‘We used to get star struck by Clare Grogan and Edwyn Collins’

DJ and superfan brings you the stories behind some of Scotland’s favourite albums

THE taxi taking his parents to the airport had barely turned the corner when Tommy Cunningham swung into action. They’d be gone for a week’s holiday, but time was of the essence. “To this day, my mother and father still don’t know the extent of what went on,” confessed the drummer of Wet Wet Wet, nearly 40 years later.

“I had to get my sisters, who’d been given the job of looking after me, to swear they wouldn’t grass me up – and to their credit they never did.”

For the next seven days it was bedlam. Furniture was stacked against the walls of the living room to clear a space for Tommy’s drum kit.

Keyboard player Neil Mitchell bought an old piano, which was delivered to the house in a van. Bassist Graeme Clark rigged up a £40 reel-to-reel tape recorder he’d bought from The Barras.

When singer Mark McLaughlan, who’d later adopt the name Marti Pellow, stepped up to the mic they made their first demo. “We recorded for a whole week from early in the morning to last thing at night,” recalled Tommy. “My sisters were going crazy. So were the neighbours, particularly when we did drum tracks at 4am.”

The band recorded Something Special and Home And Away as they took their first tentative steps as songwriters. “Immediately, there was some kind of rapport. We were literally nose to nose, working out exactly how you wrote a song,” said Graeme.

But disaster struck when the temperamental reel-to-reel chewed up the tape, destroying it. “We ended up with all this ‘spaghetti’. It was unplayable, unusable,” said Tommy.

On May 27, 1983, the band scraped together £34 for a session at Centre City Sound in Glasgow. Tommy and Graeme raised the cash by washing dishes in a local Chinese restaurant.

They recorded I Suppose, Please Louise and a new version of Something Special, which later paved the way for their second single, Sweet Little Mystery as its opening lyric was: “My love has taken a tumble/ And I’m still standing.”

“Something Special was a breakthrough moment. Suddenly, we had something we could play and it was only three minutes long,” revealed Graeme.

“It makes you go, well, we’ve done it once, so why can’t we do it again?”

It was now time to impress the Londonbased record companies. “We called directory enquiries to get their numbers

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and rang them one-by-one,” recalled Tommy. “Our attitude was we’ve got a demo, let’s sign a deal. That’s how naïve we were.”

Several majors turned them down flat, including Phonogram, who rejected the demo saying it was too crudely recorded.

Geoff Travis, boss of Rough Trade, wanted to sign them but he’d spent his budget trying to break a new band called The Smiths.

Over the next two years, the band gigged relentlessly trying to get a break. “We were never considered cool enough to be part of the Scottish music scene,” admitted Tommy.

“We’d go to The Hellfire Club to rehearse and feel like outsiders. If Clare Grogan of Altered Images or Edwyn Collins of Orange Juice walked in we got star struck. They were in real bands. We were coming at it in a

The A&R man hated the tape and threw it on the floor saying: ‘This is rubbish’

different way. Maybe that’s what made us stand apart. We also had no real life experience. So we were trying to live our dreams through music.”

The band chose the name Wet Wet Wet from a lyric in the song, Gettin’ Havin’ And Holdin’ by Scritti Politti. In 1985, Phonogram won a bidding war and signed them on a deal worth £600,000.

But the two-year road to Popped In Souled Out was problematic. The band demo-ed songs with Gil Norton, who’d worked with Echo And The Bunnymen and China Crisis. But when they were then paired with hit US producer John Ryan it was a disaster.

“When a new act is signed, many labels think what’s big in the charts at the moment and who produced them?” said Graeme. “It’s then a case of let’s apply that model to our band. During our first meeting with John, alarm bells rang when he said ‘OK, who do you want to sound like?’ I wanted to sound like us.”

Next, the band demo-ed Wishing I Was Lucky, with Wilf Smarties in Edinburgh. The song, inspired by life on the dole in Clydebank, was a turning point. They couldn’t wait to play it to their A&R man. “He hated the tape and threw it on the floor saying: ‘This is rubbish’,” said Tommy.

With relations at an uneasy impasse, Stephen Hague, who had produced Pet Shop Boys, was drafted in to see if he could turn the track into a hit.

“It was such a fantastically made demo it was impossible to improve on it,” Graeme recalled. “Stephen did have a good try but said ‘it sounds better than some songs in the charts’. He was right. The original was better.”

What happened next took them across the Atlantic. The band jumped at the chance to work with Willie Mitchell at Royal Studios in Memphis. The veteran producer was behind hits by Al Green, Ike and Tina Turner, and Solomon Burke. But while it was a valuable experience, the band quickly realised the tracks could prove commercial suicide.

“We liked the songs but being honest there was no way we had anything which could have cracked the charts,” admitted Tommy. “It was black, earthy, soulful, warm, human – everything the Top 40 wasn’t at that particular time.

“We were probably in the hole for £400,000, a level of money mindboggling to four guys who’d just got off the dole.”

When Phonogram deemed the album “unfit for release” it was back to the drawing board. It was time for one final roll of the dice. They were paired with Michael Baker and Axel Kroll, who’d had success with The Blow Monkeys.

They remixed the demo of Wishing I Was Lucky, which had cost just £600, and it was released as their first single. It entered the charts at No. 99. “That was good enough for me. We were in the Top 100, so it was a hit,” said Tommy.

Over the next few weeks it climbed to No.6 and the band appeared on Top Of The Pops. They moved to Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey for the album sessions.

“We got more assured that, finally, what we were doing was right,” said Tommy. “We gave the version of Sweet Little Mystery, recorded in Memphis, to Axl. He came back with this sound that combined soul and pop. We believed we had a guaranteed second Top 40 hit.”

The sessions also produced further hits Angel Eyes and Temptation, plus East Of The River and I Can Give You Everything, which remain key songs in their live set. The album reached No.2 in the charts, held off the top spot by Bad by Michael Jackson.

The cover art showing the band, suited and booted, was a homage to The Temptations, The Miracles and The Four Tops. They also toured the UK – playing a sellout Christmas show at the SECC – which helped the album gather further momentum. It reached No.1 on January 16, 1988. “We’d had a number of false starts, so the album was really three years of hard graft,” recalled Tommy.

“I don’t think I listened to it all the way through after we’d made it. There is never a moment when you make yourself a big mug of tea, sit down with a cake, and say ‘I think I’ll listen to Popped In Souled Out’.

“But in 2017, on the 30th anniversary, I did exactly that. And I heard just how diverse the songwriting and production was. On some tracks we were naïve and still hadn’t found our true voice while on others you can hear the real sound of the band. But there was a real joy in the room – an inspiration in the air – and that got transferred to tape.

“Popped In Souled Out gave us everything we ever wanted – success and a career. That’s a very high benchmark. It captures perfectly a moment in time.”

The Billy Sloan Show is on BBC Radio Scotland every Saturday at 10pm.