The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
The remarkable boy fae Loc hee
The second in an exclusive four-part Courier serialisation of renowned Scottish writer James Robertson’s biography
Michael William Marra was born in Dundee on February 17 1952, the fourth of five children: Edward, Mary, Nicholas and Michael were all born within four years of one another; there was nearly a five-year gap between Michael and Christopher. Their father, Edward Marra, was a printer. Michael recalled: “He worked a Heidelberg cylinder, the proper old letterpress printing”, which puts a slightly romantic gloss on what was often mind-numbingly tedious work.
Their mother, Margaret (née Reilly), was a primary school teacher, although she stopped teaching for several years in order to look after a house full of young children. Margaret was one of six children herself, and her family had struggled to find the means to enable her to go to teacher training college at Craiglockhart in Edinburgh. Michael would celebrate her achievement on his album On Stolen Stationery with the track Margaret Reilly’s Arrival at Craiglockhart.
Lochee, where the family lived, was and is a working-class district, with a long history of immigration, especially from Ireland but with significant numbers also coming from Italy and Poland. This helped to create a diverse and vibrant culture.
The singer Sheena Wellington was raised in the same area of Lochee as the Marras, Clement Park, and remembers it as a good and safe place to grow up: the houses had their own bathrooms, and coal fires with back-boilers to heat the water; children played in the middle of the street because nobody owned a car; everybody used the bus.
Sheena acknowledged the very positive influences of Michael’s upbringing: “The family itself had a faith, an ethic, and a working-class decency which Michael grew up with... He knew what was right, what was wrong, and in the middle was compassion and I think that very much came from his background.”
Both Michael’s parents had a great appetite for music, which was part of daily family life: Margaret played piano and sang in choirs; Edward did not play an instrument but loved jazz and classical music. Duke Ellington and Ludwig van Beethoven were Edward Marra’s great heroes: the only time Michael ever saw his father combing his hair was the night he went to see Ellington and his band play the Caird Hall in 1967.
One feature of the household, an item which in time Michael would inherit, was a very fine Blüthner piano. Michael’s oldest brother, Eddie, learned to play on this instrument and passed on a few tricks to Michael. Michael learned mostly by ear and by accident, discovering “the good stuff” through perseverance: “I love the shape of written music, but it looks like an adventure with Neptune rather than what (the notes are) supposed to convey. To me, the piano is all lying in front of you. It’s difficult to make a mistake as everything leads to something else.”
When Michael was in his teens, Eddie brought home a guitar for him and Chris. Both of them were interested in learning how to play it, taking their cues from the likes of James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. But while Chris would become a professional musician, for Michael instruments were always only a means to an end; and the end was to write songs.
Michael absorbed everything, from hymns sung at church (the melody of Soul of My Saviour would find its way into the opening bars of Michael’s Mother Glasgow) to Elvis Presley – Jailhouse Rock was his earliest, indelible musical memory. The Beatles impressed not just because of their energy and enthusiasm but because they wrote their own songs. In fact, Michael said, it was John Lennon who “forced” him to be a songwriter: “His voice was more than language.”
Michael first publicly articulated his long-term ambition to write songs while still at St Mary’s Primary School in Lochee. A group of boys in his class were discussing what they wanted to be when they grew up, and he said he wanted to be a songwriter. As the others mostly intended to have glittering football careers, this was not a popular option – in fact, he expected derision – but then another boy, John Duncan, chipped in: “My uncle’s a songwriter.” This assertion, too, was met with a degree of scepticism. “Oh aye. And who is he?” “Stephen Sondheim.”
None of them had heard of Sondheim or West Side Story (the show opened on Broadway in 1957) but it turned out John Duncan was telling the truth. “The mere fact that somebody had a relation who wrote songs as a job was impressive,” Michael remembered. “It was a big thing for me.”