IN the beginning was Alex Harvey and the Soul Band who begat what was to come, and its birthplace was La Cave, a club buried in a dank and reeking burrow under Central Station in Glasgow which even rodents steered clear of.
Harvey went through several incarnations in his musical career, cut short by a heart attack, he had won a competition as the "Scottish Tommy Steele", I saw him in the doldrums playing rhythm guitar in the orchestra of the musical Hair in London, and later still he would transmogrify into a glam rocker in his "sensational" phase, but the original, as the song goes, is still the greatest.
He would reel onstage, fortified by cheap red wine and uppers, and introduce himself, the band marking musical time, "My name is Alex Harvey and this is the Soul Band. And we've been framed," leading into what was more an early precursor of rap than a song.
But if Harvey was the Godfather of Scottish rock and pop his adjutant was Jimmy Grimes, the bass player and a merchant seaman who brought back the records which influenced the band, calypso and particularly blues, and which they copied. Grimes, known as "the General", had been asked to join the band with an inimitable come on, "How would you like to get into debt?"
Harvey's younger brother Lesley was a virtuoso guitar player who formed the Kinning Park Ramblers (where the family were from), including his girlfriend Maggie Bell and singer Bobby Kerr. Lessley later formed Stone the Crows with Maggie Bell and died, electrocuted onstage in Wales aged 27 (it's a fateful age for rock stars, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain make up a grisly club). Kerr went on to sing with the Joe Loss Orchestra on radio and he, too died, killed on his moped by a motorist.
The daytime hangout and a place where cross-pollination occurred between bands was McCormack's music shop in Bath Street (the family were actually McCormicks, but suffered anti-Catholic bias) now closed. Groups like the Poets, the Beatstalkers and the Pathfinders floated in and out and touring bands, like the Rolling Stones, actually borrowed equipment. This was the 1960s where the lavish touring caravanserai of today were only a dream.
On the east coast the Dundee Horns (Malcolm '"Molly" Duncan and Roger Ball) would be joined by drummer Robbie McIntosh – another rock casualty –Alan Gorrie, Hamish Stuart, Owen McIntyre from Auchinairn and later become funk meisters the Average White Band, sign to Jerry Wexler's Atlantic Records and have a worldwide Number 1 in Pick Up The Pieces.
Sally Carr's band Middle of the Road had a huge hit with the execrable Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep and she later married the football commentator Chick Young. In a BBC documentary she claims that Abba's Agnetha Faltskog covered their songs and that Abba modelled their sound on her band's.
By then Lulu had gone to London, modified her style and accent, appeared in a film and then married a Bee Gee (another tragedy). In the late 1970s Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill's band Johnny and the Self Abusers became Simple Minds, the Orange Juice flowed, with Edwyn Collins et al, and Wet Wet Wet and Deacon Blue
The singer and writer Jim Wilkie (album The Waxer) wrote an excellent book about how it all began, Blue Suede Brogans: Secret Life of Scottish Rock Music. And last year Jim put out a track, Donald my son, an imagined letter to the US President from his mother, Lewis-born Mary.
Donald, my boy, may you enjoy the White House in all of its splendour
It seems so remote from our fishing boats and our black houses long since surrendered
Try to measure your words and avoid the absurd, the temptation to cast the first stone
Donald, my son, always remember no man is an island alone
We can assume it's not on Trump's playlist.
(Rip it up, the story of Scottish pop begins a three-part series on BBC2 at 9pm this Tuesday)
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