The slagging subsided when Mackie got booked for taken a throw in from the edge of the 18 yard box.
He'd been on the whisky for breakfast and in the linament infused atmosphere of the dressing room his breath added to a heady cocktail, but back to the folks.
So I get filmed climbing out a window in Sallies, St Salvator's hall, holding and following this string. "Look surprised", someone shouted at me so I did. It was 1980, Reagan was about to be elected President, Thatcher had won last year, My 2B's and C's got me into Uni so I could leave school after 5th year, Hibs had lost after 3 games against Rangers in the Scottish Cup, I could do surprised and I could do "Plus ca change c'est la memechoise" easily.
I never got to see the end product as I'm not sure I watched the programme or if the programme got axed. The 80's were all about the Tube and it wasn't long before I was saying to Chic's wee brother Paul, I'll put you on the front cover of Deadbeat, that beats Chic getting into Smash hits!
The cover of #2 was a great continuing of an experiment, one that proved I had no artistic skill whatsoever, but it did show luck is everything. My greatest piece of luck is impossible to say but where Deadbeat's concerned, Hilary's drawing transformed our covers and whether it was Keith or me, even we couldn't fuck it up when given all the ingredients.
They lived in a boat hoose as my Holy Rood classmates advised me during another of my moments. I tried to argue that we lived nowhere near the canal but my Maryland accent wasn't going down too well. It was 1975 and Americana wasn't well received in Edinburgh.
My Dad had previously got a job as the Agricultural attache at the British Embassy, in Washington DC, he wasn't too diplomatic so we only stayed two years but more of that later. My folks loved the place, I didn't.
I had 2 years, from age 9-11 in the USA and I hated most of it. My Dentist gave me over 100 fillings in baby teeth, as I later recalled at the dole office in Castle Terrace. "I've been sponging off the state for years, even if most of the cash went to Dr Yamaichi, dental practice in Quince Orchard, just along the road from my friend James Harris' house". James had a big family and they lived in a big house halfway along the road between Darnestown and Quince Orchard where the ice cream was great and the dentist was demanding,
My brushes with celebrity were numerous in Maryland as it was the USA everyone is a celebrity. I beat my teacher at chess during lunch one day but 4 lunchtimes later I realised he was just rubbish so it was no claim to fame. James and I played football in the county trials and were soon in demand at state level, but those trials were too far away, so we stayed home.
No it was 22 miles away when I appeared on Bozo the clown throwing ping pong balls into little red buckets on WDCTV that I got famous, as the wee boy whose mum had to come out the studio audience to take the greeting wee bairn away, having missed with all three attempts. No star prize, no 2nd prize, not even the dunce's prize for just getting one in, just shame, tantrum and distress. I applied many more times but guess what, I was never again to get selected, scarred instead for life as the underdog who delivered defeat.
That Christmas I would make up for it when I arrived at the White House for President Nixon's party for diplomatic kids. Basically allowing a group of under 10's to drink as much coke as they wanted and puke all over the floor. I showed great restraint except in my search for the Green Room. As a Hibby, it was important for me to say I ran down the wing in the Green Room. So I did, evading a basketball player in a uniform before escaping back into the melee that was 100's of kids from around the world, screaming and dancing with balloons, it was a Republican white hoose... I was told to do a lot of networking here as they would be my friends of the future, well that's what one kid said to me and I laughed. They didn't support Hibs, Scotland or Brazil so how likely was it that we'd meet again?
I'd just finished writing a play at school. I'd got an A+++, which in today's parlance is like a Paul Hollywood handshake, its worth fuck all, but in the world of imaginary currency, its worth even more than something else. In my case as I got nothing but A's and A+, except my C for handwriting, an affliction derived from using my left hand and not my right. What I cant recall is any attempt made by my teachers to improve my handwriting. I do know I typed all my letters home owing to this affliction. Even now I feel for my audience so much I type so they can read the shit I write, others have suggested handwritten stuff lets you say, "yes it does say that!"
My play was quite a mind fuck of time travel and dual nationality, It involved Robert the Bruce and Jarzinho played on the wing while we were kicking a haggis around Bannockburn. I got to send a cross over for Pele in my disguise as William Wallace and he headed it home. Home of course was a cave which was full of haggis, because you could only header them into the cave, you couldn't get them back unless the spider, who tried and tried again, shifted one. My career in writing stalled after that.
So I hated my 2 years at Darnestown Elementary School, although I did like sitting down for the "I pledge my allegiance to....dah dah dah". I saw it as some kind of soviet style indoctrination that everyone had to do every morning. I was a catholic and I'd never been asked to genuflect and cross myself before the school day so I was fucked if I was going to pledge myself to someone else's flag or country. I had enough trouble with what Britain were doing in Northern Ireland and I was only 9. I hated the union jack and later I'd find out even Mao's China wasn't as bad as Darnestown, although he did melt the woks and that was worse.
I remember my Mum being summoned to the school to explain why I wouldn't stand up. She said I was Scottish. I dont remember a big thing happening when I got home, I just remember never standing again. I created even more harmony, when I memorised all the states, their capitals, their populations, rainfall, and the presidents, the assassinations and then proceeded to be a prick and explain to these kids about their country. "Gee, you're really smart" some 9 year old would tell me. I was far too polite to say, you're fucking stupid. They used dumb, which is a word I associated with deaf, dumb and blind kids who could play pinball. Surely dumb is the word for people who cant speak. Stupid is reserved for you, trust me, I'm really clever, I thought, being an arrogant, autistic, self important precocious prick, albeit age 9.
"When I get Famous" as Patrik Fitzgerald famously sang, I will recount this story, I thought in a time warped way.
I nearly made the font page when my accidental death didnt quite happen. I'd taken the tractor, as we called the sit-on mower, out to cut the back field. The garden in Esworthy Road was 4 acres and so I drove down the hill and back up the other side and started cutting. You could go quite fast going down the hill but it was a bit dangerous (you couldn't exactly do a handbrake tun at the bottom) whilst it was really slow going back up the hill so I elected for not quite so fast, all the time, by cutting across the slope. This was great especially when I started doing the slope as I had to lean into the slope, like I was riding a bike. Then it wasn't so great as the machine rolled onto me and the blades flashed past my head and suddenly I looked like Phil Oakey, 1981, not a great cut for a 9 year old. I was really lucky as nobody saw me and I could keep it that way. As I write this, it feels like my 9 year old self has taken over the narrative and doesn't want to be named. What I remember is putting the tractor back up getting on it and thinking "thank fuck" or possibly "I'd like to thank God, for helping me get the tractor back up, started, and I can now drive it back". The truth is my death was fine but being told how stupid I'd been didn't work well with me.
Watching Gordon, my elder bother, set fire to a tree using an aerosol and a lighter was one of my 10 year old experiences. He wanted to burn the spiders, it's what USA 13 year olds do. He was tormenting spiders which meant he wasn't tormenting me, but it wasn't right that the whole tree was alight and the spider was still evading his flame thrower, (or maybe it was, ha ha). The tree was a cypress and it was higher than the house so I ran and got a hose while shouting "Mum, Gordon's ....set the house on fire". I never missed an opportunity to grass the big tormenting bastard.
Years later when Gillie was fitting a radiator in the house, he needed to weld a joint while in the midst of the onset of a diabetic seizure. The wallpaper and ceiling were on fire when I suggested, 'will I get the fire blanket', to which he replied 'yes and have you got a mars bar'. I got him a couple of fun sized mars bars and they nearly passed my head as he flung them back at me. Luckily I nodded them down to him and he ate. It calmed him enough so he could go and buy a 4 pack from the shops. I was the water carrier in the team and Gillie played centre half so we knew the drill.
Just as when I was 9 the fire was doused and panic averted. Gordon would get his own back numerous times but fire would play a starring role when one of his pals Chic would receive a wee burn at a party in 1980. Scars had just made their album and my folks had headed back to see friends in the USA so this was a cue for Gordon to invite Edinburgh's finest to his 'emptie'. There was always an active band scene in some part of Edinbugh and this one was an awayday from the Tap. The pubs I recall having a real presence at our house parties were The Tap O Lauiston and The Wig'n'Pen/Coppers crew. I remember putting a Coppers advert in Deadbeat in exchange for a pint of Guinness. But enough about Cockburn Street as everyone already knows it was at the centre of this wee creative universe.
So Chic was always an arrogant wee tosser, as I recall, the kind who beautifully lobs the grenade over the shoulder of someone else before darting for safety, and he asked me for a light. In fact his words were "Get me a light!", in that tone of master and servant. As I was 16, speeding and pretty full of my homebrew, I said "aye", leaned over, struck a match and as he beckoned me closer, so he didnt have to sit up, I dropped it on his hairy but quickly balding chest. "You did that on purpose!" he exclaimed, I smiled and walked away. 'Bastard wont do that to me again' I thought.
I had a healthy respect for fire, I liked others to learn, and it went back even further than the tree in Maryland.
In 1969 I was playing, as 6 year olds do, and I'd taken two big armchairs and turned them over facing each other to make a cockpit. The game was going great and it was now a car and I had a silver dish for a steering wheel but then we skidded and I could smell burning. Suddenly I looked round and the fire was licking up the chair. The chairs were covered in this new stuff, elasticated chair covers, yes plastic. I turned off the electric fire and batted the flames before shouting, "Mum, the chair's on fire". Gordon was out so I couldn't blame him.
When my Mum appeared she seemed to thank me for saving the day, when in my head, I started it. Strange how the only eyewitness was me and how I should choose to remember the story!
By 10 my brother Gordon had exacted his usual retribution. Its funny how some people will commit 50 times the original deed and still claim retribution will follow. In this case he wrote Schools Out on my new five year diary, on June 20th, 1973. I say this, knowing full well he knew I had 5 more years writing this diary so his defacing my diary would torment me for 5 years. Yes, readers, which came first, the victim or the bully has been discussed many times before and since my long dissertation on the subject. Every religion just like most communities has its fair share of victims and bullies. Yet, still we just choose to call democracy when we vote for one arsehole bully or the other. I find the worst bullies to be those who head up victim causes, the abusers who work helping out after the hurricane are truly the scum of the earth.
By 11 we were happily heading home to Scotland with an overnight stay in New York. Gordon and I were watching some film and he shouted "you've got a hard on, you've got a hard on!". I didn't know what he meant and as he referred me to my cock which was sticking out of my pyjamas I presumed he meant that. I said stupidly that it just happened sometimes, thinking I possessed some ailment. As time went by I'd remember a day when my mum stopped bathing me with my sister Lucy, being old you're too old for a bath you just need a shower now.
I'm guessing it was because my mum saw me with a "Hard on" as my brother called it. So that's why I dont get a bath anymore. That's really bad.
Even now, I love a hotel with a bath in it. I always have a bath as I feel I've been missing out. Occasionally I have a "Hard on" too. When I soak in the bath, I know I've been missing out. Humans, this one anyway, is supposed to have a bath. We were born from water, well amniotic fluid at least, I'm a bath boy, or a power shower if my limbs are sore....
But back to the TV. I arrived in St Andrews and got paid £100 by the BBC to play the role of a student searching for the end of the raisin string. I'd just become a student so the role was a stretch but for £100 I was fairly elastic. The raisin string thing seemed a bit bizarre. I subsequently found out that at St Andrews you get an academic family, made up of parents who accost you and make you their surrogate. They've been there a few years so are typically in their 3rd or 4th year.
For many this is a great way to get acclimatised but for someone still in the eager throes of adolescent rebellion, an anathema. I still didn't know why people were studying at university instead of just partying.
Still, £100? That's a lot of partying, back to work.
Next thing filming takes me to the castle in St Andrews. I'd never been before and we filmed outside and down into the deepest dungeon and then out again following this fucking string. I'm not sure I got it but, £100 when Guinness was 30p a pint, I got that. I studied Maths, Economics & Psychology, I will enjoy being a student far more with 333 pints of Guinness. That's 33 a week for the whole of the first term, or 60 a week for what's left of it!
"Look scared", "Look surprised", lots of shouts.
"Look thirsty!" shouted one of my pals, I was, and hungry. "Do we break for lunch?" I helpfully asked. "No we're nearly finished, one more location", came back the reply and off we trotted in the minibus to the sign at Guardbridge,
"St Andrews 3 Miles".
I did my "look tired" pose and acted superbly when attempting "try and pull the sign out of the ground".
I'm tiring, but hanging in thinking, 'we've gone a bit too far but my tired and hungry poses were going well, 5 more minutes'.
So well in fact, that someone said that's a wrap. How different it was 40 years later when I saw close up how Danny Boyle and his film makers worked on Trainspotting 2. I remember looking at some of the older ones and wondering, 'did you ever work on that Terry Wogan True or False game show in the early 80's when people were allegedly rolling cheeses down hills or students received raisin strings attached to things'.
In my defence there was a lot of time between takes that day as the clouds kept covering the sun.
Just like so many things in our world, the weather is everything.
Once you had made it into the inner sanctuary of anything back in the 80's it was a golden ticket. Paul had been successful with the Prats and now got a single out on chicken jazz, https://youtu.be/3nu9W4HxkL8. That seemed a perfectly good reason to go on the front page of Deadbeat, that and my photographic credit for snapping Paul with a coffee, ashtray, the Peanut butter and silver tray, last seen in a movie about a cockpit that goes on fire, circa 1969.
Listening now, it brings back great memories and my bro's melancholic sax gently slides around the lament. I think he was with APF or Funhouse at the time and Chicken Jazz was Mike Scott's label so it makes sense. It is hard to hear expressions like 'you're so dumb', one of those that get the shackles rising in me, but Americana was all the rage then, at least there's no "this sucks" expression.
When we interviewed Roddy Frame after the gig in Dundee and Stu the roadie told us its 'all sex'n'drugs'sausage rolls' I wanted a t-shirt made! Only months would pass as we were given free passes everywhere and when Annie Lennox invited us up to share some chat after the Dundee gig it just felt the doors were always open. A huge thanks to the promoters at the time, whether they be Stuart Clumpas, Willie Potts at Night Moves or the guys from Regular. They kept us going.
It's still the best experience I ever had doing Deadbeat and I can close my eyes still and be sitting chatting with Hilary and Annie Lennox and not wondering why I was in the room. We were just out to try and promote wee bands, try and get them a bit more exposure, something to add to their demo when they sent it off to the labels. When Annie asked a roadie to bring some tequila up, I just thought Charlie and the chocolate factory, what's not to like!
Annie gave us her address and we religiously sent her a copy of every Deadbeat, laughing all the time that she must've found a use for it, maybe to put under a leg of the shaky table or pew.
We didn't care, more and more wee bands were getting words written about their music which got them gigs and sometimes even signed.
No matter how many bands we reviewed and went to see, we couldn't even scratch the surface of Scotland, never mind the UK scene. Like the parties when the folks went to the states, you'd have a small collection, a wee post punk community where random members of the Cubs, Fire Engines, APF, Scars, Josef K would dream, scheme and live.
In the end, that's all its ever been about, living. If there's one thing Deadbeat taught me it was some people get a voice, get a platform. get signed, but the machinery continues to churn and chooses its own.
Getting signed, getting famous, making money or being secure enough to make your own art. Or was it just to be able to pout and sit on a throne in your village.
I like to look at Discogs and see the Wee Cherubs single at £200 or even Ahab's Party girl selling for £50. I think someone has a box in their attic - I know I've still got mine.
So if its about money, forget the crypto currency, digging out copies of the Deadbeat tape is my new favourite hobby, I'm selling them for 300 pints of Guinness at 1983, 84 & 85 prices!
But there's no need for conclusions, there's just plenty reasons to be cheerful, now where's that manuscript, '1000 reasons why I love smoking', i started in 2005, I could do with a big fat one now!
