Beatles borrowed my eyeliner: Scots pop star you've never heard of

And yet you’ve probably never heard of her. I certainly hadn’t until I caught a screening of Carla J Easton and Blair Young’s fun new documentary Since Yesterday. The film is subtitled The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands, and in McKinlay’s case that rings true. 

McKinlay has been living in the seaside town for the last 22 years with her husband Jimmy. As well as her own picture on the wall there are photographs of her children and grandchildren. She is, and has been for many years, known as Jeanette Gallacher (her married name). But her pop story, such as it is, is associated with the name she shared with her late sister Sheila.

The bare facts are these. In 1964 and 1965 Jeanette and Sheila recorded a number of singles for Columbia and Parlophone; singles like Sweet and Tender Romance and Someone Cares For Me that made the most of the sisters’ natural ability to harmonise. Little lost pop moments from British pop’s golden age. Donovan even wrote the music for one of them (Give Him My Love).

“Ours were good, I feel, even looking back now,” Jeanette says of the songs that bear the McKinlay name. “The records were great. There was nothing crap about them. And you could hear some stuff that was going up the charts and you thought, ‘How did they even get into a studio?’”

But lack of management, a measure of exploitation and a certain naivete did for the sisters’ chances back then. They would have more luck in Germany. Well, up to a point.

It's a bright and blowy day in Dunbar when we meet. Jeanette is bright and bubbly and looks at least 10 years younger than her birth certificate might suggest. She was born in Gloucester - her dad was in the RAF - but moved to Leith when she was one. The family moved in with their grandfather, four children and three adults in a one-bedroom flat.

Jeanette and her sister Sheila adored each other. They also fought with each other, because that’s what sisters do. In her teens Jeanette started going out to clubs in Edinburgh. There was a talent contest at one of them and she talked her sister into entering it with her. 

“We were always singing. We didn’t have to learn harmonies, we seemed to know how to harmonise.”

The sisters won the competition and the prize was to sing with a band, The Edinburgh Sapphires.

The sisters in their hey day

“We used to do a lot of American bases and of course we sang American stuff. The Everlys. Anything that we could harmonise on at the time. We were fans of Elvis obviously and a lot of black acts … Sam and Dave, but that was later. Love Letters in the Sand. Ketty Lester.

“Then for some funny reason we ended up with a Falkirk band. I can’t remember the details, but they were probably a bit better and wanted us to sing with them. And then we had a Dundee band, an Aberdeen band, a Glasgow band, The Glasgow Falcons.

“We were playing in Dundee when this London agent heard us and literally from one day to the next we were going down to London to do a demo.”

Jeanette was still in her teens, Sheila not long into her twenties. “We were green. We knew nothing.” 

But they were good. They quickly became popular with music producers. “Because we would walk in, learn the song, sing it and walk out again. We were never singing off-key. It sounds awfy like I’m bragging, but I’m not. We just didn’t sing flat or sharp. We thought that was normal.”

Brian Epstein heard their first single Someone Cares For Me and began to offer them work. That’s how they ended up touring the UK with The Beatles in 1964.

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“They borrowed our eyeliner. In the ABC in Edinburgh the dressing rooms are up a floor and we had kids climbing up to our window thinking it was the Beatles. 

“We got on great with them, chatting and having a laugh. Our mother came to the Edinburgh gig. So they’re standing at the side watching us and she is teaching Paul to say ‘It’s a braw, bricht, moonlit nicht.’ And he’s doing it.”

What were the four of them like? “Paul, friendly, friendly. George quiet. It’s what you always know.  Ringo friendly enough and John funny-sarcastic. He couldn’t ever let a thing go without a slightly cutting remark. But not horrible by any means. They were all nice.

“But the Stones …” she adds, remembering the time the sisters supported the band at Wembley. “This is awful. I told you we were green. We knew they were druggies. We didn’t go near them. We didn’t make any attempt to go near them. And that’s pathetic, isn’t it?

“Because I’m sure they were nice guys. But we also knew they were university guys. Sheila and I were working class. You know your place.”

For a year the McKinlays worked constantly. They played with The Hollies, Freddie and the Dreamers, Manfred Mann. They did a season in Blackpool with Gerry and the Pacemakers.

Gerry Marsden fancied Sheila, Jeanette says. “But, of course, Sheila was having none of it. I think he was married then and I was always there. We were lucky in that respect. We were never abused or sexually compromised because we never seemed to leave each other’s side. I suppose we knew.

“Gerry was nice to us, just helpful. And he would always say, ‘I’m protecting you.’
“We were on the North Pier and The Bachelors were on the South Pier and you would always get together for parties or whatever. And he would always be chaperoning us, protecting us from them.

“If their Irish mothers had known …”

The sisters could look after themselves too. “We werenae flirty lassies,” Jeanette points out. “When we sang with these bands we weren’t trying to get into their pants and nor were they trying to get into ours, although we were good-looking lassies. We got on great with them. Because we had been in bands and we had brothers as well. You know guys and you have no illusions about men.”

(Image: With Paul and Linda McCartney)

It sounds like they were too busy working anyway. And yet they weren’t getting paid much. In fact, they had to go and bang on the door of their agents and ask for money.

 “We were staying in one wee room in Suffolk Gardens. Sheila’s birthday was in December. We’d enough money for a shilling for the meter and a bag of chips. It was diabolical.

“We did the Beatles tour. We did Edinburgh and Glasgow and then we were coming down to Manchester, I think it was, and we had the train tickets and not a penny. We arrived in Manchester thinking ‘where do we go?’”

Fortunately, Mal Evans, the Beatles’ road manager and fixer was on the same train with the band’s gear. “Thank God for Mal Evans. So he took us to the gig.”

What’s clear is that Sheila and Jeanette had little control over their career at this point. They didn’t have any say. They were just presented with the songs they were given to record.

“On the day. Literally. Walk into the studio, play it, pick it up, end of story. No choice at all. That’s terrible.”

Still, on the surface things seemed to be working. They were touring, appearing on TV in Thank Your Lucky Stars and Ready, Steady, Go. They worked with Dusty Springfield (“She was lovely”) and met their heroes, the Everly Brothers. “I was completely awestruck. Couldn’t think of what to say to them.”

But good as the records were, they weren’t getting into the charts. “We knew they weren’t becoming hits. It wasn’t being pushed. The agency were just very neglectful and I just wish we had the guts to face them and say, ‘Why take us on if you’re not going to work with us?’”

Things came to an end when they returned from performing at American bases in Germany. They rocked up to the agency only to find a big padlock on the door. “Bankrupt.”

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Not knowing what to do, they went to Denmark Street to speak to a couple of people they knew in the industry who contacted the promoter who had just taken them to Germany.

“He said, ‘Send them right back over.’ And we went.”

This is the Sliding Doors moment in the story, perhaps. What the sisters didn’t know was that Brian Epstein had already expressed an interest in managing them, only to be rebuffed by their agents. If they had known they could have approached him. Instead, they returned to Germany where they had a measure of success they never quite managed in the UK.

“We recorded quite a lot in Germany but they were behind us musically, so the songs we recorded we were never terribly chuffed about.”

It didn’t help that while there Sheila met and married a German who became their manager. “I found out he was absolutely ripping us off like you wouldn’t believe.

“We were in a club in Baden Baden and the promoter said to me, ‘You’re the most expensive act I’ve had.’ And I said, ‘What are you paying the rest then?’ And he took me into the office and showed me the paperwork. Sheila had no knowledge of this. So I just left.”

She returned home to Scotland in 1969 and got “a normal job”.

“And then, ’71, I got married and we were going to go over to Australia. Sheila was saying, ‘Don’t go. I’ll never see you. Come over, there’s still lots of work.’ 

“So Jimmy and I went to Germany. Jimmy got a job in a schallplatten factory, a record factory, and I’m doing jingles.”

The sisters were kept busy. They even recorded with James Last. But when a local producer heard a song by a Dutch couple called How Do You Do, he thought it could be a hit and asked Jeanette if she would sing on it. Then they found a male singer, Peter Petrel, to duet with her. 

She leaves the room for a moment and comes back with a small case. Inside is a gold record for sales of the single How Do You Do.

“We were a hit in Germany, number one for about three months. What did we earn? 500 marks, because we did it as a session. Signed on the dotted line.”

Meanwhile, Jeanette’s sister Sheila was still married to her German husband who turned out to be both controlling and abusive. “I could not get her to leave him,” Jeanette says. “She was a great person. But she had such rotten bloody luck with that bloke.”

Things did get better for Sheila. She met the musician Howie Casey, who would go on to play with Paul McCartney’s band Wings, and they became a couple. Eventually, she left Germany - the word Jeanette uses is “escaped” - to settle in England. 

(Image: Jeanette with her gold disc. Picture: Gordon Terris)

Sheila continued to record and perform as part of Casey’s own band all around the world. Only right, Jeanette says. “Sheila was good, better than me. I was a harmoniser. I never thought, 'I’m a good singer.'”

So what was Jeanette doing in these years?

“Being a mother. Even when I was singing I’d think the only thing I want is to be at my kitchen window, looking at my kids playing in the garden. I wanted a normal life.

“People might think, ‘Oh, look at you up there.’ But it’s shit. Not the singing. The singing’s the best part. It’s what goes with it and the people you have to manipulate to try to get money out of. 

“So by ’73 I was working at ways to get home.

“With the money I made from the German record I managed to buy a wee cottage in Ratho. Jimmy came home and got a job and I said, ‘Can I please go home on my birthday?’ This is terrible because I did this to poor Peter knowing that I didn’t want to go back. 

“People would say to Sheila in Germany, ‘What is your sister doing? Is she mad?’ Because we were on telly a lot. They thought I was a lunatic. But I knew what I was doing.

“By the time it got to Christmas ’73 I was pregnant. So I called Peter and said my doctor has advised me not to travel. Lying bitch,” she says, laughing.

There was the odd time the sisters would work together again. They teamed up to play with Paice Ashton Lord (featuring Deep Purple’s Iain Pace and Jon Lord and singer Tony Ashton) in 1977 (there’s a concert on YouTube). They even did a season with their brother in Aberdeen, in an Andy Stewart show of all things

“We weren't singing any Scottish songs. It was Bridge over Troubled Water and Fernando and stuff, but it was like 12 weeks. Howie came to see it. He must have been horrified because when you do an Andy Stewart show you don’t just do your part. Oh no. You’re in all the wee skits. And you’re in wee dresses. It was hilarious. There was a choreographer trying to get my brother to dance. He had two left feet.”

And that was that? Nearly. The makers of the film Since Yesterday did coax her to perform in Leith.

 “They had a wee concert. I just sang Sweet and Tender Romance. It’s the one song I sang the lead on. I was absolutely bricking it. I never even told my daughter and son. They were annoyed. My husband was there and I managed to sing it all right.”

Since Yesterday will hopefully help write the McKinlays back into the story of Scottish pop. Not that everyone had forgotten them. When Sheila died in 2012 Paul McCartney was one of those who sent the family flowers.

“Paul sent the most amazing bouquet,” Janette recalls. “It could barely get in the door. Beautiful, saying something like, ‘For your lovely lady.’”

As for Jeanette, this is not a story full of regrets or what might-have-beens. Her pop story is not the whole story.  

“It was amazing playing with all these bands. We sang with The Hollies. They loved our harmonies. They were lovely guys. It was brilliant. I just wish we had been better looked after. We could have made more of it, but the fact is I wouldn’t have ended up here with my four kids and I would never change that.”

Jeanette McKinlay is a grandmother and was once nearly a pop star. She knows which of those things is more important.

Since Yesterday is in cinemas now