For The Record
This essay first appeared in My Choice of Words (Paragon Press 2021).
At the age of six, I was enlisted into the choir of St. Ninian’s Scottish Episcopal Church. In the West of Scotland, in the 1960s, pretty much everyone except us belonged to the Church of Scotland or the Roman Catholic Church. Rangers or Celtic, it was as simple as that. But the Scottish Episcopal Church is neither. Like the Church of England, it has bishops, and communion with bread and wine.
And it had a whole bunch of great tunes. I wasn’t the first person to fall in love with music in a church, and I won’t be the last. And yes, it probably would have happened anyway in some other place at some other time, but it didn’t. It happened in St. Ninian’s Scottish Episcopal Church, in the Sixties.
My first jukebox was a leather-bound edition of Hymns An- cient and Modern, and like any jukebox, each song had a number and you knew where your favourites were. By the age of ten, I could read music and hold my boy soprano part through an hour or more of choral matins and evensong.
I loved every minute of it, in part, perhaps, because it was a regular gig, and a paid one. The rates were modest – sixpence here and a shilling there, but practice every Thursday, two shows on a Sunday, and a wedding or two every Saturday in June, all added up to a nice little earner.
I stayed on to sing alto, and then tenor, only finally retiring the summer before I went to university at the ripe old age of sixteen. By then, I had racked up a good ten years singing church music, two or three times a week.
By then there were girls in the choir, so the motives for staying on so long were no longer entirely financial. One became my first proper girlfriend, and we first kissed, I remember, dancing to ‘American Pie’ at a school dance in the sports hall at Marr College: ‘I knew you were in love with him when I saw you dancing in the gym.’
At first, I spent my wages on my other childhood passion, aeroplanes. I bought logbooks, a pair of binoculars, and a VHF Radio Receiver, and Airfix models of Douglas Dakotas and Vickers VC10s.
But soon, adolescence brought first pop and then rock’n’roll into my life, and what I was earning singing about God I was soon spending listening to Black Sabbath and Sympathy for The Devil.
The lawyer in me reasoned, even then I guess, that the Devil’s music is really just the other side of the story.
My enjoyment of a good anthem, like Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest,’ no doubt explains my affection for stadium rock, and for U2 and Bruce Springsteen in particular. Both are firm adherents of the redemptive power of rock’n’roll, and powerful practitioners.
The very best songwriters are just the best preachers, with the best sermons - Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, and Bob Marley most obviously so. But it’s there in Pete Townshend, Nick Lowe, Ray Davies, Jarvis Cocker, and Brian Wilson. It’s in Lennon & McCartney, Jagger & Richards, and Bacharach & David.
And, perhaps, it’s all down to that leather-bound copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern, but somehow it’s always all been about the words for me.
At Marr College, Mrs. McInnes, she of the sherry in the staffroom incident, and Mr. Cotter, freshly graduated and a neighbour on Bentinck Drive, stretched the poetry curriculum to embrace Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel, even if they probably weren’t supposed to.
And though such things were discouraged in Mr. Murray’s music room, he gave me and many others generous, and well-drilled, encouragement in school productions of Handel, Benjamin Britten, and Gilbert and Sullivan.
My father played his part too. As a student at Strathclyde, it was he who first brought The Beatles into 59 Bentinck Drive. A Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder stood in the dining room that functioned as his study, and I vividly remember the cover art of Rubber Soul on one of the tape boxes that sat beside it. Perhaps it was because of its pop-art typography. Or maybe because it was the first record cover that I had ever seen that made no mention of the artist’s name.
I can clearly recall my eldest brother John going to see A Hard Day’s Night at the cinema when, for once, we were all together on a rare family holiday in Scarborough, in what must have been the summer of 1964. But I struggle to recall any other association between him and music at all.
For his part, Michael has never made any secret of the fact that he considers nothing much written since 1900 worth bothering with.
Listening to songs and, whenever possible, seeing people sing them became my favourite, and, at some periods of my life, my only way of making sense of the world around me. They brought news that others felt as I felt, and that was welcome news. Songs and singers gave me comfort, and became my friends.
There was little pop, and even less rock’n’roll, on television then, so live records had to do that job, and they did it well. In the unlikely event that you’ve never listened to Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, or Get Your Yayas Out: The Rolling Stones Live in Concert, then waste no more of your life without them. They thrill today every bit as much as then.
But still not quite as much as being there in the room. Nothing, but nothing, can do that. I cannot now recall the day or the date, or the circumstances that allowed me to be there, but I will never forget the night in the function room of The Caledonian Hotel in Ayr, when I first witnessed a live rock’n’roll show with my very own eyes and ears. It was 1972, I was fifteen, and Rory Gallagher was twenty-three. He had disbanded Taste after their appearance at The Isle of Wight Festival, and had been voted Melody Maker’s International Top Guitarist of The Year. Eric Clapton was the runner up.
He went on to sell thirty million records, audition for the vacancy in The Rolling Stones following Mick Taylor’s departure, and work with Muddy Waters and Jerry Lee Lewis, before his death in 1995 at the age of forty-seven.
But it was as a live act that he is best remembered and, once again, if you’ve never listened to Live in Europe 72 you really should.
That night, he strapped on his worn Sunburst Stratocaster and scorched through what in my memory is at least a couple of hours of stomping blues-rock. And he changed my life.
It was the first of thousands of shows by hundreds of artists. A timeline of rock’n’roll, and a record of my life and my travels, the result of good fortune in being born when I was, and finding myself at the right place at the right time.
Roy Orbison’s last London show at the Mean Fidler in Harlesden, with Johnathan Ross, Mark Knopfler and Elvis Costello in the audience, The Ramones’ Leave Home Tour at Strathclyde University, with Talking Heads as their support, The Buena Vista Social Club in the ballroom of The Hotel Nacional in Havana, Bjork on the pier of Sopot on the Polish seaside, Tom Waits guesting with the Rolling Stones in Oakland, and Elvis Costello duetting with Bob Dylan on ‘I Shall Be Released’ at the Brixton Academy.
Somehow, I’ve managed to find myself there. And whenever I could, I’ve always made the effort to go back for more.
Over forty years, I’ve managed to see Elvis Costello, for example, on no less than 152 occasions. The most recent was in the faded grandeur of Liverpool Olympia, on the opening night of the sadly curtailed ‘Just Trust Elvis Costello and The Imposters Tour.’ It was a hometown show for both Elvis and for Ursula, who was then living and working there. And it was a standup show, too, always the best, and in the presence of his mother.
Every partner that I’ve ever spent any time with has been to at least one Elvis Costello show, although I can’t remember any that were ever particularly enthusiastic about it. I guess it must be hard to even try to begin to match my own excitement on such occasions.
Eline, a strikingly beautiful red-haired Flemish lawyer, who inexplicably chose to date me for four years, was a notable exception. We shared two Elvis Costello shows, one in Bologna following a romantic weekend in Rome, and the other on a beautiful summer’s evening at the OLT Rivierenhof in Antwerp.
Eline aside though, generally I’ve fared better enjoying shows with friends. Bob and Muddi in Aberdeen, Stuart and Dafydd in London, and Pete in Brussels, have all been happy to be my gig buddies at one time or another, over the years. Pete has gladly driven me to Nick Lowe in Bruges, and Belle and Sebastian in Antwerp amongst others, and all for the price of the ticket, or a pre-show carbonnade and a couple of beers. The fact that he knows his aeroplanes too, and is only too happy to stop off at a random field in Flanders for a bit of impromptu plane spotting, is a welcome bonus.
Not surprisingly, all my daughters have grown up enthusiastic gig-goers. Hermione coming home from a Ray Davies show at Birmingham Symphony Hall, pleased to have discovered that all her favourite songs were written by the same person.
India’s face at the moment she realised that she was in the same room as Paul McCartney, singing ‘Yesterday’.
‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ in the Glastonbury rain, sharing a supper of rum and jerk chicken with Ursula.
Moments precious beyond words.
