john douglas – Plain Or Pan

Optimistically Speaking

August 25, 2026August 25, 2026 Craig McAllister

This piece was originally written a month, maybe even six weeks ago, but I was waiting on permission from various sides to post it. In the interim, the Trashcans suddenly, unexpectedly and shockingly lost John Douglas, their glue and calming balm, and so any queries for permission to use it were quite rightly forgotten. Lest I’m accused of saturation, It’ll very likely be the last TCS-related piece on here for a while, but with permission now granted, it’s a fine way to draw a line under the most intense period in the Trashcans’ forty years’ history. Read on or scroll on, I’m not offended.

There’s a new Trashcan Sinatras record out just now. Released on Friday 31st July, Ever The Optimist is the group’s first in ten years. If you were a lazy, cliched critic, you might call it a return to form, but that would suggest they had somehow lost their golden touch at some point. To their dedicated listenership, it zings and sings – like their six other albums – with unravelling melodies and subtly brilliant musicianship; a million, kaleidoscopic ideas packed into its 11 songs. Initial response has been very encouraging to the point of fevered hyperbole. ‘Their best album ever‘, sort of stuff. It’s certainly, without question, one of their best. But you knew that already.

I’ve been working most of the first half of this year on a project that’ll see the story of the new record being told in print. A couple of months ago, in a deadline-looming fit of panic, the group asked if I could pull some of our interview quotes and create a short song-by-song commentary on the album specifically for press in foreign territories. Cool! Over a midnight shift and crossed fingers, I pulled together an article that, I hoped, would cut the mustard.

Reading back again the whole article that I’d written, the record spinning in the background, it seemed too good, too informative, too important even, not to share more parochially, so with the go-ahead from all concerned, I’ve put it below. Think of it as a very, very, very abridged version of what will be published at some point down the line. An amuse-bouche, if y’like.

Trashcan Sinatras – ‘Ever The Optimist’

It’s been over a decade since the last Trashcan Sinatras album, but the group has been anything but idle. In the intervening years, the Trashcans have been quietly going about their business of writing and refining and finding ‘the ‘hing’ that will, as ever, make your heart swell and swoon like it did when you first heard Cake or I’ve Seen Everything or Weightlifting or any of their half dozen previous classic albums.

‘Ever The Optimist’ is a record that hums and thrums with the Trashcans’ signature melodic touch and unmatched gift for lyrical punch. It’s a collection of eleven songs (or a round dozen if you’re lucky to be in Japan), all of which will thrill the group’s dedicated, pan-global fanbase and should, if those algorithms play the game properly, garner a new set of devotees into the bargain.

‘Ever The Optimist’ is, as is the TCS way, a record comprised of songs stewed slowly and over time before being reshaped by the constituent members of the group and Trashcanified into the sort of ear-friendly shapes that have garnered critical acclaim for the entirety of the group’s thirty-five year career as recording artists. Songs that began life as woozy mountain cabin sketches. Songs that have their roots in late-night poker sessions. Songs that are born from walking the dog. They all coalesce into one ebbing and flowing labour of love that may just be one of 2026’s very best albums.

SIDE ONE

Ever The Optimist

Less careerist and more careering, the Trashcans find themselves contemplating their position in the world. ‘We’re all gambling, trying to hold it together,’ sings Francis, a reference to both the smoky poker nights of yore and life’s cruel optimism:loss ratio. Beginning life as a breezy acoustic tune, it was reworked into a stomping, piano-driven thumper and is a real clarion call to listeners of the long-player. Listen out for the Pop Art Poem-aping ‘mmmmaybee’ and ‘fii-iire!’ in the first verse and the great nagging guitar part around the 1.46 mark. Like its title itself, this song hints at a great set of songs to follow.

John: We used to go to poker nights, smoking and drinking. I wrote a song about it called ‘Gambling’ and the finished version of ‘Ever The Optimist’ came from that. Some of the characters that sat around the poker table ended up in the song.

Paul: The finished song arrived easily. It all came together, this sophisticated pop song, in no time at all. Nothing was over rehearsed, so it all sounds fresh.

Games For the ZX Spectrum

‘It doesn’t matter what I did before, I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.’

With its see-sawing melody and call and response chorus, this will be, we predict, an immediate favourite. Written right at the tail end of the album sessions – ‘contrary to appearances, we move pretty fast,’ points out Francis – it owes its idiosyncratic title to the small group of retrophiles who continue, even in 2026, to write games for the unfashionable ZX Spectrum, the Trashcans drawing clear parallels between those dedicated furrow-ploughers and themselves.

Paul: You know how you get these retrophile guys nowadays who write games for the outmoded ZX Spectrum because it reminds them of their youth?

I was trying to draw a line between those guys and us making a Trashcans album. You know, we’re also making a thing that’s just for kicks, and it’s filtered through the eyes of the past – it was fun when we were young, but nobody’s really interested anymore, except for maybe a very small group of dedicated people.

Francis: I like this a lot. We had the album finished, and I’d promised Paul Savage (producer) that that was all the songs, there’d be no more on the record, then Paul Livingston said, ‘Oh, here’s a tape.’

He’d called it Games For the ZX Spectrum but he could just as easily have called it ‘Chocolate Teapot’. What’s the relevance of my songwriting? Why am I doing this? For what reason? It was a really great song, so it made it onto the album.

Bad Husband

Featuring Camera Obscura’s Tracyanne Campbell on co-vocals, Bad Husband is an upbeat and fresh duet that belies the song’s subject matter, with two unique voices from Scot-pop’s outer fringes melding together quite beautifully. Tracyanne’s vocal dips and swoops around the melody as Frank sings about poor judgements, bad feelings and storms coming. ‘Hey! This isn’t working!’ they both admit far too joyfully. Never has separation sounded so upbeat – ‘like the best party in a 1970’s Castlepark living room,’ to quote fellow Irvine alumnus John Niven.

John: Bad Husband had been brewing for a while. Some of the rhythm was from an old musical vignette created by Simon Dine. He’s always sending us his musical collages; the same thing over and over for five minutes. It’s a sonic thing…a feel…a groove… and sometimes, like with Bad Husband, the little collage inspires something really great.

Francis: I had this idea that Tracyanne Campbell should duet on it. This would be our very own Islands In The Stream! Tracyanne’s vocal was instantly magic, you know. I sent it to the rest of the group; ‘Guys! What d’you think of THIS?!?’

Stephen: Tracyanne’s vocals are terrific. The track worked well before we had her on there, but her singing just elevated it above and beyond. Her and Frank’s vocals really blend and hit off one another. I like that she’s almost speaking at points and at other times she’s swooping around the melody. Terrific stuff.

The Bitter End

‘When you’re lost and lonely, you can phone me on the way home.’

Already a radio staple thanks to Billy Sloan’s enthusiastic rotation and curation on his late-night Radio Scotland show, The Bitter End is a proper foot-down-and-drive rush. From its first metallic guitar K.O. to the final cymbal splash, The Bitter End leaps from the speakers like a box-fresh band jam. It may surprise listeners to note that the track began life 20 years ago, the product of a fuggy and foggy wee hours recording session on an eight-track machine that Frank had somehow rehomed in his Glasgow flat. ‘Did I really get up in the middle of the night and record something?’ wondered Paul in the morning. ‘I pressed play and heard this Rockpile-ish rocker.’ With Frank finishing off most of the words, The Bitter End sat patiently in the drawer marked ‘someday’ and waited for its time to shine. Its time, evidently, is now.

Paul: In the run up to choosing songs to record for this album, we put together a playlist of about 40 demos, including things we’d written from years ago that we didn’t care about, everything we had really, and Davy put The Bitter End on it. And everybody was like, ‘Hey! Bitter End sounds great!’

Davy: With Paul Savage in Chem 19, we gave it a bash, pretty much replicating the original demo – even the lyrics stayed as they were, which is unusual for us – and it all kinda clicked. Everyone was into it, so we worked it up into the recorded version that became the taster for the record.

Stephen: There’s, like, ten million guitars on this track, loud and brash, it’s got a great bouncing riff, and it all sounds instant and fantastic.

A View From Nowhere

Long-time Trashcans fans will be delighted to hear the return of the major 7ths on this track, a Davy-birthed strumalong that tips its jaunty hat to the unspooling melodies of Bacharach and David as arranged by John Douglas. Davy returned with its completed lyric after an inspirational walk with the dog. A View From Nowhere features terrific vapour-trailing harmonies from Frank atop a fuzzy, sustained guitar/synth break midway through. Many lesser bands will simply throw in the towel when it dawns on them that they won’t ever be able to write a song as lush and poppy as this.

John: This was one of Davy’s that had a charm, a real nice mood about it. Everyone straight away said this should be in the frame for the record.

Davy: I can’t remember when I wrote this. It wasn’t that long ago, maybe five years ago. It was written fairly quickly, a wee three chord thing that I’d recorded on my phone.

Stephen: Paul Savage is a great producer and arranger. He helped shape this track. ‘Try the bass like this, Davy,’ ‘Play that instead, Stephen.’

I love the sleepy quality that Paul got from the bridge. The whole thing is almost soft rock, no harsh sounds. It’s all just muted and soft. It’s a great wee mellow pop song.

Hold On To Today

The evergreen Green Gartside, a septuagenarian, you may be surprised to learn, heard enough promise in our rough and crappy-sounding demo and was ‘keen to try some singing on your lovely, little song.’ The result is fairly astonishing. The centrepiece of the album, Hold On To Today is subtle and lightly pulsing, a ballad with the beating heart of Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross recast as a gentle Brian Wilson tearjerker. Tinkling music boxes, lightly picked acoustics, ping-ponging electrics, stacked harmonies, sudden stops, unexpected changes and an exquisite outro … Hold On To Today closes side one of the album and will leave you breathless, frozen in wonder and momentarily unable to flip the record. Music is a powerful thing.

John: When Davy initially played us this, it was far less arranged than it ended up. The structure of it was really different to how it now sounds. But it had something. Davy wasn’t quite yet there with it, but the rest of us knew there was enough there to persevere with.

Francis: I changed the key a wee bit, we all played around with the arrangement, John made it a bit spacier…and then Davy somehow got Green Gartside to sing on it.

Davy: We gave Green the freedom to sing what he wanted, and what he gave us was fantastic.

Paul: It’s a beauty, It’s a good wee song, that. And it has a false ending. It’s the perfect song to close side one of the record.

SIDE TWO

The Associated Funk

A post-punk thrash that brings to mind, in feeling rather if not sonics, A Happy Pocket’s ‘The Genius I Was’. The Associated Funk is linear, propulsive and purposeful, the soundtrack of a life unravelling messily to the regimented sound of sequencers and a motorik disco beat. TCS fans will immediately spot the lyrical lift from Wild Pendulum’s ‘Let Me Inside (Or Let Me Out)’, Paul recycling an old line to furnish his new song. ‘It was written in a mountain cabin and filmed for a Patreon vlog,’ explains the writer. ‘I was expecting something bucolic, folky and mountain cabin-y, not this A-ha/Tubeway Army stramash!’

Paul: ‘Okay, I’m gonnae book a cabin for three days, and I’m gonnae buy a bunch of weed, I’m gonnae take all my stuff up there and see if I can write and record a song from scratch.’

Davy: I liked Paul’s demo straightway. It was a total stramash, very chaotic and thrashy, but I got a New Order-y vibe from it. I knew it would work. In the group’s hands it didn’t really change much. The album version is pretty much a carbon copy of the demo that Paul had made.

Francis: Paul’s really good at finding new and interesting ways to write. And on The Associated Funk, with its synths and clangs and the electronic-ness of it all, there’s a great tune in there. It has a really bright melody.

Stephen: The riff is very good, it’s very metronomic.

Rome

Reggae James Bond. A dubby trip. A scraping, jangling, sixties TV theme with John Barry harpsichords, descending, twirling strings, bone-rattling percussion and the sticky, sonic fingerprints of Simon Dine all over its claustrophobic and eerie arrangement. John and Francis duet in the verses, double dare one another in the choruses and soar in the post guitar break, a wheezing and sliding, Gilmourish, Frippish racket. For clarity, it’s a song about friends who really shouldn’t hang out with each other. Also for clarity, it’s a beauty.

Paul: From Simon’s sound snippet, this one was instantly great. What the fuck was it? Weird-sounding reggae, in 3 / 4 time, that’s what it was. The descending strings were already there, the reggae bassline too, so I put chords on it. And made a chorus and a verse. And then I put some words to it.

Stephen: Frank and John do a great job, trading lines, coming in and out. It’s got a very good vocal on it. I love the chorus and the way it soars out of the verses.

John: It’s moody noir. I think the bass is brilliant on it. I think it’s got a vibe. And it’s kind of dictated by the bass and the kit. The star of the show here is the rhythm section.

Melodramatic

‘If you don’t leave it alone, it will never get better.’

With the band having just laid down The Bitter End and with the studio still set up for maximum guitars, bass and drums, Melodramatic was thrashed out in the time it takes to listen to. ‘Maybe it’s mind over matter’ goes the chorus, its stack of overlapping vocals and driving rhythm clearly on more than nodding terms with any number of those melody and tune-obsessed west of Scotland guitar bands you might mention in passing.

Paul: This is from about the same time as The Bitter End. I was playing about with this 4-track thing in my bedroom, and Frank was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing in there, but it sounds great!’ So I finished it off.

Davy: I like that, once the singing starts, it doesn’t really stop. Frank just keeps going verse after verse, chorus after chorus, from beginning to end.

Birds I Couldn’t Identify

‘If there’s one thing The White Album has taught me, it’s that you can write a song about anything!’

A great title with an allegorical aptness, Birds I Couldn’t Identify tells the story of Paul’s trip to Rishikesh, where he spent time meditating in the foothills of the Himalayas. ‘It was all quite beautiful and bizarre,’ recalls Paul. ‘We chanted a mantra for two hours every night and meditated in different places during the day, ate amazing food. I felt wonderful! Of course I went to the Beatles Ashram (in awe), then wrote this a couple of days later.’

Trashcans fans of old will delight in the climbing chord sequence and ad-libbed, high and breathy ‘yeahs’ that Francis does at the beginning. The melody that he wrings from Paul’s words is really quite something, long and floaty and, I suppose, meditative in its own way. It’d be interesting to poll listeners after they’ve lived with this album for a few months – I reckon Birds I Couldn’t Identify will be one of the favourites.

Paul: This song’s got a really natural melody that’s very good, a bit weird, but very good. I wrote the lyrics and stuff in India, in Rishikesh.

John: Straight away, when Paul played it to us, I was thinking, ‘This is a really good one.’ It was an instant hit. I fell in love with it straight away.

Stephen: This is a cracker. It’s fantastic.

Learning To Love Your Ghost

A shimmering, slow and stately album closer that builds to a tasteful crescendo of rifling drums and long-noted synths, Learning To Love Your Ghost is, as that old cliché goes, a bit of a grower. A handful of plays will have you fully appreciating its windswept drama and the way it’s carried along on the same sort of major to minor chord changes that make Wild Pendulum’s ‘Autumn’ so enduring. Learning To Love Your Ghost is, as the group cryptically puts it, about ‘inner orbits and outer space.’ As a welcome bonus, once it’s finished, it’ll have you reaching for the record to turn it over and start from side one again.

Davy: There’s an old demo I did years ago, just ideas really, not a song. And it had this bit and this bit and that bit, y’know, parts that the others might take inspiration from, maybe turn it into something, and I had the ‘Death Star split the atom’ line in there, and Paul jumped on that.

Paul: It was this two-minute epic that Davy had written that didn’t really make any sense musically or lyrically, and I just loved it. But it needed a verse.

John: I’d been through my illness, and I just wrote about that. My central station, my inner thing was invaded. We got a great song from a difficult situation.

‘Ever The Optimist’ is an album by the Trashcan Sinatras. Play it once, you’ll play it often.

If you don’t yet own it, you can find it easily in all good music retailers. Why not buy the ‘Goldfinch Gold Vinyl with hand Numbered Sleeve‘ direct from the group?

The Trashcan Sinatras are:

John Douglas

Stephen Douglas

Davy Hughes

Paul Livingston

Francis Reader

‘Ever The Optimist’ Personnel:

Simon Dine

Paul Savage

Iain Hutchison

Traceyanne Campbell

Green Gartside

(If you made it this far, thanks for hanging around.)

Gone but not forgotten, Live!

Everything Was Enhanced By You

August 5, 2026 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