Category: Gone but not forgotten

Gone but not forgotten

Weller-Approved

Craig McAllister

I’ve been asked a few times the past week where folk can pick up copies of my Trashcan Sinatras books. The Perfect Reminder was initially available through Last Night From Glasgow, but it seems they have no stock left. If you’re so inclined, you’ll find the last dozen copies at that most obvious of retailers. It’s having a wee bit of a second wind these days since the sudden death of John Douglas, which is bittersweet to say the least.

A Full Pocket, the second bit of writing I did around the Trashcans is now out of print. There was a brief discussion a couple of years ago about doing a reprint for the American market – that’ll be the group’s American market and most definitely not mine – but, like many things associated with the Trashcans, it was an idea that never quite made it to fruition. If you’ve never read it, I’d love to help you there, but I’m not sure how I can really.

In the meantime, I’ve been to the manuscript and copied a chunk of text around John’s song The Safecracker. It’s a perennial Trashcans favourite, played in concert before even appearing on record and a staple at their live shows ever since…although a quick glance at the set list for the Irvine show in June suggests that it wasn’t played that night. I could’ve sworn it was, too.

In typical Trashcans fashion, after writing, proofreading and eventually publishing A Full Pocket, I found out a brilliant snippet of trivia around The Safecracker; that the esteemed Paul Weller was so taken with John’s song that he cornered him at some Go! Discs shindig or other and asked John to write the words and chords out for him. Does it get better than that? (Maybe if Weller had recorded it and taken it to number one, yeah, but as a songwriter, to have Paul Weller tip his hat in your direction must feel pretty vindicating I’d have thought.) Wish I’d known at the time and I’ve chased him for a quote or two…

So here’s the Weller-endorsed The Safecracker. And below that is the original text from A Full Pocket. I hadn’t really noticed until now, but TCS guitarist Paul Livingston is noticeable by his total absence in the interviews here. There was probably a perfectly valid reason at the time.

The Trashcan Sinatras – The Safecracker  

 

The Safecracker is a masterpiece in lyric writing and uplifting lugubriousness. It tells the story of a crook caught out by a combination of the moon, misplaced nails and general bad luck. It’s the melody attached to the brilliant lyric though
that elevates a simple story song into the dizzy heights of greatness.

“As fly to tarantula, as jugular to Dracula…to me and my Ford Spectacular, you’ll be drawn.”

That’s a line that might’ve crept from Lux Interior’s unused lyric book, that is.

Musically, it features the classic TCS signature thing of John’s acoustic guitar carrying the tune while Paul’s electric adds the light and shade, the dynamics to it. The dulcimer is once again all over this track, adding atmosphere and a mystery entirely in keeping with the song’s subject matter.

One of the finest songs in the band’s back catalogue, The Safecracker has long been a staple of live shows. The extended second verse – “they call me thrifty…I count out £2.50…” – when it builds and builds before dropping once more to the chorus is always sublime, even if the chorus steals just a fraction of the melody from Carole King’s You’ve Got A
Friend. What’s the world coming to though if a song about stealing can’t purloin the odd decent melody here and there, eh?

A final observation:
‘…when her Walkman started to melt…’
‘…keeps a ten-bob note up his nose…’
‘…there’s not a single episode of ‘Dallas’ that I didn’t see…’

Lyrics can often date a song and The Safecracker is no different to that triptych of Trashcans’ favourites. A gallon of petrol would very probably get you from Irvine to Paisley, maybe even from Kilmarnock if it was downhill most of the way, but not at the recession-friendly prices mentioned in the song. As we go to print, the cost of a gallon is about 250% dearer than John’s suggested 1996 price. A song about robbery indeed.

Davy: This was one of the first songs written for the album. I remember playing it during the I’ve Seen Everything tour. The Safecracker seems to be a fans’ favourite. It’s well-arranged.

John: This is another of mine which, after some encouragement from Frank, was more or less complete by the time I’d presented it to the others. I’ve been told The Safecracker sounds like Father And Son by Cat Stevens. Carole King? That’s a new one to me, but I can sort of see that.

I’ll tell you what I did rip off for the song – well, not rip off – what did inspire the song – and I hope my memory isn’t playing tricks on me here – was the radio. One thing I’d do when I was writing and looking for inspiration was to turn on the radio and whatever song was playing, that’d be the tempo I’d use on my own song. Gene Pitney and Marc Almond had a big hit at the time with Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart and I latched onto the big drum fill at the end. ‘Right,’ I thought. ‘If I did that, but not as dramatic, and with major 7ths, I might have something.’

And I started to play the verse intro. Suddenly, from nothing, I was off. The whole thing arrived from that. So, I wouldn’t call
it a rip-off, but it was certainly a motivating factor in the tune arriving.

Frank (singing): Duh Duh Duh-Duh Du Duuuuh! Oh yeah – I can hear that! I never knew that! Love it, John! That’s fantastic! This was the first song written for the album. We’d been playing it on that tour of America, so it was an established song by the time we came to record it.

Davy: John’s not feart of borrowing from other songs and making them his own. I didn’t know that about the Marc Almond/Gene Pitney steal. That was quite subtle! It’s got those major 7ths that you’ll hear in other songs. There’s a bit of Brel’s Amsterdam in there too, if you tune your ears in, David Bowie’s version obviously. That’s a magic version.

John: I remember shouting Frank through into the room I had in our flat in Kilmarnock, saying, ‘Listen, I’ve got this thing, but I don’t know if it’s any good,’ and playing it for him. Frank was instantly enthusiastic and encouraging about it, so that spurred me on.

Stephen: The Safecracker is another instantly appealing classic from John. The original demo of it had a more upbeat, soul band vibe which worked but was a bit too typical. We took the drums out of the verses, and it all became much more intimate. We knew then we had caught the essence of the song; the music just floated there and gave the vocals plenty of room.

Frank: It’s a cracker of a song, the centrepiece of the album. And everyone loves it when we play it live. Where I’ll Get Them In is linear, this has peaks and troughs. It’s a really great arrangement. We had other versions. There was a wee bouncy one, with Stephen using sticks instead of brushes. The album version though, with those little pauses before the choruses,
was the best. There’s a nice wooden sound to it. Lots of lovely dulcimer again. And loads of singing, weird harmonies by John in full-on Jake Thackray baritone, lots of people just warbling away in the background. Safecracker is a good one. It’s one of my favourite Trashcans’ songs.

Stephen: Frank’s vocal is really great on it. There’s some delicious guitar interplay between John and Paul the supportive stuff and just tried to keep out of the way.

John: I tend to fall in and out of love with it. Melodically I think it’s great. Lyrically, sometimes I don’t know. I remember being very under-confident about it. I had the verses and the chorus, I knew it had something because the second verse had a different chord change that worked, so it was worth persevering with. But I was never totally sure about it. It was a big thing for us back then to try and get words that wouldn’t normally rhyme or appear in song together, rhymes that would make people go, ‘Whit?!’ Sometimes to the detriment of the song, I should add. But not in this case.

The ‘Dracula/ Spectacular’ line came out of that mindset. Ian Dury – again – used to do that too. Reasons To Be
Cheerful has a wonderful lyric. I bet he was like a wee boy in a toyshop writing that. His New Boots And Panties album was a real influence on me as a songwriter. When it came out, I’d sit and listen to it over and over. There are bits that were unclear
at first – the shouting and his accent in places – but it’s packed full of brilliant little lyrical observations. He’s been a big influence on me.

Craig McAllister: Allison Thomson (trumpet, I’ve Seen Everything) is convinced that the Ford Spectacular in the song is her wee Ford Fiesta that she drove at the time.

John: Ha! Well, I don’t remember that but it’s certainly very possible. It’s a good rhyme though!

Frank: Hugh Jones (producer) was really intrigued by a couple of the lyrics. The ‘tradesmen’s entrance’ line was one he cottoned on to and asked about more than once.

“So, boys…I was wondering…This ‘tradesmen’s entrance’. Is it…you know…?”

And we’d all look at one another. And also the Paisley line. We’d told him about the ‘getting aff at Paisley’ phrase that was well-used in Ayrshire. (Paisley is the last stop on the Ayr-Glasgow rail line and was often used when describing how to avoid
unwanted pregnancy, if y’catch the drift…)

“So…uhm, yes…er…”

It’s the bane of my life that I never get to sing it live in the key in which it was recorded. Because of that open G/Bm chord it can’t be transposed. We tuned down half a step for the record to allow me to get to the high notes in the ‘nifty/two-fifty’ section, but every time we play it live, it’s an extra semitone up and it’s a bit of a struggle to get there. Some people want a pile of money, or a fancy house and a dolly bird, but my ambition in life, really, is to have a handful of guitars all tuned differently, so that I can sing Safecracker properly in concert.

Even at the Aye Write book festival show, it was just Davy and John and myself and I was like, “Right guys. Can we detune the guitars for this?” And they were like, “Just get to work, Frank.”

“They call me neee-ifff-ty…!!”
Jeez! It was so high! I’m getting old. It’s no’ fair!

 

A Full Pocket was expertly typeset and put together by Colin Cassells, the mild-mannered genius behind Five Hungry Joes, the internet’s best Trashcan Sinatras archive. If it’s Japanese liner notes, Australian tour posters or obscure promo sleeves you seek, you’ll find ’em all there.

Gone but not forgotten, Live!

Everything Was Enhanced By You

Craig McAllister

John Douglas 1963 – 2026

“How’s it gaun? Y’awright?”

These were usually John Douglas’s first words, whether one or two songs into a set with the Trashcan Sinatras, or more recently out front on his own, but also any time you met him. Throwaway (and maybe even insincere when spoken by anyone else), but delivered by John they revealed something of his true character; interested, empathetic, kind. Off-stage, they were usually delivered along with a warm bear hug, something that could melt the hearts of even the most reluctant and Calvinistic of west of Scotland males. We’re not all confident and outgoing huggers in this part of the world, but people like John made the act easier to embrace, pun intended. The outpouring following his death early on Monday morning has been universal in the notion that here was a man who was nothing but genuine, unassuming and decent. ‘Lovely’ seemed to be the adjective of choice and it’d take the hardest of cynics not to agree with that. It’s just a shame John’s not around to read the swell of testimonies since written about him.

I’ve known John for the best part of 40 years, initially as one of the older guys at the back of The Turf and The Crown, a musician I was told, a songwriter with a love of The Clash and Guinness and Benson & Hedges. He and his band The Trash Can Sinatras (3 words back then) had topped the premier league of local bands by earning a record deal with Go! Discs, but hadn’t yet released a record. As fate would have it, a drunken fracas in the toilets of The Attic, Irvine’s premier late night dancing emporium for those wanting to shake their thang to loud, alternative and non-chart music led, in a roundabout way, to a life-long friendship with two of the Trash Cans and, by default, John.

We’d sit around the table in The Crown talking music, film, football, politics, people, Irvine and they’d treat us to stories from the studio; what they were working on, how they’d turned a slow dirge into a fast racket, how they’d turned a fast racket into a slow beauty, how they were making a really great album. Cake, as you know, is a really great album. Not the best Trashcans’ record though.

That might be I’ve Seen Everything, album number two. By now, Sunday Drivers, an Irvine-born group of shouty guitar stranglers and drum bashers I was a proud part of was rehearsing directly below the TCS office at Shabby Road in Kilmarnock. One day, we broke a bass string. No one carries spare bass strings, least of all the ill-prepared bass player, because bass strings never break. But there we were, session abruptly over. Upstairs in the office, Trashcans John and Paul were sitting around smoking and drinking tea and doing whatever else young guys with a record deal do all day instead of work.

‘Eh. You don’t have any spare bass strings, by any chance? We’ve broken one.’

‘You’ve broken a bass string?! No one breaks bass strings!’ (Looking around fruitlessly, behind ashtrays, under CDs, on top of the cat,. ‘Nah. Nothing. Sorry.’

At this point, John leans into Paul and says something quietly before turning to us.

‘Take the Rickenbacker. We don’t really need it.’

The Trashcans had used some of their record company money to buy a beautiful black and white Rickenbacker bass guitar. It might’ve been a 4003 model, but in any case it was a Bruce Foxton, a late-era McCartney, a Colin Moulding, a Lemmy bass guitar. Rule number 1 for any recently-signed band is to buy the same type of classic guitar played by your heroes and influences, and so the Trashcans splurged on a Rickenbacker. Rule number 2 for the recently-signed band is most certainly not to immediately lend said instrument to a bunch of chancing and ham-fisted instrument abusers, but that’s exactly what they did…no questions asked, no ‘we need it back by Friday’ deadline sort of thing. We ended up using it for two years. Indeed, it was lying on my bedroom floor the night my parents’ house was burgled and they made off with the family jewels. Imagine they’d nicked that guitar too? How d’you explain that to the person who was generous enough to trust you with it?

There are loads of stories you can read about John; his Syd Barrett paint collection and the Trashcans’ song it inspired. His song Wild Mountainside, now something of a folk standard, sung by his wife, ‘the missus’, Eddi Reader, at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. The fact that he was never happier than when on the road with Eddi, travelling to and singing in the farthest-flung corners of this island and beyond. Lots of stuff has been…and will be.. written about this by more prominent writers than myself, so here’s a story with a thirty-years later punchline that you most definitely don’t know.

A few years back I was involved in putting on a Martin McAloon show in Irvine’s Harbour Arts Centre. I interviewed Martin in advance of the show and opened by telling him my pals had supported Prefab Sprout in 1991. “Ah! Lovely John!” he said immediately. “He used to busk ‘We Let The Stars Go‘ – did you know that?” I’d suggested getting John to open the show, but Martin, who’d only played one solo show before Irvine – and John had played one less than that – wanted to ease into his night, maybe play two sets, maybe just the one longer one, maybe we’d judge the room at the time… so the idea of a support act would only complicate the matter and my idea was dropped.

On the night of the show, Martin asked excitedly, “Is John here?” I’d invited John and ‘the missus’, but they hadn’t shown. “Ach. Give him a call, will you? I’d like him to play ‘We Let The Stars Go’ with me.”

I called John just before Martin took to the stage.

“Is that tonight?” he asked sleepily. “Shite. We were gonnae come to that!“

“Come! Martin wants you to sing ‘We Let The Stars Go’. He’s playing two sets. You could be here in an hour and appear for the encore.”

Which is just about what happened. John texted to say he’d arrived at the venue and could I let him in. As luck would have it, he’d turned up just as Martin was finishing the first of his two lengthy sets.

“How’s it gaun? Y’awright?” he asked me, followed by his customary warm bear hug. I took him into Martin’s dressing room.

My Cilla Black moment. “Martin – John. John – Martin.”

“How’s it gaun? Y’awright?” he asked, to Martin this time, and the pair of them hugged and fell into easy conversation, reminiscing about the Prefab Sprout tour, about the Trashcans’ records in the intervening years, how Martin’s brother Paddy was faring.

“Yes, John,” said an impatient Martin. “Paddy is doing well, but what I want to know is…did you bring your guitar?“

John went into the corridor and brought in his guitar case. He snapped it open, strapped it on, hit a chord to check it was in tune…and – doinnngg! – broke the top string. The lack of any spare strings in his case was immediately apparent. Helpful Martin went to his own case. Bits of stuff flew out as he raked his massive hands through the velvety interior for a string. A discarded setlist. A Sharpie. Yellow fluff. A tea towel. A massive and ancient-looking capo. But no strings. Both Martin and John looked helplessly – and sheepishly – at me.

“It’s your lucky day, John!”

Believe it or not, I’d just bought two sets of strings, one for home use and one for a guitar at school. One set was already on the Telecaster at home, but the set for the school guitar was in the boot of my car, to be taken out the next time I was at work. Given that this was the middle of the summer holidays, they were still there. What followed was a real race against the clock for the remainder of Martin’s 15-minute break as, with two professional yet shockingly underprepared singer/songwriters of some repute watching, I replaced the broken string. Roadie Level One completed.

You lend me a Rickenbacker, John, and thirty years later I’ll lend you an E string. Ye can’t say fairer than that.

New string on and guitar now in tune, John played ‘We Let The Stars Go‘ in the dressing room. Problem was, he played it in a key unfamiliar to Martin, and with the clock ticking towards the start of set two, Martin made the executive decision there and then to dispense with John’s guitar entirely. FFS! Martin would play it and John would sing it – they’d busk their way through it like the professional yet underprepared singer/songwriters they were. In the second half, Martin introduced John to rousing applause from a delighted and surprised audience and on he came – “How’s it gaun? Y’awright?” – to sing the Prefabs’ song. A great moment for everyone in the room.

As a postscript to this story, midway through his second set, Martin broke a string too. He looked at me, lurking at the side of the stage, and handed me that beautiful old semi acoustic guitar you can see in the video above. I went back into the dressing room and restrung it. I even tuned it up and placed it back on its stand at the back of the stage. Martin finished the song he’d been playing on his spare guitar, slung on the newly-strung instrument, played a G chord and gave me a thumbs up. Roadie Level Two completed. Piece of piss.

The last time I saw John was on June 18th, again at the Harbour Arts Centre. I’d been asked to secure the venue for a Trashcans video shoot that would perhaps turn into a gig. You can read all about that night here. There was something of a quiet air of finality about that show – ridiculous really, when they’d a brand new album lined up for release, but the carefully selected audience of former band members, family, friends, long-term fans and influential broadcasters and journalists who’d given many a leg-up to a group who fly defiantly in the face of fashion seemed almost serendipitous. The band – 40 years old almost to the date – played one of their first gigs in the HAC and here they were four decades later, closing out their set by playing an unplanned encore of their debut single Obscurity Knocks, played with all the feral raggedness of a teenage garage band. Full circle and fully sensational.

When I was told John was unwell, we texted a couple of times. His last text to me, a week or so ago, was asking after my wife’s health, as he’d heard she’d been at the hospital for a procedure. ‘Sending strength’, he said as he signed off. Interested, empathetic, kind, remember.

John Douglas will be missed by all who knew him, and the many more who had the measure of him through his literate, melody-packed and emotional music. He was, simply, a lovely guy.

Here’s The Hairy Years from I’ve Seen Everything, John’s confessional about stealing a snow globe to take back to his granny as a present from his holiday – ‘all the savings gone on bloody day one,’ – welded to a shouty Frank number, greatly tamed for the recording by the trickery of Paul Livingston and his mercurial way with a fluid guitar riff over a well-chosen chord sequence. It’s a mighty fine John moment in a discography choc full of them. Go and investigate it. Or investigate it further.

The Trashcan Sinatras – The Hairy Years

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find, Sampled

Shack Up

Craig McAllister

Jimmy Smith is the bridge between jazz and soul, a colossus of his chosen instrument who had one well-tailored foot firmly planted in the camp marked ‘strictly no sell out’ and the other in the camp marked ‘unfortunately I’ve got bills to pay.’ A master of the Hammond B-3 organ, his playing was a deep influence on Deep Purple’s Jon Lord, The Charlatans’ Rob Collins and Mick Talbot in The Style Council (et al), to name but three great players who understood the value of the B3’s flavour to their particular sonic stew.

Sampled by all manner of switched-on creatives from the Beastie Boys to DJ Shadow to The Orb, Smith’s indelible organ grind appears in the least likeliest of places at the most unexpected times. Would the Beasties’ Root Down be quite as funky without that requisite sample? Could Andrew Weatherall have borrowed from anyone other than Smith when twisting The Orb’s Perpetual Dawn inside out and upside down? Ask yr average music fan to compile a list of the ten most influential players in music and it’s unlikely that Jimmy Smith’s name would make that short list, but his influence lives long and large.

A few years ago, in the midst of a particularly heavy jazz phase, I noticed on leaving a Glasgow record shop a Japanese import of Jimmy Smith’s Back At The Chicken Shack album. A Blue Note original. A super duper Japanese pressing. And, given the pressing and its particular desirability, one that was relatively affordable. It was up high, so I couldn’t lift it down to look at it, but I wanted it. Problem was, I was properly spent out, and if I’d asked the guy at the counter to get it down for me, I’d have felt compelled to buy it with money I didn’t have. I hummed. I hawed. I left without it…but ten minutes later I’d done a U-turn down Argyle Street, flames burning from the heels of my desert boots as I hot-footed it back to the shop with the sole intention of bringing that record home with me. Of course, by the time I’d returned, some other unbelievably lucky jazz head had got there before me. We all know what buyer’s remorse is. This was not-buying remorse. Which, as you know full well, is very often worse. It’s undoubtedly good to be impulsive sometimes.

Back At The Chicken Shack is a terrific album, a proper heads-down, chin stroking melding of walking basslines, lazy drum shuffles and Smith’s smoky, croaky Hammond sound.

Jimmy Smith – Back At The Chicken Shack

The title track is a heady amalgamation of early ’60s cool, finger-clickin’ jazz. There are just four musicians on board, and the quartet contributes to a positively swingin’ affair that, if possible, is even greater than the sum of its groovy parts. Chicken Shack is brought in on a ringing, trembling bed of Smith’s organ, but no sooner have you settled in than Blue Note’s tenor sax for hire Stanley Turrentine wafts his signature rasp across the top line. Kenny Burrell’s guitar vamps quietly in the background, biding it’s time, waiting for the opportunity to break free, the swinging cymbal splash of Donald Bailey’s drums keeping everything in place and orientating the listener.

As the track meanders, unwinds and eventually pulls itself back together over the course of eight heady minutes, Smith takes centre stage; he ripples here, hits heavy chords there, goes low and bassy in this part, flies high and reedy in that. He walks his fingers up, off and out into orbit before eventually stepping aside to allow Kenny Burrell the opportunity to showcase his exquisite guitar skills; bends, double stops, soulful scales up, down and (crucially) between the frets, playing on pure instinct with his fingers going to places in the merest of nanoseconds before his brain has thought of doing likewise. Turrentine blows a cool breeze in the catch-a-breath gaps left behind, freeform yet within the structure of the track – playing riffs really, as the rock fraternity would recognise them. There’s nothing too skronky or head-melting here, just good, honest music cooked up by good, honest jazz cats playing for no-one but themselves and anyone else with an ounce of rhythm and blues in their soul.

If it’s single-button, tonic suited mod jazz yr after, look no further than Back At The Chicken Shack, daddy-o.

 

Cover Versions, Gone but not forgotten

Circulatory

Craig McAllister

It’s a well-written fact over the years that Tomorrow Never Knows was the first track The Beatles recorded for Revolver. Barely out of short trousers, The Beatles turned to studio-as-instrument and created a thumping and droning kaleidoscope of looped sound – an aural collage a million miles from, yet merely 33 months since, they’d released She Loves You; inarguably, yeah (yeah, yeah), a fantastical leap of lightyear proportions. Waiting for that great leap forward, Billy Bragg? It had already happened a couple of decades prior.

Tomorrow Never Knows – The Beatles

Tomorrow Never Knows and its ground-breaking, rule-breaking appeal has been utilised well in the intervening years. Without its influential template, Harry ‘friend of Lennon’ Nilsson may have felt the need to employ more than one chord on his rockin’ Jump Into The Fire single. Adam Yauch might not have taken to threading metres of recording tape around his kitchen via nothing more than broom handles and a prayer when experimenting with drum loops before the Beastie Boys’ first album. The Chemical Brothers’ looping, thumping, kaleidoscopic Setting Son possibly/probably/most definitely wouldn’t exist. Paul Weller has used Tomorrow Never Knows as an intro at live shows and it never fails to sharpen the senses, keen the expectation and lift the roof off before he’s even arrived. In 2026 – sixty years down the road, Tomorrow Never Knows still sounds like a dazzling, just around the corner future.

It’s interesting, then, to hear Junior Parker’s 1972 version.

Tomorrow Never Knows – Junior Parker

Parker, one of the original dust bowl blues/harmonica guys, disassembles the original of its thumps and crashes, its fuck-off whooshes and fairground whirrs and recasts it as a tremolo-heavy, late-night torch song. There’s a token heartbeat of muffled percussion and ricky-tick stick action during one of its more urgent moments, but mainly one lone twanging, reverberating guitar measures the music as Parker delivers his solemn vocal. Heavy-eyed and somnolent, Parker comes across like a stoned-immaculate Jim Morrison backed by no-one but Robby Krieger on downers. It’s a fairly essential recording, all things said, and one which the Chemical Brothers (of course!) have used in concert before segueing into their own Setting Son. Now there’s a circulatory thing if there ever was one.

Junior Parker, as you well know, is also the writer of that great standard, Mystery Train.

Mystery Train – Junior Parker

Recorded in Sun Studios in 1953, it was brought to Elvis’s attention in 1955 by Sam Phillips, the studio/label owner/producer who just so happened to have given himself a writing credit for the track. Elvis took Parker’s r’n’b heavy version and hotwired it to an electric shock of helium-high hillbilly country, creating possibly his first essential recording.

Mystery Train – Elvis Presley

It’s the sparsest of recordings – the very antithesis of that Beatles session just a mere decade away – with Scotty Moore on electric guitar, rockabilly pickin’ and riff stealin from another Parker tune (Love My Baby) to great effect. Bill Black playing stand-up bass – the same instrument that would later be owned by Paul McCartney, a birthday gift from Linda – slappin’ and walkin’ his way through the song’s foggy ether. It features a sparse percussion track that makes the action on Junior Parker’s version of Tomorrow Never Knows seem like the pounding work of John Bonham by comparison. And on top of it all, Elvis’s cu-hu-huntry bu-hoy schtick and his own scuffed ‘n scrubbed acoustic guitar. Nothing more, nothing less. And all the more essential for it.

By the way, that Mystery Train riff has been copped a thousand times since, but Scotty Moore’s chicken-picked original remains the standard for all players. Simple yet deceptive, a heady mix of left hand pressure. right hand nimbleness and decades-old hot-wired electricity will get you some of the way there.

There you are. From The Beatles to Elvis via Junior Parker and the Chemical Brothers. Not for nothing does the tagline above read Outdated Music For Outdated People. Read on, oldies.

Cover Versions, Gone but not forgotten

Has High Blood Pressure Got A Hold On Me?

Craig McAllister

American groups – like any number of those Nuggets bands you can reel off in your sleep – or The Turtles or The Byrds (‘animal’ name, weird spelling – coincidence?!?) grew their mom’s apple pie American boy crewcuts out the moment The Beatles first yelled ‘yeah!‘ They adopted the instruments…the stance…the harmonies…everything they could that might align them with the collarless coattails of the hottest act on the planet. And good on them, for using the Lennon/McCartney approach gave the world more great records.

When John Sebastian sat down with his guitar to write a song for his new band The Lovin’ Spoonful, he looked back a year or so for inspiration, to the pop sounds that were already proven to shake and shimmy American teenagers to their core. He didn’t need to look east, across the Atlantic and towards Liverpool. I mean, he could’ve, for there was plenty there that he might chose to cop. Instead, Sebastian looked north to Detroit, to the sound of the Motor City and the hand-clappin’, finger-snappin’ giddy abandon of Motown.

And so it is that Do You Believe In Magic? wafts in on the same chords as Martha Reeves and The Vandellas‘ (Love Is Like A) Heat Wave.

Martha Reeves and The Vandellas – (Love Is Like A) Heat Wave

Other than the chord sequence at the beginning, the two songs are poles apart, of course. The Lovin’ Spoonful come across like grassed-out, close-miked preppy stoners with the knack of making an unforgettable melody appear as natural as breathing.

Martha and The Vandellas crash in with all the urgency of a group who’ve been told that this might be the only record they make. There’s a rifle shot of snare, a cavalry charge of handclaps, deep sea baritone sax that climbs to the surface and punctuates every second beat, a hundred mile an hour poundin’ pianer, a guitar that hammers on the chords like life itself depends on it and a bass line (James Jamerson?) pinning the whole thing to the floor lest it falls off and causes an imbalance on the Richter Scale. And that’s just the first 30 seconds.

Martha introduces herself by gleefully kicking in the doors of pop. ‘Whenever I’m with him, somethin’ in-si-hide…starts to burnin’ and I’m filled with dee-za-hire…‘

Ah. So it ain’t about the summer weather in Detroit then. No! It is – like a gazillion Motown songs before and since, a heartfelt paean to the joys of young love, when the world’s your oyster and no-one, daddy-o, feels like you do. Holland-Dozier-Holland have captured lighting in a bottle here. Martha is beside herself with excitement and her willing Vandellas are being dragged along in her slipstream. Falsetto ‘Heat Wave!‘ backing vocals ramp it up further. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!‘ they go in the outro, the piano player’s fingers still locked on the groove, the sax player somehow saving enough breath to see his way to the song’s thumping, tumbling conclusion.

Motown may have billed itself ‘The Sound of Young America’, but (Love Is Like A) Heat Wave could be billed ‘The Sound Of Young Motown’ and few would counter that claim. Give it a good listen again and tell me I’m wrong.

A decade or so later, back over this side of the Atlantic, another young songwriter with a magpie approach to creation was cribbing the chords and calls and response that he could twist into his own shapes. That Paul Weller should dig black American pop music is never in doubt; from the version of Wilson Pickett’s Midnight Hour on The Jam’s second album, via the You Can’t Hurry Love bassline that drives A Town Called Malice to the smattering of choice cuts across his b-sides (Move On Up, Stoned Out Of My Mind), The Jam’s frontman knew a well-crafted pop-soul hit when he heard it.

The Jam cut their version of Heat Wave for their fourth album Setting Sons. Maybe they were low on original material. Maybe they just fancied cutting loose. Either way, their ramalama take on Heat Wave closes the second side of the record in good, old-fashioned killer style. Dig it!

The Jam – Heat Wave

It’s the clang of the Rickenbacker…the call and response of Buckler and Foxton, the Vandellas to Weller’s Martha…the incessant pummelling of the drum kit…the vamping piano player…the subtle introduction of a brass section that would soon be far more prominent in the sound of The Jam…but, for now, the sheer, goddammed urgency of it all. Let’s get this album finished and let’s finish it NOW!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!

 

* And to answer that titular question: sadly, it has. That’ll be a job in education for ye,

Gone but not forgotten, Kraut-y

When I Put My Foot Down To The Floor

Craig McAllister

David Bowie‘s Low is an album with its own split personality. On side one you get the interesting guitar stuff, heavily treated and effected tracks that cut against the punkish musical landscape of the era. On side two you get the icy cool of Bowie’s (and Eno’s) mainly vocal-free take on Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream and the new sounds he’s been soaking up in Berlin.

Even the synths on the record have split personality. On side two, they glide with slow, peaceful majesty, their glazed, chromium sheen teleporting Bowie and his gang into a cocooned and shiny, space age-y future.

On side one though, they fizz and spark, adding a layer of Brunel-ish heavy industry to the tracks; Speed Of Life whooshes in on a rapid fade-in, immediately disorientating, as if you’ve walked in on a band already half way through their thing. Breaking Glass is over in a groovy flash, a Teutonic military two step that somehow gives birth to the sound of Franz Ferdinand amongst its sub-two minute robotic funk. Sound And Vision‘s steam-powered rhythm section hisses and pops its way into the top ten like a Clydeside shipbuilders’ yard in 1901.

The whole side is coated in interesting and forward-looking instrumentation.

At the heart of it though – and you’ve no doubt picked up on this – is that all of them feature fantastically-recorded drums; live, in the room – in your room – slap-heavy snare, reverberating toms, kick-like-a-mule bass…Dennis Davis sounds terrific across everything here. Low is considered a progressive, era-changing album (as it should), but little has been made of just how goddam in-your-face percussive it all is. Next time you listen to Low – properly, on a turntable or a CD (not a crappy mp3 like the one below) – hone in on the drums and rhythms and be dazzled

I’ve long-held a fascination for Always Crashing In the Same Car. I love the unfolding, slo-mo drama of it all. Verlaine-ish vapour trails of linear guitar, interesting chords, a bassline that would be played twice as fast and employed later on Heroes, Bowie’s voice close in your ear, low one moment, sky-high the next, his phrasing never less than immaculate. It occurred to me just there as I listened again that he even employs a sneaky wee strung out but nonetheless Beatleish ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah‘ vocal adlib midway through. Listen out for it – it’s unmistakable. The more you listen, it seems, the more you spot, even all this time later. Ask a random to make a list of their ten favourite Bowie tracks and it won’t be there…but it probably should be.

David Bowie – Always Crashing In the Same Car

Russian 7″ single sleeve for ‘Always Crashing…’

Is it a study in cocaine psychosis? Bowie was living on a diet of milk, red peppers and Grade A pop star-quality pharmaceuticals at this point, so it may well be. Or is it Bowie’s metaphorical confession of a life collapsing around him as he makes the same mistake time and again? It may well be both?

Or it may, as some biographers have claimed, be Bowie’s retelling of the time he and Iggy Pop were cruising the Berlin city street late at night when they happened upon a dealer who’d recently ripped Bowie off. Off his head on drugs, or just off is head in general, Bowie chose to repeatedly ram his Mercedes into his former dealer’s car, then made his escape to the underground car park of the hotel he was living in and drove around in circles until his ire had subsided.

That ‘Jas-amine…I saw you peeping….when I put my foot down to the floor,‘ line. Some say ‘Jesamine’ is an alias for Iggy Pop. Others say it’s an alias for Bowie himself, writing in third person as he watches is own behaviour from the sidelines.

That can’t be right, that story, can it? Can it?

As unlikely as it sounds, Bowie himself introduced the song during his 1999 VH1 Storytellers performance with a very similar preamble, so who knows. You’ll find clips of the song online, but search as I have, I can’t find the video evidence of the song’s introduction for absolute proof. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, I say.

Gone but not forgotten

Andy Kershaw

Craig McAllister

I was sad to hear of Andy Kershaw’s death last week. We were away, and for the hours after the news had come through, I was a wee bit quiet and introspective, the way most of us go when a person in the public eye who you’ve admired from a distance passes.

I noticed an immediate spike in the stats for this page, with traffic making its way to a post I’d written about George Michael a few years ago. After George had died, Andy took to Facebook to say he couldn’t work out the level of public outpouring he was reading about a man who was essentially a pop singer and, in Andy’s words, not a ‘real’ singer, or a very good one at that.

No, no, no, Andy, I replied on his feed (to a flurry of thumbs up and further comment); when a popstar of your youth dies, a little bit of you dies too. It doesn’t matter if you liked the music, that’s almost secondary. It’s the records, tied to memories, people and places, that evokes happier, simpler times in your life, when mortgages and bills and adulting were unknown entities on some far-off and hazy horizon. That loss of childhood and innocence is what people are really upset about. And besides, Andy, George Michael was a fucking great writer and singer and, as it turned out, an even greater human being, so choose your pot-shot targets carefully, man.

In the George Michael article. I called him a twonk. Not something Kershaw would have got worked up about, but something that, since last week, has bothered me. People arriving at that article – titled, pointedly, Listen Without Prejudice – might think I had no time for Andy Kershaw, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.

I volunteer with an Ayrshire-based music promoter called Freckfest. Back in the old days of 2014, when Andy was far more active on social media – especially with a book to sell – I got in touch with him to suggest he bring his one-man ‘No Off Switch’ show to Irvine’s 100-seater Harbour Arts Centre. A date was agreed and the gig was go.

As the date of the gig loomed large, I got a daily text, every morning before 8 o’clock, to ask how sales were doing. In all honesty, they were slow. In fact, they’d stopped. A week out from showtime, we’d sold about half the HAC’s 100 capacity and it looked like we’d sell little more. He phoned me out of the blue one day while I was in the staff room at lunchtime, ‘Andy Kershaw’ appearing on my screen above a picture of him in his standard checked shirt.

‘Shite’, I thought, my heart missing several beats as I navigated my way out of the staffroom conversation I was embroiled in and made my way into the sanctity of the corridor.

‘Andy!’ I answered cheerfully whilst shitting myself. (At this point in my life, no-one mildly famous had ever called me on my phone, let alone unannounced and while I was at work). ‘What’re you saying to it?!’

‘Have we sold any more tickets, Craig? Even one? Because I’m thinking that maybe you ought to get around the town of Irvine with as many posters as you can print, like I told you to do, and pop them every chip shop, hairdressers, corner shop and bakers, like I told you to do, and demand that they display one prominently in each of their windows.’ The voice was exactly that of the radio broadcaster Andy Kershaw, which, obviously it would be, but one that nonetheless was ridiculous in the context of the call. ‘If you put posters all over the town, Craig, THEY WILL COME, mark my words.’

I was midway through suggesting it wasn’t too late to maybe postpone the show, re-evaluate our expectations and maybe put it on at a later date, when the school bell rang for the end of lunchtime.

‘Where the hell are you, Craig? In a blooody schoool?!?’

‘Eh, aye, actually, Andy. That’s exactly where I am.’

‘What the blooody hell are you doing in a schoool?’

‘I work in a school. I’m a teacher.’

‘A teacher!? A teacher?!’ said Andy, with the same incredulity that he’d normally reserve for someone who’d suggested he play Twistin’ By The Pool by Dire Straits on his radio show. ‘You’re a school teacher? You’re not a promoter?’

‘Well, I AM a promoter, but I do that in my spare time. Freckfest is a voluntary organisation. We all have real jobs to work. But we love music and if we weren’t doing this gig, no-one else would be putting it on. We grew up in a town that was soaked in music and culture and in our own way, we’re doing our wee bit to bring music and culture back to a town that’s been starved of it for too long.’

And at that, the ice melted.

Andy couldn’t do enough for us. Instead of texting me daily to ask about slow ticket sales, he got on his own social media feed and began aggressively selling the show – ‘Get down to Irvine, y’shower of cloth-eared bastards, etc, those Freckfest guys and girls do a brilliant job of bringing interesting things to Irvine – don’t let them – and me – down.’

For the record, we had stuck posters in shop windows throughout the town, like he’d told us to do, but it was Andy’s vociferous and plentiful social media posting that helped sales crawl to a respectable 80+.

Just as he was about to go on, Andy asked me to introduce him on stage. With a gulp, I very quickly put together a spontaneous version of the rolling commentary that announces Bob Dylan every time he takes the stage.

‘Ladies and gentlemen. Our guest tonight appeared wide-eyed and blagging it on Live Aid’s TV coverage. He’s stood above rivers of human bones reporting on the genocide in Rwanda. He was the first white man to shake Nelson Mandela’s hand on his release from prison. He’s worked with the Rolling Stones, Billy Bragg and the Bhundu Boys, to name just three disparate acts. He turned down ‘I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here’, but he couldn’t turn down Freckfest’s offer of a show in Irvine. Ladies and gentlemen, please show your wild appreciation for Andy Kershaw!’

And on he went.

And on and on he went.

The show was running way over time…and he still hadn’t got to the bit about his involvement in Live Aid.

Just as the Kershaw radio show packed in everything he could fit and more, it was clear we weren’t going to hear about every aspect of his quite frankly Forrest Gump-ish life before the venue’s 11 oclock curfew. He’d tell a story, shout ‘Hit it, Jim!’ to the engineer in the soundbox and a track would play loudly while Andy grinned and shuffled his way through it, his faithful dog Buster sat at his feet.

‘Route 66 is a crap way to see America,’ he extoled. ‘Unless you’re into grain stores and farming. Hit it, Jim!’
Cue: The Stones’ version of ‘Route 66‘.

‘I once tracked down James Carr to a bedsit in the deep south and let him hear some his own music for the first time. It brought both of us to tears. Hit it, Jim!’
Cue: James Carr’s ‘You’ve Got My Mind Messed Up‘.

‘The first time I heard African guitars, I was ecstatic…giddy with life! Hit it, Jim!’
Cue: Bhundu Boys‘ ‘Hupenyu Hwangu‘.

 

Suddenly, he writes in ‘No Off Switch’, it was as if the room was being sprayed with a fountain of jewelled guitar notes. Then the whole band kicked in. It bounced. It chimed. It popped. The melodies and harmonies instantly lifted and brightened the spirits. The guitars wound round each other, capturing and tossing back and forth the prettiest of tunes, yet always engaging with sublime simplicity. Peel and I looked at each other, frozen and open-mouthed. For the duration of the first song, neither of us said a word. By the end I was grinning.

That’s Kershaw’s famed and infectious joie de vivre right there.

Afterwards we went for a pint, where Buster farted violently in the corner and he told me stories of hanging out with Neil Young and the Rolling Stones, the sort of stuff that never fails to impress me. For a wee while in the months after, we corresponded. He sent me a BBC video of a WWII thing that I’d seen him present. ‘That’d be great for the kids I teach, Andy,’ I told him…and the next thing, he’d sent me the digital file for classroom use. He’d message unexpectedly, promising to return and finish the rest of his show. It never did happen. Probably, the thought of chastising me daily for not putting posters up in Gregg’s was less appealing to him this time around. I wish I’d held him to his promise though.

Andy Kershaw had a life well-travelled and his show, and the accompanying book, barely scratched the surface.

You’ll read all sorts of stuff about Andy Kershaw, and not all of it flattering, but I was really taken by him and his enthusiasm for life and music. If you haven’t, you should read ‘No Off Switch’. It’s a really great book. Trust me on that.

See ye later, Andy.

Gone but not forgotten, Kraut-y

Brand New Heavies

Craig McAllister

May 1971. Marvin Gaye releases What’s Going On?, a musical tour de force of luscious, orchestral funk, dusted with hard-hitting socio-political lyrics that address the state of America. It’ll play everywhere for evermore; Marvin Gaye’s magnum opus, the album that took him from soul singer to auteur.

Six months later, In November 1971, Sly and the Family Stone release an album which is titled in direct response to Marvin’s question.

What’s Going On? asks Marvin.

There’s A Riot Goin’ On, retorts Sly. That’s what.

There’s A Riot Goin’ On won’t play everywhere for evermore. It’ll go to the top of the Billboard Charts, selling a million-plus copies on the way there, and be certified platinum as a result, but its brooding, mid-paced funk will blind-side everyone after the event. It’s a dense and murky album, overdubbed and saturated to hell, hissing in places with a lo-fi weediness that could give a Boots’ own-brand C90 a run for its money.

Gone in the main are Stone’s staple signatures; there are no fuzz-bass freak-outs, no four-to-the-floor stompers, no call-and-response soul-savers, and, apart from the excellent and evergreen Runnin’ Away, little in the way of those light-hearted, nursery rhymish sing-songs with Sister Rose that had the ability to set the charts alight with all the brilliance and colour of the Rockefeller Christmas Tree.

A product very much of its time, There’s A Riot Goin’ On is a downbeat record which reflected the singer’s move from east coast to west and found him more interested in the peripheral recreational activities of yr average ’70s musician than the music itself; the coke. And the women.

And the coke.

And the women.

Sony, in a desperate act to have new product on sale stuck out a Greatest Hits album. It’s a beauty, but you’ll know that already. Sly had enough credit in the metaphorical bank with the label that they allowed him to indulge himself, but he was now cancelling concerts and had taken up with the Black Panthers, who not only were keen to manage him, they were keen to manage him in a particular way, employing heavies and underworld gangsters to keep certain people away from Sly – his bandmates included.

With the new album so far from Stone’s immediate thoughts, drummer Greg Errico upped sticks (uh-huh) and left. And when the band eventually did book studio time, Stone would record his own parts when the group wasn’t there, going into the studio after hours, erasing what had been laid down that day and re-doing it like a proto-Prince, in his own way and all by himself.

In lieu of Errico, Stone employed the new-to-the-market Maestro Rhythm King MRK-2 drum machine. Unhappy with the pre-set sounds, Stone set to overdubbing two and three tracks of pitter-pattering drum machine until he was happy with the now unrecogniseable-from-stock beats. Further overdubs came in the form of many, many female vocalists, all of whom were wooed by Sly with the promise of a slot on his new album in return for…well, y’know…

Deed done, the vocals would be wiped. And another hopeful would show up the next night, with the same scenario. Ol’ Sly repeated this multiple times. The result was the lo-fi, saturated murkiness that has since come to define the record. It’s an album that, although released as a Family Stone record, bore the sole fingerprints of the group’s leader.

And yet…and yet…

It has something about it, not least the big single, Family Affair and the already-mentioned Runnin’ Away, but also the opener, Luv ‘N Haight.

Sly and the Family Stone – Luv ‘n Haight

Wafting in on a wave of mid-paced wah-wah and bubbling bass, the track has Sly’s coke-rasp voice echoed above and below and between layers of horns and sky-high aahing and oohing female backing vocals, the singer scatting and vocalising about feeling so good while his sister takes the verses. Pianos clang, forever on the verge of being almost in tune, vampish Fender Rhodes ghost chords weave in and around the melody and those layers of horns begin to separate into fragments of the sort of incidental music you might find in Quincy. It’s an astonishing band performance, more so given that they were purportedly at odds with one another at the time.

For an album that puts the stack-heeled boot into the fake notion of the hippy dream, and a song titled punnily to reflect this, Luv ‘n Haight is, amazingly, pretty groovy. You’d never know there was a riot goin’ on by listening to this. The group sound as tight and together as ever. And that programmed drum pattern? It’s extraordinary, not entirely artificial to these ears either…and not a million miles from the sort of stuff Jaki Liebezeit would play a year later on Can’s Ege Bamyasi. An influence on Krautrock’s metronomic and polyryhthmic very own rhythm king? You’d have to think so.

Psssst! Wanna hear the album in all its intricate instrumental glory? Luv ‘n Haight sans vocals sounds terrific. Take a bow, the internet.

 

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find

She’s Got A Brassiere!

Craig McAllister

Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl is the greatest film to come out of Scotland no, the UK  no, the world bar none. Any one random, washed-out coloured still from the film will instantly stir more emotion, more melancholy, more longing for simpler times than any other memorial device in existence. It will also have the uncanny knack of pulling the entire script verbatim from some well-accessed cerebral filing cabinet from under my greying (but definitely not thinning) hair, the film’s never-ending treasure trove of rich one liners and cultural reference points shared and appreciated by whoever I’m with at the time. 

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a new town (in my case, Irvine) which was the architectural mirror image of Cumbernauld’s jutting white symmetry and undulating green spaces. Maybe it’s because I too played terrible football on an unforgiving orange blaize pitch with a merciless Mitre 5 that stung like six of Fowler’s belt if it caught you on the back of the thigh on a February morning.

Maybe it’s because every modern school in the New Town area looked exactly like Gregory’s (the real-life Abronhill High School in Cumbernauld) and everyone I knew at my school looked like an exact clone of Gregory or any of his hapless pals; flares, skinny school blazers that were either too short or too long in the arm, shapeless grey jumpers, shirt collars as long as the nose on Concorde, gap-toothed, awkward boys with haircuts that fell somewhere between Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks abomination and your mum’s rapid-fire Sunday night handiwork, attempted with one eye on That’s Life and the other on the smouldering inch and a half of ash teetering from the Benson & Hedges wedged in her mouth.

If you’re of a certain age, I daresay Gregory’s Girl will have had the same effect on you.

From first minute to last I could identify with just about everything in it. The mazy pathways that led around exotic corners of the bright, white housing estates. The chip shop wrapping their 15p wares in brown paper and newspaper. The head teacher wafting stealthily through the corridors, his bat-winged cloak following him like dark trouble itself. The P.E. teacher’s caterpillar moustache and whistle. That row of hopefuls he has lined up at the trial where Dorothy arrives? We’ve all stood in that row, willing someone to pick us not last. “You all know what I’m looking for,” he says with a serious face, “A goalscorer. And that requires two basic skills: ball control, shooting accuracy and the ability to read the game.” 

The entirety of Gregorys’ Girl was like my life on film. Everything, that is, except the true subject matter at its core. Aged 11 when Gregory’s Girl first made it to the big screen – the supporting feature, believe it or not, to the far-less interesting but far more decorated Chariots Of Fire –  I was a good four or five years younger than the characters in the film and nowhere near as interested in the fairer sex as Gregory and his hormonally-rampant friends. It wouldn’t be long, but for now, girls were mainly just insignificant. Strange and alien. Not really annoying, just gang-like and giggling. Certainly not to be talked to. Not to be looked at, even. We had Subbuteo and bikes and Madness and Adam and The Ants. That was more than enough. 

The music of Gregory’s Girl collected – Colin Tully

Arguably, the most iconic thing about Gregory’s Girl is its soundtrack. Composed by Scotsman Colin Tully, who was given a VHS of the soundtrack-free film by Forsyth and asked to come up with something suitable, its meandering jazz-funk and light soprano saxophone stylings are so out of step for the times it was made, yet heard nowadays they provide an instant passport back to 1981 far more than Grey Day or Stand And Deliver might.

All it takes is a crack of compressed snare, or a tinkle of Fender Rhodes, or the slap of bubbling bass, or one of Tully’s own freewheeling sax solos and I’m right back on that blaize pitch, or in that dinner hall, or in that boring class – Gregory and his pals had the welcome distraction of early leaver Steve cleaning the classroom windows one day, I had an excitable, long-tongued dog running wildly around the playground during a particularly tedious slot of double French with which to while away the long minutes.

Bella, and indeed bella. Or should that be joli, joli, Mme McGlone? 

  • * The music embedded above comes from a digitised tape made available by its composer to a friend and subsequently shared when Tully passed away from cancer. For a soundtrack that has never been commercially available, 45 years on, this might be as good as it gets. Enjoy listening to it!
Colin Tully, 1954 -2021

 

 

 

 

Football, Gone but not forgotten

Legs Eleven

Craig McAllister

Davie Cooper didn’t play for my team, but still, he was just about my favourite player of the eighties. As a teenager, I never missed a Scotland game at Hampden and Cooper – Super Cooper, if you were a Daily Record sub-editor – was an ever-present in those teams; teams carved from squads of Scottish football legends – Miller! McLeish! Souness! Dalglish! – who, through a mixture of elan and class and stubborn Scottish grit regularly progressed to World Cups.

Among his peers, Copper dazzled. ‘Give Davie the ball‘ might’ve been the only instruction the team needed before kick-off. He was, to quote Ray Wilkins, ‘a Brazilian trapped in a Scotsman’s body,’ and Cooper could, and usually did, waltz past half the opposition, inside of them, outside of them, the ball tied to his Adidas with invisible elastic. With a dip of the shoulder and the sudden bend of a well-tanned leg, he’d turn a defender back to front and upside down, get himself to the byline, look up through the fringe of an outgrown and collapsing 1950s-style quiff and stand a ball to the back post for a Charlie Nicholas or a Maurice Johnston to do the inevitable.

Cooper had a swagger. He wasn’t like the players of today, those identikit, finitely-coached superhumans whose performances are tracked by data and details and tweaked like robots accordingly. Davie played on pure instinct, a street player, a tanner ba’ player as they love to say up here, a gallusly swashbuckling left winger with a devastating left foot to match. He could thread the ball between the narrowest of international defences. He could bend it as sweepingly as the corrugated roof that covered the West Terracing behind the Hampden goal. He could crack a shot as accurately and deadly as the most highly-trained of marksmen. So, yeah. Davie never played for my team, but he played for my country and the thrill of seeing him in the starting line-up was always a rush. They’re very different players, but I’ll wager there are wee guys today who, on seeing Scott McTominay’s name in the starting line-up, feel exactly the same way. (I know I do.)

Here’s a thing:

Davie Cooper once dribbled past me.

I can still replay it in my head – it’s playing right now as I type this – and I was certain I could date the time and place with all the accuracy and confidence of a Cooper cross, but as it turns out, I maybe can’t.

As I remember it, we’re walking down Irvine High Street, my friends and I. It’s a Friday lunchtime in late May and we’re in 6th year at school, a month away from leaving school behind forever. Being senior pupils, we’re trusted to make our own way, unaccompanied by anyone from the school, to the Magnum each Friday afternoon to take part in a selection of sports activities that the school has booked for us. There’s squash and badminton, 5-a-sides, of course, table tennis and swimming (and the flumes). Sometimes, we’ll just go and have a Slush Puppy and sit in the viewing gallery, feet up against the glass, being harmless but loud and annoying to tutting members of the public. We all look forward to these teacher-free afternoons; the perfect sharpener for the anticipation of the weekend just ahead.

Unlike in more recent years, this day in May sees the High Street properly bustling. The shops are full and varied, the pavements crowded with Irvinites going about their business. It’s a sunny, late spring day and there’s a thrum of activity and good living just above the noise of the blue buses that belch past with regularity. We’ve just passed the Kings Arms, with its top-floor wonderland ‘The Attic’ yet to be discovered, when from out of the Ladbrokes bookies next door pours half the Motherwell football team, shellsuited in claret and amber and availed of their weekly wages that they’ve no doubt staked on themselves winning the Scottish Cup Final that they’ll contest the next day against Dundee United at Hampden Park. Being an upwardly mobile New Town, Irvine has a fancy hotel – the Skean Dhu – and it is here that the football teams who are playing at Hampden (the ‘Well, the Russian national team) and the bands who play the Magnum (Thin Lizzy, Spandau Ballet) will bunk down on pure white sheets of Egyptian cotton before or after the event.

Davie Cooper is among the group of Motherwell players and as they weave their way between Irvine’s shoppers, my hero and I find ourselves walking towards one another. I go to my right to let him pass. Davie goes to his left…which is my right… and we’re left in that awkward stand-off that we’ve all been in. I go to my left. Davie goes to his right…which is my left, and we’re at stalemate again. Without a second thought, Cooper dips a shoulder, fakes left but goes right, brushing past my hips and schoolbag as he does so and suddenly he’s past me. I say loudly and excitedly to Davie Davies, “Davie Cooper’s just dribbled past me!” and as we turn to see the back of him, Cooper looks back and, hearing what I’ve said to my pal, gives me a wee wink. What a thrill!

I hope Cooper was as brave with the bookie as he was with one of his many mazy runs. Motherwell would go on to win the Cup the next day, winning 4-3 in extra time, Ladbrokes’ loss the Motherwell squad’s gain.

Good wee story that.

My only issue with it is that I left school in June 1987. Motherwell didn’t win the Scottish Cup until four years later, in May 1991. Davie Cooper definitely dribbled past me in his full Motherwell training kit. That much is true. And I definitely made the remark to Davie Davis. Yet, here I am in 2026 baffled by it all.

Davie Cooper. Like the roots of this story, a true natural mystic.

Bob Marley – Natural Mystic

There were a couple of Davie Copper-related things posted online this past week and without – quite clearly – scanning the articles, I made the assumption that the anniversary of Davie’s death was this weekend. In reality, next Saturday (23rd March) will see the 31st anniversary of his passing. So not only is this post probably a week too early, it has me thinking back to that day in 1987 – no! – 1991! – when – as a schoolboy, or definitely maybe not – he swept past me as if I were an Eastern European right back defending the six yard box at Hampden Park. Does anyone else have a memory as warped and buckled as mine?