Teddy spoke of having watched him 'possibly torch his good name by telling us in song that he thought that American hard-right commentators such as Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens as well as local boy and vaccine-sceptic Neil Oliver were among his pantheon of 'good guys''.
These days, it really doesn't take much to ignite a skirmish in the forever culture wars, even inadvertently, and those two Herald articles seem to have done that.
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On Facebook, responding to an earlier post by the Anstruther Harbour Festival that King Creosote would be playing there on June 1, one man wrote: 'Evidently, [Creosote] has been expressing his support for far-right figures, including Alex Jones who harassed parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook. He is said to have done this at a recent performance. Yours is a family festival. Are you going to risk him promoting hatred on YOUR stage?'
In a second post, in which he cited the reference to Alex Jones, the same man said: 'If [King Creosote] expressed such views at the festival, it would be a PR disaster and possibly become an unsafe occasion'.
Someone else countered: 'My point was, if you weren't [at the Stirling gig], or knew the context of what was said, is it possible that this has been blown up, and out of proportion?'
Beneath the Herald's post of Teddy's second article, one person made this observation: 'So an artist with an alternative opinion gets lambasted by mainstream media and folks get annoyed.'. Other voices shared similar sentiments.
One of the issues touched on in the online discourse is, to what extent can – should – the artist and his art be separated from his personal life and opinions? As Teddy Jamieson noted: 'It is a bit ridiculous to think that artists should share the same views as you; pernicious, even, to think they are somehow less worthy of admiration if they don't. Art doesn't need to stick to some approved party political line… Still, there is a frisson of sadness when someone whose work has touched you deeply is revealed as someone you wouldn't want to invite round for dinner'.
King Creosote's views may not have come entirely as a surprise. Back in November 2023 he told The Herald's Barry Didcock: 'In the last three years I've been writing lyrics that are very politicised, and I've never done that. That's never been a King Creosote thing.' His current concerns were with 'the sort of stuff that gets censored. It's like you can have an opinion these days but it has to be a very certain [one]. It's very narrow. If you agree with this, it's fine, you can say what you like. But if you don't, it's nu-uh'.
Was he worried that he would end up being cast as some kind of libertarian, right-wing oddball? 'Yeah, of course. Because I've always been a critical thinker. I'm the guy that asks the awkward question'.
Whatever happens in the future, nothing can overshadow Anderson's reputation as one of our finest and most highly-regarded – to say nothing of impressively prolific – songwriters.
His most recent studio album, I DES, had as its common themes, as Barry noted in his article, mortality, ageing, and regret. Songs such as Blue Marbled Elm Trees and Burial Bleak were deeply moving.
In 2006 Anderson summed up, in an interview for The Word magazine, his career up until that point: busking between 1989-91, 'endless toilet gigs with the Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra, 1991-95; in 1996, 'mad depression for a year' until a eureka moment made him realise that he could actually make his music the way he wanted to. Thus was born the Fence record label and musicians' collective, and a long, long line of lo-fi, self-released King Creosote albums.
Things changed in 2005 with KC Rules OK, which was released on 679 Recordings, a Warner Music Group-owned record label. It put Anderson in the studio with members of The Earlies, and the result was a superb, lyrically heartfelt album that contained some of his finest moments: Not One Bit Ashamed, The Vice-Like Gist of It, 678, I'll Fly By the Seat of My Pants, Marguerita Red. On the album, Ian Rankin noted in an appreciation that accompanied a fuller, re-issued version the following year, Anderson 'transforms simple song lyrics into some of the most haunting wee stories around, snapshots of loss and redemption played out against small-town backdrops'.
Anderson himself said, in a 2009 interview with Ryan Drever for The Skinny: 'For me, [KC Rules OK] was basically the first chance I got to do a proper album as King Creosote … I think it was the album that made my songs shine. I also think it made people listen to songs that I had put out on my own label in a different light. It was almost like they went 'God, yeah, I think there's actually gonna be good songs on these records' and lo and behold, there are!'
Then came Bombshell, in September 2007, a rather beautiful album. Produced and arranged by Jon Hopkins, it was something of a widescreen version of Anderson's customary sound.
Plaintive strings and his own accordion ushered in the eerily magnificent opening track, Leslie. Subsequent songs – Home in a Sentence, You've No Clue Do You (which the Herald described as veering in almost a New Order-like direction), Church as Witness, Now Drop Your Bombshell, Admiral, and At the W.A.L. – were as good as anything he had ever written.
The Herald's arts editor, Keith Bruce, loved it: 'Bombshell is his finest moment yet', he wrote. 'These 13 east coast mini-sagas of the heart and head are dispatched with a sharp wit and a sublime melodic shine. Producer Jon Hopkins lends the album a gorgeous flow, galloping round the curves with the likes of 'At the W.A.L.' and slowing to an exquisite reverie with the HMS Ginafore-penned 'And the Racket They Made'. Marvellous'.
Separately, the Herald also wrote: 'His new album further refines his alternative take on folk, rendering it more accessible without dulling the sharp edges that set him apart from more morose peers, and Bombshell seems the perfect not-so-easy listening track for those windswept autumn days soon to greet us'.
In an enthusiastic track-by-track description of the album in the Guardian, Jude Rogers said that one line from Admiral summed up Anderson's songwriting: 'huge emotions delivered in the language of a soft-hearted man, who's trying desperately not to be, accompanied by instruments that hint at softness, but still hold the schmaltz back. What's especially wonderful is that he sounds like no one but himself. This is folk, but it's not traditional or old-fashioned; it's warm, bright and modern. Folk for folk like us'.
Unfortunately, Anderson's brush with 679 Recordings did not last long.
'I didn't understand that way of working,' he told the Herald in April 2009, 'and it was quite impersonal.' There were arguments about singles, and album sequencing. 'It was going the wrong way, so I wasn't distraught to come out of that. But I was just a little bit pissed off because I'd done everything I felt I could to cut costs and make it a viable project'.
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On Bombshell, he insisted, he had pushed things as far as he could. 'It's as poppy as I could have done. It's as angst-ridden, it's as sarcastic. It's me firing on all cylinders and I just didn't think I could better it, to be honest. And I didn't want to be under any pressure to better it, and I just wanted to have fun with music and not think about any of that'.
In a later interview with the Guardian, Anderson elaborated further: Warners had tried to smother the lead single with strings, had tried to tell him what to wear, and had only accepted Hopkins as producer when his previous work with Coldplay had been mentioned.
Ahead of Anderson there would be many further glories, including the wondrous, Mercury Prize-shortlisted Diamond Mine (2011), on which he worked with Jon Hopkins, his collaborator on Bombshell. The manager of Domino, the indie label which released the album, is said to have cried when the duo played him the first completed track, 'John Taylor's Month Away'.
Three years later, in 2014, came From Scotland with Love, a great collection of Anderson songs that soundtracked an archive documentary film of the same name, directed by Virginia Heath.