Foto-© Alan McCormack

Die schottische Großstadt Glasgow und ihre tolle (Indie-)Popmusik – das ist schon seit über 40 Jahren eine ganz besondere Geschichte. So viele großartige Bands haben ihre Wurzeln oder musizieren bis heute in der rauen Metropole im hohen Norden Großbritanniens: von Aztec Camera, Belle and Sebastian und The Blue Nile über Deacon Blue, Del Amitri, The Delgados, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Love & Money, The Pastels, The Pearlfishers und Primal Scream bis zu Teenage Fanclub, Travis und The Vaselines (alphabetisch geordnet).

Eine weitere wunderbare Glasgower Indiepop-Geschichte, mit stilistischen Verbindungen zu so einigen der oben genannten Bands, kommt nun endlich so richtig ans Tageslicht – mit dem fünften Album innerhalb von gut zwanzig Jahren, nach rund vier Jahrzehnten im Business. Es ist die Geschichte des bescheidenen Sophisticated-Pop-Visionärs Kenny Little und seines Langzeitprojekts Hollow Horse, das mit 5 (und nicht zuletzt dank eines deutschen Poplabel-Betreibers mit Trüffelsucher-Instinkt) nun endlich größere Aufmerksamkeit erfährt. Wir haben den Mittsechziger Little gebeten, uns seine Entwicklung und seine Philosophie als Musiker sowie die Hollow-Horse-Story zu erzählen – inklusive Track by Track zum meisterlichen neuen Album, das am 1. August auf Bureau Platiruma erschienen ist und Littles lange Karriere als Sänger, Songwriter und Band-Frontmann krönt.

Hi Kenny, there’s a heartfelt description of your new German label boss, Sebastian Voss of Bureau Platiruma. He calls your longtime band Hollow Horse „Glasgow’s forgotten legends“. And Seb continues: „Kenny Little – perhaps his name also has something to do with the understatement attitude that almost became the ‚big‘ band’s undoing… And the path to the world fame this band deserves is not yet fully cleared, but a trail is already there.“ So, tell me about this long and winding road to (hopefully) fame with Hollow Horse’s 5.
First of all thank you so much, Werner, for giving me the opportunity to talk with you today and to share my story and the history of Hollow Horse. Thanks also to Sebastian Voss from the mighty Bureau Platiruma label for such lovely words. What a kind man he is. Where to begin? Well, as Julie Andrews once said, „Let’s start at the very beginning“…
My interest in music and songwriting was fired up by some very early childhood memories. My earliest was seeing my own reflection in the polished brass pedals of the family piano. I must have been a tiny toddler and could hardly even stand to reach the keys. I was definitely curious… In 1964 my brother was given a Dansette record player and a copy of the latest Beatles single, „I Feel Fine“. That record changed my life, it honestly did, I had never heard anything as exciting and so different. Actually it is still my favourite Beatles record. I wanted to be one of them, I wanted to do that ! But how?
One day in Primary School, I was aged about ten, the teacher sat the whole class down in a big semi circle. She took her keys, opened up her cupboard and took out a small blue box. Inside was a ukulele that she then proceeded to play and sing the song, Way Down Upon The Swanee River. She then passed the ukulele to the first child with the intention of giving everyone the opportunity to try out the instrument. When it reached me it went no further, I point blank refused to pass it any further round the line. From that moment I considered that ukulele to be mine.
Every day I would take the keys from her desk, open up the cupboard, take out the box, place the keys back on her desk and sit and play. Do you know that she never tried to stop me once, not once? How good was that? I have so much to thank her for. She changed my life and really set me on the path to becoming a musician. She had given me the means to express myself.
The next thing that helped me along the path as a songwriter was receiving a book of Lennon and McCartney lyrics. I would sing the songs that I knew, but with the many songs in the book that I didn’t know I used to make up my own tunes. This was important in my development, I didn’t know it then, but I was basically half way to being a songwriter. It was only just a matter of time.

We’re in the Seventies now, Kenny?
Yes. In Glasgow in the 1970’s when the school gates closed on you for the very last time the gates to the shipyard opened up and swallowed you whole. I was no different and I followed the family tradition with all my friends and became a shipyard worker serving a four year apprenticeship as an electrician.
Werner, I hated every minute I spent there. But one day I spotted a means of escape, an art student carrying a big folder of art work and thought to myself: Maybe I could be one of them and do that too? I applied and was accepted to study at Glasgow School of Art. I threw my tool bag, boots, overalls and yellow safety hat into the River Clyde and left to study art – this is no lie, I actually did, my tools are still at the bottom of the Clyde!
I graduated in 1984 with a degree in Fine Art. Many world famous artists were students at GSA at the same time as me: Ken Currie, Steven Campbell, Jenny Saville. And a number of Glasgow musicians were also students at GSA: Stephen Lindsay and Brian McFie of The Big Dish, Fran Healy, Dougie Paye and Andy Dunlop from Travis are all ex GSA students.
Even at art school I continued writing, my life long burning ambition as a songwriter never ever diminished and I was hugely encouraged by the success of so many Glasgow bands from that time period – first at a basic local level but later achieving national success. As soon as I graduated in 1984 with a degree in Fine Art that was when I first started Hollow Horse.

Wow, that’s a very long time this band exists… How did it work then?
When we first started we were a fully functioning eight piece band with female backing singers, brass section, keyboards the works. We were a great live band and we played the very same round of venues as our contemporaries – Deacon Blue, Hue And Cry, Wet Wet Wet and so many more who later went on to have great chart success.
Glasgow then had a thriving music scene with dozens of great bands and the laser beam of the London A&R departments was solely focused on Glasgow. They hoovered up any band with a Scottish accent. Dozens of bands were signed to major record labels. Yet, despite us recording in top class studios, having great demo tapes, sending out literally hundreds of cassette tapes – we just couldn’t secure a recording contract. The A and R guys that we did speak to loved the music but thought the band was far too big with too many members to sign us. As it was becoming increasingly difficult to organise and motivate seven other people I felt it was time for a change and so I crashed the band and started again. But by the time I had put Hollow Horse mark II together that laser beam had shifted down to the Manchester scene with the start of Britpop, and Hollow Horse were left high and dry, our chance had gone. A combination of bad timing and a simple lack of luck.
But I am like a heat seeking missile, Werner, and I never give up until I reach my target. That really is the key to our story so far, despite all the set backs and being completely ignored for 40 odd years we never gave up. 7 months ago, on the 29th Dec, 2024 I sent out a random message to a chap called Sebastian Voss at Bureau Platiruma. I didn’t know him, he didn’t know me, but that message has changed the band’s fortunes. Seb could hear something in our music that no-one else previously could. We were in the race again!

You did four great indie pop albums before 5: Five Year Diary (2003), Beggarstown (2005), Escaping From A Submarine (2008) – very long break – then a great comeback with Leaving Without Saying Goodbye (2024). What happened (or didn’t happen) with these early records, what took you so long in the 2010s, and did you ever have doubts about your future as a recording musician?
Thank you, Werner, that is kind of you to say. Of course I have doubts, my goodness I often feel like that, feelings of not being worthy, the songs not being good enough, such negative thoughts, it can be torture. So why do I bother? I do it because I am driven to it, I do it because it makes me who I am, I do it because I have to. In a funny sort of way I don’t have any choice, it’s what I am meant to do.
The biggest issue with trying to achieve any sort of success as an independent band in this day and age is the sheer amount of material that is released every single day. Do you know that today alone there are 100,000 songs released, that is 700, 000 songs per week? Fun fact, there is more material released this week than the whole music output from 1970. More music in one week than in a whole year. The biggest problem now is getting your music played and being heard. No matter how good you think your material is it still gets drowned out by the sheer volume of new music – and not all of that new music is good.
Our early albums served their purpose, each one sold enough copies to finance the recording cost of the next one. I still like the early albums and still stand by a lot of the songwriting. The break between Escaping From A Submarine and our 2024 release Leaving Without Saying Goodbye was due to a number of factors, busy with my teaching career – I was an Art & Design teacher in a Glasgow School for twenty five years -, major illness, Covid hitting us all and, yes, as you suggest, doubts that sometimes can grind you to a halt.

Though you’re active as an album recording artist for more than twenty years now, though your records are acclaimed works of beauty, German readers may not know you too well. So please introduce to us your age, private circumstances (if you like), and your development as a composer/singer-songwriter.
In a nutshell, and a long story short, I am someone with a dream who simply refuses to give up. In 1965 as a seven year old child I first saw The Beatles movie Help. Werner, I bought into that fantasy hook, line and sinker. I thought if I could only learn to play guitar I would eventually live in one big house with four separate doors and sleep in a bed sunk into the floor. It filled my young head with such beautiful foolish nonsense. It has been a long journey from that wee boy to the harsh reality of the modern music business. Along the way I hope that I have maybe mastered the craft of songwriting. When I was a school teacher I used to say to my students that it takes the same amount of effort to get something right as it does to get it wrong, so why not get it right. That is what I try do with my songs, I try to get them as „right“ as I possibly can, and only hope that your German readers might be curious about this man, his journey and his dream to seek our work out for themselves. I thank them if they do.

Would you tell us about your „philosophy“ as a singer-songwriter, your influences, your musical role models? In my opinion, there’s a strong, very British, even very Scottish „sophisticated pop“ timbre in your songs: Prefab Sprout, Aztec Camera, XTC, The Blue Nile, Deacon Blue, The Pearlfishers, Trashcan Sinatras. Am I right, and who’s to add?
I once had an arguement with another Glasgow songwriter about songs – no names no pack drill. His theory, his mantra was „Melody is King“. I disagree, I think songs are an equal split of 50% melody and 50% lyric. The best songs for me are ones with strong, memorable melodies, yes, but equally strong interesting lyrics. This is what I aim to achieve in my own songwriting. The songwriters I most admire most are ones who achieve that balance, Bacharach and David, Leonard Cohen, Rodgers and Hart, Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Lennon and McCartney and of course the great Joni Mitchell.
I stopped having direct musical influences on my writing many years ago. The longer you study the craft, the long you do it, I think you slowly begin to develop your own voice, your own way of working, your own style. At least I hope I have achieved that.
How do I do it? For me there is no formula, a song can start from a chord sequence or a melody that comes out of nowhere – often at the most inappropriate times – and drops into your head. It can come from a word or a phrase you hear on a train or read in a book. There is no formula. I always keep a notebook and pen handy at all times. The process is still a complete mystery to me and as such is endlessly fascinating. What I do think however is that every songwriter needs to develop their own self-critical facilities. You have to be able to know, be aware when the work is going well and worth pursuing, perhaps even being very good indeed. Equally you have to recognise when it’s not exactly going great and maybe time to put it aside for another time. For me too many chart songs now have zero thought put into them, too many are written to a formula and too many are „cookie cutter“ songs that sound exactly the same as each other. For me there is a definite lack of true heart in chart music. Again, no names no pack drill.
So, no direct musical influences that I am aware of anymore, Werner. I am not like Noel Gallagher who often lifts other’s musical ideas and incorporates them into his own writing. I am not criticising him, that’s just the way he works. Having said that I am still open to ideas that might inspire the work from other sources, films, books, painting or poetry.
The comparisons we get to other bands, like the ones you mentioned, are not because we are influenced by them or trying to copy them in any way, it is because I am the same age as these writers and I listened to the same records that they did as we grew up and so have all the same common early influences that they do. That is perhaps where the similarities stem from. Having said that I do take it as a huge compliment to be compared to such talented writers and bands, they are some of my favourite Scottish bands.

In my ears, your songs contain a certain Scottish or even Glasgow melancholy, an atmosphere that’s typical for this far Northern region of Great Britain and it’s biggest city. How important is this regional background for your music?
It is important to me and I think also by any songwriter who lives and works here. Glasgow is a hard, tough industrial town that thrived from the 30’s to the 60’s on the strength of her expertise in shipbuilding on the River Clyde that flows through the heart of the city. It is a city of wide contradictions; great poverty and great wealth sit cheek to jowl. The two ways of escape for aspiring working class teenagers was always either in football or music, and this is why Glasgow has such a vibrant music scene with countless great bands producing such a variety of tremendous music, from the major acts of the 80’s and 90’s, Deacon Blue, Wets to all the many brilliant independent bands, The Pearlfishers, BMX Bandits, Teenage Fanclub and so many more. This toughness – and tenderness – of the City of Glasgow is reflected, I think, in a lot of the music written and produced here. Think of the jagged music of The Jesus And Mary Chain in contrast to the songs of The Blue Nile. Both are products of that same environment. And both could only ever have come from here.

So let’s talk about your recent work – the wonderful, excellent new album 5. First of all: the band, or „The Hollow Horse National Steeplechase 5 Furlong Runners & Riders“ – such a nice idea! So who’s in this team of „jockeys“? And how did you do this elaborate, crisp production, the lush, expensive sounding arrangements?
Hollow Horse has a solid core of five members: Myself – vocals and guitar; Ian Stevenson – drums and percussion; Kevin Devlin – bass; Suzanne Enterkin Kelly – vocals; Brian McNeill – keyboards. We are lucky enough to have built up a pool of friends who are also top class musicians who graciously give up their time and talents to help with the recording as we need them.
On our album Escaping From A Submarine, and as a bit of fun, I gave them all nautical names. On Leaving Without Saying Goodbye I gave them all Dr Who actors names – Ian was Tom Baker (THE best Dr Who, in my opinion). For 5 I let the additional musicians pick their own racing horse names, hence the „runners and riders“. We have no idea who won the race yet as it was a photofinish!
When we recorded our first full album Five Year Diary at Gravity Studios in Glasgow that was when I first met Brian McNeill. Brian is the ex-China Crisis keyboard player. He is, I have to say, the best musician I have ever had the privilege to work with and he has produced all five of our albums. Credit were credit is due and it is down to Brian’s talents as an engineer and producer that gives our records that polished, crisp production. There are only a handfull of people whom you meet in life who, like a force of nature, change the course of your life in a real positive way. Brian was one. Sebastian Voss is the other. Without me having met these two pivotal figures we would still be languishing, well, absolutely nowhere.
We spend many many hours in the studio working on the arrangments and production always with the aim of serving the song. The songs always comes first.

There’s a gorgeous female voice on some 5 tracks, by Suzanne Enterkin Kelly. And Sophie Louise Enterkin-Grogan, who sang on Your fourth record, is her sister?
Suzanne was a fellow student at Glasgow School of Art when I studied there. I knew who she was then but only ever had one conversation with her. When we were recording Leaving Without Saying Goodbye I felt a couple of the songs would benefit from having a female lead vocal and a mutual friend recommended Suzanne to me. What a find she was, she is a tremendous singer and a real asset to the band. Sophie is actually Suzanne’s daughter and is another very talented singer. Together they are a formidable team.

What are the new songs about in general? Is there a concept – like „concept album“? A „day at the races“ thread?
Part of my art school training was learning how to explore a theme visually, pushing your ideas as far as you could take them. I apply the same principle to the craft of songwriting and so similar themes and ideas are spread out across all five albums. I often drop in wee musical clues on one record that get picked up again on the next.
An example of this can be found in the song Little Dove Hill from our first album. In the song I sing about „…the streets of Beggarstown…“. Beggarstown is my pet name for Glasgow. Beggarstown then became the title song of our second album. At the very end of that song I walked the streets of Glasgow and recorded traffic sounds and a Glasgow street preacher. There is a melody at the very end of the track played on a tin whistle, and that melody next appears on our third record developed into a short song called Under A Burning Star where once again Beggarstown is mentioned. If you make the connection that is great, but it doesn’t really matter, it’s just me having fun and making the work as interesting as I can for the listeners and for myself.
Our previous record Leaving Without Saying Goodbye has definite ideas and themes and was partly a tribute to our bass player – one of my oldest and dearest friends, who died suddenly. There are songs of love, loss, time passing, longing and regret. It was quite an intense record to make and took us nine months from start to finish. I wanted the next record to be a lighter affair. I tried to write new material but was getting nowhere, nothing was coming. It dawned on me that this would be our fifth album and I started to wonder if there was any significance to the number 5.
Here is what I discovered: Number 5 is related to personal freedom and independence, individualism, adapability, major life changes and life lessons learned through experience. It also symbolizes motivation and determination, adventure, courage, imagination and making positive choices. Once I made that discovery the new songs flowed easily and it was obvious that the title of the new record had to be 5.

So let’s have a track by track run through 5. Give us some thoughts about the music, the words, your intentions, the subtexts etc, please.

1. & 2. Under Starters Orders… (Intro) / How You Look At Things / Through The Lens Of Time

I tried to exploit the number 5 in as many ways as I could in the design of the artwork for the cd cover and in the passages that link some of the songs together. The first sound you hear is a NASA recording of the actual sound of the planet Jupiter recorded by a probe as it whizzed by on it’s journey out to deep space. Jupiter is the fifth planet in our solar system. Next is the original piano line written in waltz time for the song „For Every Fall There Is A Rise“ that Suzanne sings so well later on in the album. This is followed by a voice saying „…number 5, number 5…“. He repeats this five times before fading away. This is obviously a nod and a wink to The Beatles avant garde track Revolution 9 on the White Album. Next is the race announcer at the start of the Hollow Horse National Steeplechase race over, guess what, 5 furlongs! See what I am trying to do?

The album then begins with the first actual song. For me this one is a very positive statement that „to lose is just another way to win“ and it’s simply how you look at things that can make a difference. I think it is a very uplifting opener to the album. The Lens Of Time was a totally different and separate song that was never finished corectly but the guitar line – played on a Rickenbacker 12 string – was too good to throw away and it tagged neatly onto the end of How You Look At Things. Mick Kinsella did a super job with the block harmonies and he and Tom Warrington both play lovely guitar lines over the Rickenbacker.

3. Burning The Paper

I always loved 60’s lone wolf detective and fantasy T.V. shows when I was a kid. The Man From Uncle, The Time Tunnel, The Baron, Adam Adamant, Man In A Suitcase – they always had such brilliant theme music. My favouite one out of them all was The Prisoner – I am not a number, I am a free man! What a show, and such stirring music. ‚Burning The Paper‘ then is my imaginary 60’s T.V. show theme with powerful brass stabs and rolling timpani hits leading it off. There is a loose narrative in the lyric that is an amalgam of all the shows I loved back then. Elements of the imaginary story were lifted and represented on the cd sleeve – the domino and the playing cards and the Prisoner pennyfarthing badge motif, now altered from number 6 to number 5.

4. I Died For You Once

I imagined God looking at the dreadful state of the world and seeing what we humans have done to it and saying to Jesus that he has to return to earth to sort it all out. Jesus refuses to go: „I don’t care anymore“. This is a tongue in cheek, light weight, humorous throw away song.

5. You Are The Universe

I am a huge Pink Floyd fan, I love Dark Side Of The Moon and the brilliant Clare Torry soaring vocal performance on Great Gig In The Sky. I wondered if it were possible to pay homage to that solo vocal on our song. I think Suzanne did a great job. This is one of my personal favourites on the record. I dedicate it to my wife.

6. I Generate Joy

This is such a wonderful song. It was not written by me but by a former guitar player with the band, Campbell Griffith. I am not daft and want the best songs available on the album and it was easy to persuade him to let us record it. I think it turned out really well. It paints such a wonderful, vivid picture with very powerful images. The arrangement we worked out really drives the song along at a pace. It features the brilliant guitar skills of the wonderful Marco Rossi who played with KMO – another Scottish 80’s band. I wanted to use the actual sample from a Maya Angelou lecture but the copyright holder of her estate wouldn’t grant us permission to use it. To get round this we got Suzanne to recite the lines as I felt it was more important to use these beautiful words than to worry who actually says them. It finishes the song off perfectly and sets the mood for the next song, a gentle ballad.

7. Steal The Starlight

This song is meant as a positive message for anyone who might be struggling with mental health issues or whatever else that life throws at us all. This is a message of hope that they will get through it, whatever it is. If I may so say myself, I think it is quite a nice song. It has some harmony vocals and a beautiful chord structure. I don’t usually like my own material – that is what keeps me writing. I might like something I have written for a day or two, then the doubts creep in and I try to do better with the next one. Starlight though I do like.

8. Who Misses Out The Most / Ice Nine

The next three songs form a trilogy and are linked by opposite words in their titles – ice with fire, fall with rise, but also by a loose narrative that runs across all three songs.

The idea for Who Misses Out The Most started with the jazz composer and piano player Stan Tracey’s piece called Starless And Bible Black. This piece has deep, resonant, dark piano chords at the beginning. It really is rather lovely. I wanted to try to write something similar to it. I also love the music from the Roman Polanski film Chinatown written by Jerry Goldsmith. It starts with someone sweeping across the strings inside of a grand piano. So I combined both of these ideas to generate the sad, gloomy, ominous atmosphere that I was after to express how I was feeling. It is a deeply personal song about loss. Who misses out the most? Sadly it was me.

It is followed by an eerie sound file that we created. For me it is back to Jupiter again and throwning rocks across a frozen lake. The title is taken from the Kurt Vonnegut novel The Cat’s Cradle. I recommend any Vonnegut book to you, he is a terrific writer.

9. The Fire Is Worse Than The Fall

This one is about what happened many years later after the experience that inspired Who Misses Out The Most. There was never going to be a safe way out, I was going to get hurt. And I did.

10. For Every Fall There Is A Rise

This song is a song of hope and brings the trilogy to a positive end. Suzanne sings it just so well. Many people who have heard it compare it to Burt Bacharach or to Brian Wilson. I don’t hear it myself but, my goodness, such high praise indeed.

11. All My Friends

This song was written round a guitar line that could have come from a Bach piece. It’s a pretty guitar figure but is quite difficult to play. Maybe it is connected to the trilogy, a love that was never meant to be? I’m too close to it just now to know for sure, but it could well be.

12. & 13. Twice As Good And Half As Bad / The Final Furlong (Outro)

In the U.K. there is a T.V. contest show. It involves 12 ceramicists who compete each week against each other to work through set tasks to build various practical pottery utensils. It is quite a nice, gentle show. The guy who presents it, Keith Brymer Jones, is one of the judges and has his own spin off T.V. programme where he and his wife are renovating a derelict church to turn it into a pottery studio. In that show one week he was telling the viewers how he met is wife. He used the phrase of life being „twice as good“ with his wife and things being „half as bad“ now they are together. My songwriting antenna went into overdrive and the song basically wrote itself. It is not very often that happens I can assure you.

The outro to the album is the imaginary horse race with the names that the musicians picked for themselves. It is an exciting photofinish. Who knows who won, I don’t. Finally we once again return to the piano waltz, and to finish where we started 40 minutes earlier we again hear the sound of Jupiter. The outro to the album is the imaginary horse race with the names that the musicians picked for themselves. It is an exciting photofinish. Who knows who won, I don’t. Finally we once again return to the piano waltz, and to finish where we started 40 minutes earlier we again hear the sound of Jupiter.