On this day in 1983

I had my hands full with the Deadbeat tape, a compilation of 8 bands, all unsigned and as we thought, surely on their way to greater audiences. Rough demo tapes sometimes just live but a raw taste of ingredients that would get polished in a studio.

It was well received in all the local record shops throughout Scotland and less so the A & R guys in London.

It was my 21st birthday and someone had thrown away the key!

36 years on and I'm walking in Spain with the sound of Burlesque "long Shadows" or the powerful strawberry tarts "walking in a straight line" exceptionally good for getting you up hills. There's a straight line from Sparks through the Jeremy Thomas classic jaw jutting guitar to Franz Ferdinand and it always makes me chuckle when I listen to the strawberry tarts tracks.

The first tape and the third one are loaded or have links on the site and well worth a listen.

At 21 my life felt over, while at 57 I'm still making new memories to chuckle over.

I still listen to all the Deadbeat tapes and they bring back great memories of the bands and that thing we all just called the scene.

Getting ready for a gig whether you were playing or watching, reviewing or interviewing after. The craic was the two hours before as well as the six hours after. Chuntering about adding or ditching the keyboards, the sax. Stripping back the sound, building more depth.

It was a blank canvas and that's what life is. One of our songs "the penny drops...as the mushroom rises" was always viewed as a CND apocolyptic anti war song, but it's really just a love song with a nuclear bomb back drop.

You listen to the words and it's all about how the penny drops as the mushroom rises.

A euphemism for you have really fucked it big time fat boy!

There is no bettere way to describe teenage angst and unrequited love than to put it in a song.

Master Craftsman Roddy Frame was for me, the champion songwriter of our day, "just like June, the curtains are closed"....

I still don't know why "walk out to Winter" went out in May. When did Slade release merry Xmas?

Just as we learnt loads of stuff doing the fanzine, tapes and the single, we also learned most people aren't as creative as you feel they should be in the industry.

It's quite simply a numbers game and the beautifully naive "need control over the whole creative process" is why many of the Deadbeat bands never "made it" to larger audiences.

The industry insists on it and it gets what it wants. Bands like fanzines would box themselves into a corner. For us we refused to move from 10p as if we were ripping people off to charge 25p. We were really lucky with Regular Music and Dance Factory, who took ads out which were listings we would have done anyway.

I love watching dramas where the art versus commercial get played out. We all know great artists that died penniless but does it really have to be that way.

In Deadbeat's case there is clearly competency in the music produced by the bands but my drawers for 1984 are full of good even great bands, so perhaps handing over their baby to the studio masters always caused  them needless concern.

With so many excellent bands about the public only has enough cash to support a few, but why Kajagoogoo!

The north south divide was at it's height when the two pairs of twins so comically divided a nation. Deadbeat had taken a career break.

In London, driving a car that I kicked, as it nearly ran me down outside dirty dicks, were Bros, quite simply vomit.

In Edinburgh, the Proclaimers, quite simply Hibees!