The BrewDog Howls

Poetry, Percussion & the Art of Collaboration

It’s not often that poets are offered creative free rein in a brewery, but in the summer of 2014 just such a chance came my way. Reader, you’re right, I hesitated not.

Though usually more of a single malt girl, I needed no persuasion when Sound Scotland offered this commission: the chance to work with an acclaimed composer, Stephen Montague on a project hosted by craft brewery BrewDog – whose first bar outside of Scotland happens to be just round the corner from my office in Camden Town. Even my trendy young media colleagues seemed impressed – and a little envious.

I’d already planned to spend some poetry and agenting time at the Edinburgh and Inverness Book Festivals in the run-up to the Independence Referendum, as well as some family research in Dundee, so this additional Scottish foray seemed a perfectly fitting extension – a week of creativity (and a bit of beer tasting) in the beautiful Aberdeenshire countryside around Ellon, where BrewDog’s shiny new brewery is based.

I checked out the photos on the website – both hi-tech and hip, gleaming stainless steel vessels set against brightly coloured murals. I was particularly charmed by the funky shark and bright green octopus: it looked like a fun place to work. “Love Hops and Live the Dream”, a neon-lit sign proclaimed and I had a memory of the scent I so loved in my years studying in Edinburgh – the waft of the malt from the Caledonian brewery.

But apart from a pint or two of Dead Pony Club and Punk IPA, few of the creative ingredients in this mix were known quantities to me. I’d met Stephen Montague briefly at a discussion session at English National Opera about how composers and librettists work together, and we’d had a general chat about poetry and music. I’d already worked with film-maker Jack Wake-Walker and composers Ollie Barrett and Roberto Rusconi on a few multi-media projects, including shows on Hitchcock’s Psycho and one for the centenary of the sinking of RMS Titanic, but Stephen had decades more experience of composing and creative collaboration. Though I hadn’t seen anything live, I knew he’d done projects in Scotland already, including the fantastic Apparitions, a collaboration with costume and installation artist Alex Julyan and video and art installation artist Kathy Hinde, which was performed in Dartington Hall and in Duart Castle on the Isle of Mull.

I was intrigued to know more about the composition process, and to see what he would come up with in the very different setting of BrewDog HQ – and to work out what I could contribute to this unusual event, beyond the baseline requirement to write up a report of the show’s development. Fiona Robertson of Sound Scotland had explained that this was part of a ‘Skills Biennale’, which was all about pairing artists (from places like Deveron Arts, Woodend Barn, Scottish Sculpture Workshop, and Gray’s School of Art) with local artisan producers of food like cheese and shortbread. We got the beer: the brief to spend some time at BrewDog HQ, communicate, absorb (and yes, imbibe a bit), collaborate, and then produce a piece of work – ‘or whatever inspiration leads to’.

Stephen got to Ellon some days ahead of me to consult with brewery staff, set things in motion and start composing the music that would be performed in a week’s time. When he picked me up at Aberdeen station there was already a lot to be briefed on – meetings arranged at the brewery’s DogTap bar, and details of the professional percussionist and bass clarinettist who were secured for the show. But there were also a number of question marks, including the news that a key BrewDog contact, Stephen Allerston (a brewer, but also a musician who was to have been part of the show) would now unfortunately be abroad and unable to take part. Apart from percussionist Tom Hunter and clarinettist Jo Nicholson, Stephen would be reliant on brewery staff volunteers and, to complete the soundscape, he first needed to know who would be ready and willing and what they were capable of, musically.

Flexibility, the ability to improvise – these are crucial to any collaboration. Optimism too. ‘It’ll be an adventure’, Stephen grinned, as I wrestled with the map of Aberdeen and attempted to navigate us sensibly out of the city and not fall at the very first practical hurdle. ‘Something will happen’.

*          *          *

The next day we arrived at BrewDog HQ on Ellon’s Balmacassie Industrial Estate just as manager Sara Jastrzebski opened up DogTap, the BrewDog bar that fronts onto the brewery. Like desperate early-morning bar-flies, but in this case just eager to get stuck into the project – despite the fact that the beer on tap here doesn’t come any fresher. (This project is wasted on you, I hear a colleague mutter….) I drank in the scent of malt and hops and yeast instead, as we put on regulation green jackets for our tour and pushed through the swing doors into the brewery itself.

Walking through a canyon of tall vats with their mysterious pipes and imposing temperature gauges, you feel the warmth of the processes bubbling away around you, so much melding and developing that you can’t see. I thought of the creative process, how differently Stephen and I would be approaching this space and the ideas it evoked. As Sara recited a litany that seemed positively magical to me – mash tun, lauter tun, wort, bright beer tanks, original gravity – I was absorbing the visual details, internalising words and phrases and wondering how all this could be turned to good effect on the page: what narrative, snatch of poem or song might emerge from this fertile field of impressions?

Stephen had done the tour before and I could see him sizing up the space where the audience would stand and where the band of musicians (whoever they would be) would play. He was listening out too, ear tuned to the hum and sigh and occasional clang of the making of ale; gauging what sound background the performers would be working with – or against. The show was planned for the following Saturday when the vast hall would be quieter than on weekdays – no bottle production line, no labelling machine, just the brewery going about its calmer weekend business. But international demand is high, and the beer never rests – the brewers working in shifts, the site on the go 24/7.

We spoke to Belfast-born brewer Russell Erskine about his work and Sara tempted us with alluring names and ingredients – Electric India, a ‘hoppy saison’ made with orange peel, heather honey and pink peppercorns, sounded particularly enticing to me, as did the idea of Dogma, with its honey-and-ten-times-single-malt brew. And though I wasn’t convinced by the description of a sweet American-style barley wine, its name, Shipwrecker Circus, was a poet’s dream. Luckily, it was lunchtime by now, a completely respectable hour for a pie (made with ale of course) and a wee spell of beer tasting back in DogTap… (At last! She gets this far and only now she gets down to tasting…?!). Well worth the wait.

*          *          *

Collaborations are interesting beasts – I love them because of the useful pressure and deadlines they impose, how you must produce something worthwhile or risk letting another artist down. And what you come up with in the company of an expert in a different medium is often greater than the sum of its parts. Commissions can stretch and challenge you, take you in surprising directions – or at least, you hope they will.

But after the initial frisson of the idea, the view of the open field of possibilities, there’s always an anxious time of sounding out the material and your creative partner, wondering whether anything good, anything at all, will come of this? Will you find a connection with the subject, feel a spark, will the project ‘take’, or not?

By Sunday I’d brushed up my knowledge of brewing and had acquired a new taste for Electric India and 5 a.m. Saint, along with a few books on craft beer loaned from DogTap. I’d quizzed Stephen on his ideas and knew there’d be a lot of creative percussion using found materials, and that beer bottles would also play a role. I knew I could rustle up a workaday record at the end of it all, but there were so many rich and interesting elements in the mix that it seemed to cry out for something more – so I was pleased when Stephen cautiously suggested that text could possibly also work, incorporated in the composition itself, and did I think I could write a new poem in a few days? Well, I’d certainly give it my best shot.

Having Wi-Fi in my digs that was about as reliable as the Scottish weather was a gift for concentration, as was the quiet of the countryside, the sense of space. By the end of the weekend I had a couple of ‘finger exercise’ poems down; explorations of the place and ideas. Focused on the landscape and the soft local water used in the brewing, I knew they were too gentle and lyrical for the edginess of BrewDog’s image – but they were functional as a warm-up of what wouldn’t quite work in this context. Another interesting thing about commissions and collaborations – how you have to feel your way into the right tone for the piece, and can’t just head off in your own direction regardless.

A further attraction to the Ellon project was that a good friend, Lorraine Adams, lives nearby, so we arranged to go walking a few afternoons that week. Walking has always been a useful creative engine for me, and it was fruitful to talk through some ideas while exploring the stunning Aberdeenshire coast. Lorraine is a brilliant artist who has done some beautiful botanical work and she could identify dozens of plants on our rambles – but she also comes from a musical family, with a father who composed brass band music. Her grand piano came in handy when Stephen needed to try out some musical ideas, and though it would have been a tall order to trundle that beast into Saturday’s brewhouse ensemble, soon she and her more portable clarinet were corralled into Saturday’s line-up as well.

Now Stephen was beginning to get an inkling of how some of his musical ideas might be realised, what instruments he’d be using – Jo, bass clarinet; Lorraine, Bb clarinet; Tom on percussion; and a recent Aberdeen University music graduate (and horn player with the Aberdeen Sinfonietta), Rona Cook from BrewDog HR. This became the core around which Rona enlisted a brace of BrewDog brewers: all enthusiastic amateur musicians.

And we also, almost, had a poem. One which the BrewDog founders James Watt and Martin Dickie and their creative team (with the occasional help of some fans) had half-written already. The notice board in the DogTap bar, with its ever-changing round of the beers on tap, breathed its own cumulative poetry – Dogma, Cocoa Psycho, Shipwrecker Circus, 5 a.m. Saint and more, like some funky, subversive hymn list. I dug a bit into the archives and found more edgy, resonant names. In-between attempts at other approaches, it was the verses of a dark-voiced ballad mash-up of these phrases – half love-song, half sharp-tongued provocation – that kept coalescing.

So ‘The Ballad of the BrewDog’ emerged as a poem that I felt matched the provocative spirit of the place; one that could work with the vigorous, inclusive, percussive piece Stephen was composing. We’d spoken about the dilemmas of librettos (including how deeply many opera composers have hated the necessary evil of librettists!) and one thing that came through loud and clear was that any text that was to be incorporated into the composition and performance had to be as simple as possible, especially with a group consisting largely of volunteers, and with only a couple of hours’ rehearsal before the show. So I wrote the poem with an insistent chorus that could be lifted clear of the rest, and before long Stephen had woven some of these refrains into the musical fabric of his score – though it would be Saturday before we could see how effective those whispers and chants would be.

*          *          *

But there was a great deal still to be done before Saturday. I’d been curious on first hearing of the project to see how one would pull such an event together with all the elements of setting, composer, writer, professional musicians and amateur performers, but being on-site emphasised the many organisational challenges, especially when dealing with a busy, successful young company, with staff working round the clock to meet demand.

We had a core group of musicians now, but there were some crucial gaps in the instrumentation; notably in what would become the percussion section. In addition to plastic tubs for some good old-fashioned thumping, Stephen had envisaged what he called ‘percussion trees’, using off-cut metal pipes and plates, bits of rubber and other industrial debris from the brewery. Now he needed somebody to fashion them – and the assistant manager at DogTap, Joe Sudron, suggested someone he was sure would be the right man for the job: Niall Robertson, Aberdeen school teacher, one of BrewDog’s many enthusiastic shareholders, and a pretty nifty metalworker. After a couple of tries on the phone, on Tuesday I managed to track Niall down on Twitter and he DM’d back with incredible enthusiasm for the idea. He’d be round to BrewDog HQ the next day, he said, to chat to Stephen and collect materials and then would set to work. It was a big task with just a few days to go, but his ebullience was reassuring – more of that optimism and generosity of spirit necessary to making a creative collaboration successful.

Meanwhile, I was still on the hunt for a good Scots voice for ‘The Ballad of the BrewDog’, which was to be read in full as the show began – I could read it myself of course, but a lovely Scottish accent would be a plus for the spirit of the piece and place. I had an interesting chat to head brewer and self-confessed ‘hophead’ Stewart Bowman, whose voice was perfect, but he’s a busy man and we had to count him out. A shame, as his impressive beard and tattoos would have been great for additional visual effect – beards and tattoos being a bit of a trademark look for many of the ‘hopsters’ working in the brewhouse.

Brewer David Stark was another suggestion, and his rich Hebridean accent was also a dream. He was available and keen to take part in the show, but when we discovered that he was also a skilled piper, Stephen was presented with a marvellous new instrumental element – the bagpipe! It seemed at first that ‘Starkey’ might have a key double role in the show, as both speaker and piper – but given that he was fitting in the rehearsals and the three Saturday performances in-between his brewhouse night shifts, in the end he decided to focus on the piping, and the voice of the BrewDog remained up for grabs.

I had to make a trip down to Edinburgh for a meeting with a publisher and, with the immediate task of my poem complete, wondered on the train journey about the musical process. I have some sense of rhythm, but don’t play a musical instrument, so the composition of music seems the most magical of all the arts: the conjuring of harmonies out of nowhere. And this project was obviously a particular challenge for any composer, with only two fully professional musicians to rely on. There were times in the week when I began to think that the BrewDog beer name, Six Impossible Things would prove particularly apt.

But I was impressed with Stephen’s calm way of working, how flexible he seemed, saying pragmatically, ‘You just work with what you’ve got’ when some new obstacle surfaced. He was also good at getting people on-side, another essential collaborative skill, and one I guess all good conductors should have. In emails from Rona I got updates on the volunteers – in the percussion section we’d have Joe from DogTap, and brewers Janos Bako and Angelos Ferous as well. By this time I’d been persuaded that I’d also need to help swell the numbers of this merry band. Anne Watson, the Audience Development and Education Manager from Sound Scotland, was coming to help with logistics on the day and was going to join in too and of course Niall was going to have a go on his own creations. All drumming hands on deck.

Niall was getting on with his welding and assembling, he said, but would only be able to deliver the finished product on Saturday morning. Stephen was photographed and interviewed for the local paper, The Press and Journal, and Saturday’s performances of a work now called ‘The BrewDog Howls’ were publicised on Facebook and Twitter. Poet-composer and Sound Scotland supporter Haworth Hodgkinson helped distribute fliers and mentioned it on the radio. Something had to happen now.

*          *          *

Something had happened while I was away in Edinburgh – the notes and rhythms in Stephen’s head had taken elegant shape on the A3 page of a new score. Beautiful pencilled notation, a work of art in itself. Just as mysterious to me as the alchemy of composition is the musician’s ability to convert these arcane symbols into sound, and it was fascinating to read and interpret ‘The BrewDog Howls’ for the first time – the intro, the percussion line, where the poem would slot in at the start, the whispered and spoken chorus moments, improvisational solos. Now it felt real: we had our map, a formula, a recipe – the early mash of disparate ideas simmered up with the various ingredients gathered together over the last few busy days.

On Friday the cavalry rode into town – The Professionals! Percussionist Tom Hunter and clarinettist Jo Nicholson arrived for a mini-rehearsal with Lorraine and Stephen to get a feel for the melodic core of a piece which relied heavily on their skill. Not with the whole percussion gang yet, a full rehearsal too complicated with the brewhouse shifts, but a chance for the pros to see the space and get a sense of what was required of them. I was impressed by their calm and good humour – from years of experience of being parachuted into much trickier orchestral situations, no doubt.

And talking of being parachuted in, on the eve of the show we now had our authentically Scottish BrewDog Balladeer. In Edinburgh I’d met up with poet friend Iain Morrison, Enterprise Manager of the Fruitmarket Gallery and generous host for an annual Festival reading I’ve taken part in there. I hadn’t realised till then that he’d studied music at Cambridge and been involved in new music in the past, so when I told him about the project he was keen to come to see one of the shows. I thought of his wonderful Scots accent – and what I call the Morrrrrisonian ‘r’ – and dropped him a line to ask whether he wasn’t perhaps keen to be in the show And voilà, another volunteer. He had to get back to Edinburgh for an engagement later on Saturday evening, so he could only do two of the three performances, meaning I would read for the last one, but it felt like a happy shared solution.

I emailed him ‘The Ballad of the BrewDog’ with some notes and we agreed to run through it on the phone a few times when he got off work. We had a hilarious and surreal ‘rehearsal’ later: me on my mobile phone outside the Cock and Bull pub where we were all having dinner, Iain on speakerphone in his Edinburgh office after his colleagues had gone home. I don’t know what the pub’s usual punters made of my sporadic injunctions to ‘Give it more bite!’ and ‘Take it from “humming the old Shipwrecker Circus blues” again, OK?’ Crazy poets. Mind you, earlier in the day we’d been sitting on the pavement outside DogTap, Skyping Fiona at Sound Scotland to make final arrangements – cadging the BrewDog Wi-Fi before the bar’s 11 a.m opening. Desperate bar-flies yet again. But only for a signal, and all in the service of art.

*          *          *

Performance Day dawned with the Curse of the Dropped French Horn. Rona Cook, who’d been valiantly juggling her work for BrewDog HR (as memorably named Keymaster), as well as recruiting performance volunteers and managing her own house move, had a French horn with a damaged valve, which now would not play a single note. Six Impossible Things, Chaos and Shipwrecker Circus rang in my head, but Rona said she had a cornet in storage, which a friend was off to fetch for her. Flexibility, optimism, the ability to improvise – and I added ‘resilience’ to my list of good collaboration skills too.

There should have been a full brass fanfare for Niall’s arrival with a car crammed full of intriguing lengths of metal and tubing, which we helped to carry in to the brewhouse ‘stage’. As Niall began to screw sections together, Stephen’s pencil-sketch percussion trees branched out into a quirky, clangorous reality. I wish I could have filmed a time-lapse video of the set-up scene. It was impossible to resist giving the various bits of suspended steel a resounding thwack. Niall said cheerily, ‘This is what happens when you give me lots of metal and ask me to make hitty things!’ I realised I was beginning to look forward to this gig…

Jo arrived, full of vim, despite having completed an icy one-mile swimming race from Banff to Macduff Harbour that morning. I was glad the only sharks around were painted on the brewhouse walls: we needed her! Anne came in with a Sound Scotland banner to put outside the bar and info on the folk who were taking the special bus between the Skills Biennale events. Each of the three twenty-minute shows could have a maximum of twenty audience members, due to Health and Safety regulations in the brewery. Tickets for the bus were pre-booked, but for the rest we’d just have to see who turned up. I hoped we wouldn’t be playing to just the octopus and shark…

In my role as Wardrobe Mistress (i.e. hand out BrewDog T-shirts to performers) and Props Master (gather the requisite number of empty beer bottles…) I got to try out the old blowing-across-the-bottle trick and discovered my technique was sorely lacking. It proved much harder to make a convincing sound than I remembered – a long time since my childhood Coke-bottle experiments. A bit late to find out that I should have been practising my beer-bottle-blowing embouchure all week. But I was encouraged to find that brewery boys Angelos and Janos also took a while to master the knack when they arrived.

Such a pleasing range of sound, though, when everything vibrated right. ‘It’s a musical cliché,’ Stephen had said when explaining the score, but of course a perfectly apt and indispensable one in this particular setting. And brilliant for interactive participation, as the show proved – the final ingredient of the ensemble being the audience themselves.

After Stephen had explained the piece to our now ten-strong ‘dectet’, the percussionists took to their trees, the wind section to their music stands, and we began our rehearsal. BrewDog steel getting ready to bark and growl on the brewery floor. The ‘Ballad of the BrewDog’ introduced the event, coming in after a prelude of metallic beats, setting the mood. Then some pace from the percussion section, developing into virtuoso bass clarinet and percussion solos, followed by the orchestral tutti – a rousing combination of the BrewDog crew playing buckets, barrels, and bell trees, with more mellifluous sounds from the wind section. With the audience’s special beer-bottle chorus of course, and a final resounding HOWL to close…

It was fascinating to hear Jo and Tom’s solo improvisations develop – Tom producing a particularly dramatic percussive cascade, bounding energetically up and down across all the instruments while the rest of us stepped back to let him have free rein. All this watched over by the rather splendid uniformed hyena and tiger painted on the huge tanks looming over us. And under the stern gaze of our composer, who kept his unconventional ensemble on track with the occasional bark: ‘Keep your eyes on the conductor!’

A couple of times a warning horn sounded from one of the tuns, probably triggered by a temperature gauge, and a bearded brewer jogged over to make some adjustment. A shame that we couldn’t get the mash and wort to bubble up on cue, as that alarm would have punctuated our percussive efforts brilliantly. But the occasional industrial sough and hiss did whisper into the show in the end, to serendipitous effect.

After the first musical run-through, Iain arrived on the bus from Aberdeen to make ‘The BrewDog Howls’ line-up complete. He delivered a rrrousing ‘Ballad of the BrewDog’ rrreading at the start of the piece and before we knew it our two hours of rehearsal had passed in a flash – or a series of clangs. Fiona Robertson arrived to see what we’d made of the commission and we could hear the hum of a full bar from beyond the swing doors.

By now there was a fizz of excitement in the air and no time to be nervous before Sara, Anne and Rona were leading the first audience group in, and giving everyone a free bottle of beer – which Stephen explained wasn’t merely to ease them into the mood, these were essential instruments, producing a variety of pitches and chords when the liquid was at different levels. Musical ale (or harmonious hops?) for their part in the performance. They took to their practising with gusto and much laughter, and I knew then that everything was going to be OK. We had an audience, we had a show. Something was going to happen; something good.

We gave three twenty-minute performances of ‘The BrewDog Howls’ – just an hour of music, but so much fun. I recall the first run as our most precise, the final one the most energetic – and predictably the middle one, which was filmed, was the one in which there was the odd slip, though our listeners seemed to enjoy it all the same. The performers certainly did; though we hardly knew each other there was a camaraderie in the joy of noise, of experimenting with sound in such an impressive and unconventional environment. Musical play with an edge, guided by a sure compositional hand.

For my half-Scottish heart, the highlight was Starkey’s closing bagpipe solo, experimenting with a composition of his own, introduced with dramatic effect. Stephen had him begin at the far end of the brewhouse – a distant piper sounding from beyond mountains of machinery, the pipes growing slowly louder and louder as he walked out from between the gleaming trunks of giant vessels into our little glade of percussion trees. Solemn, surreal and strangely beautiful.

What else do I remember? I enjoyed the final run and my chance to read, and also seeing the response from the lads who’d just popped in, curious, from their Saturday night pint at the bar, for the last show. Uneasy banter on arrival turning to enjoyment and involvement in the music, and some knowing grins as they recognised the names of ales embedded in the lines of the poem. It’s always pleasing when someone says ‘I didn’t think I liked poetry, but I really enjoyed yours tonight’ and there were several comments like that after all three performances – along with ‘I didn’t think I liked experimental music, but that was brilliant’ too.

It was good to see people respond to Stephen’s invitation to take a closer look at copies of the score, and our unusual instruments. ‘Can I really have a go?’ a woman asked, giving a tentative ‘ting’ with a drumstick at first, before letting rip with happy abandon. Niall’s ‘hitty things’ were, in short, a hit. Her enjoyment reflected ours, emphasising the pleasure of participation for everyone in such a project, audience and performers, professionals and amateurs alike.

As I type now, back down south, I think of the BrewDog crew going through their brewhouse rituals, the daily and nightly checks and routines. Simple key ingredients – malt, water, hops, yeast – and so many variations on a theme. I think of the complex elixir of art, the alchemy of orchestration, and the charmed (if you’re lucky) dance of word and music. You need a degree in chemistry to be a brewer, but head brewer Stewart Bowman also speaks of the element of ‘black magic’ in the art of brewing. Performances, which are collaborations in microcosm, can tap into something magic too. It’s the greater enchantment we look for in creating works with others: works encompassing more than our own solo skills. I’m grateful to Sound Scotland, Stephen Montague and BrewDog for this magical opportunity.