Big Gold Dream

This programme contains strong language

"Dear John, please could you play some punk rock on your show for me?"

Well, indeed, I can.

Anyway, we'll hear a lot of music that may be punk rock

and a lot that certainly is.

Well, life in Scotland in the '70s...

Extremes, I suppose - I think the '70s was quite an extreme decade.

-SIREN WAILS

-A kind of sea of brown and denim.

It still felt a bit, like, post-war, you know?

It had that feeling of abandonment.

We'd come through periods of time where the rubbish, you know,

didn't get collected on the streets,

and where power cuts were things that, you know, were expected.

The sense of being apart, alienation, no future...

Austere, I think, is the word.

Just coming from Scotland in the 1970s,

you didn't really think you could be in a group that would be successful.

There was... I mean, we had Pilot, I suppose.

MUSIC: Magic by Pilot

# Oh-ho-ho

# It's magic... #

I always wanted to be in a band.

When I was three I was in a band with my grandad.

We were called the Beatles.

He was Ringo Starr and I was John Lennon, right?

The Faces were my favourite band,

but I have to admit that I did used to listen to

my brother's Genesis albums.

We were like explorers - the brand was an explorer.

I actually read quite a lot of military strategy.

We all grew up with the Rolling Stones and the Beatles,

but that was our big brothers' and sisters' music.

Well, I was a Bowie fan.

You know, I made a guitar.

You know these old egg slicers?

It would have ten thin strings,

and you'd lay the egg in and then press it down

and it would slice the egg?

I used to chase my dad around playing that, saying,

"Buy me a guitar, buy me a guitar, buy me a guitar."

And then down to the music shop,

get you The Pianist's Picture Chords

and that's it, you're all set.

Everyone was calling themselves Brian Puke or something like this,

so I called myself Bobby Charm.

The people who were there know what went on in 1977.

We'll always have punk.

It's a predictable thing to say, but there's certain periods in which,

things like the late '60s or the earlier era of hip-hop,

there seems to be a whole group for cultural reasons,

or whatever reason, that are trying to express themselves

differently or struggling to do something interesting,

and it seemed like something like that was certainly happening in

Edinburgh. You could feel it.

I remember the Sex Pistols appearing in the NME or Melody Maker

and it was just like, "Wow."

And clearly the best-known band, I should think, in the country

at the moment must be the Sex Pistols.

Every night, at ten o'clock, John Peel,

just when you heard, like, Anarchy In The UK on your wee radio under

the covers, it was just like...

Virgin Records had an appearance of the Sex Pistols,

and we all went along and that's how we all met each other.

Sid was nowhere to be seen,

but Paul Cook and Steve Jones and John Lydon were there.

I got John Lydon to sign a single I'd just bought.

As I handed it to him to sign it, he went, "I despise you."

And we were all like, "Oh, Johnny Rotten despises us!"

It was one of those moments where you realised all the things you were

feeling, about being slightly disenfranchised and being young

and not having money, to suddenly be with a group of people,

where you looked around and thought,

"Oh, they're just like me," you know?

Punk was a great thing for self-expression and all that,

but walking down the street, you did get some stick,

you know, if you were dressed in that kind of unusual way.

I'm not talking about particularly strangely dressed, either.

I mean, we didn't have dyed hair or anything -

just straight-legged jeans was enough to get you

some, you know, smart remarks.

We weren't like London punks. We didn't have any money.

There wasn't the bondage trousers and all that look.

The look was very much making yourself look as cool as possible,

because we'd all been into Bowie and stuff,

so we immediately called ourselves glam punks.

APPLAUSE

And then the White Riot tour came.

MUSIC: White Riot by The Clash

# White riot I wanna riot... #

It was a real year-zero moment.

I mean, it was incredible.

In May '77, the White Riot tour hit the east coast of Scotland,

a star-studded bill of new punk heroes -

The Clash, The Slits, and young soul rebels - Subway Sect.

Yeah, the White Riot tour, on the big gigs,

they had, like, multiple support acts

and we were, like, relegated right down to

not at the bottom of the bill,

because we had The Prefects underneath us sometimes,

or The Slits.

Bands before that were...they were like divinities almost.

They weren't connected at all, in any way,

to the people who were out front,

and that completely changed

the very first time that The Slits walked on stage.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

The singer, she walked on to the stage, right, and said,

"Has anybody got a comb?"

She asked the audience if anybody had a comb,

and came down into the audience, so she had broken that barrier,

and it was unbelievable.

It was like,

"I want this. I want more."

A lot of people, they sort of got off on, like, The Slits

and the Subway Sect more than they seemed to with The Clash,

and took more ideas of that maybe they could do it themselves from us,

rather than The Clash, who didn't actually make like anyone

could have done it themselves, cos they had a bloody backdrop

of about 120-foot long.

You know, the band couldn't just go out and get an articulated lorry

and carry a backdrop around with them,

whereas they could just go down Oxfam,

get a load of grey jumpers, like us, and go on stage.

We were just ripe for it, for punk coming along, really.

It was just, like, a total DIY, don't-give-a-fuck kind of thing

that they were coming from,

but it was intelligent.

There was no polish to it,

and that kind of kick-started everybody to think,

"Well, there's not an enormous amount of musicianship

"going on here, but there's a lot of energy.

"We can do that."

And out of this grew a whole new generation of musicians.

MUSIC: Boredom by Buzzcocks

There are certain records,

tracks, songs, that you hear, and they stop you dead -

Spiral Scratch was one.

# Oh, yeah Well, I say what I mean... #

I bought my then-boyfriend a copy of Spiral Scratch, and said,

"You've got to listen to this."

# Boredom

# Boredom

# Boredom... #

Hilary's boyfriend was Bob Last, an ex-student of architecture.

He had a plan to build an empire with his company, Fast Product.

He had the vision, he had the name, but he didn't have the product.

I guess I was an aspiring entrepreneur or impresario.

I wasn't brought up on pop music.

I listened to Spiral Scratch and I thought,

"OK, this is what Fast Product should do,"

and went out to find what I would...

you know, my Spiral Scratch.

# Take the money... #

Bob and Hilary were roadying with The Rezillos,

an Edinburgh garage punk band who'd been on the go since '76.

# Everybody's on Top Of The Pops... #

When the punk thing started up,

you know, they didn't start and then we joined on it -

we all started up about the same time.

And it was also like,

"There's something about our attitude which is the same."

We just got up and did it, really.

# Hold tight... #

We weren't taken seriously by any of the other bands

that were on the go at the time.

They used to think we were taking the piss, right,

which in a way we were, I suppose.

I mean, The Rezillos, they were part of that scene,

and it was a very small scene,

so you'd go around the country and play a gig

and you're going to meet everyone who's in a band.

Bob was just one of them people that used his own initiative quite a bit,

and he was the obvious choice to manage the group, you know?

He was very creative and had a lot of ideas.

Erm...

Maybe a tad pretentious.

I was interested in Mao's military strategy.

I mean, God knows why.

We went along on a number of gigs,

and through that we started to see these other bands

all over Britain and we thought,

"Right, why don't we do a record label?"

And so Fast Product was born.

Over two short years,

only a dozen records would be released on the label,

but, from the word go, it challenged the might of the majors,

and paved the way for Factory and more.

I don't honestly think any of us, at the time, had any idea what an

important cultural thing Fast would actually be.

Before Factory, and, you know, pretty much at the same time

if not slightly before Rough Trade,

oh, yeah, Fast Product were right there at the start of it.

Fast would channel the homespun energy of punk

and create a label where the image was as important as the music.

We started growing the label out of a flat in Keir Street,

and, as is always the case in big cultural movements,

the local bar has an important, you know, role to play.

The pub shut at ten!

That was it.

The pub shut at ten and that was it,

so it was all back to mine.

That winter of 1977 and '78,

when Bob and Hilary were collecting people and collecting sounds,

was amazing.

They were collaborators.

Hilary was, kind of, the heart of it, I think.

She gave it heart,

and I think that was probably the first time that

I'd come across a woman like that, who was so strong.

-It was "Bob and Hilary".

-No.

It wasn't "Bob's girlfriend".

Equivalent to, sort of, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood.

He had a big flat - it had big high ceilings and huge windows,

and it was full of art,

you know, a lot of which he'd created himself.

It was on the top floor,

so we used to go up there and make toasties and have cups of tea

and things like that.

I remember a Dalek in the corner of the room,

and I found out it was, like, a Rezillos prop.

In yellow on the walls, Bob had written in big letters,

"this is luxury",

and that just seemed so radical.

We would talk about films, books...

We'd even do the...

It sounds really pretentious now,

but, I mean, we'd even do a little bit of cutting up of stuff

and doing a bit of art.

It was a place where ideas hatched.

Many bands were hatched there, too.

Keir Street was the hub of the thriving arts scene

in Edinburgh at the time,

and flat two was its beating heart.

The future Fire Engines hung out there,

The Ettes, The Twinsets,

The Thursdays, The Flowers...

The list was, quite literally, long.

And popping in for the occasional toastie was the band who would

rewrite the punk manifesto, the Scars,

formed by brothers Paul and John Mackie.

We wanted to write pop songs, you know,

but we wanted them to have energy and we wanted them to be different.

We put an advert in

a record shop window.

It was called Hot Licks and we knew

that we wanted a real front man who

was going to perform.

One day I was in Hot Licks,

and I saw an advert by a band called the Scars

who were looking for a singer,

so I decided to phone them up.

I did a rehearsal with them,

what you would call an audition of sorts.

But it was quite a fantastic audition.

I've got to hand it to Robert.

It was almost like one of those horror films

where the scary character elevates themself into the air

in a, sort of, Exorcist-type fashion.

SCREAMING

And started shaking,

and it was the most incredible thing I've ever seen.

Oh, yeah!

So I sort of looked across at John and I thought,

"We've really got a live one here."

YEAH, YEAH!

The other guy was so frightened by his performance

that he just got up and left!

So that was it - he had the gig.

This wasn't the only band of brothers in town.

Russell and Tam Dean Burn had formed

anarchic combo The Dirty Reds.

There was a sort of

budding of politics in me,

and that's why I wanted to

call our band The Dirty Reds.

And one of the first songs we wrote was called The Rich Reds.

"Here come the rich reds, from underneath their waterbeds."

Walk on stage.

Russell, you'd have seen him with his drum set.

He was the local butcher up in Clermiston,

but he also was a jazz drummer and he had a kit.

What he was doing to earn money was he was going rabbiting up

Clermiston Hill and selling the rabbits to the butcher.

So, he convinced me that I'd front the money for the drum kit

and he'd go ferreting to make the money back.

Of course, Russell was at that age where he'd started smoking and

drinking and he never went ferreting and he still owes me the money!

COWBELL CLANGS

The Dirty Reds split into Dirty Reds Two,

featuring the young Davy Henderson on guitar,

and The Flowers, with Hilary on vocals.

# He said he really liked me And did I take the pill?

# I sprayed myself with Charlie and I'm ready for the kill... #

I had written a lot of lyrics that were all sort of

angry young woman lyrics,

but it made me sick with nerves half the time.

There was lots of eventful gigs, involving lacerations

and almost decapitations, etc.

Our first gig was for the Edinburgh University Communist Society,

in some hall up in the university.

And I do remember it was, like, Russell threw the cymbal,

and it was, like, you know, just sort of flying through the air.

If that had have hit somebody, it would have been death.

But the music, in a way, strangely,

was less important than the excitement of the feeling that

you were doing something new.

One thing that differentiated Edinburgh amongst other sort of

punk movements in the country was the fact that people wanted to

move on from punk really quickly and make their own original music,

and punk was a starting point, but it wasn't supposed to be,

you know, perfecting a formula.

Always in the vanguard were The Scars,

pushing boundaries with their confrontational

and provocative image.

They were 17. Really, at that time, they were just...

Nobody could touch them.

Super-intelligent boys, and they could really play.

That was the thing - they could all play.

Our original sound was based on what kind of instruments we had.

You know, I made a guitar, but, you know, I couldn't afford to buy one.

And it was really overdriven at the top end.

It was just a sound that I really liked.

It sounded like nobody else was making.

Sometimes, you know, equipment got damaged and tempers were lost,

but it was all real.

Glam rock was a big influence on The Scars,

and it allowed us to start wearing make-up.

Like, everybody else was dressing up in an aggressive way,

so we would dress up in a kind of feminine-type way.

Bobby King would have ladies' shoes on, high-heeled shoes,

big permed hair and big earrings, and he'd be booed.

But because he was so cool and so strong,

the boos would turn into cheers,

because he was like, "I'm having you, you fuck.

"I'm having you, the audience."

He had such conviction.

We'd come on stage, and people would shout, "Poofters," or whatever,

like that, so I would usually start the gig by saying,

"Well, anybody that wants to fight us,

"you're welcome to meet us backstage after the gig."

Nobody ever came backstage.

With unbridled confidence and charisma,

The Scars knew they were the best band in town.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

That is a letter that Paul from The Scars

wrote to Siouxsie Sioux and delivered to her backstage,

about how much...

"I hate you. I hate your band.

"I've seen them only once, and I would never go to see you again.

"You were shit.

"Boring, derivative music has always made me sick, and you're the worst.

"Yours sincerely, Paul from The Scars."

I found that the other day.

GUITAR FEEDBACK HOWLS

On tour with the Rezillos,

Bob and Hilary were on the hunt for their Spiral Scratch.

We were like explorers - the brand was an explorer -

but I liked the idea of the mass market.

Our thing was always have as much control as you can, because, then,

you're much more likely to be able,

not necessarily always to do what you want,

but to do more of what you want than a major record label,

who's just controlling you, would ever let you do.

One, two, three, four!

# Living in a rut... #

Challenging the mainstream was the aim,

and they recognised a similar spirit of subversion in punk provocateurs

The Mekons, who would be the first band to sign to Fast.

They were an exemplar of having a world of ideas and absolutely no

interest in musical competence for its own sake,

which was, kind of, part of what appealed.

If it somehow worked or had an attitude that I thought

was interesting, I absolutely didn't care about, musically,

what rules it transgressed.

I went to the bank manager

and I told him I wanted to borrow 400 quid to put a record out,

and he said, "OK."

And so we got them up here and recorded them in a cottage

in the Borders.

Someone said, "Oh, I think my uncle's got a place

"in the country we can go to."

We get down there and discover...

it was all locked up.

His uncle only stayed there sometimes,

so the long and short of it was,

The Mekons' first record started by breaking into a house...

-SHE LAUGHS

-..in the middle of nowhere.

And I was quite small, so I was posted...put through a window,

let everyone in, took over this house for the weekend,

recorded The Mekons' single.

It was one thing to make a record,

but quite another to get it out to the masses.

I didn't have a clue how to do it.

I just assumed I'd made something fucking great.

I'm going to find a way of...

There are going to be people who want to buy it.

I mean, it was that simple.

I got sent on the overnight bus to go down to London

to talk Rough Trade into taking on the record.

And, famously, Rough Trade...

said it was the worst-played record they'd ever heard

and they weren't stocking it.

And to this day, I torture Geoff Travis with the fact that

he would not release our first record on the grounds of

it not being musically competent.

Indie distributors Rough Trade may have knocked him back,

but, undeterred, Bob found an outlet through a Scottish chain

which championed new, cutting-edge music.

Well, Bruce's was an absolute focus for the punk movement.

Bruce is a big music fan,

and we had all the punks of Edinburgh coming into the shop,

you know, pretty much every day of the week -

Bob Last and Hilary Morrison and that -

and they were bringing a box of 25 to start things off with.

I don't think we started really selling things

until it got reviewed in the NME -

they made it single of the week.

That's the equivalent these days of it suddenly

trending on Twitter or whatever.

MUSIC: Damaged Goods by Gang Of Four

Bob and Hilary quickly built on that success by signing

Sheffield electronic pioneers 2.3,

and agitprop, postpunk outfit Gang Of Four,

and their debut single took Fast to number one in the indie charts.

# Your sweat so sour

# Sometimes I'm thinking that I love you... #

It was one of the coolest independent labels in Britain,

in fact, if not the coolest, because at that time

Factory Records didn't exist.

One of my mates came into our office with the first Gang Of Four thing,

and the packaging and everything on those Fast releases,

I mean, it influenced Factory...

Amazing, I mean, Bob, what Bob Last did with it.

He was the template for early, cool, indie things, you know?

Many people involved in punk thought that this was all some sort of

grubby marketing thing.

We took the opposite point of view.

We said, "Actually, one of the reasons we are excited about doing

"this is because I like deploying packaging and marketing."

Brand was what would give us power to introduce music to people that

they wouldn't otherwise hear.

The idea was that, you know,

you had to have all the Fast Record records in sequence

because it was like an oeuvre.

It was a bit like collecting trading cards, you know,

bubble-gum cards or something.

You wanted to be part of this scene.

Bob is a conceptualist.

You know, he was doing all these things with posters and artwork

about consumerism,

the kind of stuff that's absolutely accepted nowadays,

but then it seemed quite unusual.

We famously released and successfully sold bits of

rotting orange peel.

The point about that was to make a point,

that if we...if you put it in a different context,

even rotting orange peel may have a value.

For Bob, concept was king.

The distinctive look and radical approach of Fast marked them out

from the crowd, and began to attract interest worldwide.

I can remember him playing a tape that he'd just got from America,

and it was Human Fly, it was The Cramps, and Rab hated it.

He was like, "It's just rock and roll. I don't see it."

And for whatever reason, Bob decided not to take them on.

MUSIC: Being Boiled by The Human League

OK, ready. Let's do it.

That was a really interesting period.

I went up to Bob's one afternoon,

and he'd received a cassette from a band and a letter on silver foil,

and it was the flipping Human League.

# Listen to the voice of Buddha

# Saying stop your sericulture... #

We, as The Human League,

never had any idea that anybody would ever be interested

in putting out any of our stuff.

Paul Bower, so he was in 2.3, he was the lead singer and writer.

I met as a fellow trainee manager at the Co-op in Sheffield,

boning bacon and stacking shelves.

He was the one who heard Being Boiled.

He said, "You've got to send this to Bob.

"I reckon he'll really like it. I think it's brilliant."

Kind of, "What are you talking about?"

First of all, it was in mono,

and nobody was going to want to buy a mono record, you know.

# Is no excuse for thoughtless slaying... #

They'd put the record out before I ever met them.

I don't know if we even spoke on the phone, I just rang back and said,

"Yeah, great, I want to put it out now."

A very strange combination of apparently incredibly significant

and important lyrics that also insisted on being

completely meaningless and poppy at the same time,

and I loved that tension,

and so they had me straight away.

Next thing you know, it's out,

and John Peel's playing it on a regular basis on his show.

Kind of, "This is utterly crazy."

It sold like, I think, around about 5,000 in ten weeks.

It was phenomenal, you know,

and that was the kind of thing that was happening

almost on a weekly basis, you know?

It was heaven, because, musically,

you didn't know what was happening next.

If there was a market for cutting-edge electronic music,

Bob was happy to exploit it.

And there was.

Anything that challenged the status quo was desirable,

and the status quo was now punk.

BELL RINGS

Punk itself settled into an incredibly antiquated

and geriatric set of rules about what was and wasn't punk,

which, you know, we were already completely uninterested in.

Punk turned into postpunk very quickly, really.

You know, the board has been wiped clean,

so it was a question of, kind of, starting again.

Everything had changed.

There was a complete sort of cultural shift.

SIRENS WAIL

By now, The Dirty Reds had evolved into another band,

with Davy on vocals and his old school friend Murray on guitar.

The name is a good one, actually.

The first piece of literary work that I ever got published,

possibly the only, was when I was six years old at school,

and it was a poem about fire engines.

MUSIC: Get Up And Use Me by Fire Engines

You know, they're red, they're noisy...

What I loved about that when I was a young guy was just

the fucking rawness, man, do you know what I mean?

# Use me... #

HE SINGS ALONG WITH GUITAR RIFF

Just fucking amazing.

It seemed like they just wanted to drive forward at full tilt,

all other considerations secondary.

Our main objective was to have something that was not laid-back

in any way. Laid-back was just bad.

The Fire Engines were just, I mean, what you might call an enigma.

And I remember, very early on, meeting...

seeing them come into the Tap O' Lauriston.

They all walked in and they'd got this job lot of

long, kind of, overcoats,

and they just...and they looked like a band.

The Fire Engines were famous for really short, aggressive,

explosive attacks of sets, you know,

maybe ten to 15 minutes long, and it was

kind of astounding to see.

People would say, "You only played for 15 minutes,"

and it was like, "Well, who wants to...?"

You're only famous for 15 minutes.

I think Fire Engines were one of the best Scottish bands ever.

Totally underrated.

Amazing live band.

They should have been a really big one.

We had a song called Discord,

and Malc was like, "You should put that out. It's really poppy.

"It's like Blondie."

And he said, "Definitely not Get Up And Use Me."

Use me.

# Use me... #

They clubbed together with a couple of friends,

Angus Groovy and Paul Steen,

and made Get Up And Use Me for around 100 quid.

I don't know... I think there was maybe 1,000 copies.

There was a big box of vinyl and a big box of sleeves.

Angus would start gluing, and expecting us to glue,

and we'd wake up at 6.30 in the evening,

and sneak out of the house, and walk into Edinburgh

and try and find somebody to buy us a drink,

and he'd be gluing away in the dark.

It actually got reviewed in the NME,

and that was just, like, unbelievable.

It just changed everything.

It just turned your mind around completely.

BELL TOLLS

By early '79,

Bob and Hilary had amassed a roster of eclectic northern talent on Fast,

and Bob decided that it was time to shift the label's focus

closer to home.

What I always thought was interesting about Fast Product was,

when it started, it was primarily northern English groups that were

involved in the label,

but where it really became charged for me was

when they signed the Scars.

MUSIC: Adult/ery by Scars

In late-summer 1977, we did our first gig in Balerno,

and it was like a whole year passed, and meanwhile, The Mekons came out,

the Gang Of Four, The Human League, and I was like,

"Are we never going to get our chance to make a record?"

I can very clearly remember seeing Roxy Music

on the Old Grey Whistle Test,

but, you know, that moment was why,

when I first saw the Scars actually play,

that was my reference point where, "I get this."

MUSIC: Horrorshow by Scars

I mean, a lot of people suggest that Blue Boy by Orange Juice was

the start of the whole explosion, you know,

and that Blue Boy was like Scotland's Anarchy In The UK.

I don't think it was.

I think it was Adult/ery and Horrorshow on Fast Product

by the Scars.

# Tolchocked a baboochka Just a mite too horrorshow... #

He took us to Rochdale, to Rochdale of all places,

to record our first single, and it was...it happened really quickly.

It was quite raw.

Horrorshow was essentially just a synopsis of A Clockwork Orange.

It was called possibly the most violent song ever written,

just because of the nature of the lyrics.

# Baboochka died that very night Got 14 years in zoo-time... #

That exploded.

That was just incredible, and it still sounds incredible.

It was just an amazing kind of mission statement,

and the fact that Fast Product had signed, you know,

a band from Edinburgh,

it just felt like Scotland was alive.

New labels, clubs and fanzines were in proliferation.

There was bands springing up everywhere,

fanzines on the grass-root level,

people putting out their own independent records

and stuff like that.

In what seemed a completely mad move,

I decided to set up a small, live event on a Tuesday night -

why Tuesday night, I don't know -

at a place called the Aquarius on Grindlay Street.

It immediately became apparent there was a whole other culture and group

of acts that were doing really exciting things.

Alan started his own label, Rational,

which went on to hone The Visitors, The Delmontes, and Article 58.

We used to support bands like A Certain Ratio, the Scars...

It was quite a fertile time.

Everyone was involved and trying to do things.

Well, there was a bit of band rivalry, obviously,

but we were all very supportive of each other.

We'd borrow equipment from each other, share PAs,

and put on gigs together, so that we could get gigs.

Cos folk would just do it for...

because they were into it and cos they enjoyed it.

I mean, now everyone wants to be paid for everything,

but then it was...

It was just for the fun of it then.

Steven Daly, drummer with Glasgow band The New Sonics,

was one such enthusiast.

He had his own label, Absolute, and wanted to sign an austere,

uncompromising Edinburgh outfit.

He loved the sound, if only they'd change their name.

They should have kept their name as TVR -

they would have been big now, but they changed it to Josef K.

I mean, that sounds like something out of a book, right?

OK. This is Josef K, and it's called Chance Meeting.

MUSIC: Chance Meeting by Josef K

For me, anyway, in Edinburgh at that time, there were three bands that

I saw live that were absolutely sensational -

The Associates, the Fire Engines, and Josef K.

All of the members of Josef K, we all went to the same high school.

I knew of Malcolm and David.

They weren't sort of in my gang, as it were.

They were far too intellectual.

# The red sky behind you

# The feeling you've been here before... #

A lot of people look back and say,

"How did they sound like that? What was it all about?"

We wanted to try and get people to dance,

and in Edinburgh that was a difficult job.

# You looked in the past, dear... #

I mean, I was heavily into James Brown and stuff,

and to make the marriage of the abrasive, slightly punk,

New Wave guitars with a sort of straight beat

was something we were definitely trying to do.

A lot of the stuff about punk in music in '77 and '78

was everyone was using fuzz boxes.

So, I was taking that clean, trebly guitar sound

and trying to really take it to an extreme.

It just felt right - a bit calmer than punk.

The first time I saw Josef K, they played with an incredible intensity,

and I remember thinking at that point,

"This feels exciting, and it feels like somebody should be doing

"something about these guys."

Alan became their manager and the gigs started rolling in.

They were so great,

and we were jealous of these guys that could play anything.

We exchanged unpleasantries,

and I think there might have been some fists - very small ones -

teenage fists.

But then we became great friends after that,

just through a shared interest in Lucky Strike cigarettes.

By 1979, Fast Products' unconventional approach

marked them out from the burgeoning indie market,

and the label became as much of a story as the bands.

We really were inundated after the first three or four singles,

and this is where the idea of the Earcoms came in.

It was Earcomming -

the idea being like a music magazine where you got a taster -

and it was to give a snapshot of very, very, very different things

that were happening.

Kier Street alumni, The Thursdays, were featured,

fronted by cult poet Paul Reekie.

Gin is remarkably potent.

If you want to get flat drunk, it'll make you that way.

It'll make you pissed through this into the next day...

Paul used to start the set with a Nico poem, Frozen Warnings,

and then we joined him on stage,

and we were ducking bottles because we weren't thrashing out.

MUSIC: From Safety To Where? by Joy Division

# No, I don't know just why... #

For the second issue,

Bob and Hilary released a couple of tracks by a Manchester band they'd

been on the brink of signing.

Jo Callis and I, in particular, were huge fans of Warsaw,

the precursor of Joy Division,

and we would give them support slots whenever we could,

and we had on-and-off discussions about releasing them.

We had turned down the original Joy Division,

cos I knew what the name meant and it...I was uncomfortable.

Joy Division is a reference to the

corps of prostitutes that the Nazis created for their military,

and I think they were playing with iconography the same way we did,

and they were being provocative.

I since met them. When Ian Curtis came off, he was a lovely guy.

He liked cats. He came to visit us and it was all fine,

but, you know, I had reservations.

We played a few dates with the Rezillos,

-and Bob Last was their manager at the time.

-Yeah.

We'd always sort of kept in touch.

He mentioned his idea for Earcom,

and we just offered him, you know, the two tracks.

They gave me the tracks cos I asked them.

You know, you don't get something if you don't ask for it.

"From Safety to Where?" was written in the studio,

and Bernard didn't like it, I remember,

and he put very, very reluctant guitar on it.

-It just goes... That goes...

-HE SQUEAKS

It's like the least you could possibly do on a track,

but it worked.

Joy Division instead signed to Tony Wilson's

fledgling indie label, Factory.

Tony Wilson, when he started setting up Factory,

he called me up many times to ask about, "Well, how do you do this?"

And there are some things about what he did which come from a similar

place as what we were doing.

They turned out to be great friends,

and they did actually inspire each other.

People like Tony Wilson and people like Bob Last

are very few and far between in this business.

They aren't out for themselves - it's all about the music.

Fast 13, that was Factory.

That's my view.

I just never told them that they had a catalogue number until now.

RADIO STATIC

Indie labels now ruled the airwaves -

in the evenings, at least.

Well, it was... You know, in the late '70s, as it hit 1980,

it was an incredibly transformative moment in music,

cos it was that stage beyond punk,

which was obviously given the name possibly by me - postpunk.

It certainly splattered the idea that music could come from

anywhere around the country,

so suddenly you started to pay attention to other places -

you know, Liverpool, Manchester, Yorkshire, Scotland. You know?

PIGEON COOS

BELL TOLLS

The tinderbox of punk had been slow to ignite over on the West Coast.

Punk was banned in Glasgow, though, wasn't it?

Cos I thought Glasgow Council said they weren't allowed to

play any punk gigs, anyone.

One of the earliest so-called punk gigs was a gig

at the City Halls in Glasgow.

The Stranglers headlined it,

and, at the end of the gig, fans invaded the stage,

and the gig got abandoned.

You know, because, in the City Halls,

I don't know if you've ever been there,

but it's no' proper security men.

It's kind of elderly stewards who wear kind of maroon blazers

with the City Hall, you know, crest embroidered

on the...on the pocket of the jacket.

So they just couldnae cope, and then the Evening Times

did a story saying there'd been a mini riot.

I couldn't possibly have people spitting and all that kind of thing,

as if that was all that it was about.

MUSIC: Singing In The Showers by Fun 4

But local bands emerged, spearheaded by Glasgow punk legend Jimmy Loser,

guitarist of the Fun 4.

I used to go to a record store six days a week.

I'd go in there at about 11 o'clock and stay there till five,

till it shut, to get thrown out.

And that's how you got to actually form bands.

The first time I met Alan Horne, he used to hang about

Bruce's Record Store, not speaking to anyone,

standing at the side until they actually did tell Alan,

"Would you mind, actually, leaving the shop?"

This is Postcard Records.

MUSIC: Blue Boy by Orange Juice

And we have here, this is all just fan mail.

And, erm, this is the accounts,

and they're not really sorted out, either,

and the taxman will get us for this.

# When he spoke, she smiled in all the right places... #

Alan Horne and his friend Edwyn Collins were setting up

a West Coast indie label to rival Fast Product,

planning to launch Edwyn's band Orange Juice onto the world.

# She wasn't listening to the sweet words... #

I found Orange Juice's Blue Boy sitting on the record player,

so I put the needle on it, and then it was kind of...

It was an epiphany moment.

You think, "What is this?"

And from that moment on, you just think,

"That's the best thing I've ever heard."

Their idea was that this was a big, shiny pop record label

and they were going to have pop hits.

The first time I heard anything about Postcard was

when a guy stopped me on the street and said,

"There's this great thing happening in a house in Charing Cross,

"you know, and they've started a record label."

And I was like, you know, "What are you talking about?"

And it was, of course, 185 West Princes Street,

the famous flat inhabited by the now-legendary Alan Horne.

I don't really know what to say about Alan

that isn't too controversial.

If you speak to anyone from Orange Juice,

they'd go straight for the jugular with Alan.

-He was a lovely guy.

-INTERVIEWER LAUGHS

Cheeky, egocentric, naughty...

Very intelligent.

Fierce energy.

Somebody that would make things happen.

He was very witty.

So cutting and camp and cynical.

There was a sort of bullying element, as well,

which I guess you have to be, to be that persuasive.

I found him very condescending and dismissive of musicians.

He famously thought that the managers in punk rock

were as important as the singers -

you know, Malcolm McLaren would be interviewed as well as

the Sex Pistols - almost like artists in themselves,

and I think that's what he modelled himself as.

Suddenly, you had this kind of pop Svengali,

or as near to a pop Svengali as Scotland was ever going to get.

MUSIC: Falling And Laughing by Orange Juice

Like Fast, Postcard would also last for only two years,

and produce a dozen records,

but would inspire C86, Creation, and a new generation of indie talent,

and their first single went straight into the charts -

the indie charts.

# You must think very naive

# Taken as true... #

I think with Falling And Laughing, that was fantastic.

You know, you couldn't want for more - single of the week,

and our first single sold out 1,000 copies in no time.

# Avoid eye contact at all costs

# What can I do? #

As soon as you heard Orange Juice, it had a sound,

because Alan Horne was very much - and it's true -

a label must have a sound.

And that sound quickly became known as "the sound of young Scotland".

The thing that was great about Orange Juice was that

they were a punk rock band,

but they sort of said, "Well, OK, we're a punk rock band,

"but we really want to make records like Chic."

Punk was kind of resolutely, you know, working-class,

and there was a lot of people, you know,

kind of embraced the whole ripped jeans kind of aspect of it.

So when Edwyn and Alan appeared on the scene,

they looked like something from The Famous Five.

# Fall falling

# Falling and laughing Falling and laughing

# Falling and laughing... #

Postcard can be seen as being a very parochial kind of organisation.

I don't agree that it was.

It was a humorous way of slapping London people in the face.

I loved the character, the personality,

and the fact that it was nothing like anything else,

that it came out of its own world.

Everything about it could have only been Postcard,

and you'd very quickly begin to trust it, which is an

amazing thing for a label to do, you know, out of nowhere.

"I want all those records. They're all going to be great. I trust it."

The sounds of young Scotland were radically different coast to coast.

The East had taken the brunt of the punk outbreak in 1977,

and that was mirrored in the music.

It was almost like America.

It was East Coast and West Coast,

and Edinburgh was very definitely the East Coast.

You were getting the sounds of Pere Ubu,

you were getting the sounds of Television -

that abrasive, angular thing.

Yeah, I don't know what they were into in Glasgow,

that they were definitely much more sort of melodic

and nice and sort of middle-class.

There was one musical influence both sides were agreed on.

It started with The Velvets, I think.

-It was the Velvets.

-The Velvet Underground.

-The Velvet Underground.

-The Velvet Underground.

-Velvet Underground.

-The Velvet Underground.

-The Velvet Underground.

-The Velvet Underground.

-Velvet Underground.

-The Velvet Underground.

You know, I think The Velvet Underground are the most important

band to every Scottish band that came out

from 1976 until probably 1986.

I remember seeing The Velvets' albums in Cockburn Street Market,

and I remember seeing copies of White Light/White Heat,

and looking at the cover, and it was black.

It looked incredibly exotic, and I was too scared to buy it, actually.

I mean, when I first met Edwyn,

I think he was carrying the first Subway Sect single

and a Velvet Underground album.

They were kind of like his blueprint, you know, for a group.

MUSIC: Heart Of Song by Josef K

# There's so many pathways that lead to the heart... #

It was the cusp of a new decade,

and one band was preparing to cross the East-West divide.

Tempted by the poppy sounds of Postcard, Joseph K defected.

Alan Thorne, you know, asked us to be on Postcard Records.

He didn't want Postcard Records just to be a vehicle for Orange Juice.

I think he had an idea that he'd like Postcard to be

a kind of Motown as well, though.

He wanted real, classic pop tunes, and big, classic productions,

so we were certainly an antidote to sort of

the glossier side of things.

# Though it's easy to hear the message through song... #

Alan boldly combined the darkness and light of his two signings

with the joint release of singles,

which shot to number 15 in the indie charts,

and Joseph K got to experience the great Postcard publicity machine

at first hand.

Those shared sleeves, we had, like, four seven-inch squares,

and then they were hand-coloured.

There was... I think there was only about five of us in this room

-with felt pens and...

-SHE GIGGLES

..and 1,000 of these things.

We're going, "We'll get this done in no time."

Alan liked to think it was kind of like a wee Factory Records scene.

You know, there was one transvestite that used to go

and hang about there, and he loved that - Lucy Alexander.

So anyone who went up to Alan's, you know,

he would just give them a felt pen and a pile of these, and say,

"Can you colour in a few of these for me?"

We ended up getting, like, a whole load of felt pens

and just doing this across them, because it had taken so long

and we were getting...

It started off going, just colouring them really nice.

We liked being on Postcard Records.

We liked to be independent.

No desire to sign to a major label.

Alan Horne and Bob Last, although not necessarily soul mates,

shared the same philosophy -

that you shouldn't have to go to London to make it

in the pop business.

What we now know as indie music was invented in Scotland.

If you think about Postcard and Fast Product,

you know, that's the seeds of labels like Creation.

That's really been the template for indie music to this day.

I was always very proud of doing things from Scotland

that were UK-wide and international,

and that, to me, was the point of being in Scotland.

It wasn't to be narrowly Scottish.

It was to say, "Hey, Scotland's part of...

"You know, we stand up there with everybody else."

There's no reason why we shouldn't operate from Glasgow.

There's no reason why, if we wanted a major contract,

then major record companies shouldn't come up here

and bring the coals to Newcastle and the fish from the fire.

THEY LAUGH

It's interesting.

Postcard were reactive to Fast Product more than they knew.

They were reactive to that.

They were going, "Well, what can we do that's not them?"

And so, right from the get-go,

part of what energised Postcard was not being Fast Product.

I think both Bob Last and Alan viewed each other very, very warily,

and circled each other and avoided contact.

Somebody told me in their recent book about Postcard,

I evidently sent them death threats.

I don't remember it being that, erm, tribal.

So, it was quite adversarial,

but it was interesting to see this energy was spreading out.

TRAIN HORN HONKS

But for one band of postpunk pioneers, London was calling.

I think it's great.

The pavements are golden.

You know, everything's wonderful.

You know, nothing lasts forever, OK?

Everything has a lifespan, you know,

and our creative relationship with Fast had a lifespan, as well,

and when it was over, we knew it.

We knew we wanted to move on to something more commercial,

and we parted with mutual respect.

Now, from Edinburgh, comes Scars,

who have just released their first album, Author! Author!.

MUSIC: All About You by Scars

# It was a cold day outside today

# I have nothing to do so I thought about you... #

They got pretty big, I think. They were on the TV, man.

Paul Morley got interested in the band.

I said to him, "Have you seen the review in Sounds? It's fantastic."

He said, "That's nothing. Wait until you see my review."

And I just thought, "Oh, my God, this is great."

Suddenly we were propelled into that arena, you know,

and getting stopped on Oxford Street or in Soho by girls, giggling.

They'd send you fan mail and stuff like this,

so, in that sense, it was good fun.

They signed to a major and made a critically-acclaimed album,

but it would prove to be their only one.

Bigger budgets meant less control.

I thought it was a shame for the Scars,

because they had a fantastic album, but then, you know,

somebody's taking photographs of them dressed up as New Romantics.

It was just really unfortunate, you know. It was just like, "What?"

Being on an indie label is different from being on a major label.

The expectations are different.

The budgets are bigger, so you've got to sell more records.

There's more pressure to have a hit.

It's the same old story.

You know, we consider it pretentiously as our art -

they call it product.

You know?

We were playing some really good gigs,

and we just couldn't get that sound to translate in the studio.

We didn't have the right sympathetic kind of ears that we'd had

when we recorded Horrowshow and Adult/ery.

I think being in a band is like...

I liken it to being married.

All the good and the bad compressed, you know?

You're touring with guys, and you know everything about them -

what you want to know and what you don't want to know -

and, you know, that's quite a pressure cooker for young guys.

Robert left the band and we carried on,

and tried to find another singer.

It didn't work out.

The same things that made it work ultimately tore it apart,

if you get my drift.

Following the Scars' departure,

Bob decided that Fast had outlived its purpose.

He put out two more singles by The Dead Kennedys and Human League,

and shut the label down.

If you look at what went on in Fast Product,

if you think of it as one body of work that collectively, every band,

everybody who ever walked in the flat,

collectively made together,

anyone who beat me up cos I didn't release their single -

all those people were part of it.

Somehow or other, I knew it had finished.

It's too far gone to remember exactly how I knew,

but it was...it was done.

But we wanted to go on doing things and trying out new ideas,

so, rather than muddy the waters of what Fast Product had done,

I invented a new brand.

I mean, that all sounds like rather grand rationalisation -

it might be that I was just bored.

And so Pop:Aural was born.

I think he saw in mind some kind of label where, you know,

all the acts had a certain affinity,

a youngness, a popness, if you like, you know, aiming at the charts.

"Well, we always thought this was about pop music -

"Let's see if we can make some pop music."

It turned out...

A, we couldn't,

and, B, we'd been so corrupted by what we did at Fast Product

that we thought that Davy Henderson was a pop star.

MUSIC: Big Gold Dream by Fire Engines

Alan always wanted to sign the Fire Engines, and I think was

absolutely galled that Bob Last signed them to Pop:Aural.

# The plan is my survival

# I'm tired of this song

-# I've a bulldozer

-Staying alive, staying alive... #

# The plan is my survival

# I'm tired of this song I've a bulldozer... #

I haven't sung that for a while, I can assure you.

In true Fast tradition, the packaging played fast and loose with

the concepts of consumerism.

They said, "Right, we want to be commodified.

"We're going to be half naked, oiled up,

"with slabs of meat and boxes of soap powder."

"Let's go to the abattoir, take our clothes off

"and, like, hang out and get covered in baby oil."

Sadly, we couldn't get into the abattoir,

and we settled on buying about...

15 quid's worth of steaks from Safeway.

# I'm tired of this song

-# I've a bulldozer

-Staying alive... #

When I did this photo session, it was very funny.

It was in my flat and I had had a break-in the week before.

I had all these half-naked, oiled-up boys on my sitting-room floor,

and the doorbell goes, and it was the police about my break-in.

Bob's roster of potential pop stars included mini supergroup

Boots For Dancing.

A slightly punky funk kind of thing.

The NME were interested in doing a cover feature on us, you know,

and Dave bottled out.

Dave decided it wasn't for him. He just...

He was worried his mates wouldn't talk to him or something,

or think he'd sold out or something like that.

It was just like, "Duh!"

What were you thinking of, Dave?

I mean, I was just a teenager then, but I didnae play the game.

But I'm quite proud I didnae play the game, because that's...

And that's pretty punk, as far as I'm concerned.

MUSIC: Candyskin by Fire Engines

Of course, we did Candyskin.

MAN SINGS ALONG WITH GUITAR RIFF

# Candyskin Oh, Candyskin... #

It was Bob that put the strings on Candyskin,

which was probably... It is the best thing about it for me.

# Candyskin Oh, Candysuck... #

We were always interested in looking for sort of

cracks into the mainstream.

It was probably the closest we ever got throughout any of that

time to something that actually was recognisable

to other people as being pop.

Candyskin is very catchy, and it did get onto Roundtable, you know,

the BBC thing.

Where it was roundly dismissed as the worst-produced record that

anyone had ever heard.

And at the end he says, "No, I don't think it's good,

"cos it sounds out-of-tune at the end."

And I was going, "Uh-huh.

"That's our sound. It's, like...

"It's not out-of-tune - that's how it's meant to sound."

So, it got the thumbs down.

# La-la-la-la... #

I think it was.... Yeah, it was a great bit of outsider pop

and remains a great bit of outsider pop.

Despite radical success,

Bob again decided enough was enough and disbanded the label,

but not to leave the music business.

On the contrary, he had his sights set on greater things -

band management and publishing.

I've had no ambition to have my own major label.

I was interested in that action of being the insurgent and I'd done it.

SIRENS WAIL

Bobby invited me to go for something to eat

in the Habitat in the West End,

and it was kind of New Year's Eve, actually, I think.

He told me he was starting a publishing company,

and he wanted me to be one of the acts.

It was either me or not at all, on my own,

and I went home and split the band up.

Russell phoned me, and I think it was New Year's Day, 1982, was it?

Possibly '83. I think it was '82.

See? I don't even know when we finished, it's that long ago.

And said, "That's it, it's finished, Davy's left the band, we're over,"

and that was that.

It's one of the biggest regrets of my life,

of which there are a few.

The people in the Fire Engines and The Dirty Reds

are my brothers,

and I do, I suppose I feel like I let them down.

MUSIC: Queen City Of The 4th Dimension by The Sexual Objects

# I got myself a situation

# Down the Young Man's Christian Association... #

Postcard, meanwhile, had been expanding the sock drawer.

Alan signed the magnificent guitar-based Australian

two-piece The Go-Betweens,

and when he enlisted East Kilbride's Aztec Camera,

fronted by boy wonder Roddy Frame,

it cemented the label's reputation as a force to be reckoned with.

We got a big three-page spread in Sounds, I believe,

before we'd released a record.

The hip press, the so-called hip press, were like...

They thought... Well, they had, like, Edwyn and then Roddy.

"There must be loads of this stuff up here."

It was really exciting, because we'd never had any of that.

We'd never experienced the music press being interested,

and there came a time in the early '80s when it seemed that anybody

who walked down Sauchiehall Street carrying a guitar case,

you know, an A&R man would jump out with a chequebook and say,

"Sign here. I'll give you a deal."

There was a big kind of, almost like a novelty, like,

to the London music journalists, to getting on the train, you know,

and actually going five hours and finding this whole scene, you know.

It was just the place to be.

You know, you didnae have to go to London any more.

It was equally, if not even more exciting,

because it was ours.

You know, we had it and it was

a ten-minute cab ride from the house.

MUSIC: Variation Of Scene by Josef K

With the press eagerly awaiting more pop pearls from Postcard,

Alan felt it was time to put out the label's first album.

It wasn't by Orange Juice, but by NME favourites Josef K.

Well, I thought Paul Haig was a pop star.

He looked like a pop star. I liked the enigma, the cryptic quality,

and the beauty of the voice.

That was my kind of pop star, you know,

slightly, I thought, existential, you know.

He looked like he read Beckett but loved Diana Ross, you know?

He just seemed the perfect hybrid.

But the classic pop charm of a 45 didn't translate to 33rpm.

# These colours, they are rising... #

When we heard the masters,

it sounded blanded out, pure and simple.

It just didn't seem to be the sound of Josef K.

So Alan started sowing the seeds of doubt about, you know, saying,

"I don't think it sounds very good. The drums are mixed too loud.

"If they're not happy with this, we don't have to put this out.

"I'll talk to Rough Trade."

Of course, Rough Trade were aghast, cos they'd put up, you know,

quite a substantial budget for it.

In relative terms, you know, I think we'd been in the studio

for five days or something, you know, which...

So, we didn't put it out, and we went back to the studio in Belgium,

and recorded the scratchy, difficult-to-listen-to

The Only Fun In Town album.

# It took ten years to realise

# Why the angels start to cry... #

It got completely slated when it came out.

I think my feeling about that first Josef K album was, what happened...

Everything was happening so quick

and I think it was just the level of disappointment.

I had in my head this kind of weird vision of Paul Haig

being on Top Of The Pops three or four times a year,

how sexy would that be, you know,

and then suddenly I heard the album and I just had one of those

bad-tempered moments of, like, "Oh, you've fucking fucked it up."

# Sorry for laughing... #

I just remember Paul Morley talking to me about it,

saying how disappointed he'd been, how things should have moved on,

and he'd thought we should have sounded like The Police.

It was almost like, to him, a betrayal, I think -

like we'd purposely committed commercial suicide or something.

But I think it was very much our love and affection.

"Oh, I'm so disappointed. You've let me down, you know?"

Forgetting that, oddly enough, the ramification of that,

-that it was, you know...

-HE GASPS

Because I was obviously meant to be the Postcard guy,

and suddenly the Postcard guy had scrawled all over the Postcard,

you know, saying, "It's bloody rubbish. What's happened?"

Not releasing that first Josef K album,

for building the label and for any kind of commerciality,

that was a ridiculous decision to make.

It was art, not commerce.

But commerce was the name of the '80s game.

They're probably the most successful British group to combine

German-style electronics with a fairly commercial form of melody.

The Human League, play us out...

MUSIC: Gordon's Gin by The Human League

Bob Last was now managing The Human League,

grooming them for pop stardom,

but his strategy for chart success would have massive implications

for the band.

Bob was a very appealing character to us,

because he had this kind of aura around him that he was like...

He was like your dad.

We just liked the way that he approached the business.

But behind the scenes, I didn't realise Bob was manipulating

and was in deep discussion with

the record company about how to split us,

and take Phil away and make him into a pop star,

and make loads of money,

and get two bands for the price of one, essentially.

The divide-and-conquer game plan worked well.

The schism produced two bands, Human League mark two and Heaven 17,

with Bob managing both.

Martyn Ware, he was kind of sacked from his own band!

The band that he'd formed, he was sacked from.

Of course, I was in a state of shock. You can imagine.

This was the first example of...

Well, probably the only example in my entire life, thinking about it,

of proper betrayal - I mean, full-on epic betrayal, you know?

# Lies the reason Faith or treason

# Playing a part... #

Bob then brought in Jo Callis, with his poppy sensibility,

to navigate the new, improved Human League towards the charts.

There was all this eclectic interest,

and, you know, one extreme of it was Abba.

You know, Phil, a great admirer of Abba and everything very produced

and very commercial, you know, very pop.

So I think Bob probably picked on that,

and picked up on that and thought,

"Well, you know, let's just have an arty Abba."

The Human League didn't actually know anything about music,

and I didn't want someone in there who was going to turn them into

some sort of progressive musical noodling,

which was clearly a risk factor,

and so I thought the idea of Jo bringing his very taut song-making

and noise attitude to them might be a good idea.

It turned out to be a very good idea.

It felt entirely right.

# Lies the reason Faith or treason

# Playing a part... #

A duo from the East Coast were also on the brink of

cracking the mainstream.

Rooted in disco and Bowie,

they were an antidote to the proliferous indie guitar bands.

# Ooh, ooh-ooh

# Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh... #

-HIGH-PITCHED:

-# Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh... #

Did we use helium?

No, not on recording,

but we did have helium in the studio

because we just thought it was so fricking funny.

It was, like, kind of anti-rock, in a way.

Fantastical pop music that was like some of it came from Bowie,

some of it came from disco...

I was already in this band,

and this band I was in, they liked Genesis and Yes,

and all things prog.

But you can tell by the name - Caspian, for fuck's sake.

But I heard this voice, and it was in Tiffany's in Edinburgh,

and I said, "I've got to have that voice."

# Don't make me do what the atheists do... #

We wrote Party Fears Two in 1977.

At that time, my parents stayed in Lithgow,

and we'd go out and get hammered on Saturday night,

and then wake up on Sunday morning and go down to the piano

in the front room and...

That's, you know, that's the piano that Party Fears Two was written on.

MUSIC: Party Fears Two by The Associates

# I'll have a shower

# And then phone my brother up... #

I came up with the riff,

and, you know, we looked at each other and we said,

"That's a hit, isn't it?"

I said, "Yeah, but not now."

You know, cos, at that time, it just sounded...

It was too poppy, you know,

it wasn't a three-chord trick played at a breakneck speed.

# Always in wrong... #

Party Fears Two got to number nine in the charts and was the first