Alan Rankine
Associate extraordinaire BORN 1958
BORN IN Bridge Of Allan near Stirling, Alan Rankine formed his vital partnership with Dundee singer Billy MacKenzie in 1976. Untrained and musically intuitive, Rankine first played in a series of left-of-centre cabaret bands with MacKenzie, before together they developed their slanted approach to musical arrangement, initially as Mental Torture and then the Associates. They attracted the attention of A&R man Chris Parry, who signed them to Fiction Records for their 1980 debut, The Affectionate Punch. Rankine was a musical whirlwind, spinning from guitar to bass to piano to synth. “He was in complete control of everything,” remembered Cure bassist Michael Dempsey, who soon joined the band. Others who were impressed included The Edge, spotted in 1980 at The Marquee club in London studying Rankine’s gift for simple yet intricate guitar figures played through a Roland Space Echo (“We ripped them off,” admitted Bono). There followed a series of brilliantly unhinged singles for the Situation Two label (compiled on 1981’s Fourth Drawer Down) and the duo’s 1982 masterpiece of otherworldly hits, Sulk. The Associates’ playful and daft appearances on Top Of The Pops became the stuff of legend – Rankine played a banjo while wearing chopsticks in his hair for early-’82 Top 10 hit Party Fears Two – but when MacKenzie ducked out of touring plans for Sulk in 1982, Rankine quit the band. “There was nowhere else this could go,” he later lamented to me. Rankine subsequently pursued a career as a producer (Cocteau Twins and Paul Haig were among his credits) and solo artist, releasing three albums including 1986’s The World Begins To Look Her Age. A reunion with MacKenzie in the early ’90s failed to take flight, and Rankine became a much-loved music lecturer at Stow College in Glasgow, co-founding the Electric Honey label that was an essential springboard for Belle And Sebastian and Snow Patrol. But it is for the luminous music he produced with MacKenzie that Alan Rankine will be best remembered. Reckoned super fan Björk, “The Associates went there.”