From Nirvana to The Fall, the QMU hits 50

Keith Bruce looks ahead to a celebration tracing the musical history of the famous concert venue

APLAUSIBLE argument might be made – in the ever-fluid chronology of popular music – that Sigue Sigue Sputnik, the group that was a mid-80s explosion of hair and guitars, were the last late flowering of glam rock. Certainly, when they appeared at Glasgow University’s Queen Margaret Union, supported by local rock’n’roll heroes The Primevals, the atmosphere in the dressing room was toxic. Not in a “bad vibes” sense, but because the amount of hairspray required was asphyxiating.

And that was, as they say, just the boys. Another unique selling point of the band formed by ex-Generation X bassist Tony James and fronted by the flamboyant Martin Degville was an all-female road crew. Mark Mackie, who had begun working with promoters Regular Music, having been entertainment convener at the QMU, remembers they had certainly not been recruited for their equipment-lugging physique – and the stiletto heels they wore were not ideal for that job either.

All that was a far cry from the QMU of 10 years earlier, when a generation of 1970s feminists ran the place, and some of that diverse history will be recalled when the 50th anniversary of the building at the end of University Gardens is remembered during an evening of Glam Rock Dialogues at the end of this month.

These occasional evenings of debate, music, feather boas and extravagant eye make-up were initiated by Glasgow University academics David Archibald and Carl Lavery, and have in the past included musical input from the rhythm section of Franz Ferdinand and the songs of Bowie and Bolan to accompany discussion of the political legacy of revolutionary France. The spirit of 1968 will be present on November 30 again, because it was then that the Queen Margaret Union’s present home, a modernist design by Glasgow architects Walter Underwood and Partners, opened.

Archibald says he and Lavery will be taking a less prominent part in this event, however, as befits the celebration of a facility built for women, whose numbers at the university had outgrown the QMU’s previous home. The key contributors to the St Andrew’s Day event will be female, with narration by theatre studies lecturer Cristina Delgado-Garcia and testimonies from current QMU president Mata Durkin and Christine Hamilton, who studied drama and went on to a career in the arts and then in academia, whose tenure on the board was in the building’s earlier years.

Hamilton says that, as was said of the 1960s, if you can remember which bands you saw at the QM you weren’t really there. But she also claims that Freddie Mercury’s Queen played there so often in her day that one of the band suggested it would be easier if the QM audience travelled to them. “But I mostly remember the politics at the time, because men were only allowed in as guests and could only be signed in after noon. These were the years of student protest and a wave of feminist consciousness-raising and we wanted the place to be mixed. It almost seems like we have come full-circle now, to be arguing for women-only spaces.”

Hamilton had come from a state school in Fife and found the women’s union was traditionally run by young ladies from private schools who still lived at home and were not minded to fight for sexual equality. “They would say things like they didn’t want men to be able to see them first thing in the morning without their make-up,” she says.

Hamilton, who heard shipyard union leader Jimmy Reid’s rousing speech when the students elected him rector of Glasgow University, stood as part of a slate of women from state schools who lived in student flats. They wrested control of the QM although it was a few years before their argument for equality led to a mixed union, and Glasgow University Union – the “men’s union” – persisted with male-only membership, barring women from certain parts of the building, for many years.

At a time of draconian licensing laws, she says, the QM was unusual in arguing for and winning a regular late licence for music and dancing. “It was a huge amount of fun but it was not just a social club – I remember some very edgy debates, including one I was chairing on Northern Ireland where we had to clear the gallery.”

Nonetheless it was the bands that brought most students to the QM, and Hamilton said her generation had rules about them. “I was told: never touch the boys in the band and never pine after them – because there will be another one along next week!”

By the start of the following decade, the QM was a mixed facility and Mark Mackie was studying marine science, living in a bedsit on Byres Road and eating every day in the union. When the catering was outsourced, he stood for election to the board on a ticket to have the food he liked restored.

In that aim, Mackie concedes that he failed but he now runs one of Scotland’s main music concert companies, Regular Music, all because he started helping out with the discos on Fridays and Saturdays.

Frequent visits by bands to the QM had stopped when Mackie became entertainments convener and he