The education that William and I received didn’t send us out into adulthood thinking ‘I can take this on – I can conquer the world!’ It seemed to encourage feelings of inferiority rather than superiority, and that was not an accident – it was the way it was designed. If we wanted to get better information to prepare us for a fuller kind of life than the one that was earmarked for us, we were going to have to find it for ourselves.
When you’re sixteen or eighteen you start to realise there’s another culture of all these cool people out there in the world, and it was hard to have contact with that in East Kilbride because the only film on at the cinema was Star Wars. But I didn’t want to see Star Wars, I wanted to see this film by this French guy I’d heard of whose name I couldn’t pronounce or even quite remember. That’s what it’s like at that age – you want to explore the options, and East Kilbride was not a great place for doing that. Maybe it’s better now, I don’t know, but in the seventies it was a cultural graveyard.
Although let me put an asterisk next to that. We used to have a library in the town centre that was run by some pretty cool people. I doubt it exists any more, but libraries in the seventies had a records section, so if there was something me or Jim weren’t sure enough about to buy but had a feeling we might like, we would order it from there. That’s how we found out about Can, because Can were in the library, and so was Salvador Dalí’s shit book. Have you heard about that one? Salvador Dalí did a load of shits and took photographs of them and somehow they turned up in East Kilbride library to be a part of Jim’s and my education. I think that book was worth a fortune and it probably got chucked in a skip when the library was ‘modernised’. Hopefully someone who worked there got first dibs on it.
With their encouragement we would go on these literary and musical adventures that were the exact opposite of the frustrating experiences we’d had at school. Like with Albert Goldman. Well, I loved his Lenny Bruce book at first, because Goldman’s a great writer, and he goes deep into the speech patterns of people – hipsters from the early sixties, late fifties – and that made reading him very entertaining. But I got sick of Goldman later on, because I realised that every subject he took on, he was determined to destroy them…
One of the reasons I mentioned Lenny Bruce at this point is that even though he obviously wasn’t a musician, he was still kind of rock ’n’ roll. Just like Marlon Brando and James Dean and Andy Warhol and William Burroughs were. I don’t know about you, but I include them all in the rock ’n’ roll family.
One day you’ve never heard of William Burroughs and then you hear about him and you go to the library and you read his book and it’s like ‘OK, there was brilliance in Burroughs for sure’. He was a millionaire’s son – the typewriter mogul’s kid – and he could’ve led a life of luxury living in big houses and travelling by air, which in those days was not common, but he chose to be what he was. Once you were done with Burroughs you could move on to Brion Gysin. I still don’t know how you pronounce his name because I don’t ever remember hearing anyone say it – I’ve only seen it written down.
Anyway, you pick up these things and then you get interested in these people and you peruse their work and you come away with something. To me, I don’t think Gysin himself was a brilliant artist, but if it was him who first came up with the idea of cutting up text and reassembling it then that undoubtedly was brilliant.
I wouldn’t claim to be a huge fan of Allen Ginsberg either, but he was one of these people who jolted you. You read his poetry or heard the spoken word albums and you had to think about it twice, and his work led you on to other people’s. I’m not saying all this to paint Jim and myself as huge fans of the beat generation. What inspired us the most I think was the examples of people who’d made a life out of art – so you don’t have to work in a factory or an office, you can actually survive a whole life doing something creative, whether it’s writing or painting or music. You don’t have to die in a pit of despair, which at that point looked to be our only option. And of course the thing that blew the whole of life wide open for Jim and I was punk rock. Instead of it just being the next thing, it fucking went to our core.
I only started listening to John Peel when rumours about punk began to circle in 1976. I’d heard him before, but I was never attracted to the music he played – there was a lot of long proggy stuff, and I couldn’t really get into his voice, so I never stuck with it for longer than five minutes. Then suddenly you’d be reading the music papers and they’d be talking about this band from New York or this band called the Sex Pistols – of course, if you were in that situation now it’d literally be seconds between hearing about them and knowing what they sounded like. But then, waiting to hear them on John Peel was the only way. He’d play about twenty records that you’d never want to hear again, and then suddenly one that would completely hook you.
Each time something happened, we paid attention. Jim liked this, I liked that. The Sex Pistols, The Clash – that’s brilliant, that’s amazing. Eventually punk bands started to appear on Top of the Pops and the two of us would be sitting there watching them together, knowing even as these moments unfolded how much they meant to us. We experienced that in each other’s company and we would talk about it endlessly afterwards, often in strangely formal terms, as if we were in a biopic. Like after watching the video for ‘Pretty Vacant’ on Top of the Pops… ‘Did you see that? This has just changed my life! I can’t believe it – I don’t know what to do!’ ‘Same with me, Jim, same with me!’
Our parents thought we were weirdos. After all those years of studied indifference – when Jim was just my wee brother and we were basically quite nice to each other but we weren’t buddies – we suddenly became allies, and the currency of our new-found friendship was punk rock.
The Sex Pistols were extremely important to me and William, and still are. One of the things they did really well in the TV series Pistol was show the positive impact their example had on people. Johnny’s become a bit of a dick in real life, to be honest. He’s no longer the guy that we thought he was back in the day – smart, articulate, saying everything we wanted to say about how much we despised the life that had been earmarked for us. Now he’s become more of a caricature of himself, like Morrissey – he seems to say utterly hateful things just to amuse himself – but then he was everything we wanted to be.
Up until punk, rock music was made by exotic creatures from places like London and New York, and the idea that little shits like me and William in East Kilbride might be able to form a band hadn’t even entered our heads. Even when punk hit it still felt like we were a million miles away from where it was all happening, but reading interviews with people like Johnny Rotten or listening to the Ramones it felt like this was suddenly something a bit more achievable. We were no longer just these kids living in this backwater where we might as well have been living on the fucking moon. What punk did – not just through the music but the whole culture around it – was it brought a lot of people together and made you feel like you were less remote and could maybe even participate, without needing Whispering Bob Harris to tell you it was OK.
There was no way I was going to get to see any of those first punk shows. I was only fifteen in 1977, but it wasn’t just about my age. We were pretty poor, so the idea of getting the money to go to a gig in Glasgow was out of the question. That’s why I was so disappointed when The Clash – who I absolutely loved – said they would never do Top of the Pops. We’re your fans and we want to see you on it, so why the fuck not?
I understood that when punk came along everybody was loading up the bullets and looking for someone to shoot, but I couldn’t see the logic in signing to CBS and then refusing to do Top of the Pops. They’d probably all been glued to Slade, Bolan and Bowie when they were growing up the same way that we were, so why would they take that experience away from us? There may have been institutions that needed to be brought down, but I didn’t – and still don’t – think Top of the Pops was one of them.
It was different for William because he was three years older than me – which is such a lot at that age – and had more money at the time, as by then he’d left school and got a job. So he had much more freedom of action.
There was a guy called Jim Sinclair who worked in my job at James Lumsden and Company, which made sheet metalwork for air conditioning. He had a ticket for the Clash gig in Glasgow on the White Riot tour, but he couldn’t go. He sold me his ticket – I paid him for it – but on the night of the show I’m ashamed to say I just sat there and never left the house. I was scared because I didn’t know anybody else who was going, so I missed a legendary gig that ended up being in the Clash movie. I tried to learn a lesson from missing out like that, and my determination not to let life pass me by would lead me to a decision which would shock my ma and da more than anything the Sex Pistols said on Bill Grundy.
Once or twice when I was at school, a cow or a bull escaped the abattoir next door and ran terrified through the school grounds. We worked in an abattoir for a week upgrading the ventilation system and what I saw and heard there left no doubt as to the logic of that terror. I’ve never forgotten the smell of that place and the sight of the cows hung upside down with the bolts slashing at their throats. It’s just brutal, and I don’t eat red meat to this day. It did take me ten years after this experience to give it up – you’d have died of malnutrition pretty swiftly if you’d tried to be a vegetarian in East Kilbride in the late seventies – but I couldn’t face the gammon rolls my ma had given me for my lunch. The guy I was working with didn’t give a fuck, though – he was tearing into them. My mate Gordon Smith who worked at the abattoir by the school in the summer was even worse – he would prank you by putting an eyeball in your coat-pocket.
I don’t think I need to make the analogy between myself and the fugitive farm animals too explicit, but I knew I didn’t want to be stuck at James Lumsden’s for the rest of my life. My job was an apprenticeship learning to making the ducts for ventilation systems. I was an awful sheet metal worker because I was always scared of getting some horrendous industrial injury. It was a dangerous job and I remember thinking ‘If I lose the tips of my fingers, I’ll never be able to learn to play the guitar.’ I know it worked out OK for Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath but that was not light engineering, it was heavy metal.
There were all these old men working there who had half a pinkie or a toe missing and would laugh about it. It was funny to them – or at least that was the way they dealt with mutilation in the line of duty – where I was thinking ‘Fucking hell, you’re not paying me enough money to lose parts of my body. Offer me ten grand a week and I’ll think about it.’ I couldn’t see me hanging around there for forty years, I just went along with what I thought would please my ma and da. It wasn’t that they were trying to limit my horizons – their attitude was ‘You get a trade and you can go anywhere’, whereas if I left, how was I going to survive? I’d become a part of the ‘demi-monde’ which my da would call the layabouts of the world.
It was really difficult giving up that apprenticeship. I didn’t just throw it away on a whim, because I knew what it meant to other people, most of all to my da. My defence of my position – ‘I don’t want to work at a job that will destroy my soul!’ – seemed ridiculous to him, especially as I was trying to talk to him about punk rock and how it had it changed my views.
That probably just made it sound trivial to his ears, but it wasn’t trivial to mine, and it wasn’t for thousands of other kids in 1976–77. Maybe music doesn’t do that nowadays, but when I was young it had a power that could change your life’s direction. It did that for me and for Jim and for a lot of other people I know. But it’s hard to tell your working-class ma and da about those things when they just think you’re throwing everything away.
William explaining his decision to give up his job with reference to things Johnny Rotten had said would’ve been exactly the wrong thing to do. To my mum and dad, we both had our heads in the clouds and absolutely no sense of what the real world was like, so to say ‘This man in the bondage trousers has shown me the way’ was just pouring petrol on the flames.
My ma and da asked me how I was going to make a living if I walked away from the job, and I remember blurting out something like ‘I don’t know. I don’t wanna work in a factory or an office – I wanna try to be a musician.’ I was always on the verge of being in a band. Even though I couldn’t technically play a musical instrument, it was always something that was being talked about. I bought a bass from my friend Duncan Cameron. It wasn’t full-sized, it was a small practice one, but it got me started. In the long run I didn’t want to play the bass, I wanted to play the guitar, but the bass was cheap and it was a beginning. I never really had an amp, though, so the whole thing was kind of silly. Gordon Smith, who liked The Stranglers, was pretty much the only other person I knew in East Kilbride apart from Jim who was into punk in 1977, so me and him were going to have a band, but we never really did anything other than talk about how great it would be to go on tour.
There was a certain amount of dreaming going on at that stage. Like when me and my cousin James were really drunk on the Friday night before the England–Scotland game in 1977 and decided to hitch down to Wembley the next day. We had no money or anything but we knew that a car travels at 70mph, so calculated that ‘if we get a ride every half an hour we can make it the morra’. Unfortunately the first guy who picked us up seemed to be some kind of serial killer. We didn’t realise that at first – when we got in the car and he said ‘Yeah, I’ll take you to Hamilton’, we thought Wembley Way was calling. Then he started driving the car at 100mph and doing this crazy laugh – like a movie villain – and we were absolutely shitting ourselves.
Have you ever been driven by a maniac? It’s a horrible experience. Luckily he decided to drop us off in Hamilton rather than driving the car into a wall or burying our bodies in the woods, and so we started to walk towards England, one step at the time. I don’t think we’d even reached Motherwell before the sun was up. By then we were starving in the way that does tend to happen when drunk guys sober up, so we raided the milk and the bread rolls the milkman had left out at the back of a café. It was about that time we realised we were not going to make it. I don’t even remember how we got home – probably caught the bus.
Either way, we made it back in time to see the pitch invasion when they broke the crossbar and a net got torn after Scotland won 2–1, and the BBC commentators were insulting the whole of Scotland, calling the crowd thugs and hooligans.
The next time I set off for the big city, I was a lot better organised.
So William’s bass guitar sat in the corner of the room gathering cobwebs for two years until the moment was right for him to write another song…
When I was young and adventurous and wanting to be Jack Kerouac, I thought the biggest adventure available was London, and to be honest London never disappointed me. There’s often anti-London feelings in bands who come from outside the capital, but I’m anti anti-London bands. If you’re sixteen and you want to see Fellini movies it won’t happen in Glasgow – well it might, but it will probably only be for one night and it might be a Tuesday night and you’ve got school tomorrow… when me and Jim started to have our little adventures down to London it was like ‘Oh my God – every band or exhibition or film you can think of comes to London!’
As the older brother I was the first to go and I surpassed myself by actually getting a job for a while – in housekeeping at the London School of Economics, the place Mick Jagger went to fifteen years before… I had a kick-ass little flat – which came with the job – right under the Post Office Tower. I would go to sleep looking up at that famous London landmark and even though I still had no money, I used to think I was the luckiest person in the world. What a little tube I was. I used to remember all the films set around there that I’d grown up watching in the sixties and seventies and feel like I’d cracked it. OK, the job only paid 99 pence an hour, but it was definitely a good move to be there from East Kilbride. Jim came down for a holiday for a couple of weeks and he loved it down there as well.
I left school in December of ’77. I went to some little building course near Glasgow. There were no jobs to be had in general, but out of the class I was the only one who got a fucking job – what kind of fucking luck is that? No part of me was pleased.
I just thought ‘I’ve got to do this course because they won’t give me any dole money if I don’t.’ So I did it and it turned out I was quite good at it. The guy who was my teacher there said something about me being ‘born to be a joiner’ which just chilled me to the bone. I was in a zombiefied state for two or three days after that, thinking ‘No, no’ but still he seemed to go out of his way to get me this job – as an apprentice joiner at the Rolls-Royce factory in East Kilbride.
I started there in March 1978. I wasn’t on the production line, it was more like maintenance, so if a forklift truck smashed into a door, we’d make a new door. It was a huge factory with five thousand people working in it, some of whom were old and had spent their whole working lives there. They’d point out ‘Wee Willie’ – some knackered-looking old fossil who’d been there since before the war. He’d give me a toothless grin and I’d experience an involuntary shudder at the thought that Wee Willie’s destiny might also be mine. I spent much of the two years I was there trying to figure a way to get out of this situation – ‘No I cannot be doing this, this is not what it’s supposed to be.’ I wasn’t entirely sure how my life was going to pan out, but I knew what I didn’t want to do, which was spend the next fifty years in that factory.
The one upside was that for the first time in my life, I actually had some money, so now I could afford to go to gigs. I think the first may have actually been The Jam at Glasgow Apollo, on Bonfire Night, 1978. The band that were playing before them, The Dickies, were the loudest band I’ve ever seen before or since. They more or less destroyed my eardrums with their version of Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’. That was pretty much all I could hear by the time they were done, which didn’t matter too much because I wasn’t the biggest Jam fan. I’m still not, to be honest. The first album had a couple of good punk songs on it, but they used to go on about being a mod band, and I used to think ‘But mod bands were in the sixties and they sound fuck all like you.’ I appreciated the punky side of it but I was more there for the outing: ‘I’ve started this job so I’ve got a bit of cash in my pocket for the first time in my life – I’ll go to see a band. Who’s playing this week? Oh, it’s The Jam, I’ll go and see them.’ A few weeks after that it was The Rezillos, again at the Apollo. That was a much better night out. It was their farewell gig (or at least so we – and they – thought at the time: their 2023 tour schedule was in fact quite extensive) and it really hit the spot. It was actually released as a live album, and it deserved to be. It didn’t make any difference to me that The Rezillos were Scottish, they were just really, really good. And getting Fay Fife to make a guest appearance on our 2024 album Glasgow Eyes would bring this story full circle forty-five years later.
I had this Bert Weedon book with all these pictures of open chords, which I had painstakingly learnt to the point where I could just about stumble through ‘She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain’. Then I would listen to punk records and think ‘How the fuck do they do that?’ I’d be looking at pictures of their hands on the guitars in the music papers and thinking ‘What was that chord?’ Then I finally worked out what a barre chord was, and once you can play one of those, you’ve got the key to the door. Bert Weedon goes out the window at that point and you start to realise how all the songs you’re listening to on John Peel or Annie Nightingale have been constructed. Once you’ve grasped the nature of the bricks in the building, you can see how the whole thing has been put together. You learn one song and then another, and next thing you know, you are busking on the London Underground.
I think Jim might have actually done it first, and he did quite well the first time because he still looked quite fresh-faced and people felt sorry for him. But by the time he tried again three years later he looked more like a heroin addict and people were literally walking by on the other side of the tunnel. Me and my friend Davy Campbell had a go one of the times down in London when things were starting to go to shit. He’d got kicked out of his flat, and we’d gone back on the dole and ended up in this place in Earls Court with five smelly blokes in one room. We busked for two days down at Marble Arch and it was pretty awful. We got 65p the first day and 45p the next with me singing punk songs on an acoustic guitar and Davy playing brushes on a snare. We were desperate and it probably showed in our performance. It was mainly Buzzcocks songs from the ‘Spiral Scratch’ EP and if I’d seen us I would’ve felt sorry for us. But I did notice a couple of famous people walk past and neither of them gave us a penny.
First there was a guy called Gerald Harper who played Adam Adamant on TV – a sophisticated English gentleman type, a bit like Nigel Havers. He wasn’t putting his hand in his pocket for my approximation of Pete Shelley’s nasal whine. Then the woman who was in Abigail’s Party but wasn’t Alison Steadman came by – later on she’d be in the Victor Meldrew programme. I loved Abigail’s Party so I was so impressed to see her coming towards me, but I don’t think she appreciated my shout of ‘orgasm addict’, as she just walked straight past. In hindsight I can see that a mental Scotsman screaming ‘You’re an orgasm addict’ might not have been the experience that she was looking for, but at the time I was pretty annoyed that she wouldn’t give me 50p.
I got myself a crappy Les Paul copy in about 1979. The way I learnt the rudiments of picking out a song on the guitar was by throwing an overnighter similar to the one Steve Jones did in Pistol except it looked much sexier on TV. I certainly didn’t have an idealised version of Chrissie Hynde coming round to give me the encouragement any man would crave – that would’ve been nice. I remember sitting up in my room in East Kilbride thinking ‘I’m gonna learn “Judy Is A Punk” tonight.’ I didn’t know how I was gonna do it but I had a chord book and the shape of a barre chord and I just sat there playing for hours and hours.
It must’ve been when William was in London, because he wasn’t there to tell me to knock it off as it sounded awful, but the next day when I went to pick up the guitar I put my hand in the shape and it was much easier. Once you can do a barre chord you can play a punk version of pretty much any song, and I wouldn’t say that I ever really got any better as a guitar player from that point on. Nobody would have me in their band as a guitarist, that’s for sure, but I was always worried that if I learnt the names of the actual chords it might all get a bit Head, Hands & Feet.
I was still hanging around with the karate crowd at the time and me and Ivor were always trying to get a band together. Different guys would drift in and out but there were was never a real band and there were never any real gigs. We did once play what we called a gig in Ivor’s living room with four girls we fancied as our audience. They kept repeating the words ‘This isn’t music’ and throwing the couch cushions at us. ‘You’ve rumbled us, but can we get a snog anyway?’ ‘No chance.’ I can’t remember who sang – it’s possible we were all too bashful – and I’m not sure which instrument I’d decided to demonstrate my lack of competence by playing on that occasion. It could’ve been guitar or bass, I was equally bad at both.
The closest I got to being in a band before the Mary Chain started to happen was 1979, when me and my friends Davy Campbell – who was the drummer I’d busked with – and Bobby Hamilton, who played the bass, had a go at rehearsing and playing through a little PA. We actually wrote a few songs together and got as far as going to a studio to record three or four of them, but they sounded terrible and I just felt like we’d wasted our money. The idea of recording seemed very difficult – it felt like you only had one shot at it. Luckily that did not turn out to be the case. I found these recordings about ten years ago and thought maybe they weren’t that bad, but when I listened to them they were even worse than I’d thought.
As early as the end of 1977, I remember a feeling that punk had run its course and was going to have to morph into something else. Otherwise it was gonna become as stale as fuck. There was a time where things sort of seemed to stop happening. One of the bands that most hit home with us was Subway Sect – those early records ‘Ambition’, ‘Nobody’s Scared’, ‘Don’t Split It’ are brilliant. There was such a buzz about them for a while – everybody thought they were going to be the next big thing – well, maybe not everybody but certainly we did. They used to rehearse at The Clash’s studio and I remember seeing a video clip of them doing… I can’t even remember what song it was but it was the perfect punk music to me. Then they just seem to go away. I was waiting on this album that never seemed to happen and when it finally did, it wasn’t the album I was waiting on. I still really like What’s the Matter Boy? But it took too long for them to get it together – I think they lost band members and maybe some of the masters, so by the time it finally came out, music had moved on.
Bands just doing the same old same old wasn’t good enough. Punk had to be about ripping it up and starting again, to borrow Orange Juice’s phrase for a time before they had even used it. There were a few notable exceptions coming through in 1978 – bands who seemed like they were doing something new and hinting at the direction punk could move into. The Banshees were one of them – their first album was one of my favourites – and PiL, and Joy Division, who were very much a punk band in my book. They were the ones who continued to reinvent what punk had been; it wasn’t called punk any more but it made all the guys with the spiked haircuts and the thrashy guitars seem irrelevant.
One of the best gigs I ever went to was Buzzcocks at the Glasgow Apollo with Joy Division opening up for them in the autumn of 1979. When Joy Division came out there was such electricity in the air. I was thinking ‘My God, it’s like we’re watching The Doors or something! I’m going to be telling people for the rest of my life that I saw the Joy Division gig at the Apollo in 1979.’ And that premonition was accurate, because that’s exactly what I have done…
There was a feeling that this was an important musical moment – people were just going fucking crazy. Obviously Joy Division are not the sort of band you jump up and down and rip up seats to – people just stood there open-mouthed. It was kind of sad for the Buzzcocks because they had to come on after and you couldn’t possibly follow that. They did their best and they were all right and everyone was into them, but they were already on the way down and being on a bill that was so unbalanced in favour of the support act can’t have helped. It was fucking amazing seeing Joy Division, but just a few months later, Ian Curtis was dead.
I wasn’t as big a fan as Jim of live music. I’m still not, really – I prefer listening to studio recordings. Even though I didn’t go and see many live bands because there didn’t seem to be much point in it, Joy Division with the Buzzcocks in 1979 was pretty fucking stunning. I think we’d seen them on some teenage TV show before – maybe Something Else – doing ‘Transmission’ and ‘She’s Lost Control’, so we kind of knew what was coming, but a gig like that knocks your world off its axis. I think one of the reasons Joy Division made such a big impression on both of us was because at the time – forty-five-odd years ago – neither of us were exactly virtuosi, and Joy Division were just so fucking uncomplicated and yet the whole thing was incredibly powerful.
The guitar playing of Bernard Sumner, or Barney Albrecht or whatever he was calling himself, was just revolutionary in my mind. He was only playing two or three notes but it wasn’t like anything was missing. Him and Peter Hook were just banging out these repetitive but incredibly catchy riffs, and then there was the drumming! In those days your world could get rearranged by some band, and I felt the same way about Public Image Limited. They had the same basic structure – a great drum sound and incredibly simple bass and guitar sounds which just made up this huge complex thing. Jah Wobble and Keith Levene were only in the band because they were Rotten’s mates, but they just happened to be these amazing fucking musicians. What were the chances? How many more people could there be out there like them, talented to the level of genius, who just never got discovered?
I only went to see Public Image a bit later, so by the time I got to them John Lydon had already picked up his cabaret band… I also went to see The Slits who I loved then and I love now. They were just so fucking uncompromising. I think Ari Up did a piss on the stage and as an eighteen-year-old kid living in East Kilbride that was quite something – ‘Oh I say!’ They were great sonically, too, but just to do something like that was extraordinary. It made me think ‘Oh my God – you can do what you fucking like and nobody cares!’ For about three seconds I thought ‘Yes, I’m going to be like that’ and then I remembered that I was the most timid person on earth and no one was going to want to watch me take a piss onstage anyway.
I saw Altered Images and the Banshees around that time as well. I also went to see The Cure but I have to admit I fell asleep at that gig. Not because they were bad or boring or anything like that, but we were sitting in a box – a lot of the main Glasgow venues were seated – and I was working in that fucking factory and I was shattered. I used to get up at the crack of dawn and be on my feet all day lifting big bits of wood. Once I got to that gig I just couldn’t keep my eyes open, so I put my head down on the seat and fell asleep.
When William had gave up his apprenticeship as a sheet metal worker, it caused an almighty hoo-ha in the house, but basically everyone got through it. So two or three years later, when I was thinking about making the same move, I was thinking ‘What’s the worst that could happen? OK, my dad’s going to be pissed off with me for the rest of my life, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, just like William did.’
I hadn’t reckoned with the fact that it being the second time around would make it worse when I did it. My dad was thinking ‘Oh fuck, not this again’, so he took a more hard-line approach and basically said ‘If you pack that job in, you’re going to have to leave this house.’ That was a shock – ‘Hang on a minute, what about William? He got to stay…’ But my dad had raised the stakes, so that was it. I understood that he wanted the best for me and he was only trying to stop me giving up what he thought of as a great job, but that didn’t make it seem any fairer at the time. And when I left Rolls-Royce after serving just two years of my four-year sentence – in the spring of 1980 – it was next stop London.
My da was not a control freak or a bully, he was just a working-class guy who’d been brought up to believe that having a trade is fine and good and honest and skilful. Which of course it is for lots of people, but not for me, and not for Jim either. Or at least, it was another trade we had in mind, we’d just not learnt it yet…
As far as London was concerned, it was all over by Christmas. I must confess to an element of calculation in the timing of my return. I gambled that my mum and dad’s hearts wouldn’t be cold enough to turn me out on the street if I came home at that magical time of year, and it turned out I was right. There was room at the inn. Shortly after I’d got my feet back under the table in East Kilbride in December 1980, a rugged-looking man with razor-sharp cheekbones came to the door.
I asked ‘Who the fuck are you?’ And he said ‘It’s me, Douglas.’ ‘You fucking monster. Who are you and what have you done with little Douglas?’ When we first knew him, Douglas looked so young that William used to call him ‘The Toddler’ – and to this day we still call him Todd… He insisted it was really him and so it was. In the six months I’d been away Douglas had gone from being a little twelve-year-old kid who’d ask ‘Is Jim in?’ in a voice high-pitched enough to make my dad worried I was a paedophile – ‘Jim, there’s a weird wee boy at the door for ye’ – to a full-grown man with stubble.
We always thought something might happen if you were in London, but it never did, at least not until we came to London as a band with a bunch of real ideas and a few decent songs. Before that, why would anyone want to pick me and Jim out and give us a record contract and access to the world? The returns from our London trips before the band happened diminished starkly, from the heady excitement of our first visits in the punk era to a couple of pretty fucking grim abortive attempts in the very early eighties.
I tried to go down again in 1981 and I got off the bus to find that the friend I was going to stay with had been kicked out of his flat and we had to sleep in an underground garage for the night. I knew about a secret laundry room that was meant to be open from my time working at the LSE – how far I’d fallen from those happy days contemplating the wonder of the Post Office Tower – but when we got there it was locked and we had no option but to sleep in the concrete car park. There was no romance to it, it was awful.
I gave London one more go in the middle of what turned out to be my five-year dole period. I just got fed up with everything and me and Davy Campbell said ‘Fuck it, let’s go to London and see what we can get up to.’ I should’ve realised by then that the solution to that conundrum was ‘not a lot’, especially when you’re stuck in the same set-up of signing on and living in a shit-hole. We only lasted about six weeks, which left time for one more busking episode but by that time our youthful charms had faded. I didn’t look like Oliver any more, I looked like the Artful Dodger’s dodgy older brother and our takings plummeted accordingly.
We were staying in some shitty place in Earl’s Court and when they found out we were signing on we got chucked out and ended up sleeping rough, which even though it was summer was not a good experience. Davy knew a few guys in squats so we lasted a couple more nights there, but by that time I’d got a terrible cold and I felt like I was going to die, so I staggered down to King’s Cross and got the bus home. Normally I could never sleep on those bus rides but on that one I kind of keeled over and the next thing I knew I was back in Scotland. There’d been someone next to me when I fell asleep but they were gone by the time I woke up. I wouldn’t have wanted to sit next to me either. On top of the cold I hadn’t had a bath for a couple of weeks and I probably looked like I’d shot up before I got on the bus. I realise this is not quite Iggy Pop’s autobiography, but it still felt like several levels of degradation below anything I was comfortable with.
The first time I heard The Velvet Underground was on the Annie Nightingale show – she played ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ and it was just incredible. Annie Nightingale didn’t get as much credit as John Peel, but I think she introduced a lot of people to a lot of things. Another song she played which I couldn’t quite wrap my head around was ‘Seven And Seven Is’ by Love – it was so fucking punky and yet it came out in the first Summer of Love, but there I was, just discovering it more than ten years later.
Everybody was always name-checking The Velvet Underground in the punk era, but it took us ages to get to hear them. William had Transformer left over from his glam days but by that time all the Velvet Underground back catalogue had been deleted and the closest we could get to them at the library was a Lou Reed compilation with a couple of Velvets songs on. I remember us going into Glasgow and trying to buy the first Velvets album at the end of the seventies but I think the only one that was actually in print at that time was Squeeze which didn’t have Lou Reed or any of the original band members on. It was maybe a year later that the original albums were released and the banana album was blinding revelation number four. First we’d had The Beatles, then glam, then punk rock and now the Velvets. I remember bringing that record home and thinking ‘This is everything we could ever possibly want to get to. It’s the best record I’ve ever heard in my life and nothing else matters.’
I know there’s nothing that is 100 per cent original or new, but there are a few bands that it’s hard to figure out exactly where their music had its roots and The Velvet Underground were a good example of that. Obviously it didn’t come from nowhere – Lou Reed was clearly very into Bob Dylan and also very into a lot of early soul music, so the way I hear the Velvets is as Bob Dylan singing with a Motown band who are all on fucking speed and their equipment doesn’t quite work.
This stuff wasn’t coming to us in chronological order. When Raw Power was reissued in 1977 – and it was cheap, like £1.99 or something – the cover sold it to me from the off. I remember looking at the picture of Iggy on the front and thinking ‘If David Bowie fucked Johnny Rotten, this would be their child.’ Lots of albums you had to get up and lift that needle to the next track every once in a while, but with Raw Power you only had to shift your lazy arse once every twenty minutes because it was all just fucking great. It was like one single after another – my God, the quality of that record.
The Stooges were another great example of an unsuccessful copy band. They wanted to be The Doors so badly but in a wonderfully incompetent way – because they weren’t so accomplished as musicians, they were more primal and had to use their imaginations and came up with something brand new which ended up being just as good. If they had been better at being The Doors, they’d have been worse at being The Stooges. When their first album was reissued I remember seeing it in a Glasgow shop with a little sticker in the corner that had the word ‘Punk’ written on it, just to let the young punks know that regardless of them appearing to be long-haired dudes from a bygone era, it was OK for their record to be in the punk section. And this was true, because it was actually a lot more punk than a lot of the punk music that was coming out.
It was actually William who bought a lot of those records, because he was working at that time, so he could afford to. But we shared the collection – and did so remarkably harmoniously, given how much we used to bicker about everything when we were younger – so what was his was mine. Then when he left his job and I started at Rolls-Royce, it was me doing the bulk of the buying, so what was mine was his too. We had very understanding neighbours – at least, they never complained – but we’d be up in the bedroom listening with my dad shouting up the stairs ‘Turn that fucking racket down.’
You went to London with stuff you could chuck in your bag. You didn’t take records, just a few cassette compilations and maybe a small tape recorder. Then when we returned, the record collection would be there waiting for us with maybe a couple of new additions.
It wasn’t just liking the same music – specifically punk – that brought me and Jim together, it was talking about it… for hours. One of the bands we bonded over most was Suicide. Neither of us could understand why Clash fans had booed them when they toured together – to the point where Joe Strummer had to come out and defend them – when it was obvious they were as punk as the Ramones, they just used synthesisers instead of guitars. I loved their stripped-back iconography, which seemed to boil down to a guy called Johnny in an old film who wore a leather jacket, and the tunes, which were incredibly repetitive but in a very hypnotic way.
Suicide’s first album to me is one of the best records ever made, but it’s very, very hard to get the reference points. How did they come up with that? I do have an idea actually, in that I think it came out of desperation. I think those guys just wanted to be in a band but didn’t know how to do it, so they found these elements they could work with and created something that was utterly unique. To me that’s essentially what rock ’n’ roll is – people finding bits and pieces and reassembling them into something else that makes sense for the time they’re living in. That’s what pretty much every band that I admire did, and that’s what William and I would eventually try to do, too.
When you’re fifteen and your older brother’s eighteen, that’s such a big gap, but once you’re eighteen and he’s twenty-one and you’ve both been away from home for a while and come back, that’s somehow not such a great divide. Where once we couldn’t agree on anything, we suddenly started to get along much better. After spending our childhoods more or less steering clear of each other, we began to realise how much we had in common – specifically, being outsiders. We had these little golden nuggets that we shared in music and art – just things that made sense to us. We were misfits clinging together. It was us against the world, and it felt like we’d be that way for life.