Wired for sound

Michael Alexander tunes into the first ever major exhibition dedicated to Scottish pop music at the National Museum of Scotland

Clutching a scorched Runrig CD which survived the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia 207,000ft over Florida on February 1, 2003, eight-yearold Iain Clark looked emotional as he handed over the disc to members of the band at a private ceremony in Glasgow. His astronaut mum Laurel, who became a fan of the band while serving with the US Navy Submarine Squadron at Holy Loch on the Clyde, took the Stomping Ground album on the doomed mission to use as a wake-up call.

The CD was found by a NASA salvage team in a Texas field after the shuttle blew up just 16 minutes from landing at Cape Canaveral, killing all seven crew members. It was one of 83,000 pieces of debris recovered. In June 2003 the band were presented with the CD and a plaque which pinpointed the exact spot – longitude 31.378 north, latitude 94,040 west – where it was found.

It also emerged that at another wreckage site, NASA found an intact CD player with Laurel’s The Cutter And The Clan album still inside, which meant the last music the Columbia crew ever listened to was by Runrig…

Former Virgin Records executive and PR man Ronnie Gurr, who helped mastermind the rise to fame of acts such as Culture Club, Simple Minds and Dundee’s Danny Wilson, knows a poignant story when he sees one. But as he explains how the CD, now housed in a NASA “evidence bag”, was donated through him to be part of the major Rip It Up Scottish pop music exhibition which has launched at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh this weekend, he admits that it’s a story to bring a lump to the throat of even the most cynical former music journalist.

“I was taken on as a consultant last summer after the museum’s curator got in touch to say it seems ‘all roads lead to Ronnie Gurr,’” says Ronnie, who agreed to go through his old contacts book to look for artefacts that “might not be the most blindingly obvious”.

“One of the most interesting and poignant was the astronaut’s CD that came via Malcolm Jones from Runrig who lives in East Lothian, not far from me. But then there were other things we discovered as the research continued.”

The museum had done well to secure a mix of articles and clothing related to the musical culture of the nation over more than half a century.

But with an impasse reached, Ronnie wanted to take a more abstract approach and secure objects that had “interesting back stories” from influential indie pioneers to global superstars.

He was chuffed that he managed to secure the 15ftx25ft Texas in bulbs backdrop used by the band in their Inner Smile video where Sharleen Spiteri played Elvis –and even managed to secure the leather suit which Sharleen wore in the video which turned out to have been made by designer Tom Ford before he went on to become famous.

Musician Kirsten Adamson, the daughter of the late great Big Country singer Stuart Adamson, helped Ronnie secure his old friend’s guitar and Grammy nomination for the exhibition.

While a phone call to another old

One of the most interesting and poignant was the astronaut’s CD that came via Malcolm Jones from Runrig