WHEN the world turns or cracks, it can be important to notice who you are, where you are, and the company you’re keeping. There will be enough big-picture views around the Brexit vote to keep the zippiest anorak happy (or at least hooked) for years. But I found myself in two significant locations over the last 10 days – one in northern Yorkshire, 30 miles away from Jo Cox’s murder spot in Batley; and the other in the gleaming atrium of the ITN news building in London.

Both of these places made the great abstractions of the European referendum feel very concrete indeed.

The Leave vote as a “revolt against the elites”? Well, all the elites were there, Thursday night into Friday morning, passing through ITN’s headquarters at 200 Gray’s Inn Road. As an invited pundit evidently very low in the foodchain, I resolved to quietly observe and sneak-tweet.

As the results roller-coastered across the screens, colleagues from all sides of the political spectrum gripped and grinned at each other. Alastair Campbell with Steve Hilton, Neil Kinnock with Owen Jones, Toby Young with Boris Johnson’s dad, J.P Morgan’s Stephanie Flanders with The Arts Council’s Peter Bazalgette, Jacob Rees-Mogg and some girl with a Union-Jack-sequinned vanity-case…

And for all of Farage’s fulminations against the “experts” and “insiders”, the UKIP reps that I saw were smoothly working the ITN atrium, receiving cheery welcomes from all the journalists, editors and fellow pols around them.

As the only Jock in the room, I began to swell with a familiar rectitude. Look – what more proof would you need that this Brexit madness was really just a redistribution of epaulettes among the officer class? Conducted somewhere up on those glass-and-steel top decks, lubricated with excellent wines…

This lasted until I found myself encountering – in quick succession– John Nicholson MP, and then Liam Fox MP. I’ve known John for 30 years. Never slow with a slicing observation, he held out his hands expansively and said, “Look at us three! Glasgow University peers from the ‘80s! Wonderful, eh?”

This is historically true. I can’t say that Mr Fox looked all that pleased to be reminded, as he tottered to the make-up room. But then, neither was I. It’s not easy to be the Karl Kraus of the media elite, when you’re suddenly hoist on the prongs of your own unavowed privilege.

I looked up and around ITN’s atrium – comprising tiers of well-spoken and capable members of the knowledge classes – and caught myself reflected in a mirrored surface, next to the Twitter and Facebook promo stands. Where are you right now, Mr Kane? Who do you speak on behalf of? Anyone but yourself? If there’s been an elite revolted against here, aren’t you part of it?

I’ve always had a good answer for all that: I’m an artist. Self-obsession, looking down and presumption is in the job spec. And to its benefit, it can sometimes take you places where important social undercurrents can be noticed.

For example, last week, my brother Greg and I were performing in Grassington – a perfectly preserved market town in North Yorkshire. It was a 20-minute drive from Batley. As you know, the day before, their local MP Jo Cox had been brutally – and politically – murdered, right outside her constituency surgery.

But the show must go on. In a beautiful hall, that night our audience were responsive and generous. However, we’ve something to report here. For decades now, as musicians, my brother Greg and I have been touring many of those areas on the English political map which most robustly voted for Brexit. In particular, those northern towns and villages “in-between” the bigger cities like Manchester, Newcastle or Liverpool.

In the last five or six years, what we began to notice – fluttering occasionally from house windows, sticking out of the radiator of a working van, or as bunting strung up and down a street – were the St George’s Flags. Union Jacks too, of course – but not as striking or as numerous as the red cross on the white. Greg (and our indefatigable soundman Rab) are both socially braver than I am on tour. All the way through the first indyref, they took themselves out to pubs on days off or after gigs, perpetually up for the conversation.

Over breakfast, they’d give me field reports. Not just about how engaged people were with the indy debate – but how much they explicitly yearned for the same kind of confidence, and power, that “you Scots” had. I’ve taken to researching these small towns on the smartphone, during the long drive there. It means that when I sing, I have some of the resonances of the area in my head (though I never explicitly mention them in performance). In terms of how this works, the Library Theatre at Darwen, near Blackburn, is the gig I always remember.

In 2012, when we fetched up at their gates, Darwen was St George-bedecked. The local Labour councillor, who had once been a BNP member but had thoroughly renounced his past, was now chairing the area’s culture committee. I wandered down the high street to pick up a local paper, which had four pages of “Asian Interest” editorial in it. Our hotel – classic weddings-and-births – was run by a largely Asian staff.

As a visitor, I love this salad-bowl experience of Northern English small-town life. The world of the Punjab, or the Maghreb, fetches up in an old textile town – and those same dark brown people hail you with an accent and manner straight out of the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club.

By people rubbing along together through fair work and local trade, and by committing solidly to the texture where they are, it seemed to me that small communities can contain the complexities of globalisation. Indeed, Darwen’s big moment in history was acutely global – or more precisely, imperial. On September, 26, 1931, the great liberator of India Mahatma Gandhi visited the town. He was there to answer a challenge.

The Indian Independence movement was boycotting British cotton goods, causing hardship to the Lancashire mill-working proletariat. The local mill-owners, who were Socialists and Quakers, invited Gandhi up from the London conference he was attending, so that the leader could witness the local hardship his militancy was causing.

Gandhi didn’t temper his campaign, but he was particularly affected by those “Darreners” he met. “The workers treated me as one of their own”, he later recalled. “I shall never forget that.”

But the internet tells me “Blackburn with Darwen” voted 56.3 per cent to Leave the other day, on a 65 per cent turnout. I’m staring at the number. I don’t believe this bustling, friendly place, intensely proud of its history (the Gandhi story was in the foyer of our venue), has suddenly become part of Farage’s symphony of fear and anxiety about the Other.

I guess we’ll find out, if and when we return to play there. Because we must try to stay connected to these places.

I’ll be pushing the Scottish independence juggernaut steadily from the back, along with all of the rest of you. I know how well we’ve built this vehicle; I know the downwards slope we have to steer it towards. I want it to gather steam, inspire as it passes, invite more to leap on board. But we must realise the authentic, motivating power we already have in Scotland. And what a cry of confusion, frustration and powerlessness the Leave vote partly represents.

As a Leave campaign email put it on referendum day, these are indeed “heartlands”. I’ll take that to mean territories where emotions drive actions and thoughts. Places where one’s consistency, integrity and coherence can be hard to maintain, challenged as it is by an accelerating and disruptive world.

Places where, sometimes, a rueful artist – elevated on the illuminated stage, exercising all his privileges – gets the opportunity to call out the better angels of our nature.

As we righteously proceed on our Scottish journey, let’s not disengage from the all-too-human dimension of these Brexit voters. I won’t. On these islands, no matter how determining lines of sovereignty become, they will still be the company we keep.