[2001]
Lyrics by David Kilpatrick

"Nope, it ain't traditional: I wrote this one. But one day you'll hear someone sing it and you'll think it's been around 150 years!
Sometimes you just pull a line out of the air, and for this one, I just sang the first verse out of nowhere. After that, it was easy to get the rest together. It's not like my usual singing but this is the way I thought it should sound. The tune is either traditional or so obvious and simple it should be"

[2002]
Lyrics & Music by David Kilpatrick

"A little song in a Latin rhythm with a Canarian timple (a five-string viheula-shaped ukulele) providing local colour! OK, it ain't flamenco, but it's the only song I've ever performed live on a flamenco guitar borrowed from a flamenco singer.
I'd been reading some of the 15th to 17th century original accounts of exploration, and the idea just came into my head. I have never before made a recording using the timple, which is an instrument only played in the Canary Islands, one of the staging posts for the New World. I had to learn to play it for this and it sounds very bright and quick; it's an instrument which could be used more".

[2000]
Lyrics & Music by David Kilpatrick

An atmospheric Border Scots ballad in the auld tradition: how 'the Piper of Loos' saved the 7th Battalion of the King's Own Scottish Borderers in October 1915..

"The week before Armistice Day (November 11) 1999 a story was published in the Southern Reporter, researched by Bill Bruce, which neatly and emotively retold how Piper D L Laidlaw VC reversed the fortunes of a Border battalion fighting in the trenches of the Great War. I wrote the song in a moderate Border Scots dialect, which is easily understood, and played it locally. The lyrics were published by the newspaper. Like most of my songs, the inspiration was immediate and it took around 90 minutes to complete and a further hour to record. This is the second take. The pipes, ambient noise and gunfire effects are added on a Roland JV-50 keyboard and the rest is a one-take recording, playing a Lowden O-10 guitar in drop D tuning and singing. The recording is on a Roland VS-880".

[~1970]
Lyrics & Music by David Kilpatrick

"I wrote this song, with a tune derived from central European traditions, around about 1970 - many years before the wars in the Balkans. I found it in a folder of teenage jottings".

http://libcom.org/history/articles/ita...

[1975-1996]
Lyrics & Music by David Kilpatrick

A song for the veterans of all wars and any wars - not a lament, nor a protest, but a comment on the passing of time and the nature of men at war. Strong chorus and rhythm.

"Started with the first verse and chorus sometime in the mid-1970s, this is a song which was gradually built, then completed in 1996 when suddenly it hit me that the old Great War soldiers returning to the war cemeteries in France would soon be gone - indeed, they would have to be 100 years old. And that's what the song ultimately comments on: the distance of time, and the few remaining. But it's about more than that. It was also completed because my father, who was a bomber pilot in the 1945 war, had died; and I realised then that I had never finished any of the songs I started writing years before, and he's never heard a single one of them. So, in a way it was... (Continues)

[2001]
Lyrics & Music by David Kilpatrick

"This song was not completed until October 5th 2001. On September 11th we were in front of the television, taking a lunch break from our office, when the news broke in. We remained there. I apologise to anyone who may be offended by my politics. I wanted to write a song which could sung by anyone, at any time in the future. It is played on my Lowden O-10 in Drop D with the capo on fret 1 and it's a very simple traditional tune".