CC: Yes. I came up with the idea a few years ago now to do sort of radical reinventions of the songs of Robert Burns. It’s something I’d done on tour for a while, back in the day: my band and I would do these gigs up in tiny villages in the Highlands and we’d always try and bring them something they knew, but in a new way, you know? So we’d do new takes on ‘A Man’s a Man’, that sort of thing.

JA: Because you grew up with these songs, didn’t you?

CC: I did. I was raised in Ayrshire, where he’s basically a local god. So of course we sung those songs at school throughout the year, not just on Burns Night. It’s the sort of thing that’ll get you drummed out of town – um. Well. Not knowing those songs. In Ayrshire. Yeah. So. On top of that, my father was a folk musician—

JA: That’s right, Malcolm Campbell. He passed away a few years ago, didn’t he. Was he with you in spirit while you were making this?

CC: Not really.

JA: Was it perhaps your way of paying tribute to him?

CC: No.

JA: But he sang these songs?

CC: Yes, he sang these songs.

JA: So. Anyway. You mentioned that you would do slightly different versions of them on tour – was this back in the Nineties?

CC: It was. Yes. And I thought about just recording an album in that style, but then I realized that the most important work I could do would be to find what Robert Burns had to say about today. Because, you know, he was a deeply political artist—

JA: He was, and—

CC: And the messages he was preaching – egalitarianism, equality – they’re messages that we need to hear today. But he was also working class, so I thought, well, where are the artists of today who are doing what he did. And it occurred to me to look at what the younger rappers and grime artists coming out of South London were making, and to involve some of them on some of the tracks, both rapping Burns’s lines and laying down some of their own thoughts.

JA: Right, so this is where the album might be considered to be controversial—

CC: Do you know, I’ve heard that a lot since I came back up to Scotland and I really don’t see why.

JA: Well, lyrically, there’s a lot of violence – and unsavoury subject matter, shall we say – in what some of these young men talk about, and you can understand some traditionalists might be upset—