Hospital hit song

RICKY Ross was holed up in a German hotel room when he got the inspiration for the biggest hit song on Fellow Hoodlums.

His wife Lorraine McIntosh had been rushed to a hospital in Bonn suffering from appendicitis. Her medical emergency was the catalyst for Twist And Shout.

“I was stuck in my hotel with a guitar – which I really don’t play too well – and I started jotting down some ideas. As I was walking up and down to the hospital I’d sing to myself into a little Sony Dictaphone. The line ‘I see a pale girl/In a blue room/With a pink dress/And a wide smile’ was about Lorraine being ill in bed.

“The song was built around the only three chords I knew on the guitar.”

Twist And Shout was the follow-up to Your Swaying Arms, which had just failed to break into the Top 20.

“When we completed Fellow Hoodlums the record company were saying what’s going to be the single?” he said.

“We were looking at each other thinking, we don’t really know. We thought maybe Your Swaying Arms was the one. It was a Top 30 single, but it wasn’t massive.

“I don’t think there were a lot of obvious singles on the album. We quickly realised we’d taken our eye off the ball, but quite purposely. Writing a hit had not dominated things in the same way as on our previous record. I was totally paranoid because I didn’t know how the music business worked. I thought let’s just make an album and hope for the best.

“We realised that having a song on the radio was going to make life a lot easier. But we relaxed. There were people out there who bought our records and came to see us. So we thought let’s just make the best record we can.”

Ross got the album title from an old crime book. “It was written about the mob scene in Chicago, around an Al Capone-style figure who’d become the mayor. When he stood up to make his opening speech he said ‘Fellow hoodlums, thank you for electing me’. I thought I’ve got to use that. It was saying what I like most about Glasgow, which is the roughness with a mix of culture. At times, the city can be a strangely dangerous place. Things can sometimes go off. We’ve seen that in the last couple of months. You have days that no-one really wants. But that’s what makes cities such amazing places and most of the time the people in them get on really well.”