70 years in the spotlight, the Stetson-wearing Scots legend who sang with Jacko and Pavarotti
HE was the unlikely cowboy who became a star of the stage. Sydney Devine will forever be remembered as the crooner behind the bittersweet ballad Tiny Bubbles – delivering country and western with an unashamedly Scottish twang. He packed venues in his 1970s heyday, when he would parade across the stage in a rhinestone jumpsuit and had picked up the nickname ‘Steak & Kidney’.
By then, the Stetson-wearing singer had come a long way since his break into entertainment, whistling tunes on the variety circuit and appearing alongside the likes of Andy Stewart and Rikki Fulton. Devine, who started out at the tender age of 13 in 1953, loved every minute of his fame.
In a career spanning nearly seven decades he sold around 15 million albums, toured the world and held his own as he performed alongside the likes of superstar Michael Jackson, pictured below, and Pavarotti.
The singer, born in the mining village of Cleland, Lanarkshire, in 1940, enjoyed a career spanning almost 70 years – and did so despite failing health, including heart attacks and a cancer scare.
Regardless of what doctors advised after life-saving operations, and even after the loss of a son to sepsis, he refused to cancel shows.
So determined was he to entertain that only last week, as he battled a mystery chest and lung infection in his hospital bed, he was making plans to release a single as a tribute to NHS workers.
When he was 13 when he was spotted whistling in a local talent show. It led to his big break, when he took up the offer of a trip to London to perform on the BBC. That brought him to the attention of Scottish tenor and variety performer Robert Wilson, who was a member of the White Heather Club.
DEVINE recently recalled the early break, saying: ‘Robert Wilson, who lived in the next village along, saw the show and asked if I wanted to tour.’ For more than a decade, Devine performed around the world with the White Heather troupe. While on the road, he met his wife of almost 60 years, Shirley, at the Tivoli Ballroom in Aberdeen.
Devine joked: ‘I was with Bill Wilson and the White Heather Club and Shirley was in the front row with her friends, who had regular seats every week at the Tivoli.
‘It was love at first sight for me and for Shirley it was love at first fright.
‘It’s been a long stint. She says she can’t remember breaking that many mirrors.’ While visiting Hawaii with Andy Stewart’s band, he heard the Hawaiian singer Don Ho perform Tiny Bubbles. The song became Devine’s signature tune, though it was not until he branched into country music in the 1970s that he hit his stride and found fame. It proved an astute move.
His sales of the track were revived in 2005 when a machine that made frothy drinks was advertised on television using Don Ho’s version of the song. Other tunes Devine made his own included The Answer To Everything, Legend In My Time, Crying Time, When You and I Were Young, Maggie and Scotland Forever. From 1974, he hosted a weekly
radio show on Radio Clyde called Absolutely Devine and added a second, Even More Devine.
In the Nineties, he would broadcast twice a week for West Sound Radio in Ayr, where he lived.
TV specials and several appearances on Hogmanay shows helped cement his star status.
In 1977, he was invited to appear in the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Royal Variety Performance in Glasgow.
He hosted a TV series, Devine Country, in 1979, and took over as host of the STV entertainment show, Shindig.
However, in 1989 he suffered a massive heart attack. He considered retirement after a serious operation to treat two aneurysms in his aorta, but he carried on.
Public relations consultant Ross Wilson, a former journalist, interviewed the singer for a national newspaper after he suffered the health scare. He said: ‘I turned up at Sydney’s door with a bunch of flowers for his wife Shirley in the hope of landing an interview.
‘Shirley led me inside and there was Sydney in his pyjamas. He told me he might never sing again. It made the paper and other papers, radio and TV picked up on it.
‘When the news got out there were plenty of comedians and people saying it was the best music news they’d heard in years.’
In 2007, Devine suffered two aneurysms and required emergency heart-bypass surgery in Spain to repair the aorta artery.
More heartache followed in 2018, when his son, Gary, died of sepsis. The father of four was only 58.
Despite the tragedy and his health difficulties, it is Devine’s music that will be his legacy. He achieved his lifelong ambition when he travelled to Nashville in the 1990s to record an album with Elvis Presley’s old backing band, but found drug-taking commonplace and not to his liking.
He once said: ‘Nashville was an experience. I was never into drugs or anything like that and there is a lot of that going on among the musicians in Nashville. I didn’t partake. No, sir.
‘Instead of Music City USA, they called it Drug City USA.
You couldn’t move for it.’
He also performed alongside the Jackson Five, Perry Como and Pavarotti and was made an MBE by the Queen in 2003. His popular tours included 45 consecutive years of shows at Glasgow’s historic Pavilion theatre, the most recent in 2019. Ahead of those dates, he spoke of his fear that he would die onstage like comedian Tommy Cooper, who collapsed in front of millions.
Devine said: ‘Each morning I wonder what is going to be wrong with me this time – a sore head, sore back or sore hand – but I’m still alive and here we go.
‘Somewhere along the line, I’ll probably do a Tommy Cooper and collapse on stage and that’ll be it – goodbye. I could just picture the headlines if that happened – “The Tiny Bubble has burst”.
‘We are all getting a wee bit closer to the cliff edge.’
His comments came close to being prophetic when he suffered two heart attacks weeks before he was due to begin the dates.
During the tour he was rushed to A&E with an angina attack.
YET he managed to complete the shows with his sense of humour still intact, joking that: ‘I had the undertaker on standby. Now I can relax and go bury my head – at least they weren’t burying my body.’ He went on to release his 50th album, I’m Back, following the shows. His final weeks were spent in the University Hospital in Ayr after he was admitted on January 22 with a lung complaint. He repeatedly tested negative for Covid-19.
Friends said he died in hospital at 3.30am yesterday.
Prior to his last shows in 2019, the singer summed up his career and determination to carry on performing until the end.
He said: ‘I don’t do it for financial reward, but because I enjoy it. ‘I enjoy the love that you get from the audience. After each show, I’m out in the foyer for each and every person who wants a photograph. ‘I have no regrets. If the worst happened tomorrow, “I’d say I had the most incredible life”.’