My lockdown heaven... tracking down the Scots stars who (unlike me) me) really were Top of the Pops!
A pop ‘failure’, Jackie Bird tells – in her own words – of her quest to f ind those who DID hit the big time
FULL disclosure: I am a failed musician who would happily swap my entire journalistic career for five minutes as a performer. So I’ve been in lockdown heaven for the past few months, making a radio documentary about all the Scottish number one records since the UK charts began. And before you start rhyming off your own favourites, hold your horses, pop-pickers – I’d put good money on the fact that some of your most beloved number ones actually never reached the top.
The strength of these historical inaccuracies became apparent as friends swore blind that everyone from Alex Harvey to Deacon Blue had a number one. But the top spot is an elite club, with a very picky bouncer who thinks nothing of turning away seasoned stars in favour of the occasional one-hit wonder.
Neither Alex Harvey nor Deacon Blue ever got to the top of the charts. The Proclaimers got there only because of Comic Relief and even the everlasting Lulu managed it only by joining in a Take That chorus.
The magic of the charts of years gone by is that you think you are glancing at a dry league table of song sales but what you are really doing is turning back the pages of your past.
Each number one song has the power to transport you to a time when you were perhaps wistfully scribbling a boy’s name on your pencil case, or getting married, or having your first child. If you think the charts are trivial, show me a historical chart of book sales that can do that.
I started singing in working men’s clubs when I was ten (Lena Zavaroni has a lot to answer for) then spent the rest of my adolescence and twenties gigging with rock bands. Actually making a record, never mind anyone buying it,
No1s transport you back to getting married, or having your first child
was a dream. So you can see why chatting to Scots who had sold millions of records was a thrill for me.
The charts began back in 1952, and as I went through the list of number ones it was seven increasingly embarrassing years before we had our first Scot at the top.
But what a performer – no less than the King of Skiffle and the man who inspired The Beatles, Lonnie Donegan.
National pride meant nailing Donegan as a Scot was vital even though he had moved from Glasgow as a toddler and sounded about as Scottish as Danny Dyer.
I asked his son, Peter, if his father, who died in 2002 aged 71, considered himself one of us.
‘Absolutely. Every time he came back to Scotland, he considered it a homecoming,’ he said. ‘Dad was a cheeky chappy and, when he went to Scotland, he’d put on a bad Scottish accent and enjoyed getting told off for it, but he loved it there.’
My own early teenage years coincided with the Bay City Rollers and it is a surprise that the maniacal adoration for the group of pale lads with short trousers resulted in only two UK number ones – Bye Bye Baby and Give a Little Love. Famously, there was not very much love within the band, so it all ended acrimoniously and without the financial rewards of a successful career.
However, guitarist Stuart ‘Woody’ Wood, like so many of the early pop stars I interviewed, was sanguine about past glories.
When asked what middle-aged Woody would tell his 18year-old self, he said: ‘Get a haircut, go see a tailor – and take a course in business.’
I tracked down Mary Sandeman, whose pop star alter ego Aneka would cause today’s millennials to self-combust.
In the early Eighties, a record company kitted out this traditional Gaelic singer with a kimono, a wig and chopsticks as she sang her number one hit, Japanese Boy, on Top of The Pops.
She said: ‘Looking back, it was great fun – it was of its time, but nowadays it’s definitely non-PC to do that sort of thing.
‘My sons were teased at school, although they look back at it now as fun and my grandchildren look at it and say, “Was that Gran?”.’ At the other end of the spectrum, you have someone with the longevity of Midge Ure.
His first number one, with the band Slik in 1976, was part of a processed pop conveyor belt.
The Glasgow band arrived at the London recording studio with their instruments only to find that their song, Forever and Ever, had already been recorded by session musicians and needed only Midge’s vocals.
He said: ‘You were treated like you were a buffoon, like you couldn’t play, so they got the “professionals” to do it. When I got the call saying the record was number one – nothing. A joy bypass.’
Midge later made it to the top of the charts as a solo artist with his own track, If I Was.
He also, in my view, recorded the most famous number one that never was – Vienna – which was kept off
the top spot in 1981 by the supposedly comic hit, Shaddap You Face by Joe Dolce.
In addition, his role as co-writer of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas means he has spent 13 weeks at number one on the strength of that song alone.
In my search for Scottish incumbents at the top of the pops, I did allow myself a little leeway. I could have taken the international football route and shoehorned in Lady Gaga because she once had a bowl of porridge, but my criteria included those who were obviously Scottish (Irn-Bru in their veins and a penchant for crying on hearing Caledonia), and also bands who had just enough tartan in their DNA to make a difference.
‘I’m the only Scottish Wurzel in captivity,’ said the delightful octogenarian Tommy Banner, who still sounds as though he has just got off the bus from his native Penicuik, Midlothian. He joined the West Country band in the 1960s and they reached number one with the parody Combine Harvester in the long hot summer of 1976.
The band’s success prompted a newspaper to run an unlikely story linking The Wurzels to sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll which, Banner recalls, caused apoplexy in his family. ‘My mother, wee Mary Banner, rang me up and said, “You never telt me it was gonna be a band like that you were joining, I never thought that’s what my son would become”,’ he said.
One of the earliest number ones I can remember as a child was catchy 1971 hit Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, by a band from the Central Belt called Middle of the Road.
They had been working in Italy with their singer, Sally Carr, dubbing songs by movie stars including Sophia Loren, but when a songwriter offered them Chirpy, the rest of the band were not impressed.
She said: ‘The boys said, “There is no way we are going to sing that, we’d have to be p **** d before we sing that”. But I liked the song – it was simple and fun.’
The track spent five weeks at number one and is still loved by fans on the nostalgia festivals circuit.
In fact, Carr credits Chirpy with helping her return to performing after she suffered a brain haemorrhage eight years ago.
She said of her comeback gig: ‘I was terrified. I thought I was going to pass out at the side of the stage but people helped me along because they got up and sang with me.’
Dexy’s Midnight Runners, the young soul rebels of the 1980s, were not Scottish but their brass section had an Aberdeenshire lilt.
Jim Paterson, their trombonist, hailed from Portsoy and co-wrote the band’s 1982 dancefloor filler Come on Eileen.
But just before the song became a hit, the band’s leader, Kevin Rowland, decided to replace their signature brass sound with fiddles.
Paterson recalls: ‘Kevin had this vision and I wasn’t going to argue with his vision, I trusted him 100 per cent. But we felt like we’d been demoted, been replaced. I just went into rehearsals one day… I said, “I’m leaving”, I just walked out.’ Years later, the pair set aside their musical differences and the experience of getting to number one is something Paterson
cherishes. He said:
‘The best thing for me was I had the chance to
phone my mum and dad and tell them. I was so proud for them because they had made sacrifices and kept their faith in me.’
But there was another side to topping the charts – some artists I spoke to found it either intensified internal squabbles or was overshadowed by the fear they would never do it again.
Wet Wet Wet’s career embodied all of that and more. Four years after their first number one with a cover of The Beatles’ With a Little Help from My Friends, in 1988, they were about to be dropped by their record label.
Drummer Tommy Cunningham said: ‘Every news outlet had a headline, “The Pop Bubble Has Burst – The End of Wet Wet Wet”. We’d had a small club tour where only half the audience turned up.
‘The bank accounts were depleted, the mortgages were needing paid… there was no money in the bank.’
Luckily for the Wets, the last song they hastily recorded for what could have been their last album was Goodnight Girl – and it went to number one in 1992.
Two years later they spent 15 weeks at the top spot with the love-it-or-loathe-it Love is All Around but, says Cunningham, the worldwide fame of that song strained their friendships. He said: ‘A real separation started within the band, a disintegration.
‘Working-class boys getting everything they ever dreamed of doesn’t turn into a fairy story.
‘It took us ten years to come back as friends.’
In the early 2000s the power of
Saturday night TV talent shows gave Scots singers Michelle McManus, Leon Jackson, David Sneddon and Darius fleeting success and each hit number one.
Yet Annie Lennox, who has graced the charts for more than 40 years, has only once reached the very top with Eurythmics’ There Must Be an Angel (Playing With My Heart), in 1985.
In recent years it’s a DJ from Dumfries, Calvin Harris, who’s made the UK charts his own with his ten number ones.
My last interview for the show was with Nathan Evans, the Lanarkshire postie turned pop star whose sea shanty Wellerman is the current number one.
What will become of the 26year-old in the long term is anyone’s guess, but perhaps we should change that dismissive description of one-hit wonder to one-hit wonderful – because that is what topping the charts is. l Jackie Bird’s Top of the Scots is on BBC Radio Scotland tomorrow at 3pm.
There was another side to reaching the peak