Wham ne’er a town surpasses…

Heading by clattering electric train from the gloriously restored (after a fire) Troon Station to the (finally and just barely open again) Ayr equivalent, I was tracking my teenage self’s search for godly guitar glory.

I took this route to my first ever public performance, bellowing gospel songs, strumming a Framus guitar. Victoria Hall (now Riverside Evangelical Church) youth group listen politely to 17-year-old me as I threatened them with Larry Norman’s rapture-horror ditty, I Wish We’d all Been Ready. They weren’t scared. I was singing to the heavily converted.

Later, unraptured, I was dropped off at the gigantic red sandstone Station Hotel, which actually incorporated the railway. A whisky soaked wedding party was noisily expressing worldly, liquid enjoyment. They’d not be meeting a pre-millennial Jesus in the air when He arrived next week, I thought. Or hopefully before my Highers.

Only a sad stump of the Station Hotel remains, most of it demolished after years of dereliction and finally arson. And Ayr, pun-centric in its business names, once the epicentre of the County, is looking a bit worse for…wayr

.

At least the massive, squat grandeur of the old Playhouse survives, B-listed and bingofied, but closed by Mecca and for sale.

Once part of the Green’s entertainment empire and the second biggest cinema in Scotland – 3100 seats – it hosted one Francis Albert Sinatra on the 12 July 1953, with the Billy Ternent Broadcasting Orchestra. Two shows. A mere 500 people turned up between them. Frank’s wild years…

Just 19 years later, Rory Gallagher played the function suite at the Caledonian Hotel (now a crumbling Mercury). I would have given almost anything to go, but my redeemed Gospel Hall soul was too high a price for a glimpse of a true guitar god. Even possessing the Live in Europe LP was sinful. Besides, there was school next day. I couldn’t work out how to get back to Troon after the last train. And there would have been parental excommunication.

There’s the bus station where I saw my first girlfriend off to Dumfries, and afterwards ate a classic piece of early Ayrshire hybrid cuisine, a steak mince pizza. I can still taste the Bisto.

Today, it’s a proper Italian burger and chips – genuinely excellent, and great coffee – at Cecchini’s on the still impressive Wellington Square, followed by some ghost sign hunting and punfinding. Guitars of course, had to be checked out, now for secular purposes. Fifty-two years after that first gig, I can never walk past a window of six-strings.

Burns Statue Square, and the Odeon, where I once was secretly taken by mum to see The Sound of Music (under constant threat of imminent apocalypse). Thankfully rescued from closure and fettled as an Astoria. No longer sheltering in its haunches a branch of the superbly dubious Speed Records, all patchouli and darkness with just the merest hint of sulphate. Or maybe sulphur.

Back to the station, which genuinely looks like a bomb site, and off to Troon. “Is this the Glasgow train?”

“Aye, take a chance, you might be lucky.”

And I was. Well, I thought I was. then I got back to the flat and found I had Covid, again…