Skip to main content

Andrew Midgley obituary

Born October 26th 1965

Died October 28th 2010

Andrew Midgley, who has died of a heart attack during a session in a Musselburgh gym aged forty-five, didn’t look like a pop star. Neither did this most garrulously playful of raconteurs particularly enjoy talking about his brief time in the charts during the early 1990s. Yet, while there was far more to this most singular of autodidacts, as one half of club-dance duo Cola Boy, Midgley caught the pop-rave zeitgeist with appearances on Top of the Pops performing the band’s infectiously catchy top ten hit, Seven Ways To Love. Even here, however, just as he would later apply diligence and care behind the scenes as a sub-editor on the Edinburgh Evening News, creating two of the funniest websites on the planet or managing an award-winning comedian, the man nicknamed ‘Boy Naughty’ preferred to stay in the background, allowing former Wham! backing singer turned Radio Two DJ Janey Lee Grace to bask in the day-glo spotlight of the period.

Midgley was born in Stepney in London’s east end before being decamped with his parents and younger brother Michael to one of Peterborough’s new town overspills. Such modern but mundane suburban environments would feed the imaginations of many of Midgley’s generation, including the people behind London-centric trio Saint Etienne, who Midgley’s own musical adventures would crucially intertwine with.

Midgley latched on to music from an early age, entering his teens with a punk rock sensibility laced with a wickedly clever sense of humour and a taste for the then hugely influential music press that would hold him in good stead for all his future endeavours. Punk was an attitude for Midgley, who embraced Postcard Records bands Orange Juice and Josef K, as well as The Associates, the Cocteau Twins, The Pastels and the TV Personalities via forays into hip-hop and electro. Midgley’s comedic influences came from a post-war English picture postcard past drawn up by PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Carry On films and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s foulmouthed Derek and Clive routines. The only thing Midgley couldn’t stand was Jazz.

While working at Peterborough tax office, Midgley founded a punk-inspired DIY collective to pursue various activities under the umbrella of Blue Veiner. These included fanzine Pop Avalanche, named after an NME headline quoting Postcard Records svengali Alan Horne’s pronouncement blaming the London media on Edinburgh band Josef K splitting up. One of Midgley’s co-conspirators on Pop Avalanche was future music journalist and founder of Saint Etienne, Bob Stanley, with whom Midgley would play with in the band Forever Drone, named after a Josef K song.

Along with Stanley, Midgley developed an interest in sampling, the increasingly accessible use of collaging material from other sources that was infecting club culture. Stanley formed Saint Etienne, whose first single, a version of Neil Young’s Only Love Will Break Your Heart, chimed perfectly with the indie-dance crossover that had begun. Taking note of the records played in the small venues they toured to, Stanley composed Seven Ways To Love, a piano-led Euro-styled bubblegum anthem originally recorded with Saint Etienne vocalist Sarah Cracknell and put out under the name Cola Boy. With commercial crossover imminent and with Cracknell bound to a contract elsewhere, Stanley recruited Midgley and Grace to be the public face of Cola Boy, who duly took the re-recorded version of Seven Ways To Love to number eight in the charts in 1991.

While a follow-up single, He Is Cola, didn’t fare so well, Midgley and his then partner set up a production company in Manchester, providing theme music for Channel 4 programmes before relocating to Dublin. Eventually Midgley moved to Edinburgh, becoming a researcher for Channel 4 while writing for and managing comedian Garth Cruikshank, who, as Harry Ainsworth, won the Perrier Best Newcomer award as part of the 2001 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Midgley founded two blogs, The Filthy Pen, which archived humorous graffiti from Edinburgh walls; and Bank Holiday Britain, which documented snapshots of the accidental mundanities of everyday life. An exhibition of the latter was shown at the 2010 Leith Festival, and plans were afoot to take it to Hong Kong.

Midgley’s freelance life stopped following the 2002 Cowgate fire, which wiped out the offices that housed his archive. Midgley had contributed music reviews to the Edinburgh Evening News, and became a full-time sub-editor on the paper. When Boy Naughty surfaced for gigs by old favourites such as Vic Godard and Subway Sect, former Josef K singer Paul Haig or former Felt and Denim frontman Lawrence’s Go-Kart Mozart project, his free-thinking mix of fan-boy enthusiasm and razor-sharp intellect leavened by a mischievous wit were the hallmarks of a unique and consistently amused outlook on an absurd world. Midgley’s parents, Richard and Dorothy, brother Michael and girlfriend Rosalind Gibb survive him.

The Herald, November 2010

ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h