Time to hop back on board Hipsway's Candybar Express?

“I think the shows will be euphoric, amazing,” says Grahame Skinner, better known as Skin, Hipsway’s frontman. “There will be so much energy in the room. ‘We want to make music that will last’ is a kind of stock thing you say in an interview. But here we are 30 years later and it has kind of worked.”

Clearly, there is a strong nostalgic appetite for this music, yet Hipsway – and the other blue-eyed soul bands who were their peers and rivals – have never, or only briefly, been hip. Indeed there is a whole wave of Scottish music, groups who emerged in 1986 and 1987, that is not acknowledged by tastemakers as part of the national canon. Think Love And Money, Hue And Cry, early Wet Wet Wet, The Big Dish, even Deacon Blue to a lesser degree. These were bands making slick, commercial pop rooted in soul, funk and jazz. Popular at the time, but nobody talks up these records now. They don’t make it into top ten lists. They are embarrassing second cousins, not cool uncles like the Jesus & Mary Chain. They come from the years that cool forgot, between post-punk and acid house, between You Trip Me Up and Movin’ On Up.

But, actually, a lot of those songs were great. They deserve attention and reappraisal. Stick on Hallelujah Man or Labour Of Love or Prospect Street and they sound fantastic. Better, in fact, than they did at the time. Why? Perhaps because they are shorn of their political and social context. “The lyrics may be concerned and caring,” Simon Reynolds sniffed in a Melody Maker overview of the scene, “but the music sounds nouveau riche, ostentatiously flashy, costly … and the only people who want to be smoothies are Thatcherite southern spivs. To aggravate all this further, the records all sound as though they were designed to be played on compact disc.”

What sounded spivvy to serious critics three decades ago, now comes across as artistic assurance, even winning cocksureness. Wet Wet Wet’s Wishing I Was Lucky – to take one example – is a minor masterpiece. As a statement of the economics of working class life it is the equal of those other songs of that year like Shoplifters by The Smiths, Rent by the Pet Shop Boys, and, in particular, Deacon Blue’s Dignity, to which it can be seen as a companion piece. “Bogie” in Ricky Ross’s anthem is grafting and saving in order to realise his dream; Marti Pellow, by contrast, is jobless, thwarted and “kicking in the gutter”.

That opening line – “I was living in a world of make believe/When my best friend wrote and told me/That there may be a job in the city” – when it came drifting out of radios in the spring of 1987 smelled of dole queues and tower blocks and fresh cut grass on council schemes. The effortless sweetness of the vocal creates an atmosphere of defiant optimism that, for those of us whose families were part of Thatcher’s three million, brings the mood of those times right back whether we wish it or not.

“The power of these artists and songs was that they believed that a pop single – and pop stardom – could encompass everything they wanted to do,” Hue and Cry’s Pat Kane recalls. “Just at the end of our five peak years, rave began to kick in: a much more collective experience, anonymous grooves allowing the dancefloor, whether in field or warehouse, to become much more important, becoming their own stars. We still wanted the audience in their place, listening to our great songs, because we'd poured so much into them. Quite a limited model, but we were creatures of our era.”

As A&R men flew up from London, hoping to sign the next Altered Images or Orange Juice, getting a recording contract became ridiculously easy. “If you had half an idea, a quiff, a plaid shirt and a semi-acoustic, you could talk yourself into a deal,” recalls James Grant. “But I was anxious to prove that I was more than a haircut.”

He had been in Friends Again, indie janglers under the spell of Postcard Records, but his new band, Love And Money, would have a much more polished and accomplished sound, influenced, as were others on the scene, by Glasgow’s increasingly sophisticated and hedonistic nightlife. “I was at clubs maybe five nights a week, with Skin and Harry from Hipsway,” Grant says. The Sub Club, Bennet’s, Henry Afrika’s, Fury Murray’s – these were the places. Jocelyn Brown’s Somebody Else’s Guy, Chaka Khan’s I Feel For You, Bobby Womack’s Tell Me Why, and pretty much anything by Chic – these were the big songs. “Eventually I was dancing to my own records,” Grant laughs. “What a prick.”

The Scottish bands attempting their own take on black American music may often have been working class in their backgrounds and red in their politics, but their songs soundtracked a changing Glasgow – arguably, a shallowing Glasgow – in the period between Miles Better and the City of Culture. As observed in a 1984 Sunday Times feature on the “repackaging” of Glasgow, the city was going from being a place where people cared about ideas to one in which “lifestyle” was the most important thing. Or, as Skin observes about his own sudden success, “It’s difficult to be left-wing when you’re driving about in a stretch Mercedes.”

Why is it that the bands who emerged from this transforming city are now held in such low esteem? The novelist Denise Mina, who moved to Glasgow from London in 1986, believes that their music had too obvious an ear for what would sell. “It’s like they were optimistic and poppy so everyone hates them,” she says. “There’s an idea, particularly in Glasgow, that if it isn’t whiny it’s not authentic. And I wonder if it’s also because people don’t like to admit that there’s an interaction between the market and art? That’s seen as quite vulgar. It’s one of the reasons why crime fiction has a lower kudos. There’s a churlishness about admitting that artists need to try and make a living from their work.”

A Scottish artist starting now and desirous of any kind to credibility would be unlikely to perform in an American accent; it would be interpreted as cultural cringing and a horrible affectation, and this is perhaps another reason why Love And Money, Hipsway et al continue to be black-balled by the critical establishment. “You have to sing Caledonia now, don’t you?” says Muriel Gray with a shudder. As a presenter of The Tube and face on the scene, Gray had a ringside seat on the rise of the blue-eyed soul bands. She remembers backcombing her hair to the sound of Jimmy Shand on Take The Floor before heading out to the Sub Club. For her, TransAtlanticism was a sign of confidence and ease – a way of saying that we, the Scots, are as good as anyone and will take the best bits of music from wherever we like. “Now, everybody is so self-conscious about cultural appropriation and there is a self-censorship that goes on that’s absolutely joyless.”

So, is the moment right, finally, to give these bands their due? To stop worrying and learn to love Strange Kind Of Love? James Grant hopes so. He is about to release new music, under the name The Korvids, which reunites him with Gary Katz, the Steely Dan producer who worked on that classic Love And Money album. For Grant, he and his peers are misunderstood. Their music, far from being some kind of arriviste aberration, was a deliberate break with Scottish indie tradition, an attempt to prove that virtuosity could be a virtue and commercial ambition no sort of vice.

“I remember some guy in NME said that Love And Money had undone in one fell swoop what great Glasgow bands had been doing for ten years,” he laughs. “I was enormously flattered by that.”

Hipsway play the O2 ABC, Glasgow, on November 25 & 26. A deluxe 30th anniversary edition of their debut album is released on Hot Shot Records. Bad Faith, the new single by The Korvids, is out on Nang Records with an album to follow in February.