East Kilbride was by no means luxurious in absolute terms, but compared to where we’d come from, it absolutely was. We got there in 1966 and I didn’t go to school till a year or so after, so it was different for William as he was already at primary school in Glasgow and therefore had to change schools. My memory is that we both adjusted to the move quite well, but I can’t be sure because we weren’t close at that stage. By the time I’d got to East Kilbride I’d figured out that there was no point tagging along with him because William wasn’t up for it – the three-year age difference was just too much. Who wants a little brother following them around?
In Glasgow I was popular and sociable and had tons of friends, so when we moved to East Kilbride I was confident I was going to fit in, especially as we already had family there – our cousin James had moved there about a year before us, which was how we knew East Kilbride was not just an option, but coming from Glasgow it looked like a paradise. You didn’t have to go to the public baths any more, and you could have a shit in your own house. But for some reason it didn’t work out that way.
I just felt a bit cut off – like I’d been amputated from Parkhead, and the memory of the place I used to be was left behind as a phantom limb. For reasons I couldn’t quite get straight in my head, I struggled to make friends. On the face of it, East Kilbride was a great place to grow up – it was more suburb than concrete jungle, and you were never far away from woods and rivers and trees to climb and fields to play football in – but I found it hard.
I definitely had depression as a child and a teenager, but I don’t think anybody in our circles or even wider society in Britain would’ve called it depression, because I don’t think a depressed child existed in the sixties and seventies. How it manifested with me was it would be a beautiful sunny day and I would be upstairs reading comics. A friend would come to the door asking ‘Is William coming out to play?’ And my response would be ‘I don’t wanna! I don’t wanna see him!’
I liked my friends, and I liked going out to play football in the park, but then there I was sitting in my room alone with my Batman comic or Amazing Stories, worrying about why I didn’t want to go out. It’s natural to want to be by yourself sometimes, but when it becomes a reflex you can’t get the better of, that’s depression. I know this because I’ve experienced it as an adult as well, and if it happened to one of my kids now, I would take them to a child psychiatrist, but of course my ma and da weren’t going to do that because at that stage it wasn’t a thing you did. Children were not really human beings yet in terms of being seen and heard.
Even though Jim and I have been very aware of each other’s mental states as adults, for some reason the subject of whether he suffered as I did when we were children has never really come up. Maybe that’s a hangover from the time when it was something you weren’t really supposed to talk about…
I had a feeling of isolation right through my primary school. There were periods where I had some level of normality, but there was a lot of times where I just slunk about on my own and couldn’t connect with other kids properly. I never really felt like I fitted in, but in a way that’s just me: I didn’t want to be the life and soul of the party, or even the centre of attention – I still don’t. I realise that’s a strange thing for someone who ended up being the frontman of a band to say, but there you go, it’s the truth.
There were no thoughts of stardom when I was a kid, no glimpse of the big time at a school talent contest or walk-on part in a nativity play which hinted at something more. There was none of that ‘I’m so talented why can nobody see it?’ kind of shit. It was pretty much ‘Keep your head down and try to get through it.’
Because I still wanted to support my team but my da and my uncles only wanted to go to the football a few times a year – they were just as happy watching it on telly on a Saturday night, really – I joined the East Kilbride branch of the Rangers supporters club. The meeting point was in Calderwood Square and I’d get up at five or six in the morning – five if it was Aberdeen, ’cos that would just mean driving all day – to be down there for the pick up. If you think of it from today’s perspective, it was quite outrageous. I was only eleven or twelve and I’d be going away hundreds of miles with a bunch of men I didn’t even know and my ma and da didn’t bat an eyelid. I’d say ‘I’m away tomorrow to see Aberdeen,’ and they’d say, ‘Who are you going with?’, ‘Rangers supporters club’, ‘Oh OK.’ That was the kind of trust in institutions that people had back then, which is obviously how a lot of bad things ended up happening, but I was lucky that they didn’t happen to me. Quite the opposite in fact, as the older guys on the bus would always take care of me. If I never had enough money they would buy me a bridie, which is like a cheese and onion pastie. It can be a nice delicacy but if you buy it at a football stadium it’s a cold lump of lard. It still tasted good to me. I had patience for the travelling – I thought to myself ‘I’m going here for a reason.’ If you’re thinking ‘That’s good preparation for your rock ’n’ roll touring lifestyle later on’ then you’re quite right. Jim wasn’t into football – he’s not a football guy, little twit that he is. How can you not be into football?
My da used to like going to the pictures more than the football. We’d been in East Kilbride two or three years by the time they opened the cinema. One of the first things that happened was the younger one from Steptoe and Son – Harry H. Corbett – came to do a personal appearance. This was written about in the local paper as a major news story and I remembered thinking at the time that if I had the money I would’ve went to see him.
Famous people were like distant gods. The idea that somebody famous could be in your eye-line was simply preposterous. One of the most surreal moments of our childhood was when we were just playing out in the street and Lulu came walking down the road and went into our next door neighbour’s house. Fucking hell, Lulu! This would’ve been in the early seventies when she was hanging out with David Bowie. She was like a messenger from another world.
One day, when we were adults, Jim said to me, ‘You were cruel to me when we were kids’ and I did apologise to him, because even though I don’t think I was a bully by nature, there were a few times when I definitely mistreated him. I am still embarrassed by this, but let me tell you what I did to him. When I was maybe eight or nine we were in the lift going up to my granny’s flat and I told Jim there was a spider on his back, and he went totally nuts. He was screaming and trying to pull his jacket off, but when I told him ‘No, it’s away’, he was instantly quiet and completely calm. He just accepted it, which was weird to me, because I would’ve taken longer to adjust. So I did it again – ‘Wait a minute, there is a spider!’ And he freaked out again, then when I said ‘Oh no, my mistake it’s not’, he calmed down straight away. He was just a little kid at the time but I couldn’t understand how he could he go from crazy panic to being completely calm in the blink of an eye, so I might have done it a few more times as a kind of scientific experiment, and he carried on responding in just the same way. Looking back, I suppose you could see this as early training for his later life as a performer.
There was another time when I have to confess for the sake of full disclosure that the two of us were in the bath together – no, we weren’t in our late twenties at the time – and I poured hot water over his back and it was too hot and he didn’t like it. It’s not the worst but I shouldn’t have done it and I hope that if Jim’s ever seen a therapist about it he remembered to tell them that I said I was sorry.
I feel like once I was a bit older, in my early teens, I didn’t bully him but I just thought he was a stupid little idiot because he was my wee brother. I wasn’t actually cruel to him, I just didn’t like it when he would walk in my space or talk to my friends. But that’s what you do with little brothers, isn’t it? ‘You’re there, we’re here, we’re bigger than you.’ It wasn’t like it was just the two of us, because the move to East Kilbride was by no means a clean break as far as our extended family was concerned. We left Glasgow but not everyone came with us, so we’d still go back to my granny’s flat for New Year parties and other celebrations. In fact, early on it felt like we went back most weekends.
Those family gatherings when we were little were quite memorable. The kids all seemed to get on pretty well and the adults would amuse us by drinking way too much and getting into all sorts of bother. What we’d now think of as being alcoholism was basically the norm back then. All the adults would drink and smoke themselves senseless and the kids would hide under the table pissing themselves with laughter as the chaos unfolded.
Once a few drinks had been had, the sing-song would begin. Everybody had to do one. The older people would sing Scottish folk songs that nobody could ever remember properly – some shit about a bonnie lass, but it felt like they were making it up as they went along. The younger ones would sing Beatles tunes or whatever was in the charts. In terms of performance levels, it was a real mixed bag. If you remember Vic Reeves’s club singer on Shooting Stars, that’s how all of my uncles used to sound.
A few more drinks would go down the hatch and then family grudges would start to get aired. ‘Do you remember that time thirty years ago? Do you remember what you said to me?’ As far as we were concerned you couldn’t buy this level of entertainment – after all, there were still only three channels on TV at that time – and we’d be rolling around on the floor laughing.
There was never any actual violence but there was a while where it was all ‘Ye bastard ye’, until about four hours in when they’d all be crying in each other’s arms and saying how much they loved each other – ‘I love ye, ye bastard.’ The next day none of the adults could remember a thing about what had happened and we’d just be thinking ‘Ah well, it’ll all happen again next year.’ This would later be the template for our international touring schedule.
At least some of that extended family atmosphere did transfer to East Kilbride, in that we’d be in and out of my Auntie Matty’s house all through the summers. School would shut its doors and William and I could basically spend six weeks over there hanging out with our cousins. There were a bunch of them as Matty and Uncle Rab had five kids, and between the seven us we used to have a bit of a laugh. It was pretty uneventful but also easy-going and I remember being generally quite happy – even though looking back I’m not sure why, as we had fuck all and no real prospects of anything better.
The first time we went to Ayr as a family was in 1969. We stayed at Mrs Murphy’s B&B. Carry On Camping was at the pictures and a man – well, two men – had just walked on the moon. A horse escaped and ran wild through Ayr, but we weren’t so lucky… Two years later, we came back and stayed at Butlin’s.
We almost never went on holiday because we couldn’t afford to, and whenever we did go it was spectacularly unspecial. Ayr is not a bad little seaside town but the Butlin’s was horrible. It was like a cross between Hi-de-Hi! and Stalag 17 – the paint was flaky, the food was flaky, the paedophile redcoats were flaky… You were told before you arrived that everything would be free, and of course it was, but once you got there you found out that the stuff that was free was stuff you didn’t want anyway.
The slightly out-of-focus cinema didn’t even have Carry On Camping, it was showing films starring Victor Mature. The place hadn’t seen a lick of paint in years. The swimming pool that should’ve been painted blue with the water all crystal clear was just a swamp of green sludge. I remember thinking that for how long it took us to get there – we got the bus and it seemed to take forever – we could have probably gone to Africa, but it was only about forty miles. It was good because it wasn’t our day-to-day existence and a change from the norm was welcome, but I remember even as a kid thinking ‘Fucking hell, there’s got to be more than this.’
The worst thing that happened at Butlin’s was I sang my ma and my auntie a song some older kids had taught me, thinking it was going to really impress them, but for some reason it didn’t. It went to the tune of ‘Oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah everyone knows’ from Oliver! And the revised lyrics were ‘Bum tit tit, bum tit tit… play on my hairy banjo’.
My ma and aunt were totally horrified – ‘What the fuck are you singing?’ How was I to know that was dirty? Years later I would attempt to heal the scars left by this unhappy event by releasing a B-side called ‘Jesus Suck’, but the pressing plant weren’t having any of that either.
Drinking was pretty big with the men in our family, but the women were more into swearing. I never really heard my father say ‘fuck’ – or it was a special occasion if he did – and it was the same with my uncles. They were all gentlemen – the women were ladies too, of course, but they swore like troopers. They were always f-ing and cunting, and I grew up with my granny calling us ‘skinny cunts’ – ‘this cunt did this, this cunt did that’. I honestly thought that’s the way it was throughout Britain. As I became an adult and met people from different backgrounds, I would ask them: ‘Does your mother call ye a cunt?’, ‘No’, ‘What about your granny?’, ‘No’, ‘OK, fair enough.’
The beginning of the long musical coming together that William and I had was when the Reid household acquired its first record player. It was one of those old Dansette-style devices in a suitcase, and I thought it was just something we came by as a family until William brought this up recently and I realised it was actually his birthday present which somehow became a family object, so he got screwed out of a gift that should have been his alone.
That’s what happened – I got robbed. My ma and da ripped me off by giving me a gift that turned out to be for the whole family. It was one of those things that would irritate me for years. A record player was my dream present, but the first red flag was when I was told by my ma and da that I couldn’t take it upstairs because it would be ‘better in the living room’. Better for them, maybe. Jim had an even worse time than me at birthdays, usually, because he was born four days after Christmas. That was something he was still resentful of to my ma years later – ‘Why did I never get a real present?’ Because there was never any money left, he’d get a selection box or maybe a couple of Mars Bars – whatever was left over after Christmas. So I suppose he was due a change of luck with the shared record player.
My mum said ‘Jim, go and get a record’ – because we had nothing to play on it – so I went round all the neighbours’ houses going ‘Gissa record’ and eventually it was the Willses two doors down who came up with the goods. OK, so the only single they were willing to trust us with was ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ but I ran back with it and played it about fifty times in a row – ‘Where’s your mama gone?’ – thinking ‘Fuck, this is amazing.’ I have to say I still love that song.
Not long after that, one of my cousins took pity on us because we had no records and lent me and William a bunch of Beatles and Bob Dylan albums – the early solo ones, not the ones with The Band on. William was into both because he was older, but I was only about nine, so when I heard Dylan I just thought ‘Who’s this old guy singing with a scratchy voice?’ The Beatles on the other hand were a revelation. I remember very clearly thinking ‘I never realised music could be like this.’
Of course, they had split up by this point. But even though their music was everywhere when I was younger – in fact, my mum had even bought me a little plastic guitar and she used to get me to amuse the relatives by pretending to play it and shouting ‘She loves you, yeah yeah yeah’ – this was the first time I’d really inhabited the worlds it contained. It didn’t matter that The Beatles weren’t a band any more, I was into them. And this was the start of music being very important to me – and to William – in a way that gradually began to bring us closer.
I know 1971 was the year the record player came into the house, because the first single I got for Christmas was ‘Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves’ by Cher. I can’t remember why – it must’ve been on the radio and I must’ve said something about liking it. Next up after that was ‘Without You’ by Harry Nilsson, who I still think is a fucking genius even though that’s not actually his song.
As well as the record player, the other new arrival around that time was my sister, Linda. I was nine when she was born and I’m pretty certain – and I don’t think this will come as news to her either – that Linda was not planned. But I remember that as being a nice period in our lives – everything went relatively smoothly and I used to do quite a lot of babysitting and nappy changing. If I’d been closer to her in age there might have have been more adjusting to do in going from being the young one to not being the young one any more, but, as it happened, there was none of that.
One minute you’re at primary school where everyone’s drawing pictures and telling the teacher ‘He was mean to me’, then you go to high school and it’s a giant place with lots of people and all the kids are smoking – it’s like a jungle. I’ve never been in prison but I’d imagine the experience of arriving there is similar in terms of suddenly feeling at risk of violence. I don’t know what it was like for the girls – knowing girls it was probably more psychological torture. I’d have to ask Linda.
At primary school you’re in the same class all through it and you get to know those kids pretty well. There were a couple of nutters in mine but only a couple and it was easy enough to stay out of their way, but going to high school at the age of eleven was more like being drafted to Vietnam. Suddenly you’re thinking ‘Fucking hell, what’s going on?’ It was like all innocence had ended. Hunter High in East Kilbride was where childhoods went to die.
William and I were only there a year or two together. Either he’d had a different experience, or he just didn’t prepare me for what it was going to be like, but whatever the reason it definitely came as a shock. Maybe I’m just a sap and an utter softy, but I found it quite difficult. You got glimpses of what the world you were going to have to make it in was actually like, and the realities of life started to seek you out.
The sectarianism aspect was a part of the reason me and Jim did not have a great time at high school. Most people were Protestant in East Kilbride – there was only one Catholic high school, St Bride’s, but there were about four Protestant ones. William Mulhern lived about four doors away from me and one summer we were best friends, then he went to his Catholic school and I went to my Protestant school and that was it – we were done.
There are a lot of awful things about America, especially with all the right-wing stuff over the past few years, but at least you don’t get people going to Christian school or Muslim school – they’re all thrown in together. Even the English don’t seem to care too much. It’s just this weird thing we’ve had in Scotland and Ireland – ‘Are you a Protestant or are you a Catholic?’ I think it’s got much better as the new generations have peeled off old skin – ‘Why would I hate a Catholic just because I’m a Protestant?’ In my kids’ culture it’s just weird to be racist, and I’m proud of them for that.
The worst thing about growing up in Scotland was the sectarian bullshit. It wasn’t such a big deal in the new town environment as it probably would’ve been if we’d stayed in Parkhead, but the Protestant/Catholic divide certainly didn’t disappear when people moved out of Glasgow. Obviously it wasn’t as bad as growing up in Belfast, but it was crazy that I could’ve chucked a stone out of my bedroom window and hit my best friend Stuart Cassidy’s house (not that I did, of course), but because his family were Catholics he had to go to a different school to me.
Sectarianism was something I never gave much thought to till after I left Scotland. It was only once I got to London in my mid-twenties that I started to look back and realise how fucked up it was. I’ve lived in England for nearly forty years now, so I don’t know what that situation is like in East Kilbride any more, but it’s probably just as bad.
Maybe I’m making it out to have been worse than it was – after all, my mum and dad never tried to stop me being friends with Stuart – but there were definitely some parents who were bigoted enough to stop their kids hanging out with children of the other faith. The irony of it was, we weren’t actually Protestants in any sense that had any meaning. I was not religious in any way and had never been to church as a kid. If I was anything, I was an atheist. It was supposed to be about religion, but it was really about colours – ‘My colour’s orange, your colour’s green.’ The ones who used to knock lumps out of each other, there was no religion in them, really. They said there was, but there wasn’t.
The other thing about our education besides the sectarianism that completely sucked was the teachers. They just didn’t seem to give a shit about anyone who was in any way struggling. It was just the way things were at the time, but that didn’t make it any easier to take. I know kids have a terrible time at all kinds of schools, but I think that level of not being encouraged – almost of institutional discouragement – is a specifically working-class experience.
In those days if you told people you thought you were clever but you kept failing exams, they’d just tell you ‘No, you’re stupid.’ The idea of anxiety as something that might cause a child to underachieve had yet to take root. So I would find myself at the bottom of the class or in a low stream when it came to the next year, and think ‘Why am I in classes with these guys who light their own farts?’ When outside the lesson I’d be friendly with all the kids we thought of as the leading intellectuals of the day. The equivalent of having read Noam Chomsky then was having read or touched or even seen a copy of Oz.
I always had a hard time understanding algebra, and was just about keeping my head above water when I got flu and was off school for a week. By the time I got back, everyone in the class had advanced far out of sight of anything I had a handle on. I told the teacher I didn’t understand this new thing they’d learnt and he was such a lazy cunt he just said ‘Ask around.’ Even all these years later I can still remember the pain of knowing there was no point doing that – my classmates didn’t care. That was meant to be his job. I always thought if I bumped into Mr Cunningham in adult life I would politely tell him: ‘Hey, Mr Cunningham, you weren’t that great – your teaching methods hurt people. I was just a little fourteen-year-old who had the flu and got off the algebra train and because you couldn’t be bothered to help me, I never got back on it.’
The same thing happened to me in what we called technical drawing. I was so bad at that. I’ve got this thing where I struggle with practicalities – not uniformly, but certainly with spatial challenges. If I read a book and they describe the inside of a house, it’s very hard for me to imagine it unless they say something like ‘It looked like the Psycho house.’ Everybody else seemed to be getting this subject really easily but I couldn’t quite figure it out, and instead of trying to explain it, another terrible teacher was shouting and screaming at me every single lesson, to a point where I couldn’t handle it and told my ma I wasn’t going to go to school any more.
When she found out what had happened, she got my cousin Robert – who went to university so we all think he’s an academic titan, and he actually is pretty clever – to come over and help me out. I won’t say I was good at technical drawing after that, but I certainly stopped being hopeless.
There were no support structures, in fact even using an expression like ‘support structure’ would probably have got you a slap around the face. I remember the woodwork teachers who used to work on building sites would kick the shit out of kids who gave them any lip. If you got mouthy with them they’d ask you to give them a hand in the store-room and then the wee ned concerned would emerge looking dishevelled but a bit more respectful. To think of things like that happening now is just unimaginable really
In general, my school was dreadful. There was just no one there to give you any direction in terms of the possibilities of life – nobody who tried to open up your imagination or foster intellectual curiosity. There was a crushing sense of heading nowhere other than on a conveyor belt towards the factory down the road, which was in fact exactly where I was headed, in the short term at least. It makes me very angry when I think back to it, but I learnt next to nothing at Hunter High beyond basic literacy, and any useful knowledge I did pick up I acquired on my own from going to the library, going out into the world and experiencing things, or just sitting at home watching TV.
For instance, I love history, but the way they taught it made it the most boring subject in the world – you would go into the classroom and look at the blackboard where there would be a whole big jumble of names and dates and the teacher would just say ‘Copy that into your jotter’ and that would be it. It was just the dullest way to spend a couple of hours, and every subject was like that. You could tell that the teachers didn’t give a shit. It wasn’t that they would stamp down on signs of individuality – it’s not like there were people reading Oscar Wilde in the corner and the teacher was telling them ‘No, you mustn’t do that’ – it was just a complete lack of interest.
I hated it, but I couldn’t say that I rebelled. Basically everyone seemed to accept this situation – the teachers were doing a job that they clearly weren’t into and the kids were thinking ‘This is all we’ve got, so fuck it.’ The best you could hope for was to get from one end of the day to the other without being bullied. There were tough guys there – most of whom had been shipped out from Glasgow like us – and you had to keep an eye out for them. At that time I looked, and probably behaved, much younger than everyone else in my class – when I was fifteen, I looked about ten. It could’ve made me vulnerable but in a weird way looking younger made me invisible. I wasn’t a threat to anyone and that was definitely for the best because I did see some nasty violence. It would come out of nothing – one kid would look the wrong way at another and the next thing you’d know they’d be getting horribly beaten up. You’d see that going on around you and think ‘Thank fuck no one at Hunter High’s noticed me.’
I, on the other hand, was a wee bit of a glam rocker.
The Beatles I came to kind of after the fact, but glam rock was the first big cultural experience I actually had while it was happening. Me and William were still into slightly different things at that point because of me being younger. I was more into Slade where he was into Bowie. I liked Bowie as well, but to me in 1972–73 Slade was the best band in the world. A lot of people seem to grow out of the first records they buy but I think those records still sound amazing – I love them now as much as I did then. The first single that I really remember making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up was ‘Blockbuster’ by The Sweet and I still think that sounds great. Yeah it owes a certain debt to ‘Jean Genie’, but so fucking what.
On Sunday night when we were supposed to be in bed early for school the next day we’d stay up listening to music. As well as the record player we had a little transistor radio, so me and William would be under the covers at night listening to Radio Luxembourg. The reception would drift in and out so you’d be listening to Roxy Music and it would start fading into the distance and you couldn’t know if that was on the record or not, but that was part of the magic of it.
Because we shared a room, that was part of the reason we bickered a lot as kids, but with no personal space and people living on top of each other, that’s bound to happen. The upside of it was that hearing that music together, in such close proximity, started to forge a bond between us. It wasn’t easy to hear great music and it sounded like shit coming out of that little transistor radio, but somehow that just made the shared experience seem more valuable.
Top of the Pops was the only place you could really see the people making the music – even if they were miming – and that’s why it was so important and absolutely everybody watched it.
Of course there was The Old Grey Whistle Test as well, but the presenters were just like the teachers who made everything incredibly fucking boring. Whispering Bob Harris would say ‘And now, it’s Head Hands & Feet with a twenty-minute jazz-rock fusion experimental piece’ and I’d be thinking ‘When are Slade gonna be on?’ Why couldn’t someone invent punk rock and blow all this shit away?
At this point the only person likely to blow all this shit away was my dad who every now and then would say ‘You’re not watching this Top of the Pops shite – The Andy Stewart Show’s on.’ And I’d have to walk a mile to my cousin’s house to watch it, thinking ‘Oh for fuck’s sake’, but it was worth it to get a glimpse of Marc Bolan. William had a bit of a social life by this stage and would quite often go out on a Thursday. He was probably trying to make it with some girl by then.
Top of the Pops was always in danger – my da would let us watch it so long as it didn’t get in the way of what he wanted to see. So you’d see it for ten weeks straight then suddenly something new would come on ITV and we’d have to go to make other arrangements. I would go round to my friend Gordon Smith’s house because Top of the Pops was really unmissable – if you did miss it everybody would be in school the next day talking about this guy Brian Eno who looked like a Martian and you’d be wondering who he was but they already knew – ‘Oh, he played this song with this band’ they’d say, not giving too much away like they were in on a secret. It was the same with Monty Python – I would beg my ma to let us watch it but in Scotland it wasn’t on till about eleven o’ clock in case it corrupted the youth.
I used to buy boxes of ten awful cassettes for 99p to tape songs off the top 40 at my friend’s house. I don’t remember ever worrying about sound quality, I think I was too engrossed with the content. That was how I listened to music for a long time because records were pretty expensive. I’d go down to the Barras sometimes – the market near the Barrowlands – and there were stalls where you could get four or five older records for the price of a new one. I remember buying a Who record, Mind Games by John Lennon and a tape by Elton John. At those prices you could take a chance on something you didn’t know. I also used to try and acquire Words magazine or Disco 45 so I could get the words to songs and commit them to memory. It’s kind of uncool to say it but the thing about certain songs that appeals to you is that they’re well structured and effective. I came across ‘Tom Tom Turn Around’ by New World on YouTube recently, and half a century on I still knew all the lyrics by heart.
I was trying to write songs of my own from the age of about fourteen. I took it quite seriously but my early attempts were just bad versions of songs that existed already. The only one I can really remember was basically a rip off of a Glitter Band tune and it was called ‘My Name Is Jonathan’. The emotional content was quite heavy – ‘I walked by the park about half past two/Then I saw Colin McKay walking with you/I began to cry/My name is Jonathan… and it’s Jonathan Wrigley to you’. It’s a touching story of loss and betrayal…
I remember ‘My Name Is Jonathan’. To be honest it was kind of a joke between us because William would say ‘I’ve got a song’, then he’d just sing it because we couldn’t play any instruments at that time and I’d say ‘That’s not a song, that’s just shite.’
William was quicker out of the traps than me in fashion terms as well. He took his affinity for glam rock to a ridiculous level where he had a giant pair of platform shoes which were about two storeys high. He would wear them to the Olympia which was the local dance hall – more or less a disco.
There was dancing three nights a week at the Olympia. I thought it was great, especially if you could get a couple of cans of lager. Once the alcohol kicked in the music sounded amazing, on giant speakers with a bass like you’ve never heard before, and I would dance, probably with my fingers in my belt hooks. We never did it in unison or anything like that – it was an independent thing, more interpretative…
I didn’t go to the Olympia because I was younger and a bit of a Nobby No-Mates, then by the time I was old enough punk was happening and things like that became really uncool. But William was more outgoing than me at that time and he went through periods where he had a few mates – I wouldn’t quite say a gang, but they all got up to mischief together. There were proper gangs around too, that you had to look out for. One of the Catholic ones was called ‘The Shamrock’, and ‘The Woody’ – because they were from Calderwood – were their Protestant counterparts.
I don’t want to incriminate him too much but I think William was in that organisation for a while.
Joining a gang when I was sixteen was the greatest thing I’d done in my life at that time. The crazy young Woody from Calderwood neighbourhood. We weren’t all Proddies because the toughest guy in the whole gang – an absolute psycho called ‘Messer’ – was a Catholic and no one was going to give him any trouble about it. I’ll tell you what it was I liked about joining a gang – girls.
I was really shy around girls in my teens. I would go red when a girl spoke to me and super red if I fancied her. It was terrible. Me and my cousin James were both sixteen and you know what that’s like when you’ve got a spotty face and no confidence – we just couldn’t get girls to be interested in us. Even though James was a pretty popular character, we could never get to the best parties – we’d only hear about them a couple of days afterwards whereas all the kids that were in gangs got invited to everything and were always getting off with girls. So we joined the gang and that was it, we were in – there was no initiation or anything. James was a bit of a scrapper and had something of a reputation, so maybe that helped get us in under the velvet rope, but the moment we were on the inside our social lives instantly went from zero to hero. Suddenly me and James were going to all these parties where the parents were out and the girls at school thought we were bad boys.
Again, it was probably good preparation for being in a band in terms of the overnight transition to being considered attractive – ‘Ye were not attractive last week, but now, I don’t know, there’s just something about ye…’ Most of the other guys were just regular dopes like us, as far as I remember. There were only one or two dangerous people. Unfortunately, I crossed the paths of the wrong members of another gang and got quite badly beaten up. Well, they broke my arm and my nose. I wasn’t hospitalised at first – I just picked myself up and went away. I didn’t even know I had broken my arm till the next morning when I was lying in bed and it was really sore. I’d just left school at sixteen and started work at that point, and when I got there and I couldn’t pick things up they sent me to hospital. After that, being in a gang didn’t seem like so much fun any more.
Was East Kilbride a good place to grow up? It certainly could’ve been worse. If we hadn’t bailed from Glasgow at just the right time we’d have ended up in one of those horrible high-rise blocks. As it was there were plenty of amenities and a fair amount of stuff to do. There were several libraries – a couple of which we used to frequent, the main one built into the fabric of the town centre was the only one you could get records from. There was also a big hi-tech swimming pool – one of those ones where when you walked into the reception area and you could see the deep end through the glass – even though legend had it that it was something like two foot short of Olympic size because when they dug out the the hole they didn’t take any account of the thickness of the concrete. That seemed very typical of the place and the time that we lived in. We used to piss ourselves laughing at the sign as you came into town that said ‘You’re entering East Kilbride, the eighth largest town in Scotland’. We’d be thinking ‘For fuck’s sake! Is that the best you can do for a mark of distinction?’ But on reflection, maybe being normal was not so bad – ‘You’re entering East Kilbride – it’s not Shangri-La, but it’s not bad at all’.
Time gives you a different perspective on the comforting memories of childhood, like the fish and chip vans that came to our street in East Kilbride at the weekends, which were fantastic at the time. It wasn’t till I was about forty and watched a documentary which showed the number of people who got badly burnt operating them that I saw the dark side of this great consumer experience. Obviously the oil had to be kept really hot – I think it was 250 degrees – and the van was quite cramped and trying to get to as many stops as possible. So the oil was prone to boiling over anyway, but all that had to happen was for someone to say ‘Oh look, there’s a squirrel!’ The driver would slam on the brakes and the poor guy in the back would have a bucket of boiling oil all over him. It was like medieval torture.
In Comfort and Joy, the film Bill Forsyth made in the eighties that was loosely based around the Glasgow ice cream wars, the story was about a DJ who got caught up in the conflict and brokered some kind of peace. They made it fun and everyone lived happy ever after, but it was only when a TV documentary came out years later that everyone realised how violent it got in real life. People were set upon with machetes and there was a terrible house fire where kids were killed. A lot of Glasgow’s enmities made it out to East Kilbride in slightly reduced form, and I do remember rival ice cream van drivers fighting over pitches. Duncan from Duncan’s Ices and Davey from Davey’s Ices would be knocking seven kinds of shit out of each other in the street and you’d have to wait till the fight was over to see which one of them to go to for your 99 cone and a bottle of Irn-Bru.
Two out-of-shape guys rolling around in the mud trying to throttle each other seemed funny at the time but in retrospect it was quite bleak. There must have been a bit of money in the ice cream business for them to be fighting over it, but it was hard work – as I remember, the guy who came to our road was there three times a day, seven days a week, early afternoon, early evening and later in the evening. Maybe he had the odd day off, but it didn’t seem like that. I lived in East Kilbride for eighteen years and he was there that whole time and for years after I left. It was just a part of the culture that people wanted to hold on to. Fair enough in somewhere like Easterhouse where there wasn’t much infrastructure, but East Kilbride was pretty well set up for shops – it was only five or ten minutes’ walk from our house to any number of pretty decent places, but still everyone waited on Duncan’s Ices.
There was another guy called Mr Muir who sold groceries and clothes. My mum would drag me up to his van – it was more of a lorry – and make me try on trousers round the back. There’d be some girl in the neighbourhood you’d been trying to impress for ages and you’d be utterly humiliated as your mum whipped down your trousers so you could try on a pair of Oxford bags. See how I’ve switched to the second person to try and distance myself from the humiliation, but fucking hell, after six months of trying to impress the girl that lived three doors down in any way possible, this whole painstakingly constructed edifice came crashing down with my trousers…
Even though she had that lovely apartment, my granny didn’t like being left behind in Parkhead when the rest of the family moved out. So eventually she told social services some bullshit about how cruelly her sons and daughters had abandoned her and they responded by taking her out of the high-rise flat and foisting her on her children. Everyone was livid because from that point on she basically went on a tour of the family, staying with each of her children in turn for months on end.
My granny was brilliant and beautiful but she was difficult – she had that type of selective hearing where when you’re sitting next to her on the sofa and you say something she can’t hear it, but then she can hear the ice cream van from two streets away because she wants an ice cream – ‘Go get me one: chocolate.’ And don’t bother asking how come she can hear the far sound but not the near one, because she’ll pretend she can’t hear you.
Depending on the time of year, she’d be in the house in East Kilbride for weeks on end. It was horrible in the winter because when it was cold all the windows were shut and if my granny was there that meant it would be my granny, my ma and my da all smoking like chimneys. As a little kid I just thought it was repulsive. I wouldn’t let my mother handle my food if she was smoking a cigarette – I’d make her wash her hands ’cos I thought it was disgusting. The closest I got to ever smoking was a friend of mine stole one of their dad’s cigars when I was about eight and I might have put that in my mouth, but like Bill Clinton I did not inhale.
I think Jim saw how repulsed I was by their smoking and realised it was a filthy thing we should have nothing to do with, and so did my sister when she was old enough. So we all rebelled by not smoking, which I suppose you could see as evidence of a capacity to go against the grain from quite an early age. Our propaganda worked in the end, because my mother did eventually give up smoking in her fifties, which I respected her for. She gave up drinking as well, which was quite an achievement in our family.
Not smoking was one of the first things Jim and I did that marked us out from the culture of our parents and grandparents. I can’t speak for him, but I always felt like I was very different from my ma and da growing up. I argued with their view of the world in so many ways, even though I now hate the thought of having argued with them, because I loved them and it’s a long time ago and they’re dead now. I can see that my da didn’t have a lot of the opportunities to see things in new ways that I had growing up in the late sixties and early seventies, and this was the source of a lot of tension in the household. It was like a culture war before the phrase had even been invented.
The classic example would be the David Bailey documentary about Andy Warhol that was finally broadcast on ITV in 1973 after initially being banned due to a lot of fuss in the media. I really wanted to watch it and I resented the fact that my ma wouldn’t let me. I knew it was because she didn’t want me to see a man in bed with another man – one of the selling points of the documentary was that it featured David Bailey interviewing Warhol on a bed.
My ma and da weren’t bigoted people but they came from a bigoted culture and people were incredibly homophobic in those days, even though I guess life is complicated because Morecambe and Wise could be in bed together on TV in their pyjamas with half the country watching and no one would say a word about it. Over time people’s views changed. My ma would have probably had to be considered as quite homophobic in the early seventies, but by the time Boy George was a pop star a decade or so later she wasn’t so bothered. Around that time I remember her admitting ‘Oh, Bowie’s not that bad’ – she’d been on a journey!
One of both my and William’s favourite films growing up was Lindsay Anderson’s If. I was only ten or eleven when I saw that for the first time and it’s still one of my favourite movies – I guess that’s a clear example of William being older than me and pointing me in a particular direction. You might wonder what a film about a rebellion in an English public school would have to say to a Scottish ten-year-old, but that would be quite a superficial analysis because it’s debatable whether those surface details are anything like as significant to the film’s meaning as its dreamlike quality, which was mesmerising to me then and still is now.
The first time I saw it I had no idea of what it was about – I guess the school is like a microcosm of the country and the world – but it stuck in my mind. In those days, before video recorders, you could only see a film like that when it came on telly once every four or five years, but when it did come on again, it was an event. Later on I saw the rest of Linsday Anderson’s trilogy – O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital (which is not quite as amazing, and very hard to see now because it’s not on any streaming sites that I’m aware of) – and got a better idea of how the whole thing fitted together. If was like a gateway for me into a world of culture that my parents didn’t understand.
Not saying anything against them, as I loved them very much, but my parents were terrible philistines…
Here’s a weird thing – me and Jim used to judge things by how much our ma and da hated them. I’m not even joking. If we were out on a Sunday night when a film was on BBC2, and when we came back they said ‘Oh it was terrible, we couldnae make head nor tail of it’, we would think ‘Fuck, we’ve missed something good.’ They were very reliable critics. I remember the night we missed Jack Nicholson in Antonioni’s The Passenger – ‘Oh it was in the desert, there was a lot of sex and we didnae understand the dialogue.’ Fuck, that sounds brilliant.
I realise now, although I wouldn’t have used that name for it then, that our instinct was always to be drawn towards the counterculture. It’s almost like a magnet attracting you to things – you hear about this weird guy called Franz Kafka who wrote this weird book about how he turned into a bug… In a working-class environment where the education system gives you no encouragement and your parents are very much in the mainstream, culturally, it’s purely a matter of luck, the people you come across who give you tip-offs.
I remember there was a guy at my school called Robert McArthur, although everyone knew him as Gif. I don’t want this description to seem unkind, but it’s necessary to set the scene in terms of what his standing was in the school. This guy was thought of as being the uncoolest guy – he had greasy hair and a huge nose and he was bullied at a level that was beyond belief. Everyone used to laugh at him and people convinced themselves he had lice. They would go up to him and say ‘I nose you, but I don’t lice you.’ And in the midst of all this cruelty – maybe partly even as a reaction to it, I don’t know – this guy was a musical prophet.
At the end-of-year art class where we were allowed to bring in records, he would turn up with things no one had seen before. He had the Velvet Underground banana record, and the first time I ever saw the cover of The Stooges was through him. We’d be asking ‘What’s this?’ And he’d be saying ‘This is Andy Warhol’s The Velvet Underground,’ or ‘This is Iggy and The Stooges.’ We didn’t know what he was talking about, and the teacher wouldn’t let him play them – it’s almost like he knew what they might do to our minds. But then five or ten years later I was dancing round my bedroom to these records. I often thought about that, wondering how I would’ve responded if I’d heard them at that point, instead of later. Would I have been ready for them? Either way, I’d love it if Gif could come to a show in Glasgow one day, and I could tell him ‘Hey Gif, you were the coolest guy and nobody fucking knew it.’ He was listening to our future – the custodian of the Mary Chain spirit, before the Mary Chain even existed.
Schools can be very small-minded places. There was a girl who was always being teased about her long legs. I saw her again a few years after she’d left and she looked like a supermodel.
I was one of those kids who spend the summer holidays just lying on the couch watching telly all day every day – enjoying the respite from school. My mum and dad would tell me to ‘Go out and do something – join a club’, and I’d be shouting back ‘Hold on, The Lone Ranger’s on in a minute.’ Eventually their desire to get me out from under their feet overcame my inertia and they finally succeeded in getting me to join something. It was the karate club and I went for about six months. My dad paid for me but I still hated karate – absolutely couldn’t get into it – because I instinctively knew it was utterly useless to me in terms of defending myself.
Even if I was a black belt and some big tough kid came up to me, he would still just jump on my head and I wasn’t going to be able to stop that from happening. The reason I couldn’t imagine a way it could ever be a useful tool was that you’re either the type of person who can smash your fist into someone’s face or you’re not. If you’re already that type of person you don’t need karate anyway, and the reason I knew I wasn’t is that there’d been a couple of times at school when I was about thirteen or fourteen where I got into fights and both times I got beaten up – not savagely, but the other guy got the better of me on both occasions. I could’ve beaten him both times if I really wanted to. I remember thinking ‘This is the moment to punch him in the face’ but I could not bring myself to do it, so eventually he would do it to me. I knew this was just what I was like and no amount of karate was going to persuade me otherwise. Once you’re in that situation and you realise that you’d rather be beaten up yourself than beat someone else up, then the die is kind of cast.
Even though I quit karate after about six months, I carried on going for two years without actually going to the classes – I’d tell my dad ‘Yeah, I’m off to karate now’, when where I’d actually be was up in the café that overlooked the sports centre where the class was happening. I could buy a bag of crisps and a Coke with the money I was supposed to have spent on my subs and enjoy the social scene. The kids downstairs could do the sweaty bit, it was much more fun hanging around together upstairs.
There was a kid called Ivor who I got on really well with ’cos he liked weird music. You kind of zero in on those people when you’re looking for clues about the other more interesting world which you know is out there. In East Kilbride everyone walked and talked and looked the same way, so if you found someone who went against the grain a bit and was into the weird shit that you were starting to be into then you tended to very much gravitate towards them. There’s an immediate bond, and Ivor knew this other kid called Douglas, who really was a kid – he looked about eight – but he had the same kind of instincts to be looking for something different, and it was with those two that I had my first thoughts of starting a band.