On 60 North Radio and Mixcloud

Listen to the show on Mixcloud here: https://www.mixcloud.com/tom-morton2/toms-beatcroft-anti-social-26-may/

The death of two people overshadowed this week – one was Professor Donald (“Donnie Foot”) Macleod, Free Church theologian, journalist and charismatic (small ‘c’) communicator in both English and Gaelic. The other was Tina Turner, hugely influential performer, writer and survivor of terrible abuse at the hands of her (equally influential in musical terms) former husband Ike.

I met and spoke with Prof Macleod several times back in my days as Highlands hack for The Scotsman. He was never anything but erudite, pleasant and often hilarious. Tina I never met, though I did encounter two songwriters who provided material for her. One of them dined out on his one Turner B-side, and I think was able to live off that single song for many years.

In the vintage days of 45-rpm vinyl singles, the writer of a record’s B-side received the same royalty as whoever wrote the hit. So the rewards could be substantial. Some B-sides grew to outperform their more publicised companions, notably Rod Stewart’s Maggie May (originally the flipside of Reason to Believe). Graeme Thomson has a splendid article ont he phenomenon in an old edition of The Spectator here: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-joy-of-b-sides/

Most album tracks and A-sides in this week’s show: Tina’s comeback as a solo artist was engineered in the UK, initially by Martin Ware of Heaven 17 with his production of Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together. I love that live John Fogerty solo version of Almost Saturday Night – short, stripped to the bone – and then there’s Rockpile, fronted by Dave Edmunds, doing Graham Parker’s Crawling from the Wreckage. Incidentally, Rockpile (Edmunds, Nick Lowe, Terry Williams and the Great Billy Bremner) were phenomenal live, and this Rockpalast gig from 1980 is them at their best. Not just that, it’s one of the best in concert things on the whole of YouTube. Imagine, as hapless headliners often had to, following that…

Anyway, go there later. Coming up, the much-underrated Divinyls (much more than I Touch Myself) and two completely different songs called Messin’ With The Kid, one of which pretty much changed my life….

Tina Turner — Let’s Stay Together

Heaven 17 — Train of Love in Motion

John Fogerty — Almost Saturday Night

Dave Edmunds — Crawling from the Wreckage

John Hiatt — Slow Turning

Lily Hiatt — some Kind of Drug

Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes — I Don’t Want to Go Home

Patty Larkin — Mink Coats

Divinyls — Better Days

The Saints — Messin’ With the Kid

Rory Gallagher — Messin’ With the Kid

Linda Ronstadt — Willin’

Little Feat — New Delhi Freight Train

Terry Allen — Truckload of Art