Robert Burns, poet, songwriter and revolutionary romantic, paved the way for generations of Scottish musicians and writers to follow in his well-penned footsteps (famously, The Proclaimers walked 500 miles).
Sunday is Burns Night, and in his honour, we’ve selected five modern songs that capture his spirit and lyricism.
Listen to The Observer’s playlist of the week here.
At age of 15, inspired by a farmer’s daughter in a neighbouring village, Burns wrote his first love poem. That raw, restless romanticism finds a modern echo in Primal Scream’s 2006 hit Country Girl, which reached No 3 in the UK charts. Bobby Gillespie’s haywire blues rock plea, “Country girl, take my hand / Lead me through this diseased land”, crackles with the same youthful intensity and longing that fuelled Burns’s early infatuation.
Burns’s first poem marked the start of a lifelong devotion to celebrating women in verse and song, a tradition that lives on when “toasting the lassies” at a Burns supper. Gerry Cinnamon’s Belter, is an affectionate ode to a woman who’s “different from the rest, diamonds on her finger, and always looks her best”. With its stomping folk-pop energy and unmistakable Scottish lilt, you cannot sit still while listening to it.
Some of Burns’s most powerful works gave voice to the less privileged. Paisley-born Paolo Nutini channels that same spirit in Iron Sky, a call to rise above oppression and conformity – “over fear and into freedom”, he sings.
Amy Macdonald’s Celtic folk-style song was born at an after-party following Pete Doherty’s first Glasgow gig with Babyshambles, when Macdonald and her friends stayed up passing a guitar around. The next morning, she captured that moment in the line, “And you’re singin’ the songs, thinkin’ this is the life.” It’s a modern echo of Burns’s Auld Lang Syne: a gentle reflection on friendship and memory.
Burns was laid to rest in 1796 in Dumfries, the birthplace of another Scottish musical icon, Calvin Harris. While Harris’s sleek house beats below Dua Lipa’s smokey vocals in One Kiss have filled dancefloors, the song can’t rival the quiet heartbreak of Burns’s farewell to his secret lover, Agnes Agnes MacLehose, in Ae Fond Kiss.
Illustration by Charlotte Durance
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