We gate-crash a funeral on a bright summer’s day. It’s not intentional, you understand – merely a sunny pub-lunch date that coincides with a lunchtime wake – but meeting Glasgow flamenco-punk heartbreaker RM Hubbert in such surrounds feels apt.
The guitarist has long cast light on grief, and loss, and love, through music – from the instrumental First & Last in 2010, through a series of vocal collaborations that include Thirteen Lost & Found, which featured Hanna Tuulikki, Aidan Moffat, Emma Pollock and more, and won the Scottish Album of the Year award, and his new long-player, Telling The Trees, which has Eleanor Friedberger, Rachel Grimes, Kathryn Williams and Kathryn Joseph among others making appearances.
We touched on the Glasgow DIY linchpin’s bygone adventures in the Quietus a few years back, in an interview with Hubbert and his long-term ally and collaborator Alex Kapranos, of Franz Ferdinand and FFS, wherein Kapranos said of our protagonist: "Only Hubby plays guitar like that, communicating things that could never be talked about."
Hubbert’s Baker’s Dozen is similarly defined by Hubbert’s musical relationships with others – from Ladytron’s Helen Marnie to Stevie Jones, his bygone comrade in post-rock dissidents El Hombre Trajeado. "I thought it might be interesting to look at the people I’ve collaborated with, and maybe give some insight as to why I wanted to collaborate with them, through these records," he says.
"Also, having had a look back at the interviews my peers [Mogwai, Aidan Moffat] had done, I didn’t think the Quietus needed another Baker’s Dozen from a Scottish indie guy talking about Slint’s Spiderland and Low by David Bowie," he laughs. "Even though that’s my record collection, too…"
Here, then, is Hubbert’s life in music, as charted through thirteen collaborators, and their albums.
Telling The Trees is out now on Chemikal Underground. RM Hubbert plays Beacon Arts Centre in Greenock on June 30 and Eden Court in Inverness on July 2; for full details and tickets, head here. Click on his image below to begin scrolling through his choices, which run in no particular order
