Hamish the Goalie

One of Michael’s much-loved football songs is Hamish. This is how he used to explain its origins before singing it at gigs: “A great footballer called Ralph Milne asked me to write something to celebrate the testimonial year of his team-mate, the great Dundee United goalkeeper and entertainer Hamish Macalpine.

“I admired Hamish although I was a Dundee supporter but we are not Glaswegian about these things, and then one night I attended a match at Tannadice Park, which is where Dundee United play. The newsreader Peter Sissons pronounces it “Tanna- dee-chy”, isn’t that cool?

“Anyway, Dundee United were playing against FC Monaco and present among us, the people of Dundee, in the grandstand, was the wonderful Hollywood star Grace Kelly. She was there with her man, I can never remember his name.

“Anyway, she was wearing a white turban – which is unusual in Dundee – but unfortunately she was sitting behind an advertising hoarding which proclaimed ‘TAYLOR BROTHERS COAL’. It was what we cry incongruous.

I had no camera so I went home and made this song. It’s called either Hamish or Grace Kelly’s Visit to Tanna-dee-chy.”

In his song Reynard in Paradise, Michael describes a game of football as “a working model of the one big thing” a metaphor for life, in other words, or for some of its better aspects, at least: cooperation, skill, passion, excitement and grace.

He was also very conscious that football, like music, had the power to demolish barriers of language, race and cultural differences.

In his song Flight of the Heron, Michael wrote about Gil Heron, the first black professional footballer to play in Scotland. Heron had a season with Celtic in 1951-52 and was known as the Black Arrow because of his speed on the ball.

The chorus of Michael’s song is:

Higher, raise the bar higher He made his way across the sea So that all men could brothers be

This was part of Michael’s wider philosophy. After his death in 2012, the journalist Lesley Riddoch summed him up in these words: “Like Robert Burns, Michael was driven by compassion, humanitarianism and a deep-seated fury at cruelty”, whether that was the callous cruelty of war or the cruelty of men towards women.

“All of his work was characterised by humanity and, despite the mess humanity has made of the planet, optimism.”