One of the perks of being an actress is you fetch up at short notice in places you hadn’t especially planned to visit. So it was that in July 2022, I found myself in Latvia working on a Sky docu-drama series about the Russian royal family. We were due to film in the grounds of Rundāle Palace and the cast were put up in a nearby hotel that was like an idyllic, Chekhovian summer house. Set in mature grounds, Mazmežotnes manor is surrounded by apple and plum trees, a rose garden and from the terrace is a view of open fields and the Lielupe river coursing through the valley beyond. One late afternoon, as I sat there having a cup of tea with a fellow actor, gazing out at the bucolic scene, Led Zeppelin’s ‘The Rain Song’ came on over the outdoor speakers. Suddenly, I was overcome by a feeling of what I can only describe as sublime joy - the synthesis of the beauty of music and the beauty of nature. I can truthfully say it was one of the handful of moments I can recall in this life as transcendent. 

‘One May morning early I chanced for to roam,
and strolled through the fields by the side of the grove.
It was there I did hear the harmless birds sing,
and you never heard so sweet, you never heard so sweet
you never heard so sweet as the birds in the spring.’

The opening verse to ‘One May Morning’, circa early 18th century

God is in nature, and God is in music, and when the two come together we get a glimpse of heaven. My moment in Latvia brought to mind an anecdote from one of Scotland’s finest, under-recognised guitarists, Ricky Gardiner, who died in 2022. One fine May morning in 1977, freshly returned from touring with Iggy Pop and Bowie, Gardiner went strolling around the walled garden of his country home, guitar in hand, gazing with contentment at the blossom on the apple trees. He had been in ‘a light dream’, he recalled, when he suddenly realised he was playing some chords. They had come to him unconsciously.  Thinking they were pretty good, he put them in his pocket for another day. A couple of months later he offered them up when he re-joined Iggy and Bowie for the Lust for Life session in Berlin and those bouncy May morning chords are now forever iconised in the opening to ‘The Passenger’. Channelling the spontaneity of the cosmos seemed to have been the north star for the Berlin session. The song ‘Lust for Life’ was recorded as the moon was peaking to fullness; in fact, Gardiner put the whole album’s imaginative success down to ‘rising lunar energy’.

Music in harmony with nature is a state of perfection. Looking at some of the greatest songs of all time is evidence enough. There’s the joyful end, ‘Here Comes the Sun’, ‘Mr Blue Sky’, ‘California Soul’ and the celestial groove of ‘Aquarius – Let the Sunshine In’. At the reflective end we have ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, ‘The Killing Moon’, ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’, or ‘Higher than the Sun’. The simple brilliance of these songs comes from the fact their message is total and powerful. Each and every one has a reverence for something greater than ourselves and, like the elements, a sound that is fresh and new. 

Are we still fully open and connected to the muse of nature? It's now no longer just us and the natural world when we step out. Technology and micro-management have intervened over the last fifteen years, closing in more and more on our psyches, interrupting the whispers of the universe. Mentally tethered as we are to screens, the availability of wi-fi, the pull of breaking news and social media, we’re blocked from being able to completely and fully surrender to the slowly disappearing mystical arcadia of our islands. 

In what remains of it, we can free ourselves, if we choose to. Elemental inspiration comes from the unseen - it’s in the trees and they really do speak. It’s also a place we can fully embrace the unusual or unexpected, for the trees don’t judge. We have reached the time the technocrats are pursuing some ideal A.I. interpretation of this already perfect world. By the use of algorithms they are keen to suck the blood from our collective creativity to create what? An algorithm won’t know what it means to be in the moment, or what it feels like to fail, or to feel the sun on your face, or to walk out into a newly snow-covered landscape, or be able to capture the spirit of simply being alive on a beautiful day. The technocrats and their enablers are banking on the fact we will forget that for centuries the greatest art, whether it be a painting, a song, or symphony, has come from a human being who looked up and out and dreamed. Now, more than ever, we need to come back down to earth.