It
was Friday the 13th when Jazzateers supported The Motorcycle Boy at
Glasgow’s long lost Fury Murray’s venue. It was also the night the band
originally founded by guitarist Ian Burgoyne and bass player Keith Band who had
been one of the lynchpins of Alan Horne’s West Princes Street-based Postcard
Records of Scotland split up. It had been a long haul for the group, originally
fronted by vocalist Alison Gourlay, but replaced in turn by Deirdre and Louise
Rutkowski, future Hipsway vocalist Graeme Skinner and Paul Quinn, who would see
the band morph into Bourgie Bourgie.
By
the time of the Fury Murray’s gig, however, while Burgoyne and Band remained, Matt
Willcock had moved in front of the microphone, with extra guitar provided by Mick
Slaven, later of The Leopards, and Douglas MacIntyre from Article 58.
“Everything
fell apart after the first song,” MacIntyre recalls. “Keith’s mantra was taken from
Herbie Flowers, who said you should never change your bass guitar strings, but
he broke a string, and he had to go off and ask The Motorcycle Boy if he could
borrow their bass. While he was doing that we jammed this version of Garageland
by The Clash, and it was horrible. That was the point we realised it was over.”
On the
Friday the 13th in question, The Motorcycle Boy’s leather-clad
amalgam of former Shop Assistants front-woman Alex Taylor and members of the Fire
Engines-inspired Meat Whiplash were riding high. Formed in 1987 by Taylor with guitarist
Michael Kerr, bass player Eddy Connelly and drummer Paul McDermott, as well as
second guitarist David Scott, The Motorcycle Boy’s debut single for Rough Trade
Records, Big Rock Candy Mountain, fused an indie guitar aesthetic with a more polished
machine-age sound. The band duly signed to a major label, though, like Jazzateers
before them, fell apart before an album could be released.
“Alex
and Eddy threw David out, so I left in solidarity,” Kerr remembers. “The rest
of the band moved to London and recorded other stuff, but I suspect the record
company felt they’d lost momentum by then.”
The recordings,
however, remain, and, more than thirty years on, previously unheard works by
both bands have been released into the wild within a couple of weeks of each
other. Blood is Sweeter than Honey is the third archival release by Jazzateers put
out by the Creeping Bent Organisation, run by MacIntyre for the last quarter of
a century. This follows on from Rough 46, previously released in 1983 on Rough
Trade Records, and Don’t Let Your Son Grow Up to Be a Cowboy, made up of unreleased
material recorded at various points between 1981 and 1982.
Scarlet
by The Motorcycle Boy is an even rarer find, released on guitarist Michael Kerr’s
Forgotten Astronaut imprint after remaining in limbo since it was recorded in
1988.
“It’s
been such a long process,” says Kerr of putting the album together after
eventually rediscovering Scarlet’s original master tapes. “David lives in
Kentucky now, but we talked about trying to release it, and I’ve been working
solidly on it for the last year. Listening to it again, some of it sounds
dated, but I think the songs are definitely good enough to be released.”
If the
sound of Scarlet stems from a period when indie bands were starting to shake
off their luddite tendencies and incorporate sequencers into their sound, Blood
is Sweeter than Honey shows off Jazzateers as a band who were maturing in a
different way.
“The
Jazzateers story is the main arterial narrative to the Sound of Young Scotland,”
says MacIntyre, “but it’s a hidden story. Jazzateers only released one album in
their lifetime, and then at the height of their acclaim they transmogrified
into Bourgie Bourgie. This record is also the only document of Matt’s work,
both as a singer and as a really great lyricist.”
The
release of both records arrives at a time when archival releases from the 1980s
post-punk era are at a premium, with Postcard in Glasgow and the Fast Product label
being assessed with a forensic line of inquiry. Not for nothing was Simon
Reynolds’ 2005 book documenting the history of post-punk called Rip it Up, a
title taken from Orange Juice’s biggest hit. The same title was adopted by the
National Museum of Scotland in 2018 for its major historical exhibition of
Scotland’s pop music.
Meanwhile,
Grant McPhee’s two films, Big Gold Dream and Teenage Superstars, remain vital studies
of the era. Taking its name from the final single by Fire Engines, Big Gold
Dream inspired Cherry Red Records to produce Big Gold Dreams, a five-CD box set
of rare recordings by artists from Scotland between 1977 and 1989. Tracks by
both Jazzateers and The Motorcycle Boy appear in the collection.
Beyond
the Motorcycle Boy and Jazzateers releases, the age of the archive goes on. Cherry
Red have just released a 2-CD version of Trapped and Unwrapped, the sole album
by Friends Again, whose alumni included Chris Thomson, who would go on to form
The Bathers, and James Grant who would later front Love and Money. Future
Creeping Bent releases, meanwhile, include collections by The Secret Goldfish
and Article 58.
While
this reclaiming of lost history has much to do with a punk ethos of seizing the
means of production and a recognition of the records as serious artworks, there
is geek appeal too.
“You
get some young kids now wearing Postcard t-shirts, who are as fascinated with
that whole part of musical history as I was with the Velvet Underground,”
MacIntyre observes.
Kerr similarly
points out how “If you look at a lot of the box sets that Cherry Red put out,
like C86 and C87, I think they’re the equivalent of the Nuggets ‘60s compilations
that we grew up listening to.”
MacIntyre
quotes former head of Rational Records and the Hoochie Coochie Club in
Edinburgh, Allan Campbell, to help explain things beyond what happened on
Friday the 13th.
“The
future lies in the past,” he says.
Blood
is Sweeter than Honey by Jazzateers is released by Creeping Bent Records.
Scarlet by The Motorcycle Boy is released by Forgotten Astronaut Records.
The Herald, November 7th 2019
ends
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