Autumn 1904 - Interview

  by John Clarkson

published: 7 / 9 / 2025

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P“It is like we are restoring an old building,” says Allan Dumbreck, the keyboardist with Autumn 1904, about his reformed group, who both returned to live work and finally released their debut album, ‘Tales of Innocence’ in 2024, after an absence of almost forty years. “We can’t save all of it, but we are restoring it in a way that is hopefully respectful of what we were doing back in the day, yet it is also functional and usable in the modern world.” In their original lifetime, Autumn 1904 had at one point eleven record labels competing with one another to sign them, after they recorded a well-received John Peel Session in early 1984. They, however, fell apart instead. Autumn 1904 had first formed in 1982, and the seven-piece group, which, as well as band leader Dumbreck, also then consisted of Ross Thom (guitar), Billy Bowie (bass), Keith Falconer (drums), and Billy Lesliie, Indira Sharma and Lisa Cameron (vocals), had built up a strong local following in their native Edinburgh. In what was extremely bad luck, both Sharma and Cameron developed medical issues, and when it became apparent that they would not be able to tour or record with the band they both left Autumn 1904 in the summer of 1984. By the time new members had been recruited and Autumn 1904 was ready to play gigs again, much vital momentum had been lost and the record companies had all moved on. Thom, Bowie and Falconer all quit in early 1985 to form another project The Crows, While Dumbreck and Leslie carried on with Autumn 1904 for another few months, it was to dwindling audiences now and they broke up towards the end of that year. After Autumn 1904 finished, Allan Dumbreck spent some time working as a session player for other Scottish acts such as The Big Dish, Horse and The River Detectives before moving into music education. He co-created with Starless and Love and Money’s Paul McGeechan and Deacon Blue’s James Prime the BA course in Commercial Music at the University of the West of Scotland. He has worked there as a senior lecturer for many years, and, while he has continued to do occasional bits of session work. he has co-authored two text books, partially inspired by his own experiences, on music entrepreneurship, During lockdown, while tidying out a cupboard at home, Dumbreck discovered some old Autumn 1904 cassettes, and was excited enough by them to try to contact his old bandmates. He found through Facebook Ross Thom and Keith Falconer living and working near him in Glasgow, and Billy Bowie in London. He also traced Billy Leslie, who spends most of the year working abroad. Indira Sharma had. however, sadly died, and Lisa Cameron had simply vanished. The surviving members of Autumn 1904 decided to rre-record and release some of their lost songs for a single or an EP. When Dumbreck went to his friend Ian Smith, the owner of the prolific Scottish label Last Night From Glasgow, (The Bathers, Starless, Skids, Sister John, Cowboy Mouth), for advice on how to do this, Smith, liking Autumn 1904’s story, offered to release their material, but suggested that they release an album instead, as it would be easier to market. Billy Leslie had by this stage had already dropped out, feeling that his voice was no longer up to scratch and with his work overseas taking him away so much that he could not commit to the band. “We were left with the four instrumental players but none of the vocalists,” Dumbreck tells Pennyblack. ‘Tales of Innocence’ features Leslie, Indira Sharma and Lisa Cameron on six tracks, the four songs that comprised the John Peel Session, and two other songs ‘I Heard Catherine Sing’ and ‘What’s in Your Eyes’ which the band recorded in 1984. Bassist Billy Bowie, who had briefly been the original main singer in Autumn 1904 before Leslie joined the band, stepped up to take main vocals on two other tracks, ‘Motherland’ and ‘Sister’, which the band had written in 1984 but only finally went into the studio within 2022 and 2023. Guest singer Tippi from The Hedrons, another Last Night From Glasgow signing, lent her voice to ‘The Blessing’, another previously lost song, and there is also an instrumental, ‘Kyrie’, which pushes Allan Dumbreck’s keyboards to the fore. When ‘Tales of Innocence’ was released in January of last year, it reached no.9 in the Scottish album charts. The band decided play some dates. The first of these was at SWG in Glasgow last May and sold out, and the second show, a Pennyblack-promoted gig at The Wee Red Bar in Edinburgh, also saw the group playing to a packed room. The problem of the female lead singer was solved quickly and surprisingly. “We needed to identify at least one female vocalist to take on the parts that India and Lisa used to do,” Dumbreck enthuses. “Fantastically for us, Holly Rolins rocked up at the university last year. She is one of our students. She came out of nowhere. She literally appeared qt one of our Open Days. She walked through the door at the university and the minute she walked in there was this red light flashing in my head. Something in my head was going, ‘It is really important that you speak to this person’. When we began talking, Holly started asking a lot of questions, and there was something that I said and I got this little sarcastic laugh back from her, which reminded so much of Lisa, and that when it clicked. She would be ideal for the band.’ Rolins started out as a guest singer for the first gig in Glasgow, but by the time of the second gig in Edinburgh she had become a regular band member. “She has grown into the role. At the end of the first gig last May, we asked Holly to join the band. For my money, she is every bit as good as the girls we had previously. She fits in perfectly. She is great fun, so laidback and looks totally at home on stage.” Both the Glasgow and Edinburgh shows featured various guest singers, and they and Holly Rolins brought new life and often new direction to the brooding, gigantic post-punk soundscapes that make up much of ‘Tales of Innocence’. At the Edinburgh gig, on the paranoiac, alienated ‘The City’, for example, rapper Johnny Cypher gave it a new focus with a furious, self-penned rap about the have and have-nots in society. Craig Paterson, the frontman with local act Twisted Nerve, also brought additional flamboyance and a punk edge to the breezy, poppy ‘I Heard Catherine Sing’. On two unheard songs ‘Not My Skin’ and ‘Frisk Me Down’, for which Dumbreck had sketched out tunes in the mid ‘80s, Rolins took things in a surprising funk direction. Autumn 1904 are now working on a second album. They thought initially of bringing in one singer to collaborate on the writing of the songs and to work with Rolins on delivering them. They have, however, decided to do what they did by default on ‘Tales of Innocence’, which is work with two or three, possibly slightly more guest vocalists, on two or three tracks each. “I think thar it would be easier to put on a musical than another Autumn 1904 the way we did those last two,“ says Allan Dumbreck talking about the two gigs where a lot of the guest singers sang on one song each, and explaining his thinking about this. “We are looking for guest vocalists now, who are going to sign on to do more than one song. That would take some off the pressure off me with the running of the gigs. It is also another opportunity to take the band down a different route, which is always exciting.” The first of these guests - Autumn 2004 are announcing through this interview – is Ian Donaldson. Donaldson was the singer with the Glaswegian synth pop outfit H2O, who had hit singles with ‘I Go To Sleep’ and ‘Just Outside of Heaven’ in 1983 and whose only album ‘Faith’ from the same year earned critical acclaim. Allan Dumbreck and Ian Donaldson met after Ian Smith at Last Night From Glasgow introduced them earlier this year. “We came up with a number of different ideas for people that we could work with,” says Dumbreck, “and when I took the concept to Ian Smith, and before I got to the end of the conversation, he said, “No, no. I know who you should work with. You should work with Ian Donaldson from H2O,” and I went, “Oh, right! He is not on our list.” We had never thought about working with him. We saw H2O as being quite close to us, maybe a little bit poppier and I thought, ‘Would he even be interested in working with us?’ We hadn’t really considered him because we didn’t think that he was available.” Ian Donaldson had released his second solo album -and first album in eight years – last year through Last Night From Glasgow. “My album ‘Dreams from Tenement Land’ came out in October of last year,” Donaldson tells Pennyblack in a separate interview. “It is a snapshot of me from when I was a teenager until now. There is a bit of punk, a bit of new wave and a bit of glam rock in there. There are a lot of different textures and tones. It is really eclectic. For instance, the last song is a six-and-a-half minute epic and is called ‘Rachel Tyrell’. She is one of the characters in ‘Blade Runner’, and was played by Sean Young in the film. She is the android who Harrison Ford’s character falls in love with. I always thought the love affair that they had was worthy of Romeo and Juliet but only in the future somehow. Their love story is my imagined love story for the future.” Science Fiction is very much in the creative Donaldson’s blood. He also self-published a well-received Sci-Fi/Fantasy novel. ‘A Rainbow in the Basement‘, in 2016. “’A Rainbow in the Basement’ has gone into the black and is still selling,” Donaldson says, before adding. “My friend is a school teacher and he liked it, and it ended up being on the curriculum of half a dozen schools in Scotland.” “There are two more books in the works, a oollection of stories about my life from being a teenager until now and the things that have happened both good and bad, and some of the people I have met. The other is more in the vein of ‘A Rainbow in the Basement’, and like that book influenced by Ray Bradbury, who is one of my favourite writers. It is about how magic affects normal people.” “I didn’t know him at all,” says Dumbreck, talking about first meeting Donaldson, “but we hit off pretty much straightaway. I listened to both the H2O’s material and Ian’s solo material, and more and more I saw the connection between what we are doing and what he is doing.” “I really liked ‘Tales of Innocence’ a lot,” laughs Donaldson. “If you are going to be bringing out music forty years on from when you last worked upon it, you are either going to be a total chancer or it is going to be unfinished business. I was hoping with that Allan that it would be unfinished business. So, I thought it was worth a meeting, and we met in Caffe Nero. Within about ten minutes, I realised that this was a man that I could work with. He was serious about making music. He cared about music and we had a lot in common like David Bowie and T. Rex, all sorts of things, and so I thought, ‘This is definitely worth doing. We’ll see what happens.’” Dumbreck has approximately fifteen uncompleted songs from 1984 and 1985. Autumn 1904 and Ian Donaldson have already worked on two songs together. The first of these is a song called ‘Savage Days’. “I wrote that just about the time that Autumn 1904 wound up, and it was originally called ‘Didn’t It Rain’ “ says Dumbreck, “We didn’t have a full lyric for it, and Ian came up with a completely different lyric and took it in a completely different direction. He has done a wonderful job.” The second song is called ‘Tunnel Vision’. “That was one with an established chorus,” says Ian Donaldson. “Generally the chorus is a conclusion to the verse, so you are working back. You are thinking, ‘What kind of story would happen in the verses? What story do I have in order to create in order to make sense of that chorus?’ It has been challenging to do both these songs but I have got a lot out of it.” “Ian is going to be on at least three tracks, maybe more,” concludes Allan Dumbreck. “We have another track in which we will need a rapper and another track in which we will need a female vocalist. The album is going to have other guests on there but Ian is turning out to be a bigger part of it than anyone would have imagined at the start. That whole process is going so well. I imagined him singing on a couple of songs, but we are now looking at a third one and beyond that we will see how we get on.” While it will be some time to come before we hear the second album, Autumn 1904 after their long absence are clearly with the support of Ian Donaldson enjoying making music again. Top photo by Philip Wark

Band Links:-

https://www.autumn1904.co.uk/
https://www.facebook.com/Autumnnineteenofour/
https://www.instagram.com/autumn.1904.band/

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