50s pop such as Guy Mitchell, Johnnie Ray & Frankie Laine. Previously I'd listened to my dad's 78's & musically grew up a very old-fashioned boy. I remember singing Tiptoe Thru The Tulips in the playground at primary school & it wasn't even the
contemporary cover by Tiny Tim - I knew it from a scratchy 78.
Not long after I started secondary school Elvis died and, hearing his records played back-to-back on radio forth the following
night, I fell in love with his music. I still love it. In quite historically accurate style, the Beatles came next for me,
after my dad gave me a book of their lyrics. I Am The Walrus fired my imagination & they are still my favourite band.
My parents bought me my first guitar when I was 14 - I wanted to emulate McCartney & Denny Laine singing Mull Of Kintyre:
it didn't look too hard in the video.
I recall when I was 15 Dixons in the St James Centre in Edinburgh having a sale & picking up cassettes of The Beatles blue 67-70, The Stones' Some Girls & Simon & Garfunkels's Greatest Hits which had strange applause merging the songs. The visuals painted by the Beatles & S&G songs were immediately vivid to me (although Nana Mouskouri fave El Condor Pasa never hammered or nailed me except to the fast forward button). I dug moons rising over open fields, pretty nurses selling poppies from trays but I couldn't incorporate this into my own manuscripts of unpublished rhyme. It would be a further eight years till I tumbled blindly into Costello-style wordplay - me minus the picture painting of, say Sleep Of The Just from King Of America or Battle Old Bird & Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head from Blood & Chocolate. Yeah, between though & expression lies a lifetime, especially when your means to an end is to stubbornly recycle the same forced pun couplets into any lank melody that'll have them. Previous Roy was trying to create songs by some osmosis-like process rather than letting in the air & empathy they needed to breathe. I can hear it in my over-strident voice in tapes from that period...
My first efforts at recording had been inspired by my love of early 60s echo - the black self-contained mystery surrounding a record like Roy Orbison's Only The Lonely. To try to achieve something similar I used to tie a Boots cassette player microphone to an unemployed tall lamp stand and encase it in an opened, empty biscuit tin.
Back to a holiday in Canada in 1979... I bought With The Beatles & Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan. That Christmas, the BBC broadcast
all the Beatles films, including their Shea Stadium concert. I was never the same again.
I started listening to the Stones, Bowie, Sun rockabilly, country, Motown & Stax & a BBC radio show called 25 Years Of Rock.
I really liked the psychedelic tunes I heard on the show. Another great BBC show, Star Choice, hosted by various celebs from
Bowie to Frank Zappa (not a fan of the latter but showed good taste) introduced me to Sweet Jane & All Tomorrow's Parties
by The Velvets, 96 Tears by ? & The Mysterions & endless great stuff.
Around this time my friend Mark & I formed a non-performing. initially imaginary, band called the Rhino Disciples (name from
random dictionary opening). People from school were becoming involved with the local music scene (Josef K, Fire Engines, Little
Red Duffelcoats) but I wasn't quite part of the in crowd who attended gigs but I liked the music I heard, particularly Poor
Old Soul by Orange Juice. The chords reminded me of Dear Prudence.
Mark & I did some recording, both at home & in a studio beneath a record shop in Forest Road, Edinburgh, but I didn't really
pursue music as a pastime. I did get in the Melody Maker in 1985 but that was for my Reader's Chart. They printed my photo
with the comment "here's a good-looking boy to thrill our lady readers" (!). They also printed my address but I never heard
from any readers, ladylike or otherwise..
