The musical frenzy that was Glasgow in the mid-1980s

My photographer pal Stewart Cunningham and I are currently working on a wee photobook about our couple of years in the mid-1980s snapping and writing in Glasgow for the late music weekly Melody Maker. Here’s a taster. ‘Caught Up In This Big Rhythm’,will be available in the summer. Spotify playlist at the end…

The mid-1980s in Glasgow. Mark Goldinger had the first cellphone I’d ever seen. He was managing a band called Sugar Sugar and was round at my shared Wilton Street flat, promoting their whiter-than-white-soul delights. His briefcase began ringing, and from it he plucked this huge, brick-like apparatus with a stubby aerial, like a World War Two walkie talkie.

The call  was something to do with  Henry Afrikas, the nightclub Mark co-owned in York Street, in the arched, cavernous basement of an old warehouse. Call over, Mark handed me a promotional cassette and a VIP pass for the club. “Thursday nights” he said. “Everybody’s there.”

And many, or most were, because musicians got in free and could apologise past any queue. So did music press hacks. Into the wee small hours lurked The Blue Nile and the Bluebells, Andrea Miller (NME) and John Dingwall (Sounds) DJs like Billy Sloan and Bryan Burnett. Bands occasionally played there. The Roaring Boys. The Petted Lips. Softpack Marlboro Red from the cigarette machine, surly, chemically  glazed bar staff, Red Stripe and Grolsch. There was a burger restaurant (‘deli’) upstairs. I think I once bought Pete Stanway a meal there.Photographer, rock’n’roll roué, band manager, later fundamentalist pastor. Things change.

Taxis howling like banshees in the rain (something to do with the brakes), hundreds of lost umbrellas. Club to club, venue to venue: Rooftops, or Night Moves with those dangerous stairs and terrifying cage lift. Maestro’s, punishing you up the vicious incline of Scott Street. The Sub Club, bouncers gazing critically at your shoes. Trainers were out of the question. Nae gutties! Fury Murry’s. Gay club Bennett’s student night on a Tuesday – very cheap drink,  sometimes bands. Love and Money made their debut there. 

QM and Level 8 at John Street, Glasgow Tech, the Vicky at the Art  School where I saw the Clash in their death throes on that terrible acoustic tour. The Apollo, of course, until it closed. The smell of rotting carpets and bad burgers. Barrowland, drinks in the Sarry Heid beforehand. Unnamed rough cider and a wee old man doing George Raft impressions 

Other bars. The Rock Garden, the Fixx, Nico’s. Café Gandolfi and later its sister, Baby Grand. Big touring acts were always at the Albany or the Holiday Inn and so were the ubiquitous A&R reps, coked up or speeding and happy to splash cash in the bar after hours. 

Weird characters drifted in and out of town. That big time Californian honcho, brandishing his black-varnished fingernail. “Know what this means?” No. Neither do I wish to. Youth from Killing Joke, becoming Martin Glover. Just another A&R guy in a floppy suit, sussing out the scene, man. The record company bosses  with runny noses and apparently unlimited expense accounts (“Trebles for everyone in the bar, landlord!”). Painfully polite gangsters with rearranged faces, charming as all get out. And local managers, reporters, actors, dealers, cops, writers and snappers. Would-bes. Wannabes, nearlies and nevers, the occasional nascent star and one or two of the falling or fallen.

 London on the shuttle, when you could swop tickets between British Airways and British Caledonian, for gloriously long, entirely liquid lunches with the Melody Maker team. When there was no money, the overnight Stagecoach: Ricky Warwick, later of the Almighty, with a box of demo cassettes from his then-band Rough Charm. That weird situation with an ancient man called Bob, bow tie and braces, working out of UPI in London and paying cash for introductions to bands so he could punt radio royalty collection in the US. Lunch at L’Etrangers, bowls of cigarettes on every table. Making up the freelance fees from MM with cash for albums that were delivered in dozens and ruthlessly flogged to second hand shops. The Columbia Hotel, and the less said about that the better.

What was I doing? I didn’t have a clue. I was on the rebound from God, stumbling through post-evangelical life, scrabbling as a journalist and religious broadcaster; I was playing the guitar and steeped in the sounds of the American 70s – a year or two too old for punk, so it was Zevon, Newman Springsteen, Mitchell. But I’d learned my rock journalism through obsessive immersion in Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent, Alan Jones, Pete Erskine. And I thought I could turn out a fair facsimile. Free gigs and records? Why not give it a try?

NME was too cool, and I was anything but that. I fired off something to Melody Maker, a news piece about the Apollo, then phoned on the off chance. Any gigs needing reviews? Someone called Steve Sutherland was generous and encouraging. Iron Maiden at the Apollo. What? Guest listed, a box about a metre from the main PA. Deaf for a week and the tinnitus I still live with arrived. But they liked the review in London. Aztec Camera and the Cure at Barrowlands? And so it began.

Everything was typed. Initially on the Brother portable I’d got for my 17th birthday, then on a series of ancient Imperials salvaged from the Barras or Paddy’s Market. As time passed MM wanted pictures, and these had to be sent by rail using British Rail’s Red Star service. Down on the last London train to hit deadlines. Desperate taxi rides to central from the West End with envelopes of copy paper and barely dry ten-by-eights. 

Photographers had the rough end of it. Fine if you were overnight posting, but on a Monday or Tuesday deadline they’d have to to snap, drive, develop,  print then get the pictures to me for packaging and sending. Mairi Macdonald, Grahame Bent, Chris Hill in Edinburgh, John Logan.

I met Stewart Cunningham through a mutual friend, Ken Symon. He’d just come back from Australia and of all the snappers I worked with, was the only one who’d done proper staff news work, all over the world, notably for the Murdoch empire in Oz. We hit it off and became friends as well  as colleagues. We still are. Still going to gigs. Last weekend saw us down at Culzean Castle for the launch of Yvonne Lyon and Boo Hewerdine’s new CD. Stewart’s still getting in folks’ faces with his camera.

The self-importance of rock n roll officialdom never fazed Stewart. I suppose once you’ve had to leave South Africa as an enemy of the state or been stranded in the Nullarbor Plain in a downed aircraft, hassle from an Apollo heavy is no huge deal.

I got used to being pinned against the wall by giant slavering German dogs during visits to his studio, which was in his mum’s house. She had a  team of Doberman Pinschers. It was a Clydebank thing. And so was our visit to Bowling Basin to interview and photograph a very young Wet Wet Wet.

Gradually I learned to navigate the murky hinterland of Glasgow’s mid-eighties music scene. Old pals from my holy past were suddenly clawing for secular traction – Ricky Ross, Brian McGlynn, Charlie and Dot from Talking Drums, Steve Butler. The city’s soul obsession surfaced via the Wets, Hue and Cry, along with aching jangle of the Big Dish, one of several refugees from the  deep Lanarkshire that would eventually gift us the Whole Bellshill twang thang.

And there was the strangeness of Edinburgh. Early in the week there would sometimes be mad dashes to the Grassmarket if no pubs were open in Glasgow, but expeditions to the Hoochie Coochie Club or the Caley Palais highlighted the differences between east coast and west. They did it differently over there. They did ART. In Glasgow it was always commercially linked. Postcard was the Factory, east coasters like Josef K were absorbed and chewed over but it was Edwin’s focussed charm that won out. And he was Dundonian. Then came the Proclaimers. From, of all, places, Auchtermuchty

They were like nothing on earth, or certainly the Calton. Stewart photographed them at the Tron Café Bar. At least the audience didn’t cover them in spit, as the rabid Barrowland fans of the Housemartins did during an astounding support stint…

For me, for two years or so, the Glasgow, or central Scotland  music scene called for total immersion. I was working on a Sunday night religious TV show as a producer and presenter, and make up artists sometimes had difficulty disguising the effects of the rock’n’roll lifestyle. There was a mostly good-natured battle with other local stringers for access, exclusives. I was handicapped by my affection for the likes of Neil Young, as yet to be rehabbed into coolness, the Stones and Jackson Browne. I remember an appalled acquaintance insisting I read White Light, White Heat: The Velvet Underground Story by Richie Unterberger, the Bible and roadmap for so many of the Glasgow unilluminati. She was appalled that I’d never listened to those most influential of all Glasgow influencers. I never liked them. 

Years later, when the late Ian Bell and I were journalistic colleagues and friends, he too would shake his head in despair about my lack of appreciation for Reed, Cale, Tucker and Morrison. But at least we were united in admiration for Springsteen and Dylan. And by then, I was out of Glasgow and uncaring about perceived coolness, or the lack thereof. But that’s another story.

Here’s a (limited) Spotify playlist, representing those days and nights of twang, crunch and white soul yodelling…