Keyboard and guitar player with art-rock band the Associates
ALAN RANKINE, who has died aged 64, was a guitarist and keyboard player with the Associates, the Scots band who lit up the early 1980s with a sophisticated brand of electro-inflected art rock that marked them out from the minimalist synthpop crowd with such louche hits as Party Fears Two and Club Country. As he later put it: “We wanted sumptuousness, for it to be dripping with silk and satin.”
He was born on May 17 1958 at Bridge of Allan, just north of Stirling, and grew up in Linlithgow. He gravitated to nearby Edinburgh, and there met Billy Mackenzie. Bonding over their mutual love of David Bowie, Roxy Music and Sparks, they formed a band, initially playing covers, which went through several names, including the Ascorbic Ones, Caspian and Mental Torture, before settling on the Associates.
They were soon being courted by several labels, and an illicit version of Boys Keep Swinging, David Bowie’s hymn to gender fluidity (for which they had not secured the copyright), won them a deal with Fiction Records. Their debut album, The Affectionate Punch, was released in August 1980.
It did not trouble the mainstream charts but had critics in raptures, the NME’S Paul Morley describing it as “a kind of masterpiece … a passionate cabaret soul music”. The follow-up, Fourth Drawer Down (October 1981), a compilation gathering together all their A-sides and B-sides up till then, reached No 5 in the indie charts.
Demos for Party Fears Two and Club Country earned them a distribution deal with the WEA label, who gave them a £60,000 advance. They spent half of it block-booking a studio, while the rest they spent on clothes, drugs, and rooms at the Swiss Cottage Holiday Inn – including an extra room for Mackenzie’s whippets, which he fed on smoked salmon from room service.
Rankine, who often played all the instruments on a track and was a relentless experimentalist, later insisted that the profligacy influenced the sound of the album: “If we hadn’t spent the money, the album wouldn’t have got made in the way it did. It was mental, but there was also a self-assured cockiness, because we knew we had these songs.” The resulting album, Sulk, released in May 1982, was a critical and commercial success and contained two hit singles in Party Fears Two and Club Country, which reached No 9 and No 13 respectively.
Party Fears Two, based on a Rankine piano hook written years previously, was inspired, said Mackenzie, by the memory recounted to him by his brother of two young women trying to smash their way into a party using their stiletto heels.
It expressed the feeling, Rankine recalled, that “we never fitted. We felt like imposters. We felt like we’d got in with forged papers.”
Sulk spent 20 weeks in the charts, peaking at No 10 and being named Album of the Year by Melody Maker. The Associates were courted by labels such as Sire, but Rankine, frustrated at Mackenzie’s reluctance to play live or become involved in promotional activities, quit in 1982 and established himself as a successful producer, working with acts like the Cocteau Twins.
In 1986 Rankine recorded the first of three solo albums, and he later lectured at Stow College in Glasgow, helping his students to set up a record label, Electric Honey, which launched the careers of such luminaries of the Scottish scene as Belle and Sebastian, Snow Patrol and Biffy Clyro.
Billy Mackenzie, meanwhile, continued with the Associates for a few years and then carried on as a solo act. There was a mooted Associates reunion but it came to nothing. In 1997, suffering from depression, Mackenzie took his own life.
Alan Rankine married Belinda Henderson, a director of the Les Disques du Crépuscule label for which he recorded his solo output, but the marriage was dissolved, and he is survived by two sons.