Climbing the Fence

"HAVE YOU HEARD THE PICTISH Trail's album? It's amazing, really, really brilliant."

The person raving to me about The Pictish Trail, aka singer-songwriter Johnny Lynch, is none other than KT Tunstall, sitting backstage at the Alhambra in Dunfermline before the gig and enthusing about her handpicked support act.

Tunstall knows Lynch through the Fence Collective, the eclectic assortment of musicians based in the East Neuk of Fife. She was part of that nascent scene in the late 1990s before moving to London, and Lynch is now second in command of both the collective and its affiliated label, Fence Records, dealing with all the day-to-day running of the business. Until recently, Lynch has been so busy running the label, organising gigs and festivals and playing guitar for Fence's nominal leader King Creosote and other Fence acts that he hasn't found time to dedicate to his own music.

That's about to change. His debut album, Secret Soundz Vol 1, is out next week and he's in the middle of a whirlwind of gigs, radio sessions and promotional work which is seeing his stock rising by the day.

Backstage at the Alhambra, the 26-year-old is relaxed, showing no nerves about the fact that he has to get on stage in an hour in front of 1,700 Tunstall fans . It may help that his band is effectively The Fence Allstars, with both King Creosote and Domino-signed James Yorkston backing him up.

Lynch got here by a curious route. He was brought up in Edinburgh and Yorkshire, but his family moved to America when he was a teenager, and it was only then that he really got into music – only not American music. "When I was living in Connecticut, I used to go to this record store called Secret Sounds that sold a lot of import stuff," he says. "And that's where I was first introduced to The Beta Band, The Delgados, Belle and Sebastian and Mogwai, a lot of Scottish music.

"As soon as I heard that first Beta Band record, I thought, 'Oh man, I have to be where this thing is'. I was applying for colleges at the time, so I applied for St Andrews and got in. Within a week of being in town, I saw Kenny Anderson performing in a local pub with his brothers Gordon and Een. They were doing this amazing harmonising, playing great songs, and at the end of the night they went into She's the One by The Beta Band. It was only later I found out that Gordon had been in The Beta Band. I was blown away."

Soon he was recording his own material in his student digs. "Just being in that environment, seeing the Fence members play each week, that was totally inspiring. I thought I might as well give this guy Kenny a tape of my stuff, and we just stayed in touch. When I finished uni I didn't know what to do, and Kenny asked if I wanted to help to organise gigs. We started doing regular nights in the Ship Tavern in Anstruther, and it's all just grown amazingly from there."

Lynch's own music has so far been a well-kept secret among Fence aficionados, but Secret Soundz Vol 1 will change that. An inspired debut, it's also quite a surprise considering Fence's reputation for folk-tinged melancholy. There is still an element of guitar strumminess, but the album offers a whole lot more. Weird electronic instrumentals sit alongside epic rock tunes, funky dance tracks nestle next to hypnotic drone-folk. It's all infused with style and wit, tapping into the knockabout geekiness that has made successes of the likes of The Beta Band, Beck and more recently Hot Chip.

Lynch says all three acts are major influences, and that he set out to make his debut idiosyncratic and quirky. It's both those things, yet it's also mainstream and marketable. "I'd bore myself if I did a record from start to finish that didn't have some weird, crazy s*** in it," he laughs. "That's a direct influence from people like Beck, or that last Hot Chip record. It was a total mess of songs, things that don't sit together, but because of that you're forced to listen to them and discover they're great songs on their own merit."

Live, Lynch is just as likely to pitch up alone with an acoustic guitar, or keyboard and sampler, as he is to arrive with a full rock band, or with just King Creosote's accordion for company. For this Tunstall show, his six-piece band often turn the gentler grooves of the album into swaggering rock beats. "I think there's a concerted effort to make it sound different live from the record. We've never rehearsed any of the songs properly, I've just given the rest of them the recordings and they've worked out what they can do around it. That's how a lot of Fence bands work anyway." He lets out a chuckle. "We haven't had a stinker yet, anyway. Famous last words."

Lynch tends to play down The Pictish Trail with respect to the Fence Collective as a whole – which is charming, though I wonder if a bit more selfishness wouldn't do his career the world of good. The first artist he named as an influence was King Creosote, followed by several other Fence acts – but you get the feeling he's just being honest.

"When I get sent new recordings from one of the bands or artists associated with Fence, that totally inspires me," he says. "The collective is still evolving, we're always bringing in more bands and nurturing existing bands, having them try to do new things. Everyone's egging each other on, and that brings out the best in all of us, which is how music should be, isn't it?"

&149 Secret Soundz Vol 1 is released on Monday on Fence Records. The Pictish Trail play The Caves, Edinburgh, 17 September; AIA Hall, Anstruther, 21 September; The Tunnels, Aberdeen, 25 September; and Captain's Rest, Glasgow, 26 September.