This is going to be the most pointless page on the internet but I’m going to do it for my own satisfaction, rather than for the benefit of anyone. If you’re thinking about reading it, take a pro-plus first 🙂
I can’t remember when my obsession with music started. I do remember being really small and sitting on the floor with my ear against the speaker of the family ‘radiogram’. Remember these large pieces of wooden furniture the size of a sideboard, a speaker on either side, a huge lid that opened, containing a turntable, a radio tuner and space to store you LPs. For all you young things in your 40s, I’m not talking a ‘music centre’. I mean a huge fucking piece of furniture that played records and the radio. Anyway, I would sit for hours with me ear welded to one of the speakers. My mum even got a wee article written about me in the local paper because I could sing along, word perfect, to pretty much every song that came on, whether it was Perry Como or Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Titch. They were in fact, a favourite of mine. I still have the old 45’s of Zabadac and the Legend of Xanadu ! I was probably about 4.
Cut forward four years or so and my older sister was flying through grades on the piano like a virtuoso, so I bugged the shit out of my parents about wanting to learn the guitar. (I’m sure you’re asking, what went wrong ??). I remember being taken to Biggar’s in Glasgow where I got this 3/4 sized acoustic guitar for the princely sum of £9.17. It had steel strings, not nylon, and had the action of a cheese grater made from barbed wire. In the wee notice board in the shop, my dad found a guitar teacher in Wishaw, close to where my gran, who we visited every Saturday lived. First lesson was a piece of old cardboard with the chord boxes for G, C & D (and D7) scrawled on and a photocopied sheet of words and chords for ‘The Wabash Cannonball’. Next week was Volume 1 of Mel Bay’s ‘A Tune A Day for Guitar’ where I was taught (kinda) to ply the melody reading from the music and also play through the song with the chords. This was done at the rate of a tune a week. Fuck Mel Bay and his Tune A Day shite. I ended up pretty much being able to sight read and play the melodies but I struggled like fuck with the chords. We can fast forward through the next four years, working through the Mel Bay series of books. I still couldn’t really do the chords properly. It took me a few years to work out why. At the age of 12 or 13, I chucked it.
When I was 15 or 16, (1978/79) we happened to be visiting my cousins (one of whom is roughly the same age as me). She had an old cataloge strat copy and WEM 20 watt amp. I asked her for a shot and noodled around for a bit and finally realised that the reason I couldn’t fret chords was because a guitar is not meant to have an action that’s an inch high at the 12th fret. The things you learn, eh ? My cousins guitar and amp was promptly borrowed and off I went again, this time with no lessons or any of that shite. Mostly just fannying around with the odd mate who played a bit as well. I was the master of learning bits of songs. Never all of them. The intros to ‘All Night Long’ and ‘Since you’ve been gone’ by Rainbow and other stuff off the records I listened to, The Sweet, UFO, Rainbow, Sabbath, that sort of thing 🙂 Inevitably, as 16 year old boys with guitars do we found some dick with a drum kit and ‘started a band’ 🙂
A few iterations and a few sackings later, we actually ended up with a four piece and the folk in it were actually quite good (if you exclude me). I’d been ‘relegated’ to playing bass. We used to hire this studio in High Street in Glasgow, which hired out a room with PA, drums, mics etc, during the night, for about £3 an hour or something. We used to book it from like 1 AM to 6 AM on a Saturday morning, trying hard to put a rock covers set together. The guitar player was (and still is, shit-hot). I won’t embarrass the poor bloke by naming him. The drummer proved somewhat unreliable. I had another pal who was an excellent drummer, and used to phone his house at midnight on a Friday and ask him to step in for our rehearsals and to his credit, he did, and he was bloody good ! Long story short, I fell out with the singer and lead guitarist over the drummer, and like 99% of teenage bands, we were finished.
I went back to noodling in my bedroom (with a guitar of course, not what you were thinking). The guitar and stuff like that went on the back burner for a few years until I was about 21 or so.
I had no interest in messing about with c**ts in bands but then, I bought one of them Casio Keyboards (probably in about 1984). They had loads of preset drum patterns with bass lines etc which you played by playing chords with the left hand. Pretty much all musical theory that I learned as a kid had gone from my brain, but a few remnants of scale and chord construction remained. Enough for me to work out keyboard chords anyway. At roughly the same time, I bought a flat down in Broomhouse (near where Calderpark Zoo used to be), right next to a pub/restaurant called The Mailcoach Inn (or The Ostlers Halt) as it’s sometimes known. So, one one hand, I was learning old fashioned pop standards on my casio, recording them on a big Philips twin deck cassette and using the recordings to play guitar and ‘sing’ over and on the other hand I was going into the pub next door a lot. The pub had music on every Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. It was one of them old fashioned music pubs with a house double manual organ and a drumkit on a wee stage, a WEM copycat and PA speakers built into the walls. There was an M.C., a keyboard player and at the weekends a drummer joined them. It was one of these places where people who could sing came along and got up for couple of numbers 90% of which were actually pretty good. The thing that made the place though was the keyboard player. An older guy called Iain McDonald. This c**t knew every fucking song that had ever been written whether it came from the 1920s or was in the charts at the time. He could then play that song in any key you wanted. If you didn’t know your key, he would have it by the time you’d sung five words. I was in absolute awe of this guy. He was a fucking genius.
Being such a regular in the pub, I got to know the guys fairly well. The keyboard player told me to come in on the Tuesdays and Thursdays and bring my guitar. I protested that i didn’t know 95% of the material that was getting played, but he said he would just shout chords for me to strum and off I went. If you’ve never done anything like that, take my word for it, you learn A LOT in a short space of time. I would occasionally get up and sing a couple of songs with the house band and strum chords etc for the regular singers, sitting quietly behind the keyboard player. At the same time, I had traded my casio for a better one where you could program and record four tracks of drums and instruments so I started making up backing tracks for stuff that you couldn’t actually play properly with the casio autochords. Bearing in mind, most solo turns you saw in boozers in those days had an acoustic guitar and maybe some crappy pattern drum machine that went ‘pew tss tss’ and sounded shit. I was building up an extensive collection of ‘backing tapes’ made with my casio 🙂
By sheer chance, a regular in the pub next door, who i had the occasional pint with, came to my door one night and asked if I fancied going for pint. I was fannying about with my music stuff in the house and he asked to hear something. I played him something and he was like “fuck sake man, that’s great, how do you do that’. It wasn’t great but it was OK. In comparison to most of what you heard solo acts doing in pubs (guys singing ‘Your Cheating Heart’ on an acoustic using a cheap mic through a crap amp), I suppose it probably did sound not bad.
A week or so later, the same guy comes to my door and announces that a pub he drinks in after work, in Duke Street in Glasgow was looking for a solo turn to do Friday nights and he had told the owner that he knew someone and would bring me along. No audition, no interview no discussion. He had said I was doing it. End of story. For a week I crammed in loads of learning songs and recording backing tracks with the casio and the big Philips double cassette. I was hyped up ! A trip to The Barras secure a second hand H&H 100 Watt PA and a Boss Analogue delay/ I already had a couple of guitar effects pedals. An SM58 from McCormacks had me ready to go.
On the night, I was fucking petrified. I don’t mean scared or nervous, I mean fucking petrified. I really don’t know how I managed to get going. The venue was a pub called The Overdale in Duke Street owned by some supposed gangster, but normally run by his wife. Right across from Tennant’s Brewery and next door to an old Victorian hotel which had fallen on hard times and become a homeless hostel (The Great Eastern Hotel). It wasn’t Las Vegas but it might as well have been. The audience were were made up of a couple of relations, some down and outs, a few already drunk women and a bunch of crazy bastards from a local traveler site. I’m not sure how I got started because of the abject fear I was feeling, but I did. At the end of the first song I got a ripple of applause. Two or three songs in, a few people got up to dance. The material was pretty mundane. Status Quo, Elton John, Dr Hook, some sixties standards, some old songs I know from The MailCoach, Wonderful Tonight, that kinda thing. It went as well as could be expected. Every night the boss gangsta wasn’t in it went well, when he was in, he would dig me up for stuff like coming in late when I hadn’t. After probably about three months, I got sick of his pish and just never went back. Problem was I was now infected with playing live.
Just to be clear here, even at that time, I had no delusions of grandeur. I just loved doing it, and so far the punters I was doing it in front of seemed to quite like it.
I went off in search of another gig and landed myself a trial night in a pub called The Lamp Post, further up Duke Street. In these days pubs closed at 11 PM, so most gigs were 8.30 PM, two one hour sets, with a half hour break in the middle. My first set didn’t go that well, but the second did, punters up dancing and cheering. I was stoked !! The guy who booked the bands paid me and then told me to fuck off. Yer shite mate, we don’t want ye back ! A great lesson in being to quick to feel good about yourself 🙂
Off in search of another gig. Tried all the places round the Barras with no success, but a week or so later I got a call (house phones only in them days kids) from a guy that owned The Wee Mans. Just before that Barras. This was one of these classic pubs of its time. On a corner of what used to be an old Victorian block, but the rest had been demolished and only the pub remained. A bar, mostly full of jakes and a small lounge mostly couples and groups of women. Suffering again from nerves after the recent ‘fuck off, you’re shite’ from the Lamp Post, I got kicked off and right from the get go, the punters liked it. At my break, the barman tells me the boss wants to see me in his ‘wee room’. Fearing the worst, I go to see the man and he tells me he’s firing his normal turn and I’m doing Tuesday, Friday and Saturday every week, until he tells me otherwise. The Glasgow Garden Festival was on by this time (so i know it was 1988) and for some reason the pubs were allowed special licenses to open until midnight. This meant more material and longer sets but more money. I think I was on £45 a night or something. I’ve no idea if that was good for what I was doing but it was good enough for me.
Around that time, the gear was all changing. I changed my big humphy old Philips twin cassette thing for a TEAC Portastudio and my casio got binned for an old Roland Juno analogue synth and a Yamaha RX7 Drum Machine (programmable, not patterns) so the ‘backing tapes’ got better and more sophisticated.
I think the Wee Mans actually lasted about a year before they got sick of me and I got replaced in exactly the same way that I replaced the guy before me. One day you’re just unceremoniously ‘oot’. It didn’t matter really, as punters over the previous year generally seemed to like me and my name was known to other Gallowgate boozers. Over the next year or so, I played in loads of pubs down that way. Eastenders, The Earl of Lennox, McKinnons, Bairds, Norma Jeans, and a few others who’s names elude me now.
One day, I get home from my ‘proper job’ to find a message on my answering machine (oh yes, the good old days) from some guy from an agency in Shawfield. If you were pub muso in Glasgow around the time, you’ll remember them. Nighlife Enterprises. They ran pub quizzes and live music nights in pubs. Over the next few years they had me all over the place. All the The Barrachnie Inn (actually my local when I lived with my parents), The Piperack in Shettleston, The Atlantis and The Cleddens in Clydebank, A couple of pubs I can’t remember at Paisley Road Toll.
My material was coming on as well, I was doing a bit of Chris Rea, some Dire Straits, Springsteen (I didn’t say I did it well, I just did it) I still did the Sex Pistols, Quo, Elvis, Squeeze, T Rex, Neil Diamond, the obligatory Hi Ho Silver Lining and Shang a Lang 🙂 I used to try and spot the songs of the time that would have some kind of longevity and spend hours trying to recreate the drums on the RX7, record the bass using the Juno and maybe stick a track or two of simple keyboards on there too. I was never going to set the heather alight, but I never set out to. The ‘Nightlife Years’ are a bit of a blur, but to this day, some 35 years on, I still talk to Tam, the guy who did the music bookings for Nightlife. I also did a brief stint with the Ken Meikle Agency but they were a bit too up-market for me and didn’t really have a lot of work at my end of the market. They were more into weddings, dinner dances, golf clubs so I kinda just stopped phoning them and they didn’t seem particularly bothered by that 🙂
There are too many stories to mention from the years with Nightlife, some hilarious, some tragic, but one deserves a mention. Barry, the owner of the agency, phoned me and asked me if I’d be willing to go to Braemar. I jumped at it. Decent money, food, accommodation and travel expenses. Off I went, heading for a place called The Fife Arms Hotel. On getting there, I find a car park full of Wallace Arnold buses, a hotel that was entirely made of tartan carpets and stags heeds selling tea and scones to elderly English tourists. The manager, a very nice older gentleman, showed me around. When he takes me into the lounge, I spy a poster on the wall proclaiming ‘SATURDAY NIGHT, an evening of traditional Scottish music, with Ally Maxwell’ (for those that don’t know, that’s my real name). Boy, did this guy have the wrong fuckin’ act booked !! I tried to explain that this was about to go horribly, terribly wrong, but as the manager said, there’s nothing we can do now. Just go do your best 🙂 I played for about 45 mins to shocked expressions and a deafening silence at the end of every song and pensioner couples looking at me like i’d just stolen their life savings. It was a fucking disaster.
I went for my break a bit early, trying to work out what to do and during that time a group of about 20 complete bams come in, dressed in 14th century Scottish outfits, complete with swords and shields. I didn’t know at the time and had never heard of them, but they were from an organization who re-enacted battles from history and during the weekends they did that, they lived the life. The clothes and the gear were all as authentic as possible. Anyway, I was thinking they were hopefully more my kind of audience. At that point, one of them comes up to me at the bar and shouts ‘Haw you, are you the boy that used to play in Eastenders’. I reply in the affirmative and he starts shouting to all his pals ‘It’s that boy that used to play in Eastenders !’ More and more of them trooped in, the hotel residents are retreating in fear and I start my second half with a lounge absolutely rammed to the gunnels with pissed up blokes from the east end of Glasgow (my territory !), hell bent on partying. That second hour was completely mental. They were on tables, on chairs, throwing each other around the place, singing, screaming, cheering and just generally going mental. The beer was flowing like a river in spate and everyone was bevvied and having a time of it. At the end, the manager came and told me they’d never had a night like that, it was the best night they’d ever seen etc etc and he couldn’t be more pleased with how it went. He wanted me back and would be phoning the agency first thing Monday to arrange it. Now, I’m not stupid…I’m more than aware that I’d just had the luckiest escape ever, but it was most certainly an ‘experience’ and a good one at that. As an addendum to this story, I should point out that the manager phoned the agency on the Monday and demanded to have me back. Although I knew better, I let my heart rule my head and did it. Guess what happened ?? It was a lounge full of elderly Wallace Arnold punters and I went down like a lead balloon. 🙂 You live and learn. Well, you should, but I generally don’t.
I carried on playing gigs around Glasgow for Nightlife but I managed to secure myself a four month stint up in Aviemore playing at the Freedom Inn every Saturday night from New Year to the end of April. i think it would be ’91 or ’92 by this time. Food, accommodation, gigs, money, expenses. It was good generally. Some nights weren’t so great as the hotel had older punters who went to bed early and it was a bit dead, but 75% of the time was younger folk up for a weekend skiing or on the piss. The bar chucked out at midnight for non residents, so I played till then. Unfortunately the bar stayed open for residents until the residents didn’t want to drink any more. As time went on and I got friendly with the staff, bed time got later and later and I started going home with less money than I arrived with. One particular night, the Mrs went to bed about 1 AM and I stayed up ‘just to finish this pint’. She came down in a less than good mood at 7.15 AM to tell me to get to my fuckin’ bed. I did my four months but never went back to do it again. I wasn’t allowed 🙂
By this time, it was all change on the music technology as well. I now had a dedicated wee box room in the house with a Roland D10 and an Alesis MMT8 8 Track sequencer. I messed with Atari STs and Cubase around then, but the D10 and the MMT8 was my go to for creating backings. I still tried to keep them fairly simple. Multiple hours trying to replicate the drums as much as possible, a bass track as close as I could work out to the original and a couple of tracks of keyboady bits if needed, maybe some strings to fill out the sound. Live, I used a Roland D110 (the rack mount version of the D10) and an Alesis Datadisk, both in a 3U rack box with a power amp into the extra rack space. For the first time, the backing tracks were on floppy disc and the old cassettes were in the bin.
I carried on doing gigs for Nightlife though not as often, snagged some on my own without agency assistance but it was starting to appeal a bit less than before.
I got involved in another couple of things (of a musical nature) around that time but I can’t really be arsed getting into them.
Suddenly, we’re in August ’92 and I’m getting married to a young lady I started going out with in 1980 ! We still are. (Or at least we are until she reads this). The gigging carried on but I was only maybe playing a couple of times a month. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Forward to November ’93 and my daughter is born. Gigging took a bit of a back seat although not completely out of the picture, it wasn’t either as regular or important to me.
Fast forward to 1994 and I took voluntary redundancy from the ‘proper job’ I’d had since I was sixteen, believe it or not, as a research scientist at The National Engineering Laboratory in East Kilbride. Despite working there for nearly sixteen years, I pretty much hated it. I didn’t like having bosses and it showed. Looking back I know I was an obnoxious wee bastard and must have been a nightmare. At one point, I was moved to a different department and for a while, had the only boss i ever actually liked, an older guy called Jim Humphries. Things looked up at first but Jim got quite ill and took early retirement. He was a supremely intelligent character with a killer sense of humour, liked a bevvy and as long as the work got done, he didn’t worry to much about how or when. His patter and put downs used to leave me in stitches. I remember some discussion was being had with a handful of people and Jim was describing some older engineering process or another. Some smarmy gobshite dismissed him with a wave, saying ‘Yes Jim, but that was before my time.’ Jim half killed him with a look and responded ‘Yes, so were the Romans, but I’m sure you’ll have heard of them. After all, you’re not a fucking idiot, are you ?’ I loved that guy. If you ever watched The Fast Show, Jim looked and sounded like Roly Birkin QC. Sadly missed !
Anyway, following redundancy I had a very short stint as the world’s most unsuccessful private hire taxi driver and did the occasional gig. I also found out that the only thing I actually gained from my time at The NEL was an aptitude and knowledge of IT systems that was actually sought after in the outside world. I did a couple of short term IT contract gigs in the technology and banking sector and then started my own IT consultancy company in 1995. At that point the gigging stopped totally. I didn’t have the time of the headspace.
In 1999, my son was born and the music gear remained firmly in the attic, and I carried on consulting (or insulting) the IT world.
In 2005 I moved to The Isle Of Bute and things were about to change. I was still an IT consultant, but after 11 years, the financial motivation was partly gone and I still did it, but took lengthy periods off between contracts, choosing to spend more time at home.
Rothesay (the main town on Bute) didn’t have much of a pub music scene when I moved there. There were only ever one or two things on on a Saturday night, and generally that was about it, but ‘fate’ was about to intervene. I went for a pint one night at a pub fairly close to my house and they had a kind of a jam session. Just guys with acoustic guitars singing some folk songs and stuff. Low key and fairly pleasant to listen to. This particular night, there was only a couple of guys playing and a couple having a pint. A right deed night. I didn’t know anyone. One of the guys asked me if I played or wanted to join in. I literally hadn’t played in a decade. I sat in and played a few songs with them and sang a wee bit. It felt good 🙂
There was a guy who played at these open jam sessions (again, I won’t name him, i don’t like dragging ‘real people’ into this because I’m only writing it for my own benefit and maybe two or three people who may read it) who wanted to get into proper ‘gigging in the pubs’. He managed to get himself on in one of the local pubs and a load of people went along to give him some support. When i went down, he had an acoustic guitar plugged into a wee 6 W practice amp and a microphone plugged into an old fucked up Fender guitar amp 🙂 I tried to tell him that wouldn’t work for him, but he literally knew fuck all about the required gear. I told him to wait fifteen minutes and I jumped up the road and loaded my gear into the car and set it up for him in the pub. (remember my gear has been in storage for 10 years, except my old ’85 strat which i took out every now and again, played for 4 or 5 mins then put away again. Just before he was about to start, through my gear, he had an attack of nerves and said he couldn’t do it and would I do a couple of songs while he steadied himself. I did it. I pretended I didn’t want to, but if you’ve ever gigged in any capacity you’ll know fine well that I wanted to 🙂
Long story short, the owner of the pub asked me to do a night for him, which I agreed to do, but not for money. I didn’t really plan to get involved in all this again, so me just doing it as a freebie would make it feel like a one off. That went well, so he asked me to do one a month. Fuck it, why not. The pub 100 yards up the road decided they wanted to get in on the act so I started doing occasionals for them as well. Then, one of the bigger pubs in town called me and asked me to do Fridays for the summer. Yep, it’s mid 2005 and we’re back on the merry go round again 🙂
For the next four or five years, I played in a various pubs in Rothesay and Port Bannatyne. The Golfers, The Gluepot, The Port Inn, The Anchor, Ghillies, The Islander, The Black Bull, maybe others but my memory is a bit hazy of that because I was still working away from home during the week as an IT contractor and doing (normally) one gig per weekend. It was good, because it was just kinda keeping my hand in but not something that consumed a lot of time and energy.
In 2010, I was playing in The Glue Pot at an event organized by a guy who had recently moved to the island. This guy was an out of this world good guitarist, but also a complete cunt. I won’t use his real name, but we can call him Mr Temperamental-man 🙂 By sheer coincidence, another guy who was playing at the same event earlier was drinking in the bar next door (probably emptying the bar of Stella !). He came in with his sax, well oiled and joined in a tune or two. This bloke was (unknown to me) a pissed up sax playing singer, legend and force of nature going by the name of Gerry O’Hagan. Most people locally will know Gerry. A brilliant entertainer, singer and all round mental case. We had a (slightly drunken) chat and he said that, rather than bring his guitarist and keyboard player to the island for gigs, would I come along and do the guitar/backing vocals etc for him. I really didn’t expect anything to come of it, but we did it anyway and we actually carried on doing it for about four years. Gerry is one of these rare characters who’s simple presence in the room makes everything fun. The guy is simply a riot with an incredible ability to get all the words wrong but still be fucking brilliant at the same time !.
Bob Asher & Gerry O’Hagan in The Islander Bar, 2014
Before moving on, I need to relate one story that typifies what a headcase (in a good way) Gerry is. One summer, I was playing in The Black Bull from 2-5 PM on Saturdays (to coincide with the booze cruise that is The Waverley) and then 9-12 PM in The Golfers with Gerry. There was a group of three or four in, sitting really really close to where I was set up and lets say ‘they’d had a few’. Gerry came in for a pint and I dragged him up to do a couple of songs. He did his usual ‘Baker Street’ on the sax and just as he was about to do another one, someone sitting right close up to him said something that I didn’t hear. I assume it wasn’t a compliment. Some more words were exchanged, the geezer pushed Gerry, Gerry pushed the geezer and, being a bit bevvied, he fell backwards onto a table of drinks, knocking off a load of glasses and a lot of beer onto the floor. Someone else squared up to Gerry, I ripped my guitar off and jumped in and everyone else headed for the door. We all ended up in the street, with a bit of shoving and swearing etc. Just handbags at dawn really. When everyone drifted away, me and the bold Gerry walked back in to find an empty pub and staff mopping up beer and sweeping up broken glass. Ten seconds earlier he had been in a frothing rage, but being the crazy character he is, he cracked a big smile, turned round, grabbed me in a big bear hug and said “So, do you think they liked us ? Think they’ll book us back ?’. Love that guy. He’s still around and back on the island gigging the odd time (as of Spring 2025). If he’s on, somewhere, go and see him. You won’t be disappointed.
Again, before moving on, I need to go back a bit first. Not long after moving to the island, I went out for few pints with an old mate who also lived there. He’d been there longer than me, so he took me out to show me the pubs etc. We went off down the south end of the town, starting at The Regent (now the Summer’s Bay), The Palace, The Golfers, The Royal (yes, it was still open then) having a drink or three in each. It was almost the end of the night so we went in to The Esplanade, which I was told had karaoke/DJ some nights. Not this night though. We went in and it was empty. The owner said it was ok to come in, so in we went for a last drink or two. There was a bit of general chit chat and I was introduced to a young girl called Amy, who worked behind the bar, serving tables with food and also did the karaoke. We chatted for a bit and she said, come on then, lets switch the stuff on and do some songs, which we did. She was (and still is) a hell of a good singer. I’d see her occasionally if I ever went into the Esplanade for a pint. She carried on doing the karaoke for a number of years.
During the years from 2005 to 2014 I gigged solo and I gigged with Gerry. It was all good fun. Also, during that period, I would do the odd event for the owner of The Victoria Hotel (also the owner of The Esplanade). One new year, and I can’t remember what year it was, I was setting up in the afternoon in The Victoria, for a Hogmanay gig that night. The owner informed me that Amy from The Esplanade would be coming along to set up too as she would be doing a bit of a spot at the Hogmanay night. She brought in her backing tracks, mic etc and I set her stuff up through my PA and sound checked her. All ready and good to go. While chatting, one of us (and I really don’t know which one it was) suggested we try a couple of songs together. She flicked though her backing tracks and we had a pop at Meatloaf’s ‘Paradise By The Dashboard Light’. Now, bearing in mind we’d never actually sung together, I was gobsmacked at how good I thought it sounded. She could sing, she could harmonise and we seemed to be perfectly in tune and time, without any previous rehearsal. Nothing came of it at that time, except that for the three or four years I did Hogmanay at The Victoria, she’d come along and do her spot and we’d have a wee bit of a practice session in the afternoon. Despite only singing two or three songs once a year, without practice, we were always perfectly in sync.
To be continued……