King Creosote - Musical Career

Musical Career

In 1995, local Fife musician Kenny Anderson launched his own label, Fence, and began recording albums under the name King Creosote:

I had a band and we did all the things you know you do with a band and you trial it and take advice and do shows, then you lose money and the band gets hacked off then the band breaks up and it just got to a point where I just questioned why I was doing it in the first place. In a way, it seemed like the fun had gone out of it. A lot of the songs I was writing were written for the band & things became big things, I just got to a point where, I thought the band were hating every song I was writing for whatever reason, some people were like oh no I don't want to play that, that's too this or that's too that. It just got to a point where the band broke up and I thought, well, you know what I just want to get back into recording again and doing it on my own, I don't have to watch the clock I'm not in a studio anymore more, and at the time I got one of the really early stand alone CD Burners and that was like a revelation because it meant I could make CDs so I'd have a DAT tape as a master then burn albums one at a time and do artwork.

Today, Anderson runs Fence Records alongside Johnny Lynch, as well as Fence's annual Homegame Festival.

In recent years, Anderson has teamed up with Domino Records who have co-released some of his albums. He also spent some time on Warner subsidiary, 679, which gave him major label backing for the first time.

To this end, KC Rules OK was re-released in 2006 with different versions of some songs, and a version of the album called "Chorlton and the Wh'earlies" recorded with The Earlies was available with some purchases. Bombshell was released with an additional disc, a DVD film of King Creosote and friends on tour.

In a June 2008 interview on BBC 6 Music, mistakenly introduced as "King Creole", he told Tom Robinson that he'd like to play a festival every weekend this summer and then return home for the weekdays.

In the 2007 film Hallam Foe two of his songs, "The Someone Else" and "King Bubbles in Sand", were featured.

In late 2009, Anderson released a new studio album Flick the Vs, and crafted a performance only album, entitled My Nth Bit of Strange in Umpteen Years. Anderson also contributed to the Cold Seeds collaborative album along with Frances Donnelly of Animal Magic Tricks, and Neil Pennycook and Pete Harvey from Meursault; which was released on the Edinburgh-based indie label Song, By Toad Records. Anderson, Donnelly and Pennycook all wrote songs for the project, which all four performers then recorded together; each singer often taking the lead vocal role on a song written by another of the artists. The album was given a special limited release at the Fence Records Homegame Festival in Anstruther, Fife in March 2010, before a general release was announced for June 2010.

In 2011, Anderson attended the SxSW Music Festival and played a number of shows, two of which featured fellow Scottish attendees Kid Canaveral as his backing band. The same year, Anderson released Diamond Mine, a collaborative album with electronica composer Jon Hopkins, to critical acclaim. The album was nominated for the Mercury Prize, with Anderson stating, "It feels like this is the beginning of something. And to feel that so far down the line, after putting out forty effing albums, oh my God! It means, I can still do this, it's not over." The duo subsequently released an EP, Honest Words.