The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Spotlight on Scottish export the Average White Band.
Forty-five years on, a new BBC Radio Scotland documentary charts the Tayside roots of 1970s funk and soul meisters the Average White Band.
From whisky to the flushing toilet, Scotland has become famous for exporting many things over the years– but it’s only relatively recently that it became famous for exporting soul music. The band that made that possible is the Average White Band and several of the founding members met at art school in Dundee.
In the early 1970s a bunch of Scottish soul musicians – including Alan Gorrie, from Perth and The Dundee Horns (Malcolm ‘Molly’ Duncan and Roger Ball) – set out to take on the world with their energetic blend of white soul.
What followed was a classic tale of rock ‘n’ roll – from the high of Marvin Gaye going up on stage and doing an encore with them to the low of original, Dundonian drummer and founding member Robbie McIntosh dying of a drug overdose aged just 24 at a Hollywood party in 1974.
Now the 45th anniversary of the Average White Band is being marked in a new BBC Radio Scotland documentary – Picking Up The Pieces – The Average White Band Story.
Long-time associate of the Average White Band and ex-manager of Simple Minds, Bruce Findlay tells the story of Scotland’s most successful soul music export, reaching No 1 in America with their million-selling instrumental classic Pick Up The Pieces and a series of soul and disco hits from 1974 to 1980.
The documentary charts their roots in Scotland and their move to London to form the band that would take them to America, where this white soul band gained respect from black audiences with a string of successful albums.
This year is the 45th anniversary of the band but it’s actually 50 years since Alan Gorrie and Onnie McIntyre started making music together.
In the 1960s it was rock and roll that was sweeping the UK but for Perthborn Alan Gorrie, who was starting to play the bass guitar and sing, it was the soul sounds from America that were his biggest influence. “The music that drove us in the 1960s was Tamla, Motown, Stax, Atlantic Records, Chess Records – we wanted to perfect the playing of that kind of music,” he says.
“We weren’t really interested in rock ‘n’ roll, to be honest – the rock ‘n’ roll that was developing was a very kind of hard guitar, grungy stuff that didn’t appeal to us.”
Like Norrie, saxophonist Malcolm Duncan was also about to discover soul music. “When I moved to Dundee, to the art school here, I’d already become interested in saxophone but I didn’t have one,” he says.
“A friend of mine had a band at the college; to cut a long story short, I had five days to learn some little bits of Junior Walker, and that’s how it started for me – and then I got very interested in soul music and funky music.”
Gorrie adds: “Dundee art college was actually the meeting point for three of us – the two horn players, Molly Duncan and Roger Ball, and myself.
“I was part of a pop up blues and jazz club in Perth called the Blue Workshop in the 1960s and, I being the one who went to Dundee art college, got these guys to come up to Perth every fortnight on a Sunday to do this ad hoc get-together with these guys I brought in from Dundee. So that was the place that gave us the idea for what became the Average White Band.”
Picking Up The Pieces – The Average White Band Story airs on BBC Radio Scotland on Christmas Day from 4pm to 5pm.