Paul Tasker

“Finish up and go home!” When the pub’s bouncers have shouted at us at least ten times and we finally finished the drinks they served us five minutes earlier, only one challenge remains: to walk through the drunk people on Sauchiehall Street and over the hill to Paul’s flat. It’s a steep hill and my Dutch legs are still not very much build for it. I once witnessed a drunken guy fall down that same hill, from top to bottom, leaving behind a trail of blood in the snow. The pub in question usually is State Bar on Holland Street and the hill usually proves too steep that late at night, forcing us – sometimes after a half-arsed attempt – to walk all the way around it.

Having arrived in Paul’s flat, he fills a couple of coffee mugs with whisky, just enough so a couple of drops end up on the floor, and starts to fiddle on a guitar or banjo. Whichever one’s nearby. It’d be a shame not to drink it, so I just sit on the sofa and get treated to a free concert of old and new songs and tunes, melodies he’s been working on – or struggling with – for a while and an incidental AC/DC cover. This has almost become a ritual. Sometimes a new song arises, recognisable by the approving murmur it is greeted with.

Even from the guest bed room down the hall, my usual Scottish residence ever since my first visit to Glasgow in 2009, I hear an occasional ‘get in’, ‘fuck yes’ or ‘horse it on’, coming from the living room. All three of the above roughly mean the same thing. Time to sleep. For me at least, because the next morning when I’m looking for the toilet, still sleep-charged, I still hear the same noises. You can only stop Paul by putting coffee and breakfast directly in front of him.

I first met Paul Tasker in 2008 while filming a documentary on the Welsh songwriter Davie Lawson, who was touring in The Netherlands with Paul as his guitarist. That same week Paul fell down a flight of stairs in my house, leaving Davie and me standing on the top of it, looking down like in some sort of cartoon, thinking Paul had met his maker. After a short while we luckily hear the same growling sounds I now recognize as him playing a wrong chord. I’ve stayed in Glasgow regularly ever since and Paul’s often toured in The Netherlands, mostly with his folk duo Doghouse Roses.

There aren’t many better folk guitarists around than Paul Tasker, however subjective such a statement might be. He’s often compared to his great hero and influence Bert Jansch or named ‘one of the guitarists of his generation’. You’d think I would have gotten used to his talent, having witnessed it so many times, but the opposite is true.

In spite of all that, I had some doubts his instrumental solo record would ever see the light of day. Paul had been working on it for years, or at least had been planning to record it sometime soon. Things came up. Bills had to be paid and so he stuck to giving guitar and banjo lessons, from early in the morning till late at night, sometimes seven days a week and o