1
It was a poet who gifted the name to Boots For Dancing, the critically neglected Edinburgh-sired agit-Funk auteurs led by vocalist 'Dancing' Dave Carson during Post-Punk's first flourish between 1979 and 1982. The phrase was introduced into the lexicon by way of an off-the-cuff counterpoint to another band's three-word melding of socio-cultural tropes. Such tropes were forged in the heat of a generation's existential disaffection in late 1970's Thatcher's Britain. They also tapped into everything Boots For Dancing were about.
Here was a name that implied a Doc Marten buffed youth club gang cutting loose from the working week and letting off their collective tension on the floor. There was a sense of pride too in such a mass ritual, where sartorial elegance and cutting a dash was as much a part of the experience as the moves themselves. Looking good, feeling better was an unspoken mantra. It came with a package, that understand music was a matter of life and death. It also democratised the dance-floor beyond the stages that separated performers from their audience and put the former on a pedestal just out of reach.
Twas ever thus with working class musical revolutions, from jumping Jive to Northern Soul to Acid House and beyond. Not the stuff of super-clubs and stadiums, but something more intimate, born out of pub function rooms, dance halls and social clubs. These are the places and spaces where real pop art comes from, because the people making it or hearing it are living it, experiencing every second-hand emotion from the songs of strength and heartbreak that lift them onto the floor for real. Some might call it Soul.
But in the late 1970s, life on the street of any city or small town was tense, especially for teenagers spewed out of school and into the dole queue, where one-time factory fodder were put into another form of production line just as mechanically choreographed. To step out of line and to dare to be different was not the done thing.
So it was when Punk happened, as, beyond the tabloid outrage and short-lived explosion of Dada-Situationist inspired nihilism, that community, who didn't even know they were part of one yet, began to find their voice.
“There was a solid hardcore of Edinburgh punks,” Dave Carson remembers, “probably a couple of hundred, who went to different venues. There was a youth club basement in a church in the west end called the Cephas Cellar. It was probably quite a small scene with people from different housing estates and different schools discovering this emerging youth culture and it was really exciting”
In Edinburgh, the catalyst was The Clash's White Riot tour, which opened at Edinburgh Playhouse on May 7h 1977. This wasn't due to the headliners, who postured as good as any old pros, but to support acts The Slits and Subway Sect. Those bands mix of rudimentary musicianship, speak-easy bonhomie and sartorial ordinariness as well as attitude aplenty was as far away from the tabloid idea of 'Punk' as possible.
“It was very convenient that all these bands played on the same night,” says Carson, who was in attendance. “Very few people mention that the Jam played as well, but they were second from the top after the Buzzcocks, Subway Sect and the Slits, and you don't see a line-up like that very often.”
Because of this, and contrary to popular mythology, Scotland's rich and fecund music scene didn't begin in Glasgow, where 'Punk' gigs were then banned by the local council. Big Gold Dream: Scottish Post Punk and Infiltrating the Mainstream, ia a lovingly realised documentary film made in 2015 by Grant McPhee. As this extensive study of the era between 1977 and 1982, reveals The Sound of Young Scotland began in a flat in Keir Street, next to Edinburgh College of Art on the cusp of the city's Tollcross neighbourhood.
Here, co-conspirators Bob Last and Hilary Morrison would set down a blueprint for pop entryism via Fast Product and Pop Aural records, labels which focused on packaging as much as music. As records, the twelve releases on Fast were several works of art in one, with the sleeves wrapped around each disc as significant as what was on the record in a then punky but now commonplace form of packaging.
As for the music itself, in releasing the first records by The Mekons, Gang of Four, The Human League and the Dead Kennedys by way of Scars, Fire Engines and Boots For Dancing, Fast Product and Pop Aural would eventually go on to change the world. Until now, Boots For Dancing were the missing link in such a crucial seam of influence.
2
Boots For Dancing were born out of an incestuous network of Edinburgh conceptualists that included The Rezillos, Dirty Reds, The Flowers, Josef K, Thursdays, plus the aforementioned Scars, Fire Engines and others.
Ideas Over Ability, a music paper small ad manifesto at the time, was the key to all this. After Punk, everyone who got the new musical revolution had ideas. This in turn sired a hot-bed of artistic invention that didn't concern itself with rule-breaking, largely because no-one knew what the rules were. Like so many of their peers, from The Pop Group in Bristol to the Gang of Four in Leeds and Manicured Noise in Manchester, Boots For Dancing looked beyond rock's rich platitudes for inspiration.
In truth, in the midst of Auld Reekie's late 1970s Presbyterian gloom, the low-slung sophisticated euphoria of Chic, Funkadelic and James Brown were as big an influence as the Velvet Underground and Captain Beefheart on this nascent non-scene. Jazz, Funk, Soul and Reggae were all thrown into an increasingly eclectic mix. Of course, no-one knew how to tap into the complexities of all this stuff, so everything came out wrong. Which is where things became interesting.
Where today's conveyor belt of flush-cheeked indie pirates can simply download a pick and mix of influences, press the Post-Punk-Funk button and howl their way to cultdom, back then nobody had a clue what they were doing. Accidents happen when you can't play.
In their short life, Boots For Dancing would feature members or have connections with most of their Edinburgh peers named above as they developed into a Post-Punk-Funk unit of ever increasing eclecticism, but with one foot remaining firmly on the dance-floor.
Over two and a bit years and a multitude of line-ups, they released three singles. The first, a 12”, was, like it's 7” follow-up, released on Pop Aural, while a third came out on the band's own Re-Bop-X imprint. Boots For Dancing also recorded a trio of increasingly ambitious John Peel sessions before imploding. These shards of long lost brilliance are at last recaptured on this disc.
Here then is a tale of pop entryism and Smash Hits conceptualism; of gold sequinned jackets, everyday arson and the politics of dancing. It's a tale of dancing fools, showbiz with substance and a band which fanzine writer and future BBC producer of Top of the Pops 2 and a host of music documentaries Mark Hagen described as “a youth club James Brown.”
By the time Brian Hogg's comprehensive paperback history of Scottish pop, All That Ever Mattered, was published in 1993, however, Bob Last was quoted declaring his former charges as “totally self-destructive.” Ultimately, the story of Boots For Dancing is one of such inherent contradictions subverting the system, of being uptight, alright and, for far too long, out of sight.
3
“It's a bit like it's not me,” says Carson after listening to the Boots For Dancing recordings contained on this album for the first time in more than thirty years. “It's like something that happened years ago that I was really passionate about and involved with, so to hear it now it's very strange. We maybe didn't appreciate at the time what we were doing because we were in the thick of it, but we always tried to work as a collective, and there was a tension to that, because we were all listening to different things.
“The original band, we all had different ideas. Graham the guitarist wanted to be Captain Beefheart. Douglas sang and I sang, and I stopped playing bass and Douglas was brilliant at it.”
It was a tension that worked, with Boots For Dancing on record a taut, edgy and urgent display of each band member tugging in umpteen different ways, sometimes in the same song.
“In my head I always thought it sounded like Chic,” Carson says of the Boots For Dancing sound, “so that's why I kept the lyrics simple, but I wanted them to have meaning as well. Chic used simple phrases and repetition. One of our biggest influences at the time was Spacer by Sheila B. Devotion. If you listen to Nile Rodgers' guitar on it what he's doing sounds really simple, and we wanted that, but in a way that was relevant to a Post-Punk audience. The whole thing about Punk music was to have some kind of meaning behind it, so that made things more complex.”
In this way, there was clearly something in the air. Since Punk, and unless you were the Buzzcocks, silly love songs were off limits, and even Devoto and Shelly's pop miniatures were loaded more with abrasive sarcasm and hormonal disappointment than moon-in-June schmaltz. Disco meanwhile, as appropriated by the Bee Gees, had become a soundtrack of smoothed out bubblegum for attendees of neon-lit high street meat markets in search of escapism through booze, sex or both.
By co-opting other musics outside such worlds, Boots For Dancing and others showed that dance music, however scratchily played, could be something more urgent and less anodyne than mere posing. By adopting an intelligently oppositional stance, Boots For Dancing's musical and lyrical stew was taut, sinewy and stripped back to basics. Agitational as well as agitated, and with muscle and guts in abundance, here was a glorious evocation of the politics of dancing, a place where pleasure and danger co-existed in (im)perfect harmony.
“Punk was played out,” says Carson. “Everything was played out. The thing that always got me was the bit about Punk being about three chords, when Funk was just about playing one chord. I remember saying at the time, this is going to be easier than Punk, but actually the opposite was true, because it's all about timing and playing together.
“So part of the concept wasn't about being minimal, but about doing things in a different way that's got all these parts to it and has a certain energy. At that time I hadn't really heard Northern Soul, but had seen grainy TV footage of James Brown, though the sound was more based on what I'd read than anything. Where I read that Funk was just one chord I don't know, but that was the concept.”
Another driving force behind Boots For Dancing was a conscious decision to play youth clubs as well as regular venues.
“The kids who came to see us were only used to chart acts,” says Carson, “and then we came along full of this different kind of live energy that they weren't used to. Part of the plan was to explore alternative routes to the music business. There were lots of opportunities then, but even though there were shifting sands the gate-keepers were the same, but really I wanted to capture the youth market. My view was that if you could play youth clubs and get away with it, then you really would corner that market.”
Such a mix of calculated subversion fitted in famously with Fast Product and Pop Aural's entryist ethos.
“The comfortable part of the relationship with Pop Aural,” says Carson, “was that they had this response too that you could be subversive with pop. That was there in the Human League as well. So you can see why we fitted quite nicely with what Bob was doing at the time.”
4
In the so-called Year Zero fall-out of Punk, a form of new puritanism had sprung up amongst the serious young men and women taking the stage to explore seemingly new territories. Anti-rockist and seemingly anti-performance in spirit, fun was a serious business and speaking to or even acknowledging the audience was a no-no.
Born in part from studied cool, part from painful shyness and part getting to grips with instruments they'd barely learnt to play, Post-Punk bands at the time reflect a greyness and seeming return to 1930s austerity, with utilitarian Army & Navy Store chic and high theory to the fore.
Boots For Dancing had the theory alright, but they also had the politics. Anti Thatcher and anti racist where some of their contemporaries frowned on political commitment, they aligned themselves with the Rock Against Racism movement of the time. Also counter to the prevailing miserabilism, and more akin to the acts that graced the Harlem Revue, Reggae sound-systems and Funkadelic's Sci-Fi spectaculars, Boots For Dancing wanted to put on a show.
“That was my experience of seeing the Damned, the Banshees, the Heartbreakers,” says Carson. “They all acknowledged the audience, and then this thing happened where that stopped, maybe because the bands were nervous, but then it became a thing to do.
“We were always a live band, and when we did play live it was even edgier and more chaotic than on record. We had an audience to play with rather than play for, and we would orchestrate stage invasions and stuff like that. In the early days I'd come on from the audience, so you were already breaking the fourth wall and putting on a show. We were always very energetic.
“In some ways it was a disadvantage in terms of what we were seen to be. People expected us to be morose and insular, detached and other, whereas we wanted to embrace who was there and have fun, and not be precious about things, but be irreverent. We had a thing about show-business as well. I would make a point of introducing all the band members in a way that wasn't done at the time, but being a kind of MC. It was a bit like being Kermit off the Muppets. That confused people as well, because they wondered if we were a comedy band, as opposed to just listening to the music.”
Such a mix of showbiz and subversion would sometimes be taken to extremes. One act of reckless showmanship took place during a gig at the Nite Club, one of the city's foremost small venues of the time situated above Edinburgh Playhouse, where the White Riot tour had changed everything. Mid-set during a pre Christmas show, and as a gift to the audience, Carson and co sprayed the words 'Boots For Dancing' on the club's freshly painted back wall. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
5
Carson's in-roads into Edinburgh's nascent Punk scene began at Craigmount School, just down the hill from Clermiston, where his family had moved from Essex when he was ten and a half.
“I had to culturally assimilate,” he says, these days sounding as Leith as it gets, “because I was getting battered for my English accent, not to mention my ginger hair and being the youngest in my year.”
At school Carson became friends with a boy called Andy Copland, and the pair found an affinity with Tam Dean Burn and his kid brother Russell.
“I always liked music,” Carson remembers, “and listened to all sorts, including Glam and Prog, but I really liked Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran.”
It wasn't until he heard the first Ramones LP, however, that something clicked.
“The Ramones deconstructed things for me,” he says. I could hear them and understand the parts to it, and it sounded much simpler to Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, even though I later realised it wasn't.”
Copland had started playing guitar, and Carson somehow ended up playing bass. The pair kept bumping into Burn, and with him on vocals and Russell on drums, the pair formed the very first line up of Dirty Reds, which became the nucleus, not just for Boots For Dancing, but, with Russell on the drum stool, for future Pop Aural label-mates Fire Engines as well.
It was a poet who gifted the name to Boots For Dancing, the critically neglected Edinburgh-sired agit-Funk auteurs led by vocalist 'Dancing' Dave Carson during Post-Punk's first flourish between 1979 and 1982. The phrase was introduced into the lexicon by way of an off-the-cuff counterpoint to another band's three-word melding of socio-cultural tropes. Such tropes were forged in the heat of a generation's existential disaffection in late 1970's Thatcher's Britain. They also tapped into everything Boots For Dancing were about.
Here was a name that implied a Doc Marten buffed youth club gang cutting loose from the working week and letting off their collective tension on the floor. There was a sense of pride too in such a mass ritual, where sartorial elegance and cutting a dash was as much a part of the experience as the moves themselves. Looking good, feeling better was an unspoken mantra. It came with a package, that understand music was a matter of life and death. It also democratised the dance-floor beyond the stages that separated performers from their audience and put the former on a pedestal just out of reach.
Twas ever thus with working class musical revolutions, from jumping Jive to Northern Soul to Acid House and beyond. Not the stuff of super-clubs and stadiums, but something more intimate, born out of pub function rooms, dance halls and social clubs. These are the places and spaces where real pop art comes from, because the people making it or hearing it are living it, experiencing every second-hand emotion from the songs of strength and heartbreak that lift them onto the floor for real. Some might call it Soul.
But in the late 1970s, life on the street of any city or small town was tense, especially for teenagers spewed out of school and into the dole queue, where one-time factory fodder were put into another form of production line just as mechanically choreographed. To step out of line and to dare to be different was not the done thing.
So it was when Punk happened, as, beyond the tabloid outrage and short-lived explosion of Dada-Situationist inspired nihilism, that community, who didn't even know they were part of one yet, began to find their voice.
“There was a solid hardcore of Edinburgh punks,” Dave Carson remembers, “probably a couple of hundred, who went to different venues. There was a youth club basement in a church in the west end called the Cephas Cellar. It was probably quite a small scene with people from different housing estates and different schools discovering this emerging youth culture and it was really exciting”
In Edinburgh, the catalyst was The Clash's White Riot tour, which opened at Edinburgh Playhouse on May 7h 1977. This wasn't due to the headliners, who postured as good as any old pros, but to support acts The Slits and Subway Sect. Those bands mix of rudimentary musicianship, speak-easy bonhomie and sartorial ordinariness as well as attitude aplenty was as far away from the tabloid idea of 'Punk' as possible.
“It was very convenient that all these bands played on the same night,” says Carson, who was in attendance. “Very few people mention that the Jam played as well, but they were second from the top after the Buzzcocks, Subway Sect and the Slits, and you don't see a line-up like that very often.”
Because of this, and contrary to popular mythology, Scotland's rich and fecund music scene didn't begin in Glasgow, where 'Punk' gigs were then banned by the local council. Big Gold Dream: Scottish Post Punk and Infiltrating the Mainstream, ia a lovingly realised documentary film made in 2015 by Grant McPhee. As this extensive study of the era between 1977 and 1982, reveals The Sound of Young Scotland began in a flat in Keir Street, next to Edinburgh College of Art on the cusp of the city's Tollcross neighbourhood.
Here, co-conspirators Bob Last and Hilary Morrison would set down a blueprint for pop entryism via Fast Product and Pop Aural records, labels which focused on packaging as much as music. As records, the twelve releases on Fast were several works of art in one, with the sleeves wrapped around each disc as significant as what was on the record in a then punky but now commonplace form of packaging.
As for the music itself, in releasing the first records by The Mekons, Gang of Four, The Human League and the Dead Kennedys by way of Scars, Fire Engines and Boots For Dancing, Fast Product and Pop Aural would eventually go on to change the world. Until now, Boots For Dancing were the missing link in such a crucial seam of influence.
2
Boots For Dancing were born out of an incestuous network of Edinburgh conceptualists that included The Rezillos, Dirty Reds, The Flowers, Josef K, Thursdays, plus the aforementioned Scars, Fire Engines and others.
Ideas Over Ability, a music paper small ad manifesto at the time, was the key to all this. After Punk, everyone who got the new musical revolution had ideas. This in turn sired a hot-bed of artistic invention that didn't concern itself with rule-breaking, largely because no-one knew what the rules were. Like so many of their peers, from The Pop Group in Bristol to the Gang of Four in Leeds and Manicured Noise in Manchester, Boots For Dancing looked beyond rock's rich platitudes for inspiration.
In truth, in the midst of Auld Reekie's late 1970s Presbyterian gloom, the low-slung sophisticated euphoria of Chic, Funkadelic and James Brown were as big an influence as the Velvet Underground and Captain Beefheart on this nascent non-scene. Jazz, Funk, Soul and Reggae were all thrown into an increasingly eclectic mix. Of course, no-one knew how to tap into the complexities of all this stuff, so everything came out wrong. Which is where things became interesting.
Where today's conveyor belt of flush-cheeked indie pirates can simply download a pick and mix of influences, press the Post-Punk-Funk button and howl their way to cultdom, back then nobody had a clue what they were doing. Accidents happen when you can't play.
In their short life, Boots For Dancing would feature members or have connections with most of their Edinburgh peers named above as they developed into a Post-Punk-Funk unit of ever increasing eclecticism, but with one foot remaining firmly on the dance-floor.
Over two and a bit years and a multitude of line-ups, they released three singles. The first, a 12”, was, like it's 7” follow-up, released on Pop Aural, while a third came out on the band's own Re-Bop-X imprint. Boots For Dancing also recorded a trio of increasingly ambitious John Peel sessions before imploding. These shards of long lost brilliance are at last recaptured on this disc.
Here then is a tale of pop entryism and Smash Hits conceptualism; of gold sequinned jackets, everyday arson and the politics of dancing. It's a tale of dancing fools, showbiz with substance and a band which fanzine writer and future BBC producer of Top of the Pops 2 and a host of music documentaries Mark Hagen described as “a youth club James Brown.”
By the time Brian Hogg's comprehensive paperback history of Scottish pop, All That Ever Mattered, was published in 1993, however, Bob Last was quoted declaring his former charges as “totally self-destructive.” Ultimately, the story of Boots For Dancing is one of such inherent contradictions subverting the system, of being uptight, alright and, for far too long, out of sight.
3
“It's a bit like it's not me,” says Carson after listening to the Boots For Dancing recordings contained on this album for the first time in more than thirty years. “It's like something that happened years ago that I was really passionate about and involved with, so to hear it now it's very strange. We maybe didn't appreciate at the time what we were doing because we were in the thick of it, but we always tried to work as a collective, and there was a tension to that, because we were all listening to different things.
“The original band, we all had different ideas. Graham the guitarist wanted to be Captain Beefheart. Douglas sang and I sang, and I stopped playing bass and Douglas was brilliant at it.”
It was a tension that worked, with Boots For Dancing on record a taut, edgy and urgent display of each band member tugging in umpteen different ways, sometimes in the same song.
“In my head I always thought it sounded like Chic,” Carson says of the Boots For Dancing sound, “so that's why I kept the lyrics simple, but I wanted them to have meaning as well. Chic used simple phrases and repetition. One of our biggest influences at the time was Spacer by Sheila B. Devotion. If you listen to Nile Rodgers' guitar on it what he's doing sounds really simple, and we wanted that, but in a way that was relevant to a Post-Punk audience. The whole thing about Punk music was to have some kind of meaning behind it, so that made things more complex.”
In this way, there was clearly something in the air. Since Punk, and unless you were the Buzzcocks, silly love songs were off limits, and even Devoto and Shelly's pop miniatures were loaded more with abrasive sarcasm and hormonal disappointment than moon-in-June schmaltz. Disco meanwhile, as appropriated by the Bee Gees, had become a soundtrack of smoothed out bubblegum for attendees of neon-lit high street meat markets in search of escapism through booze, sex or both.
By co-opting other musics outside such worlds, Boots For Dancing and others showed that dance music, however scratchily played, could be something more urgent and less anodyne than mere posing. By adopting an intelligently oppositional stance, Boots For Dancing's musical and lyrical stew was taut, sinewy and stripped back to basics. Agitational as well as agitated, and with muscle and guts in abundance, here was a glorious evocation of the politics of dancing, a place where pleasure and danger co-existed in (im)perfect harmony.
“Punk was played out,” says Carson. “Everything was played out. The thing that always got me was the bit about Punk being about three chords, when Funk was just about playing one chord. I remember saying at the time, this is going to be easier than Punk, but actually the opposite was true, because it's all about timing and playing together.
“So part of the concept wasn't about being minimal, but about doing things in a different way that's got all these parts to it and has a certain energy. At that time I hadn't really heard Northern Soul, but had seen grainy TV footage of James Brown, though the sound was more based on what I'd read than anything. Where I read that Funk was just one chord I don't know, but that was the concept.”
Another driving force behind Boots For Dancing was a conscious decision to play youth clubs as well as regular venues.
“The kids who came to see us were only used to chart acts,” says Carson, “and then we came along full of this different kind of live energy that they weren't used to. Part of the plan was to explore alternative routes to the music business. There were lots of opportunities then, but even though there were shifting sands the gate-keepers were the same, but really I wanted to capture the youth market. My view was that if you could play youth clubs and get away with it, then you really would corner that market.”
Such a mix of calculated subversion fitted in famously with Fast Product and Pop Aural's entryist ethos.
“The comfortable part of the relationship with Pop Aural,” says Carson, “was that they had this response too that you could be subversive with pop. That was there in the Human League as well. So you can see why we fitted quite nicely with what Bob was doing at the time.”
In the so-called Year Zero fall-out of Punk, a form of new puritanism had sprung up amongst the serious young men and women taking the stage to explore seemingly new territories. Anti-rockist and seemingly anti-performance in spirit, fun was a serious business and speaking to or even acknowledging the audience was a no-no.
Born in part from studied cool, part from painful shyness and part getting to grips with instruments they'd barely learnt to play, Post-Punk bands at the time reflect a greyness and seeming return to 1930s austerity, with utilitarian Army & Navy Store chic and high theory to the fore.
Boots For Dancing had the theory alright, but they also had the politics. Anti Thatcher and anti racist where some of their contemporaries frowned on political commitment, they aligned themselves with the Rock Against Racism movement of the time. Also counter to the prevailing miserabilism, and more akin to the acts that graced the Harlem Revue, Reggae sound-systems and Funkadelic's Sci-Fi spectaculars, Boots For Dancing wanted to put on a show.
“That was my experience of seeing the Damned, the Banshees, the Heartbreakers,” says Carson. “They all acknowledged the audience, and then this thing happened where that stopped, maybe because the bands were nervous, but then it became a thing to do.
“We were always a live band, and when we did play live it was even edgier and more chaotic than on record. We had an audience to play with rather than play for, and we would orchestrate stage invasions and stuff like that. In the early days I'd come on from the audience, so you were already breaking the fourth wall and putting on a show. We were always very energetic.
“In some ways it was a disadvantage in terms of what we were seen to be. People expected us to be morose and insular, detached and other, whereas we wanted to embrace who was there and have fun, and not be precious about things, but be irreverent. We had a thing about show-business as well. I would make a point of introducing all the band members in a way that wasn't done at the time, but being a kind of MC. It was a bit like being Kermit off the Muppets. That confused people as well, because they wondered if we were a comedy band, as opposed to just listening to the music.”
Such a mix of showbiz and subversion would sometimes be taken to extremes. One act of reckless showmanship took place during a gig at the Nite Club, one of the city's foremost small venues of the time situated above Edinburgh Playhouse, where the White Riot tour had changed everything. Mid-set during a pre Christmas show, and as a gift to the audience, Carson and co sprayed the words 'Boots For Dancing' on the club's freshly painted back wall. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
5
Carson's in-roads into Edinburgh's nascent Punk scene began at Craigmount School, just down the hill from Clermiston, where his family had moved from Essex when he was ten and a half.
“I had to culturally assimilate,” he says, these days sounding as Leith as it gets, “because I was getting battered for my English accent, not to mention my ginger hair and being the youngest in my year.”
At school Carson became friends with a boy called Andy Copland, and the pair found an affinity with Tam Dean Burn and his kid brother Russell.
“I always liked music,” Carson remembers, “and listened to all sorts, including Glam and Prog, but I really liked Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran.”
It wasn't until he heard the first Ramones LP, however, that something clicked.
“The Ramones deconstructed things for me,” he says. I could hear them and understand the parts to it, and it sounded much simpler to Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, even though I later realised it wasn't.”
Copland had started playing guitar, and Carson somehow ended up playing bass. The pair kept bumping into Burn, and with him on vocals and Russell on drums, the pair formed the very first line up of Dirty Reds, which became the nucleus, not just for Boots For Dancing, but, with Russell on the drum stool, for future Pop Aural label-mates Fire Engines as well.
Tam Dean Burn departed the
band to go to drama school, becoming one of the most
adventurous, Punk-inspired stage, film and television actors in the
country. Before that, in December 1977, Dirty Reds supported The Rezillos, a band
formed at Edinburgh College of Art whose cartoon trash aesthetic
would eventually take them into the pop charts. The Rezillos
guitarist Jo Callis, already a seasoned veteran, would go on to
become a major player in the Boots For Dancing story, as would two
others in attendance that night.
By that time Carson was working in a record shop, in the Edinburgh branch of a still hippified Virgin Records. It was here that a young woman came in with an advert saying she was a singer looking for a band. With the three leftover Dirty Reds in need of a vocalist, the ad never got as far as the notice board, and The Flowers were born, with the young woman, whose name was Hilary Morrison, aka Hi-Ray, the singer.
After nine months, Carson left The Flowers, who, with Copland still in their ranks, went on to appear on Fast Product's high-concept Earcom 1 12” compilation, alongside Graph, the Blank Students and The Prats, and would later release two singles on Pop Aural.
“The Fast Product thing happened and all the Fire Engines hung out in Keir Street, but the reason I went round there was because I was in a band with Hilary, and after I left the band I disengaged from that scene, but Bob was always away on tour with the Rezillos, so I never made that connection.”
For Carson, meanwhile, it took another Virgin ad to find Boots For Dancing's first guitarist, Graham 'Pogo' High.
“He had a reel to reel tape recorder,” says Carson, “and out of that grew the first line up of the band.”
Before that, however, there was a kind of naming ceremony that took place in the Tap O'Lauriston, the now demolished magnet for Edinburgh's punk scene situated a stone's throw from Edinburgh College of Art.
“We were in the Tap, Graham, Douglas, Paul and myself, and I think Metropak were playing,” Carson recalls.
'Douglas' was Douglas Barrie, initially Carson's co-vocalist turned bass player for the original Boots For Dancing. 'Paul' was Paul Reekie, the Fife-born genius who, as the front-man of Thursdays, had appeared on Fast's Earcom 2: Contradiction 12” follow-up compilation to Earcom 1. Thursdays opened and closed the record, with their own composition, Perfection, ushering in two songs by Basczax on Side 1, before following two exclusive originals by Joy Division on Side 2 with a beautifully cracked cover of Otis Reading's (Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay.
“That was before Paul became a poet,” says Carson, “although he always had it in him, and he showed me this list of stuff, and because there was this band, Shoes For Industry*, he put down Boots For Dancing. Metropak had no support act that night, so we said why don't we get up and do something, storm the stage or something. Me and Graham and Douglas got up, and Paul was quite a good drummer, and that was when we called ourselves Boots For Dancing, because that was what we shouted out.”
With Stuart Wright recruited on drums, the first line-up of Boots For Dancing was complete.
“We got access to rehearsal space,” Carson remembers, “and made a cassette, one of which we gave to Hilary with a view to supporting The Flowers. By that time we knew Bob from his Rezillos connections, and then I got a phone call from him. I knew he was starting a distribution company, and thought it might have something to do with that, but we met, and he said he thought the song Boots For Dancing would make a great single and wanted to put it out.”
While Carson's response was hardly the stuff of career opportunities, it did give a youthful nod to the collective idealism that would in part define the band.
“I said I'd need to check with my mates first,” he recalls. “Then Bob said he wanted the single to be a Disco 12”, and I just thought you're taking the piss here. I phoned Graham, and I'm pretty certain Graham said to tell him to fuck off. Then I said, let's think about this, because it's an opportunity. I mean, we hadnae played live. What we were doing was basically a concept. That's what Bob probably picked up on. I know he'd been going to New York, and had done a night in Edinburgh called the Dancetaria, which obviously came from the New York club, so he could obviously see something.
“I suppose retrospectively you can dig out everything that was happening at the time. We loved James White, but there was all the other stuff like Arthur Russell, so you can see why he would maybe think about us in that way.
“With the song Boots For Dancing itself I suppose we were making a statement, because it's about wanting to go dancing, but most of the discos in Edinburgh, if you went to them and were a punk you'd get jumped. That's the line about I like dancing but I don't like discos, it's about the environment and not about the music. “
The eponymous Boots For Dancing was duly released on Pop Aural as a 12” EP in April 1980 backed by two new songs, Parachute, and Guitars & Girl Trouble. In keeping with the label's visual aesthetic, the sleeve was adorned with images of footprints like those used in old time step by step beginners guides to cutting a rug to the latest dance-floor craze. In the corner, a pair of boots was placed, stock still and side by side, saving themselves for the final number.
“The next thing was we were going to have to play gigs,” says Carson, “so we had to start writing songs. The best thing that happened was that we did our first gig in Aberdeen and not in Edinburgh in front of people we knew, because I'd moved centre stage, so I felt quite confident not being in front of people we knew. We did three or four gigs after that, and the next thing we're supporting the Human League at George Square Theatre in Edinburgh, and then at Hammersmith Palais in London.
“The original line-up lasted about six or seven gigs, but significantly, certain people saw us at those gigs, like Jo, and Ali (Angel) Patterson drummed for us once.
With Wright vacating his drum stool, Carson's co-writer High announced his forthcoming departure to London.
“And this is where it gets slightly incestuous,” says Carson, “because Graham ended up playing with the Delta 5, and that came about because because Jo's sister Jackie played bass with the Delta 5, and then later Jo joined us. We always had an interchangeable line-up, with people leaving because of other bands and other priorities, so it was never a big issue. It was always like that.”
Prior to this, and by way of promotion for the 12” EP, Pop Aural's ongoing attempt to infiltrate the mainstream saw Boots For Dancing grace the competition pages of Smash Hits, no less. More usually associated with the likes of Adam Ant and Duran Duran, many forget than in its early days the glossy pop magazine founded in 1978 by former NME editor and future founder of 1980s style bible The Face Nick Logan was a heady mix of chart-bound bubblegum and more independent fare. Just the sort of thing, then, that would appeal to Pop Aural and others pushing the so-called New Pop revolution that would eventually see the likes of the Human League, Heaven 17 and Scritti Politti become bona fide pop stars.
On page 28 of the magazine below a 'Star Teaser' word game and beneath the headline 'Put The Boot In!', readers were invited to take part in a Spot The Ball style competition involving, not some image of a high-kicking sporting activity in motion, but a photograph of a busy city street in which passers by were simply crossing the road. To win, you had to put a cross on the foot of which passing pedestrian entrants considered to be the most likely to dance. As well as picking up a copy of the Boots For Dancing 12” EP along with the 1979 EMI released Fast Product compilation, The First Year Plan, the competition winner also received a pair of Doc Martens, 'or if the girls don't fancy that, a pair of boots to the value of £25.' For the benefit of anyone who may have entered, the winning feet belonged to Carson.
6
In keeping with Carson's aspirations for the nascent youth market, he also managed a teenage punk band called Chaos.
“That was Andy's wee brother and a couple of other guys and Jamo, James Stewart, on drums,” Carson remembers. “They were great. They had a song about the band The Freeze called Anti Freeze. That's how Jamo ended up playing drums for us.”
With High about to depart to London, he played a farewell show with Boots For Dancing on a bill with Jo Callis' post Rezillos band, Shake, which also featured former Rezillos Simon Templar (nee Bloomfield) and Angel Patterson, and what turned out to be the final gig by Paul Reekie's band, Thursdays.
“I'd been very good friends with Paul and Thursdays,” says Carson. “They were from Glenrothes, where Stuart and Douglas were from, and from that gig Michael Barclay, who was Thursdays guitarist, joined us, and Jo joined us. After the Rezillos I think he was looking around for stuff, and he could see what we were trying to do. He did Shake, who were very good, and over the years all three members of Shake ended up playing in Boots For Dancing.”
It was this point that Boots For Dancing really tightened up as a working unit.
“Some of the ideas from the first line up were rearranged by Jo for the first John Peel session,” Carson says of a session first broadcast in December 1980, and which according to Ken Garner's book, In Session Tonight*, also featured both Last and Morrison on backing vocals. Given that at the time BBC and Musicians Union rules stipulated that bands in for sessions were paid per member, Last and Morrison's appearance helped maximise Boots For Dancing' fee. This was particularly helpful to pay for rehearsal space in Edinburgh whenever Last invoiced them.
7
It is this line up who appear in the only known film footage from the pre camera phone world that Boots For Dancing occupied, when they were captured giving a live performance of Parachute recorded at the Queens Hall in Leeds as part of the 1980 Futurama festival. Billed as 'The World's First Science Fiction Music Festival', Futurama was a weekend-long compendium of underground Post-Punk acts with a couple of major head-liners, and in retrospect looks like a pre-cursor to the likes of the All Tomorrow's Parties week-enders that brought an assortment of indie kids and chin-strokers to off-season UK holiday camps throughout the noughties and beyond.
Top of the bill at the first Futurama in 1979 were Public Image Limited, while the 1980 edition was headlined by Siouxsie and the Banshees and Gary Glitter. The line up also featured the Psychedelic Furs and U2, plus the likes of Young Marble Giants, Clock DVA, and an electronic trio from Sheffield called Vice Versa. From Scotland there was Altered Images, plus Boots For Dancing's Pop Aural label-mates The Flowers, still fronted by Morrison.
For Boots For Dancing's set, while Callis wore a kilt, Carson sported a gold sequinned jacket, a glitzy showbiz relative of the gold lame variety that was a vital signifier of British pop history. As noted by Michael Bracewell in his book, England is Mine: Pop Life in Albion From Wilde to Goldie*, Billy Fury, Malcolm McDowell in Lindsay Anderson's 1973 state of the nation film, O Lucky Man!, and Morrissey in his early post Smiths solo guise had all donned such a garment.
“Bob must've known we were going to be filmed,” says Carson, “and he sent me to Mutrie's Theatrical Costume Hire, who had just opened a brand spanking new warehouse on Brunswick Street off Leith Walk, next to the Royal Mail sorting office. We were theatrical anyway, and he told me to get something showy, so I got this gold sequinned jacket that looked like a Teddy Boy jacket. I hired it for a week and took it to Leeds, but it was so heavy I took it off very quickly.”
In the Futurama footage, shown originally on late night television,sure enough, the jacket is there when Carson introduces Parachute with an earnest 'We may not be the greatest but enjoy yourselves', but by the end of the first verse it's gone, freeing him up to shimmy with controlled abandon.
Watching Carson cavort his way through Boots For Dancing's set were the young men from Vice Versa, who, as fronted by a fanzine writer turned musician called Martin Fry, were scheduled to play straight after. A couple of years later, Fry would effectively deconstruct the pop song with ABC on their string-laden debut album, The Lexicon of Love. Fry's knowing lyrics wrapped up in Trevor Horn's epic airbrushed production would also set the charts alight with such grandiloquent statements as The Look of Love, Poison Arrow and, most glorious of all, All of My Heart.
ABC publicity stills featured Fry knowingly styled within an inch of his life in glossy retro chic images that gave him the appearance of a matinee idol in an irony-free 1980s pastiche of Hollywood noir. On the cover of Smash Hits, Fry went one step further than Carson. It wasn't just a gold lame jacket he was pictured in, but a gold lame suit.
Carson, meanwhile, had continued his affection for natty dapper formal stage-wear via circuitous routes that included nabbing the tartan lame jacket worn by Rezillos bassist William Mysterious in the picture on the back of the band's debut album.
“There was a white one as well,” says Carson, “which Titch (Michael Barclay) our guitarist said made me look like Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull.”
8
Boots For Dancing released a second single, a 7” featuring Rain Song / Hesitate, on Pop Aural in March 1981. Hesitate was originally earmarked to be the A side, but Last switched the two songs at the last minute, with the recording being sped up by 10% at the lathe cutting stage, “just like Phil Spector!”, says Carson.
In search of a follow-up, Carson looked to an unlikely favourite of the Boots For Dancing live set.
As cover versions go, Heaven Is in the Back Seat of My Cadillac could have done for Boots For Dancing what Shack Up did for Factory Records house band A Certain Ratio when they released their version of Washington DC Funk outfit Banbarra's then little known 1975 dance-floor filler. Carson tried to persuade Pop Aural in vain to release Heaven is in the Back Seat of My Cadillac as the third Boots For Dancing single. As it turned out, what ended up as their swan-song didn't come out on Pop Aural at all, and by the time of their second John Peel session in July 1981, the line-up had changed again.
“We recorded a third single,” says Carson, “but it was a bit of a disaster. We recorded it in Castle Sound, which is a really lovely studio, and Calum Malcolm who produced it was brilliant, but being in this professional studio, it was too smooth for us. Jo was away, and we ended up putting harpsichords on it, and it sounded shite. Jo was furious.
With Jamo Stewart eventually departing the band and Callis having already joined the Human League, with whom he would co-write Don't You Want Me, hitting commercial pay-dirt when the song became the 1981 UK Christmas number one, Boots For Dancing regrouped yet again. Carson and co enlisted drummer Mike Baillie, who had just returned to Scotland from London after playing with the Skids circa their Days of Europa album. The new Boots For Dancing line-up reached potentially explosive heights, however, with the arrival of the living legend that was the Amazing Dickie Fusco.
“Dickie was a jazz drummer who lived round the corner,” says Carson. “He played percussion, and would play completely random stuff. He was always this really funny guy who taught himself to fire-eat, and when he switched from methylated spirits to paraffin, he almost burnt the ceiling at the ICA in London. But going from having two guitarists to having a drummer and a percussionist really changed things. Mike Baillie and Dickie Fusco were a formidable combination that took us to new heights rhythmically.”
By the time of the band's second Peel session, elements of Latin, African and what would come to be known as World Music were skittering into view as Boots For Dancing looked even further outwards. Their sound became slicker and more nuanced, exploring Fourth World avenues that similarly styled peers such as 23 Skidoo were also navigating. This first became evident on the third Boots For Dancing single.
Ooh Bop Sh'Bam / Money Is Thin On The Ground, was released in February 1982 on the band's own Re-Pop X label. The title of the A-side was appropriated from Dizzy Gillespie's twelve-bar big band blues, Oop Bop Sh'Bam, which itself was attempting to verbalise an onomatopoeic interpretation of what was then the new, hot as hell sound of Be-Bop jazz.
Novelist and Beat poet Clarence Major's 1970 book, Black Slang: Dictionary of Afro-American Talk described the phrase 'Oh bop sh'bam' as 'an existential jazz phrase; perhaps a mystic effort to comment on the inscrutable in the black man's social, moral and spiritual condition in the United States, or simply another way of talking to that “sense” of mystery often referred to as GOD.'
“The lyrics of Ooo Bop Sh'Bam came from a job interview I had,” says Carson, “and the guy interviewing me pointed out that there were huge gaps in my employment history. He said people might think I'd been in prison, or that I could be seen as work shy.”
“We gigged a lot,” says Carson, “maybe two or three times a week.”
It paid off. From the uptightness of their early days, Boots For Dancing's third Peel session, now with former Josef K drummer Ronnie Torrance taking over from Baillie, who had departed to pursue his own Epsilon project, seemed to be fleshed out in even more exotic colours.
“I think that's because we worked more collectively,” says Carson, “and if someone had an idea we'd work on it. We were all listening to very different things, and we shared that to try and understand it all. On the third Peel session, Bend An Elbow, Lend An Ear is based on a Chilean folk song. We did fund-raisers for Chilean solidarity against the Pinochet regime, because we had friends at the time who were Chilean, and who came to Edinburgh in the 70s. We came across the folk song, and then when we got the Peel session we just decided to do it.
“I wrote the lyrics in the car in the traffic jam to the Peel session, and that was it. We just did it and never played it live. I suppose that was a missed opportunity, that we never got a chance to experiment more. It was more diverse, and sometimes we struggled with that live, it was how do we have a continuity and bring these elements in again. So for me it felt a bit strange but if we were doing it now I think people would have different ears in their heads than people then, and I think they'd see it. Things were more compartmentalised then.”
Fusco's influence especially can be heard all over the third Peel session, on Just The Ticket in particular.
“That's because our pyrotechnic percussionist drummed on that,” Carson says of Fusco's input. “I had no memory of doing that until I heard it again recently. I thought who the hell's this, because we only ever played it once in the studio, and I don't know where it came from, but that's totally about Dicky's drumming.”
9
It is the previously unheard material here, however, that is most evocative of that period of Boots For Dancing's short lifespan. Recorded in Autumn 1981 at Barclay Towers Studio, a converted loft and lived-in kitchen analogue set-up run by producer Tony Pilley in a turret control room in a top floor flat on the corner of the Meadows in Edinburgh's Bruntsfield district, these five tracks consolidate everything that had gone before.
“In some ways it's very different to everything else we did,” according to Carson. “We were a lot more relaxed, because we'd played a lot. At least two of the songs were jams that we just made up at the time, and two of them we'd already recorded for a Peel session, so we played them back with a sense of clarity, and were a very confident band. I suppose that's when we tried to stretch out and bring in jazz influences and what have you.
“At that time I wouldn't have known this, but it's like there's version on version of Jamaican music, so you're influenced by someone, and maybe use two or three elements you can hear in your head because you like a particular part of a song, and you try and mash them together, and you're never gonna get there anyway, but it becomes something else.”
The Barclay Towers sessions and the third single were executive produced by Pete Harris, who, along with Alan 'Pinhead' Proudfoot, formed the Boots For Dancing road crew, with Harris on sound and driving duties and Proudfoot on lights. Harris also played Hammond organ on the second Peel session version of Wild Jazz Summers. Proudfoot designed the posters for Tollcross-based venue, the Hoochie Coochie Club as well as various record sleeves, including Caledonian funkateer Jesse Rae's third single, (It's Just) The Dog in Me, released on 12” by Allan Campbell's Supreme International Editions label in 1983.
10
For all the ideas that now existed alongside ability, however, by the end of 1982 Boots For Dancing were no more.
“In terms of that kind of intensity that we had,” says Carson, “it took a lot of work to do that as a unit. I suppose the only time we had anyone who really directed us was in the early days when Jo joined, because he had all these skills, and that changed us dramatically. From floundering when he joined, to being fully equipped by the time he left, we eventually had all this knowledge about dynamics and how you develop collectively.
“It was brilliant, because he just had all that all in his head, but it took a lot of energy for us to do that, and I think that's why we didn't last that long. It required everyone to have that energy, and people had other things to do. That was good as well, because it kept things healthy. If you become too insular you become like the last gang in town, and you just plough a furrow, disregard everything outside that and continue what you're doing, and what you're doing might be crap.
“There was a point it became, not frustrating, but it just wasn't going to keep going that way. I thought we'd played longer, but it was about two and a bit years. I can understand why now. It was quite a short period of time. You did something and that was for then, but for bands now there's a whole different way of working.
“The thing I always wanted us to do was to be two bands, like Parliament and Funkadelic. I wanted one band that could play anywhere to anyone doing a lot of covers so you could use it as your bread and butter to do your own stuff.
“Some of my contemporaries signed to major labels, usually as solo artists, and for many of them it was the worst thing that ever happened to then. I've always been retrospectively glad that we never went down that road.”
11
Post Boots For Dancing, the band's alumni scattered in ways as disparate as their sound. Following his stint in Delta 5, Graham High became a translator for German pharmaceutical companies, while
Of those who continued with music, Jo Callis' epoch-changing stint with the Dare era Human is probably the best known. After that he formed the glamtastic S.W.A.L.K. with fellow ex Rezillo Eugene Reynolds along with Michael Barclay, and more recently joined and left a reformed Rezillos before becoming briefly involved in former Scars singer Robert King's Opium Kitchen project.
Jamo Stewart went on to front glossy dance act Syndicate before sadly passing away in the 1990s. Barclay went on to become head of the Art department in a school in Dundee, and has been known to tutor the occasional school band. Mike Baillie remains involved in the annual Skids fanclub get-together, where the surviving members of the band minus vocalist turned film director Richard Jobson perform with fans who get to sing their favourite Skids song.
The Amazing Dickie Fusco, meanwhile, joined the monotheistic religion, the Baha'i Faith, which Dizzy Gillespie had converted to in 1970, and which has taken Fusco to live and work at various points in Zimbabwe and China.
“He's kept the faith,” says Carson, invoking the ultimate Northern Soul mantra.
As for the back-room team, Alan Proudfoot now lives between Musselburgh and Turkey pursuing visual art projects, including a recent exhibition at the Prestoungrange Gothenburg in Prestonpans, East Lothian. Pete Harris is a key player with The Warehouse Sound Services on Water Street in Leith, which sells and hires out top quality sound equipment to a range of organisations.
One of these was the 2014 Edinburgh International Festival presentation of Delusion of the Fury, German composer Heiner Goebbels' fantastical staging of radical American iconoclast Harry Partch's rarely heard 1965 music theatre piece, which Harris worked on, and which utilised versions of some of Partch's custom-built instruments.
Hilary Morrison worked in film and television before moving into community arts, and is currently co-ordinator of the Craigmillar Archives Trust in Edinburgh. Bob Last moved into film, and was music supervisor on Iain Softley's Beatles film, Backbeat in 1994, the film version of Jim Cartwright's play, Little Voice in 1998, and others. Last was executive producer on Terence Davies' film of The House of Mirth in 2000, producer of Sylvain Chomet's partly Edinburgh-set animated feature, The Illusionist in 2010, and is currently executive producing Davies' big-screen adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's novel, Sunset Song.
Carson himself formed a loose-knit nouveau Be-Bop combo called The Jazz Thugs, playing fund-raising gigs for the 1980s UK Miners Strike before forming an even looser knit Blues duo called the Blind Lemons. Carson went on to study youth and community work, and worked in the Wester Hailes area of Edinburgh before becoming a drug support worker, and is currently Chair of the community-based Leith Festival.
“For a while I lost interest in music,” he says, “and at one point I didn't listen to any music at all. That was partly to do with having worked in a record shop, where you listened to music in a different way because it was for your work.”
Gradually, however, his interest in Soul, Funk and Dub returned, and he started to DJ, often in tandem with Paul Reekie as Itchy & Scratchy prior to Reekie's untimely passing in 2010. Today Carson remains in pursuit of the rarest of grooves, and looks on at the resurgence of Post Punk over the last decade or so with informed interest.
“I think it was brilliant,” he says. “The first time I heard Losing My Edge by LCD Soundsystem I thought it sounded like us, except they have access to all that technology now that makes it sound better.”
That particular record came out in 2002, and ushered in a wave of acts who seemed to be able to flick the Post-Punk / Punk Funk buttons in a way that, while sounding equally as urgent, contrasted greatly with just how much their forbears including Boots For Dancing were flying blind.
“I was into things like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and This Heat as well as Dub,” Carson points out, “and if you were making records like that now it would all be with samples, and that would make it much easier. In some ways we were trying to sample without any technology, because we were trying to snatch ideas and feelings from different things, but we ended up doing our own thing with them as well.”
In this respect Boots For Dancing sound as fresh and as uncategorisable today as they did during their all too brief lifespan. Given how much the current age of austerity resembles the late 1970s and early 1980s era, what better reason to put on your boots, face the music, and dance.
“I feel privileged that I did it,” says Carson, still possibly trying to tap into the ever elusive youth market. “Although it's a past era, we were doing things then that young people can do now. Not necessarily with music, but they can do it, just working with a group of folk, having a laugh, doing something creative, challenging things, being slightly off kilter and mixing things up. I feel quite delighted I was involved in Boots For Dancing, but I don't think it would've lasted much longer than it did. It was a different time, and things moved faster then.”
Footnotes
* Shoes For Industry were an equally urgent Bristol combo whose 1980 album, Talk Like a Whelk, was released on Fried Egg Records, and who leant towards a more manic form of avant-conceptualist Post-Punk. Like Boots For Dancing, Shoes For Industry were John Peel favourites, while the band's vocalist, sax player and driving force, Paul Basset Davies, had co-founded and toured Europe with multi-media experimental theatre troupe, the Crystal Theatre, and went on to perform solo comedy shows on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, two of which were short-listed for the Perrier Award. He also wrote the screenplay for the film of The Magic Roundabout.
* In Session Tonight – Ken Garner (BBC) 1993
* England is Mine: Pop Life in Albion From Wilde to Goldie – Michael Bracewell (Flamingo) 1997
* Black Slang: Dictionary of Afro-American Talk – Clarence Major (Routledge) 1971.
The Undisco Kidds by Boots For Dancing is available on Athens of the North Records now. www.aotn.co. The record can be heard here. https://soundcloud.com/djfryer/sets/boots-for-dancing-the-undisco-kidds-november-27th-athens-of-the-north-records
By that time Carson was working in a record shop, in the Edinburgh branch of a still hippified Virgin Records. It was here that a young woman came in with an advert saying she was a singer looking for a band. With the three leftover Dirty Reds in need of a vocalist, the ad never got as far as the notice board, and The Flowers were born, with the young woman, whose name was Hilary Morrison, aka Hi-Ray, the singer.
After nine months, Carson left The Flowers, who, with Copland still in their ranks, went on to appear on Fast Product's high-concept Earcom 1 12” compilation, alongside Graph, the Blank Students and The Prats, and would later release two singles on Pop Aural.
“The Fast Product thing happened and all the Fire Engines hung out in Keir Street, but the reason I went round there was because I was in a band with Hilary, and after I left the band I disengaged from that scene, but Bob was always away on tour with the Rezillos, so I never made that connection.”
For Carson, meanwhile, it took another Virgin ad to find Boots For Dancing's first guitarist, Graham 'Pogo' High.
“He had a reel to reel tape recorder,” says Carson, “and out of that grew the first line up of the band.”
Before that, however, there was a kind of naming ceremony that took place in the Tap O'Lauriston, the now demolished magnet for Edinburgh's punk scene situated a stone's throw from Edinburgh College of Art.
“We were in the Tap, Graham, Douglas, Paul and myself, and I think Metropak were playing,” Carson recalls.
'Douglas' was Douglas Barrie, initially Carson's co-vocalist turned bass player for the original Boots For Dancing. 'Paul' was Paul Reekie, the Fife-born genius who, as the front-man of Thursdays, had appeared on Fast's Earcom 2: Contradiction 12” follow-up compilation to Earcom 1. Thursdays opened and closed the record, with their own composition, Perfection, ushering in two songs by Basczax on Side 1, before following two exclusive originals by Joy Division on Side 2 with a beautifully cracked cover of Otis Reading's (Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay.
“That was before Paul became a poet,” says Carson, “although he always had it in him, and he showed me this list of stuff, and because there was this band, Shoes For Industry*, he put down Boots For Dancing. Metropak had no support act that night, so we said why don't we get up and do something, storm the stage or something. Me and Graham and Douglas got up, and Paul was quite a good drummer, and that was when we called ourselves Boots For Dancing, because that was what we shouted out.”
With Stuart Wright recruited on drums, the first line-up of Boots For Dancing was complete.
“We got access to rehearsal space,” Carson remembers, “and made a cassette, one of which we gave to Hilary with a view to supporting The Flowers. By that time we knew Bob from his Rezillos connections, and then I got a phone call from him. I knew he was starting a distribution company, and thought it might have something to do with that, but we met, and he said he thought the song Boots For Dancing would make a great single and wanted to put it out.”
While Carson's response was hardly the stuff of career opportunities, it did give a youthful nod to the collective idealism that would in part define the band.
“I said I'd need to check with my mates first,” he recalls. “Then Bob said he wanted the single to be a Disco 12”, and I just thought you're taking the piss here. I phoned Graham, and I'm pretty certain Graham said to tell him to fuck off. Then I said, let's think about this, because it's an opportunity. I mean, we hadnae played live. What we were doing was basically a concept. That's what Bob probably picked up on. I know he'd been going to New York, and had done a night in Edinburgh called the Dancetaria, which obviously came from the New York club, so he could obviously see something.
“I suppose retrospectively you can dig out everything that was happening at the time. We loved James White, but there was all the other stuff like Arthur Russell, so you can see why he would maybe think about us in that way.
“With the song Boots For Dancing itself I suppose we were making a statement, because it's about wanting to go dancing, but most of the discos in Edinburgh, if you went to them and were a punk you'd get jumped. That's the line about I like dancing but I don't like discos, it's about the environment and not about the music. “
The eponymous Boots For Dancing was duly released on Pop Aural as a 12” EP in April 1980 backed by two new songs, Parachute, and Guitars & Girl Trouble. In keeping with the label's visual aesthetic, the sleeve was adorned with images of footprints like those used in old time step by step beginners guides to cutting a rug to the latest dance-floor craze. In the corner, a pair of boots was placed, stock still and side by side, saving themselves for the final number.
“The next thing was we were going to have to play gigs,” says Carson, “so we had to start writing songs. The best thing that happened was that we did our first gig in Aberdeen and not in Edinburgh in front of people we knew, because I'd moved centre stage, so I felt quite confident not being in front of people we knew. We did three or four gigs after that, and the next thing we're supporting the Human League at George Square Theatre in Edinburgh, and then at Hammersmith Palais in London.
“The original line-up lasted about six or seven gigs, but significantly, certain people saw us at those gigs, like Jo, and Ali (Angel) Patterson drummed for us once.
With Wright vacating his drum stool, Carson's co-writer High announced his forthcoming departure to London.
“And this is where it gets slightly incestuous,” says Carson, “because Graham ended up playing with the Delta 5, and that came about because because Jo's sister Jackie played bass with the Delta 5, and then later Jo joined us. We always had an interchangeable line-up, with people leaving because of other bands and other priorities, so it was never a big issue. It was always like that.”
Prior to this, and by way of promotion for the 12” EP, Pop Aural's ongoing attempt to infiltrate the mainstream saw Boots For Dancing grace the competition pages of Smash Hits, no less. More usually associated with the likes of Adam Ant and Duran Duran, many forget than in its early days the glossy pop magazine founded in 1978 by former NME editor and future founder of 1980s style bible The Face Nick Logan was a heady mix of chart-bound bubblegum and more independent fare. Just the sort of thing, then, that would appeal to Pop Aural and others pushing the so-called New Pop revolution that would eventually see the likes of the Human League, Heaven 17 and Scritti Politti become bona fide pop stars.
On page 28 of the magazine below a 'Star Teaser' word game and beneath the headline 'Put The Boot In!', readers were invited to take part in a Spot The Ball style competition involving, not some image of a high-kicking sporting activity in motion, but a photograph of a busy city street in which passers by were simply crossing the road. To win, you had to put a cross on the foot of which passing pedestrian entrants considered to be the most likely to dance. As well as picking up a copy of the Boots For Dancing 12” EP along with the 1979 EMI released Fast Product compilation, The First Year Plan, the competition winner also received a pair of Doc Martens, 'or if the girls don't fancy that, a pair of boots to the value of £25.' For the benefit of anyone who may have entered, the winning feet belonged to Carson.
6
In keeping with Carson's aspirations for the nascent youth market, he also managed a teenage punk band called Chaos.
“That was Andy's wee brother and a couple of other guys and Jamo, James Stewart, on drums,” Carson remembers. “They were great. They had a song about the band The Freeze called Anti Freeze. That's how Jamo ended up playing drums for us.”
With High about to depart to London, he played a farewell show with Boots For Dancing on a bill with Jo Callis' post Rezillos band, Shake, which also featured former Rezillos Simon Templar (nee Bloomfield) and Angel Patterson, and what turned out to be the final gig by Paul Reekie's band, Thursdays.
“I'd been very good friends with Paul and Thursdays,” says Carson. “They were from Glenrothes, where Stuart and Douglas were from, and from that gig Michael Barclay, who was Thursdays guitarist, joined us, and Jo joined us. After the Rezillos I think he was looking around for stuff, and he could see what we were trying to do. He did Shake, who were very good, and over the years all three members of Shake ended up playing in Boots For Dancing.”
It was this point that Boots For Dancing really tightened up as a working unit.
“Some of the ideas from the first line up were rearranged by Jo for the first John Peel session,” Carson says of a session first broadcast in December 1980, and which according to Ken Garner's book, In Session Tonight*, also featured both Last and Morrison on backing vocals. Given that at the time BBC and Musicians Union rules stipulated that bands in for sessions were paid per member, Last and Morrison's appearance helped maximise Boots For Dancing' fee. This was particularly helpful to pay for rehearsal space in Edinburgh whenever Last invoiced them.
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It is this line up who appear in the only known film footage from the pre camera phone world that Boots For Dancing occupied, when they were captured giving a live performance of Parachute recorded at the Queens Hall in Leeds as part of the 1980 Futurama festival. Billed as 'The World's First Science Fiction Music Festival', Futurama was a weekend-long compendium of underground Post-Punk acts with a couple of major head-liners, and in retrospect looks like a pre-cursor to the likes of the All Tomorrow's Parties week-enders that brought an assortment of indie kids and chin-strokers to off-season UK holiday camps throughout the noughties and beyond.
Top of the bill at the first Futurama in 1979 were Public Image Limited, while the 1980 edition was headlined by Siouxsie and the Banshees and Gary Glitter. The line up also featured the Psychedelic Furs and U2, plus the likes of Young Marble Giants, Clock DVA, and an electronic trio from Sheffield called Vice Versa. From Scotland there was Altered Images, plus Boots For Dancing's Pop Aural label-mates The Flowers, still fronted by Morrison.
For Boots For Dancing's set, while Callis wore a kilt, Carson sported a gold sequinned jacket, a glitzy showbiz relative of the gold lame variety that was a vital signifier of British pop history. As noted by Michael Bracewell in his book, England is Mine: Pop Life in Albion From Wilde to Goldie*, Billy Fury, Malcolm McDowell in Lindsay Anderson's 1973 state of the nation film, O Lucky Man!, and Morrissey in his early post Smiths solo guise had all donned such a garment.
“Bob must've known we were going to be filmed,” says Carson, “and he sent me to Mutrie's Theatrical Costume Hire, who had just opened a brand spanking new warehouse on Brunswick Street off Leith Walk, next to the Royal Mail sorting office. We were theatrical anyway, and he told me to get something showy, so I got this gold sequinned jacket that looked like a Teddy Boy jacket. I hired it for a week and took it to Leeds, but it was so heavy I took it off very quickly.”
In the Futurama footage, shown originally on late night television,sure enough, the jacket is there when Carson introduces Parachute with an earnest 'We may not be the greatest but enjoy yourselves', but by the end of the first verse it's gone, freeing him up to shimmy with controlled abandon.
Watching Carson cavort his way through Boots For Dancing's set were the young men from Vice Versa, who, as fronted by a fanzine writer turned musician called Martin Fry, were scheduled to play straight after. A couple of years later, Fry would effectively deconstruct the pop song with ABC on their string-laden debut album, The Lexicon of Love. Fry's knowing lyrics wrapped up in Trevor Horn's epic airbrushed production would also set the charts alight with such grandiloquent statements as The Look of Love, Poison Arrow and, most glorious of all, All of My Heart.
ABC publicity stills featured Fry knowingly styled within an inch of his life in glossy retro chic images that gave him the appearance of a matinee idol in an irony-free 1980s pastiche of Hollywood noir. On the cover of Smash Hits, Fry went one step further than Carson. It wasn't just a gold lame jacket he was pictured in, but a gold lame suit.
Carson, meanwhile, had continued his affection for natty dapper formal stage-wear via circuitous routes that included nabbing the tartan lame jacket worn by Rezillos bassist William Mysterious in the picture on the back of the band's debut album.
“There was a white one as well,” says Carson, “which Titch (Michael Barclay) our guitarist said made me look like Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull.”
8
Boots For Dancing released a second single, a 7” featuring Rain Song / Hesitate, on Pop Aural in March 1981. Hesitate was originally earmarked to be the A side, but Last switched the two songs at the last minute, with the recording being sped up by 10% at the lathe cutting stage, “just like Phil Spector!”, says Carson.
In search of a follow-up, Carson looked to an unlikely favourite of the Boots For Dancing live set.
Heaven is in the Back Seat of My
Cadillac had been a Top 30 hit for Hot Chocolate in 1976, and the
gold medallions and hip-hugging flares of Errol Brown's Top of the
Pops friendly troupe were seemingly as far from Post Punk puritanism
as they could be. In truth, the song's faux Philly strings, pumping
bass line and sparkle-laden delivery were perfect for plundering
without prejudice. Brown even wore a sequinned jacket on TV.
As cover versions go, Heaven Is in the Back Seat of My Cadillac could have done for Boots For Dancing what Shack Up did for Factory Records house band A Certain Ratio when they released their version of Washington DC Funk outfit Banbarra's then little known 1975 dance-floor filler. Carson tried to persuade Pop Aural in vain to release Heaven is in the Back Seat of My Cadillac as the third Boots For Dancing single. As it turned out, what ended up as their swan-song didn't come out on Pop Aural at all, and by the time of their second John Peel session in July 1981, the line-up had changed again.
“We recorded a third single,” says Carson, “but it was a bit of a disaster. We recorded it in Castle Sound, which is a really lovely studio, and Calum Malcolm who produced it was brilliant, but being in this professional studio, it was too smooth for us. Jo was away, and we ended up putting harpsichords on it, and it sounded shite. Jo was furious.
“The band had a fluid nature, but
there were personal loyalties there as well. The loyalty, that was
the magical quality to it. We tried to get everyone to contribute and
work as a collective. We'd been offered gigs in London with
Restricted Code, but Jamo had been threatened with losing his job at
British Rail. He was quite a bit younger than us and had just left
school, so you felt slightly responsible. My position was there was
no way we were performing without Jamo. Then Bob said don't worry
about your band, I've got you a band. For me that was the end of it.
It was a good thing to make a break with Pop Aural, but it caused
lots of problems at the time.”
With Jamo Stewart eventually departing the band and Callis having already joined the Human League, with whom he would co-write Don't You Want Me, hitting commercial pay-dirt when the song became the 1981 UK Christmas number one, Boots For Dancing regrouped yet again. Carson and co enlisted drummer Mike Baillie, who had just returned to Scotland from London after playing with the Skids circa their Days of Europa album. The new Boots For Dancing line-up reached potentially explosive heights, however, with the arrival of the living legend that was the Amazing Dickie Fusco.
“Dickie was a jazz drummer who lived round the corner,” says Carson. “He played percussion, and would play completely random stuff. He was always this really funny guy who taught himself to fire-eat, and when he switched from methylated spirits to paraffin, he almost burnt the ceiling at the ICA in London. But going from having two guitarists to having a drummer and a percussionist really changed things. Mike Baillie and Dickie Fusco were a formidable combination that took us to new heights rhythmically.”
By the time of the band's second Peel session, elements of Latin, African and what would come to be known as World Music were skittering into view as Boots For Dancing looked even further outwards. Their sound became slicker and more nuanced, exploring Fourth World avenues that similarly styled peers such as 23 Skidoo were also navigating. This first became evident on the third Boots For Dancing single.
Ooh Bop Sh'Bam / Money Is Thin On The Ground, was released in February 1982 on the band's own Re-Pop X label. The title of the A-side was appropriated from Dizzy Gillespie's twelve-bar big band blues, Oop Bop Sh'Bam, which itself was attempting to verbalise an onomatopoeic interpretation of what was then the new, hot as hell sound of Be-Bop jazz.
Novelist and Beat poet Clarence Major's 1970 book, Black Slang: Dictionary of Afro-American Talk described the phrase 'Oh bop sh'bam' as 'an existential jazz phrase; perhaps a mystic effort to comment on the inscrutable in the black man's social, moral and spiritual condition in the United States, or simply another way of talking to that “sense” of mystery often referred to as GOD.'
“The lyrics of Ooo Bop Sh'Bam came from a job interview I had,” says Carson, “and the guy interviewing me pointed out that there were huge gaps in my employment history. He said people might think I'd been in prison, or that I could be seen as work shy.”
Given Boots For Dancing's roots and
influences, several years later this somewhat fittingly gifted
another Edinburgh band, the decidedly nouveau Bop Sh'Bam, its name.
But it was this later line-up of Boots For Dancing that worked the
live circuit the most fervently.
“We gigged a lot,” says Carson, “maybe two or three times a week.”
It paid off. From the uptightness of their early days, Boots For Dancing's third Peel session, now with former Josef K drummer Ronnie Torrance taking over from Baillie, who had departed to pursue his own Epsilon project, seemed to be fleshed out in even more exotic colours.
“I think that's because we worked more collectively,” says Carson, “and if someone had an idea we'd work on it. We were all listening to very different things, and we shared that to try and understand it all. On the third Peel session, Bend An Elbow, Lend An Ear is based on a Chilean folk song. We did fund-raisers for Chilean solidarity against the Pinochet regime, because we had friends at the time who were Chilean, and who came to Edinburgh in the 70s. We came across the folk song, and then when we got the Peel session we just decided to do it.
“I wrote the lyrics in the car in the traffic jam to the Peel session, and that was it. We just did it and never played it live. I suppose that was a missed opportunity, that we never got a chance to experiment more. It was more diverse, and sometimes we struggled with that live, it was how do we have a continuity and bring these elements in again. So for me it felt a bit strange but if we were doing it now I think people would have different ears in their heads than people then, and I think they'd see it. Things were more compartmentalised then.”
Fusco's influence especially can be heard all over the third Peel session, on Just The Ticket in particular.
“That's because our pyrotechnic percussionist drummed on that,” Carson says of Fusco's input. “I had no memory of doing that until I heard it again recently. I thought who the hell's this, because we only ever played it once in the studio, and I don't know where it came from, but that's totally about Dicky's drumming.”
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It is the previously unheard material here, however, that is most evocative of that period of Boots For Dancing's short lifespan. Recorded in Autumn 1981 at Barclay Towers Studio, a converted loft and lived-in kitchen analogue set-up run by producer Tony Pilley in a turret control room in a top floor flat on the corner of the Meadows in Edinburgh's Bruntsfield district, these five tracks consolidate everything that had gone before.
“In some ways it's very different to everything else we did,” according to Carson. “We were a lot more relaxed, because we'd played a lot. At least two of the songs were jams that we just made up at the time, and two of them we'd already recorded for a Peel session, so we played them back with a sense of clarity, and were a very confident band. I suppose that's when we tried to stretch out and bring in jazz influences and what have you.
“At that time I wouldn't have known this, but it's like there's version on version of Jamaican music, so you're influenced by someone, and maybe use two or three elements you can hear in your head because you like a particular part of a song, and you try and mash them together, and you're never gonna get there anyway, but it becomes something else.”
The Barclay Towers sessions and the third single were executive produced by Pete Harris, who, along with Alan 'Pinhead' Proudfoot, formed the Boots For Dancing road crew, with Harris on sound and driving duties and Proudfoot on lights. Harris also played Hammond organ on the second Peel session version of Wild Jazz Summers. Proudfoot designed the posters for Tollcross-based venue, the Hoochie Coochie Club as well as various record sleeves, including Caledonian funkateer Jesse Rae's third single, (It's Just) The Dog in Me, released on 12” by Allan Campbell's Supreme International Editions label in 1983.
10
For all the ideas that now existed alongside ability, however, by the end of 1982 Boots For Dancing were no more.
“In terms of that kind of intensity that we had,” says Carson, “it took a lot of work to do that as a unit. I suppose the only time we had anyone who really directed us was in the early days when Jo joined, because he had all these skills, and that changed us dramatically. From floundering when he joined, to being fully equipped by the time he left, we eventually had all this knowledge about dynamics and how you develop collectively.
“It was brilliant, because he just had all that all in his head, but it took a lot of energy for us to do that, and I think that's why we didn't last that long. It required everyone to have that energy, and people had other things to do. That was good as well, because it kept things healthy. If you become too insular you become like the last gang in town, and you just plough a furrow, disregard everything outside that and continue what you're doing, and what you're doing might be crap.
“There was a point it became, not frustrating, but it just wasn't going to keep going that way. I thought we'd played longer, but it was about two and a bit years. I can understand why now. It was quite a short period of time. You did something and that was for then, but for bands now there's a whole different way of working.
“The thing I always wanted us to do was to be two bands, like Parliament and Funkadelic. I wanted one band that could play anywhere to anyone doing a lot of covers so you could use it as your bread and butter to do your own stuff.
“Some of my contemporaries signed to major labels, usually as solo artists, and for many of them it was the worst thing that ever happened to then. I've always been retrospectively glad that we never went down that road.”
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Post Boots For Dancing, the band's alumni scattered in ways as disparate as their sound. Following his stint in Delta 5, Graham High became a translator for German pharmaceutical companies, while
Douglas Barrie became a journalist and
academic expert in aviation warfare, specialising in drones. Of the
later line-up, Simon Templar/Bloomfield moved into social work and
settled in Sweden, with Angel/Ali Patterson becoming an architect in
Germany, while Ronnie Torrance is ensconced in Dalkeith, Midlothian.
Of those who continued with music, Jo Callis' epoch-changing stint with the Dare era Human is probably the best known. After that he formed the glamtastic S.W.A.L.K. with fellow ex Rezillo Eugene Reynolds along with Michael Barclay, and more recently joined and left a reformed Rezillos before becoming briefly involved in former Scars singer Robert King's Opium Kitchen project.
Jamo Stewart went on to front glossy dance act Syndicate before sadly passing away in the 1990s. Barclay went on to become head of the Art department in a school in Dundee, and has been known to tutor the occasional school band. Mike Baillie remains involved in the annual Skids fanclub get-together, where the surviving members of the band minus vocalist turned film director Richard Jobson perform with fans who get to sing their favourite Skids song.
The Amazing Dickie Fusco, meanwhile, joined the monotheistic religion, the Baha'i Faith, which Dizzy Gillespie had converted to in 1970, and which has taken Fusco to live and work at various points in Zimbabwe and China.
“He's kept the faith,” says Carson, invoking the ultimate Northern Soul mantra.
As for the back-room team, Alan Proudfoot now lives between Musselburgh and Turkey pursuing visual art projects, including a recent exhibition at the Prestoungrange Gothenburg in Prestonpans, East Lothian. Pete Harris is a key player with The Warehouse Sound Services on Water Street in Leith, which sells and hires out top quality sound equipment to a range of organisations.
One of these was the 2014 Edinburgh International Festival presentation of Delusion of the Fury, German composer Heiner Goebbels' fantastical staging of radical American iconoclast Harry Partch's rarely heard 1965 music theatre piece, which Harris worked on, and which utilised versions of some of Partch's custom-built instruments.
Hilary Morrison worked in film and television before moving into community arts, and is currently co-ordinator of the Craigmillar Archives Trust in Edinburgh. Bob Last moved into film, and was music supervisor on Iain Softley's Beatles film, Backbeat in 1994, the film version of Jim Cartwright's play, Little Voice in 1998, and others. Last was executive producer on Terence Davies' film of The House of Mirth in 2000, producer of Sylvain Chomet's partly Edinburgh-set animated feature, The Illusionist in 2010, and is currently executive producing Davies' big-screen adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's novel, Sunset Song.
Carson himself formed a loose-knit nouveau Be-Bop combo called The Jazz Thugs, playing fund-raising gigs for the 1980s UK Miners Strike before forming an even looser knit Blues duo called the Blind Lemons. Carson went on to study youth and community work, and worked in the Wester Hailes area of Edinburgh before becoming a drug support worker, and is currently Chair of the community-based Leith Festival.
“For a while I lost interest in music,” he says, “and at one point I didn't listen to any music at all. That was partly to do with having worked in a record shop, where you listened to music in a different way because it was for your work.”
Gradually, however, his interest in Soul, Funk and Dub returned, and he started to DJ, often in tandem with Paul Reekie as Itchy & Scratchy prior to Reekie's untimely passing in 2010. Today Carson remains in pursuit of the rarest of grooves, and looks on at the resurgence of Post Punk over the last decade or so with informed interest.
“I think it was brilliant,” he says. “The first time I heard Losing My Edge by LCD Soundsystem I thought it sounded like us, except they have access to all that technology now that makes it sound better.”
That particular record came out in 2002, and ushered in a wave of acts who seemed to be able to flick the Post-Punk / Punk Funk buttons in a way that, while sounding equally as urgent, contrasted greatly with just how much their forbears including Boots For Dancing were flying blind.
“I was into things like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and This Heat as well as Dub,” Carson points out, “and if you were making records like that now it would all be with samples, and that would make it much easier. In some ways we were trying to sample without any technology, because we were trying to snatch ideas and feelings from different things, but we ended up doing our own thing with them as well.”
In this respect Boots For Dancing sound as fresh and as uncategorisable today as they did during their all too brief lifespan. Given how much the current age of austerity resembles the late 1970s and early 1980s era, what better reason to put on your boots, face the music, and dance.
“I feel privileged that I did it,” says Carson, still possibly trying to tap into the ever elusive youth market. “Although it's a past era, we were doing things then that young people can do now. Not necessarily with music, but they can do it, just working with a group of folk, having a laugh, doing something creative, challenging things, being slightly off kilter and mixing things up. I feel quite delighted I was involved in Boots For Dancing, but I don't think it would've lasted much longer than it did. It was a different time, and things moved faster then.”
Footnotes
* Shoes For Industry were an equally urgent Bristol combo whose 1980 album, Talk Like a Whelk, was released on Fried Egg Records, and who leant towards a more manic form of avant-conceptualist Post-Punk. Like Boots For Dancing, Shoes For Industry were John Peel favourites, while the band's vocalist, sax player and driving force, Paul Basset Davies, had co-founded and toured Europe with multi-media experimental theatre troupe, the Crystal Theatre, and went on to perform solo comedy shows on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, two of which were short-listed for the Perrier Award. He also wrote the screenplay for the film of The Magic Roundabout.
* In Session Tonight – Ken Garner (BBC) 1993
* England is Mine: Pop Life in Albion From Wilde to Goldie – Michael Bracewell (Flamingo) 1997
* Black Slang: Dictionary of Afro-American Talk – Clarence Major (Routledge) 1971.
The Undisco Kidds by Boots For Dancing is available on Athens of the North Records now. www.aotn.co. The record can be heard here. https://soundcloud.com/djfryer/sets/boots-for-dancing-the-undisco-kidds-november-27th-athens-of-the-north-records
Written in June 2015 as sleevenotes for The Undisco Kidds by Boots For Dancing, which was released on Athens of the North Records in November 2015. Excerpts fromthe essay were subsequently published in Product.
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