Mic hael and sc hool

It is fair to say that Michael and school did not agree. Once, at primary school, he was pulled up when writing a story about meeting Cilla Black on a bus in Lochee. He had written a piece of dialogue in which a bairn said: “Look at her, she looks dead like Cilla Black.” The teacher red-lined the sentence and replaced “dead” with “very”. From then on, there was always likely to be trouble between Michael and the system.

But it was at secondary school – Lawside Academy – that things became really difficult. His disaffection was less with learning than with school as an institution, and this would grow into a lifelong distrust of all institutions. His extreme antipathy to being told what to do would re-emerge 20 years later when he found himself kicking against the demands of the music industry. “I really do not like anybody controlling my time or even deciding what topics we are going to be thinking about. That, very early, was a drawback at school.”

By his own admission he was every teacher’s worst nightmare, an “underminer” quietly and deliberately sabotaging everything he could. There was, for example, the occasion when he persuaded his classmates to bring an assortment of screwdrivers and other tools into school: under his direction, they proceeded to dismantle the classroom, taking the desks apart but leaving them with just enough support to stay upright until the next class arrived and tried to sit down.

“It wasn’t as if I wasn’t educating myself, anyway,” he said later. “I could read and write.” He could, for example, consult the encyclopaedia his father had at home. “They taught us at school about the discovery of the South Pole without mentioning Amundsen. That told me what was going on quite early. I thought: ‘Watch out.’ In my book at home, A was for Amundsen.”

Margaret Marra with, from left, Michael, Mary, Nicky, Chris and Eddie.