James Yorkston – It's Lovely To Be Here

Fans of singer-songwriter James Yorkston won’t have been too surprised to hear that the Fife dweller and sometime Fence Collective dabbler had become a bona fide author earlier this year. Yorkston’s lyrical style tends to be in the storytelling mould anyway, with his best-known track Woozy With Cider being a spoken word, dreamy reflective piece on the awkward social situations of a struggling musician and the use of alcohol therein. It’s Lovely To Be Here, the book in question, picks up this baton, detailing with wit and charm the “thick set, baldy Scot’s” troubadour adventures across the globe. And with his upcoming stint at Unbound, Yorkston is set to combine his two worlds of writing and performance, although he claims he’ll be laying off the whisky this time.

“It’s different than when you’re on stage doing your own music that you know really well,” he begins of some recent book shows. “When you’re doing a Q&A it’s slightly trickier to answer things honestly with a drink in you because you can easily go off on a rant and end up looking like an absolute twonk you know?” Well, we’ve all been there to some extent, though Yorkston feels safe in the hands of his Book Festival question master, fellow Scottish author Ian Rankin. “I’ve met him once or twice and he seems like a really nice guy. I don’t think he’s going to try and make me cry or anything.”

In terms of the actual writing process, Yorkston champions the ever-favourite insomnia route for literary success. “I was pretty tired a lot of the time as I’d just had my first child,” he reveals. “I wasn’t getting any sleep but I found I could write a lot at these times, even though I was completely banjaxed!” Yet even when the bulk of writing had been done, there wasn’t much more time for catching a little shut eye it seems. “When the test-pressings came through I was like ‘help ma boab!’. It was just full of mistakes. I had a merry old time re-reading the thing about fourteen times.”

All of which has been worthwhile, with the finished article being a rare read that, if you haven’t guessed from Yorkston’s parlance so far, is imbued with dry Scottish, self-deprecating humour. “It does tend to go down well with Scots,” admits Yorkston in anticipation of his Unbound appearance. “It’s nice when people really get the language and the humour that I use in the book, so yeah, I’m looking forward to it.” Jings, so are we James.