Wisdom from Big Noise...

On the early days

In the year of the first-ever Eurovision song contest, other chart presences included Bill Haley’s Rock a-Beatin’ Boogie, Bill Haley & His Comets’ Rock Around the Clock, David Whitfield’s When You Lose the One You Love, the Hilltoppers’ Only You, Eve Boswell’s Pickin’ A Chicken and Alma Cogan’s Never Do a Tango with an Eskimo. Truly a mixed bag – or Sheena Easton for short.

The impact of skiffle had been as sudden as my wife’s mood changes, as deep as the Loch Ness monster’s cellar and as permanent as our World Cup failure

On Sydney Devine

We can say with some certainty that the Ricky Barnes All Stars was Scotland’s first rock’n’roll band, followed shortly afterwards by acts like Butch and the Bandits, the Saints, the Kinsmen, the Falcons, at least two Crusaders and many many more. We can also say the All Stars were responsible for the country’s first rock’n’roll riot. We can further say, no matter how high our eyebrows rise beyond our foreheads as we say it, that Sydney Devine stopped the first rock’n’roll riot. We can say all that because it’s in the history books... but as it turns out, it’s almost certainly utter bobbins.

Sydney came second in the Tommy Steele contest, and his biog Simply Devine has several choice tales to tell about touring with Alex, partying with girls and generally acting like a rock star. Maybe it took a while for us Scots to generate a star with global status, but we had the partying sorted from right early on. Yeah.

On Scottish wheech

Although Good and Robinson later went to court over the Rockingham title – a tad dim since there actually was a Lord Rockingham who could object to them both – the affiliation lasted long enough for the band to go on tour and record the famous jazz spoof, Hoots, Mon – a take on A Hundred Pipers which stopped swinging long enough for everyone to shout, ‘Hoots mon... there’s a moose loose aboot this hoose!’ Yes, isn’t that grand? Here we are swinging towards the sixties with no mention of Harry Lauder, except that one, and it was happening all over again. And it wasn’t over either. We should be proud to note that the first-ever UK rock’n’roll export to American TV was Edinburgh teenager Jackie Dennis. We should be less so that he’s remembered for swinging through his hits La Dee Dah and Purple People Eater, colourfully in black and white, in full kilt and regalia. Oh boy, Jackie had wheech. Unfortunately...

On tsunamis in music

Like the coming motorways, which would shave hours and even days off tours, the music scene was a multi-track road. A change in social trends led to new ways of thinking, which led to new ways of expressing ideas through instruments. People were thinking about the moon, Mars and galaxies, as well as nuclear holocaust, the Common Market and the coolest clubs to check out on Friday nights. And the vehicle best suited to tear up that motorway was the tsunami. Driven by the Beatles. Note to self: never use tsunamis as an analogy for rock’n’roll again.

On the TV revolution

On 1 January 1964, when everything was still shut and ‘Yer Uncle Michael’s affy tired, son’ was being slurred across the nation by slouched lumps on sofas, later-to-be-Sir Jimmy Savile launched Top of the Pops from a converted church in Manchester. Like all the other music shows, the bosses gave it a tentative one-season run, and of course it stayed on air for forty-two years. Episode one starred the up-and-coming Rolling Stones, the Hollies, Dusty Springfield, the Swinging Blue Jeans, the Dave Clark Five, Gene Pitney, Freddie and the Dreamers and no Beatles at all... well, except for the Beatles. A week later, more than seventy million people in the USA – that’s a quarter of the population, fact fans – tuned in to watch the JohnPaulGeorgeRingo thing on the Ed Sullivan Show.

On plastic

In the UK, 1965 started with the abolition of the death sentence, the death of Winston Churchill, a ban on TV cigarette advertising and the appearance of plastic in every imaginable household object, and some unimaginable ones too. (There’s a... thing... in my kitchen drawer that I daren’t even mention to the wife in case it’s for something evil and she’s just forgotten to do it to me yet.)

On the north-south divide

Then, like Marmalade and the Beatstalkers before them, they went south, changed their name to Trash, then White Trash, and still headline stadiums all over the galaxy. No, I’m joking – what actually happened was, they went south, the label tried to change their repertoire, a couple of singles did nothing, and they wound up being Marsha Hunt’s backing band. Thanks again, London, you complete bastard squad...

On the death of pirate Radio Scotland

The last broadcast of 14 August 1967 was an emotional affair, complete with piper, as were the wind-up clan balls held all over Scotland. As many DJs wound up with the new BBC pop station, Radio 1, there was indeed to be loss of life. Radio Scotland’s MD, Tommy Shields, who was known as Mister 242, died six months after the Marine Offences Act became law. It was noted, ‘We’re supposed to have abolished the death penalty.’

On violence

A very wise old editor once told me the best journalists were people who would be in jail if they hadn’t found newspapers. Perhaps that same is true of musicians, certainly from the first quarter century of Scottish rock’n’roll. Everyone viewed nights out at concerts as an escape from working-class drudgery – and for the guys on stage, at least, it stood a spitting chance of being permanent.But in early 1968, for many of the lads and lassies who went home to the schemes of Scotland once the house lights came up, it was a different story. Some spoke with six strings wired into an amp – others spoke with five fingers wrapped into a fist.

On the space race

Lulu celebrated Eurovision success with Boom Bang-a-Bang, in a vocal delivery that really did seem incredibly global. John married Yoko and Paul married Linda, while George Harrison and his wife Patti were fined for possession of marijuana. Brian Jones quit the Rolling Stones and was found dead in his swimming pool weeks later, while Judy Garland was found dead in her London flat. The USA took the lead in the space race when Armstong, Aldrin and the other one went to the moon. Allegedly. No really, don’t start me.

On Billy Connolly

Stealers Wheel main operator Gerry Rafferty had quit the band, but came back when the single did so well. He’d previously been half of folk duo the Humblebums with Billy Connolly, but he was never really a folkie – and, as it turned out, Connolly was never really a musician. Staff at Unicorn, his management company, recall the conversation where it was agreed – ‘The stuff Billy does between songs is better than what he does during the songs.’ They told him so, but he didn’t go for it and soon left the entertainment industry. An’at, know?

On the curse of hit singles

Come 1975, January started with January. The Pilot song, I mean. Yes, I’ve used that line before in at least one book and several magazine articles, but it really is incredibly satisfying. The band featured David # and fellow ex-Roller Billy Lyall, and while it also featured a very catchy line in multiple-part harmonies, Pilot’s construction had a beauty worthy of being called classical music. They’d already hit with Magic, but the LP From The Album of the Same Name failed to do so well. Oh, oh, oh, it’s tragic... Some bands are cursed with being thought of as album bands, while the opposing curse can be just as bad.

On the red Clydesiders and punk

The revolution nearly came in 1919. The Russian civil war was in full swing and the Soviet Union was about to be created, and all over the world governments were nervous. When striking Clydeside shipbuilders raised the red flag in George Square, the authorities’ response was heavy-handed in the extreme: overnight, Glasgow became a city under siege by English troops, tanks and machine gun posts. No one trusted Scottish soldiers not to side with the strikers, and chances would not be taken.

Perhaps you don’t know much about all that. The tale of the tanks in George Square isn’t much of a chunk of anyone’s education these days, even though it should be. Now that the bravery of the men shot for cowardice in the trenches has been recognised, it’s probably time the Red Clydesider era was re-addressed...

Anyway, my point is that modern Britain has always managed to stamp down any attempted revolution, during four centuries of everyone else getting away with them. It’s been said that the underlying reason is the force of middle-class politics; back in 1707, the English government was able to buy Scottish nobles’ votes to push through the union of parliaments because, secretly, everyone has their price.

Or maybe that’s just shite. There’s no doubt that punk – the real actual what-we-all-call ‘punk’ punk – was a revolution, and it did sweep quite a lot of rock’n’roll away. Like the skiffle and beat revolutions before it, punk told a bored young population: you can do this; it’s for you.

On Thatcherism

Let me just say I admire Lady Thatcher as a hard-working moralist who believed she was right, and that I’d like to first-foot her one Hogmanay with the traditional piece of coal, saying, ‘There ye go, hen, that’s the last o’it.’ And we’ll say nothing – nothing, mind – about the home-rule referendum.

Maggie Thatcher was a punk – with the added advantage of knowing what she wanted and how to get it. When the steelworkers called a strike which was to last from January to April 1980, it was the beginning of the end for anyone who didn’t do things her way. Thatcherists did what they liked and everyone else could just fuck off. That’s anarchy in the UK.

On crap album names

The Whites’ album was called Shine. Now, I have to take issue here – how the hell damn many albums do there have to be called Shine? I can see why you might want to use it, but that’s why everyone else does, meh. Another thing that really gets me is the amount of bands who’ve been called Rise – same issue: the reason why is the reason why not... And the minute Rise release Shine, I’m outta here.

On men of the millennium

Popularity polls distort with proximity – ’tis a fact, as well as a pleasantly alliterative phrase. John Lennon was not the man of the last millennium. He was a musician, and musicians are not the most important people on the planet. Nope, someone way back when – like the guy who discovered deadly nightshade was poisonous, or the bloke who suggested different wiping-sticks for each visitor to the toilet – someone like that was the man of the millennium.

On the future

I’ll borrow a tradition from a highly-regarded old sports journalist, and say this: my predictions for the next ten years in Scottish rock’n’roll are in an envelope, sealed and stored in the sight of my colleagues, to be opened in 2016. I’m confident I’ll have been proved correct – that’s because there’s ninety different envelopes.