Scottish folk singer Alasdair Roberts heading to Cambridge

Glasgow-based singer and guitarist Alasdair Roberts will soon be coming to Cambridge on a tour supporting his new solo album Grief in the Kitchen and Mirth in the Hall.

The intriguingly titled release, due out on March 31, is a collection of 12 traditional songs and ballads from Scotland and beyond, delivered in the 40-something’s inimitable style.

Speaking to the Cambridge Independent from his kitchen in Glasgow, Alasdair reveals he has been working on a film project, but can’t really say too much about it. Is this his first foray into the medium?

“I’ve done a few film-related things,” replies the hardworking musician, who also plays in the groups The Furrow Collective and Current 93, “but I think this is probably the biggest involvement that I’ve had in a film project.”

Addressing the title Grief in the Kitchen and Mirth in the Hall, Alasdair says: “It’s a line from one of the songs; there’s a ballad called The Baron o’ Brackley and it’s basically a song about this baron who lives up in Aberdeenshire and a guy called Inverey comes to steal his cows.

“His wife says, ‘You’ve got to go out there and get your cows back, Inverey’s coming’ and he’s like, ‘Oh, I can’t do it, there’s only one of me and there’s loads of them’. His wife basically accuses him of not being a real man for not going out to fight.

“He does go out to meet them and he gets killed, and then at the end of the song it turns out that his wife is having some kind of illicit liaison with Inverey, the villain of the song. The last verse says ‘There’s grief in the kitchen and mirth in the hall’.”

Alasdair notes that nine of the tracks on the album are Scottish folk songs, two are Irish and one is from Prince Edward Island in Canada. “Some of the songs are ones that have been in my repertoire for a long time,” he explains, “and I just hadn’t either got round to recording them or done any previous recordings which I thought were satisfactory.

“So I had maybe six different songs like that and then it was a case of consciously trying to find more songs that might fit with those ones, that might make a nice collection. So some of the other songs are more recent additions to my repertoire.”

He adds: “I think the title gives some indication about some of the themes on the record, like struggles of class and gender and status – and geography as well; some of the songs are about that Highland/Lowland split within Scotland itself.”

Alasdair was exposed to Scottish folk music at an early age, courtesy of his father, who was also a musician. “My mother’s German and I was born in Germany in the 70s,” he recalls, “and when I was very young my parents ran a booking agency in Germany, mostly for Scottish, Irish and some English folk acts, because in Germany at that time it was very popular – Celtic music.

“So it [Scottish folk music] was always around when I was growing up and my father played a lot in the house, but I didn’t really get seriously into exploring traditional song myself until I was in my early 20s.”

Interestingly, Alasdair, who has performed at the Cambridge Folk Festival “a couple of times” – once as a solo artist and once as part of The Furrow Collective – actually started writing songs before he got into traditional folk music.

“I’ve probably been making up songs since I was about five or six,” he says, “on a little Casio keyboard, but I got more seriously engaged with writing when I was in my mid-teens.”

Acclaimed by Folk Radio UK as “one of our most talented, important and relevant songwriters and song-adapters”, Alasdair, whose partner Maud is originally from Swavesey, has released several

albums over the past two decades, alternating between collections of his own idiosyncratic and evocative compositions and fresh interpretations of traditional songs and ballads.

Although a keen collaborator, he will be touring entirely solo this time, presenting material from the new album as well as from his extensive back catalogue in an intimate setting. The tour rolls into Cambridge – The Blue Moon, in Norfolk Street – on Saturday, April 1.

[Read more: Scottish folk collective Breabach heading to Cambridge, The Outside Track en route to Cambridge]

Tickets, priced £15.40, are available at wegottickets.com/event/563892. For more on Alasdair, go to alasdairroberts.com.