Espedair Street

SIX

The weirdness began about the end of '74, after we'd finished the album, before anything had really started happening. We'd worked ten and twelve hour days in the studio, used shifts of technicians, seen virtually nothing of London except the inside of the studio in Ladbroke Grove and the flat off Oxford Street. We still overran by a week, but taking a month to do an album — even with the mixing still to be done — was hardly slow. Some bands take that long for one track.

I got out of the flat exactly once, to wander down Oxford Street and Carnaby Street (it was a relic even then). Bowie clones and skinheads; platform boots and every now and again the confusing sight of people wearing narrow-legged jeans but otherwise looking ... I don't know; up to date, fashionable. There was change in the air: I could almost smell it. I got back to the flat feeling relieved to be out of that bewildering gaggle of styles and sensations.

I still don't understand fashion. Why do people dress up in new styles in the first place if they're only going to act all embarrassed and ashamed about them later? So flares and platform boots look stupid now; just wait till you see how sniggeringly daft spikey hair and torn black T -shirts look in a decade's time. At least flares had the practical advantage of making it possible to change your jeans without taking your boots off. Try that in drainpipes.

I remember thinking it Meant Something that hippies seemed to grow out of the ground and be fuzzy round the edges; the loon pants like stems, the puff-ball hair, the leather fringes and flared, open cuffs; hippies seemed to be part of what was around them; they faded out at the periphery. The harder look inspired by punk (but now very much post-punk) has meant definite boundaries; straight legs, very assertive looking footwear, and no-nonsense upperworks; so now everybody looks like para-civilians; streetwise combatants in the battle for jobs.

But that's now and this was then, in the very best age there ever is; when you're young enough not to have lost that head of enthusiasm, and it's still possible to feel this is where the wave breaks, with you and your generation; now the same old rolling bore breaks up and the frothy fun starts; surf's up!

Well, maybe next time...

We were back in Scotland for a month, in a curious limbo. We'd been excited and frightened and nervous making the album. Studios, approached correctly, are just great big toys, and immense fun to play about with, but we were a little intimidated by it all. We'd been living on a sort of continual high for that month — a natural high, apart from the odd spliff in the flat to relax before crashing out, and one occasion when we took some speed to get us through a long session on 'Answer and Question', which we were determined to finish that night.

Once it was over, and we were back in Paisley, it all seemed unreal. I had to tell myself it had really happened, and I think my flatmates thought the whole deal had fallen through, or I'd made it all up. My ma obviously hadn't heard that it was a cliche for the mothers of budding rock stars to lament the fact their sons or daughters didn't have a real job.

I was being careful with the money. Once I'd worked out how much I'd have to save for tax, and how much just living would cost if we had to move to London — which looked likely — my share didn't look all that immense after all. Also, I think I was being superstitious. I felt that if I spent it too showily, I'd be punished. Not God but Fate would turn everything round again; the album would flop. There would be no single, the band would fold, or they'd find somebody else to play bass and write their songs... the best tactic was not to have too high a profile. Then Fate wouldn't notice. Intense hubris, tasteless extravagance, would attract some terrible reckoning.

I always meant to look Jean Webb up, to keep in touch, to take her out for a drink or a meal, or just pop round to her mum's to say hello, but I never quite got into the right mood; I always felt there'd be a better time, when my future was more settled, when I had some really good news. For whatever reason, I never did get around to it, even though I still thought about her now and again.

So we practised the songs from the album — which we were now heartily sick of — and started on some new tunes. I had worked on these latest songs for much longer by myself, with what I thought was my new-found mastery of compositional technique, before showing them to the others. I wanted these to be mine. Having Dave and Chris rework the first batch of songs, and then, just when I was starting to get used to the material in that form, having it all altered again by Mike Milne, our producer, had been a traumatic experience. This time I wanted to present them all with something more like the finished product (that was how I thought of it. This was before I developed my hatred of the word 'product').

We played some gigs in Glasgow and Edinburgh; my first on stage. To my extreme and delighted surprise, I enjoyed it. I did keep in the background, and though there was a spotlight on me, that was only lit when the rest of the band were spotlighted too; I was never singled out.

I refused to do a bass solo. This was almost unheard of for any band hoping to be classed as anything like 'progressive', but I was adamant. I wore dark clothes on stage, I already had the mirror shades and I'd started growing my beard the day I left Paisley for London and the recording studio.

I was getting my act together, man. The record company wasn't too keen on this at first; they wanted us all to be nice, outgoing kids with bright smiles. Having a six and a half foot semi-scrofulous mutant in the band wasn't really what they wanted at all, but as I did write the songs they couldn't get rid of me, so they must have hoped they could take the rough edges off my strangeness. Some hope. They were confused at first, uncertain whether our youth and the good looks of Dave and Chris meant they ought to try aiming us at the teenybopper market, or Dave's guitar-hero style and my unorthodox but still hummable songs suited us for the progressive charts. Singles or albums? Sensibly, they eventually went for the latter .

Albums were outselling singles by then anyway, and even a record company exec high on coke and his own creative genius knows there's more staying power in a 'serious' rock band than a short-lived teenybopper phenomenon (though of course your teenybopper band will shift a hell of a lot of product very quickly, which means they'll sell all their records while under your contract and not have the time to head for another label offering better royalties).

Mike Milne had had a lot of pressure on him from the company to do his bit in packaging us; they wanted a strong 'credible' album, but they wanted a single too; something smooth and easily marketable, something ideal for Radio One, something they could sell. A cheaper producer would have given them just what they wanted. Milne's time was expensive because he came fully equipped with brains, including the bit people call heart, or the soul.

Somehow, he could immediately sense the weaknesses and strengths in the groups he worked with. While everybody else was still worrying about whether they should change their names and what colour they should all dye their hair, Milne would be working out how to play to those strengths and develop whatever worthwhile qualities he'd found in the band. It was a sixth sense very few people seem to possess; common sense.

In us he seemed to have a strategic view while all around him were looking only at the tactics of marketing us efficiently. He made a virtue out of the necessity of recording the album in a comparatively short time; he kept the sound rough and ready in places, giving it a raw live feel, and he used those of Dave's solos which sounded the most exciting, not the note-perfect, technically impressive but finally rather heartless examples Dave produced when he was trying too hard.

And, thank God, he didn't let us over-indulge in solos. This was the age of the half-hour drum solo; Jesus, I could see the point of a five-minute solo on stage, to give the rest of the band time for a pee or a quick jay — I've known guys who go backstage for a quick blow job off some adoring fan during their drummer's solos — and certainly it keeps the drummer happy (a lot of them get fed up sitting back there, mostly hidden, doing all the hard work), but who the hell actually wanted to listen to thirty minutes, or even fifteen, of mindless look-how-fast-I-can-play drumming (on the other hand, who the hell ever wanted to be spat at, either)?

But quantity was quality then. The bigger your sound system, the faster you could play, the longer your double or triple concept album, the longer your tracks, the longer your solos, the longer your hair, the longer your prick (or your tongue), the wider your loon pants... the better you were.

At least it was simple. We had no taste whatsoever but we did have values.

So that first album had ten tracks on it, played for forty-two minutes, and had no drum, bass or vocal solos. The guitar solos, like the songs, were kept short, leaving you wanting more, making you want to play that song, that side, the whole LP again. It was brilliantly but not overly produced, and it had... energy.

We all went back down to London to give our uneducated opinions and make our usually ignored suggestions during the final week of mixing, and as soon as I heard that first playthrough, I knew it was all going to be just fine.

We sat there in silence in front of a mixing board about the size of a squash court — we were only using a fraction of it, but Mike Milne liked to work with the best — and I thought, 'That's it. We've done it', and I didn't even feel terrified at entertaining such a fate-tempting thought. I knew.

I was so certain we were going to be incredibly famous and rich I got depressed about it. It ought not to be this easy. We'd pay. I would, anyway. This wasn't the way I'd imagined it at all. I thought I'd find my band of rough-edged rockers, we'd argue and fight and eventually get a few tunes together, play small gigs in Paisley, then Glasgow, maybe a club or two in London, be dead broke, have vans break down on the M6, borrow money from parents and friends, have a session played on John Peel's show, accept an offer from a tiny shoestring-budget label that'd go bust, play larger pubs, gradually gather a small but fanatical bunch of followers, have continual and confusing changes in line-up, eventually pay for our own single to be pressed and do the labelling ourselves, be taken on by a sharp manager who'd subtly rip us off but get us on as support band for somebody else's nation-wide tour, at last sign with a big company, produce at least one album that did nothing, build up a following in the record-buying public over the next couple of years, have all sorts of legal and contractual wrangles with our management and the record company, play the universities for a while, think about giving up, and then bring out an earth-shatteringly good album, or have a brilliant but seemingly non-commercial single that topped the charts for two months... that was how I'd imagined it: lots of hard work.

I'd been prepared for that, I'd already accepted all that hassle and effort. It was a profoundly unsettling and disturbing experience when it didn't work out like that at all. Sure, I always thought we'd be accused of selling out, that was only natural... but I thought we'd have the chance to be sold in, first.

Our manager was Sam Emery, a big man with thick grey-white hair and an even thicker East London accent who'd have looked tall if he wasn't so wide as well. We'd all taken some convincing that we really needed a manager, but Rick Tumber — now effectively our liaison officer at ARC — explained it all to us, and we accepted we did need something else apart from ARC Records between us and both the rest of the industry and the public. Big Sam came highly recommended, and with a reputation for being straight that had me instantly suspicious; the guy must have worked out some really clever scam to have fooled everybody in this business, I thought.

Big Sam arrived in time to provide the last push we needed to make success rapid as well as inevitable. It was a simple idea, but the good ones usually are. It was also, again, as commercially good ideas tend to be, rather dubious morally.

The first single was, after all, going to be 'Frozen Gold'. 'Another Rainy Day', ARC decided, was too downbeat for a debut. It was the better song, but just not right for that vital first impression. 'Frozen Gold' it would be then; and that suited my desire for neatness, and my vanity; F, G. My clever idea.

I'd written the song for a male voice; it was for Dave Balfour to sing. Never even occurred to me to do it any other way. When I wrote the words, 'Why do you bite me on the shoulder, why do you scratch me on the back? Why do you always have to make love, like you're making an attack?" I was imagining a couple screwing, missionary position, him on top, her scratching his back, biting him when she came... and I stress imagining; I was still very much a virgin at the time, but I'd read a lot of my flatmates' Penthouses and Forums, so I reckoned I knew what I was talking about, and of course such physicality was shown to be just a metaphor for a particular relationship, as the song developed (oh, I thought I was very clever) ...

Then Big Sam said keep the backing, but re-record it with Christine singing lead. Dave wasn't sure at first, but Sam said he could lead on the next single, probably 'Another Rainy Day'; he just had a hunch about this one being right for Christine. Rick Tumber didn't think it would make much difference at first, but then became very enthusiastic. ARC's management came round to the idea too. We held up the single for a week, Big Sam got me to re-write the subsequent verses a little, to make the song more personal, less abstract, then Christine spent just one more day in the studio and we released 'Frozen Gold' at the end of September , with Christine singing lead. I still hadn't realised.

The single came out, and I experienced that unreal, dizzying feeling of listening, for the first time, to something I had written being played on the radio. That sense of unreality continued. The publicity had started; there were posters, interviews (though not for me, of course) ... and not all that many sales. I felt curiously unworried. Something would happen.

ARC got us onto Top Of The Pops. I wasn't sure whether to be appalled or delighted. The same programme as Barry White? Jumping Jesus. But at least my ma and my pals would finally be convinced it was all really happening.

It wasn't until we were rehearsing for the programme that I understood just how smart Big Sam was. Christine's voice had been improving anyway, under Milne's direction, and she'd been loosening up generally, moving better, looking more relaxed and comfortable on the stage, really starting to show that she was enjoying it, but Big Sam had obviously had a word with her, and in that rehearsal I saw what he was up to. I didn't say anything.

Then came the recording in the TOTP studio. We got it first time; nobody fluffed their mimes. God knows how; Christine was stunning. I felt my eyes staring, I don't know about anybody else.

All it was was that she sang that first verse as though she was living it there and then; it was sex. She started with her hair tied up, in a sort of bun. That was unusual for a start. She wore a black dress with (of course) gold trimmings; Dave wore black flares and a white tuxedo (almost drably low key and tasteful for the time). F, G: F F, E G. We set off.

Christine didn't just sing; she strutted and pouted her way through that first verse, seemed about to kiss the camera, and as she sang 'attack?' she used her free hand to take hold of the collar of the dress and pull. It ripped. Just a little, but it ripped. She threw her head back and marched to the other side of the stage and another camera while we slammed out the middle eight built around F and G. The torn dress flapped a little, exposing her shoulder. She shook her head, spilling long blonde hair out, and sang the rest of the song as though she was just about to either orgasm or kick the next male she saw in the balls. Or both.

The BBC producer was no fool. He made us do it again anyway, even though there was nothing wrong with the first time.

The floor manager asked Christine if she'd mind not ripping her dress on this take, and we wasted quarter of an hour while a little old lady from the costume department was located and escorted to the bopper-infested studio. It took her all of thirty seconds to mend Christine's dress.

The second run-through was lacklustre. They broadcast the first one, dress-tearing and all. It had been a close-run thing, we discovered later (there was a reaction against 'permissiveness' at the time and, dammit, it was sexy), but they did use it. If they hadn't, we'd still have made it, though perhaps not with that single (the song wasn't all that strong, like I say). But Christine sold it. That dress sold it. Sex did.

I used to have a video of that programme, and it all looks fairly tame now, but only relatively. This was pre-punk, remember, and even though one shoulder was hardly in the same league as Jim Morrison's dick, we are talking about a family show here. But even watching it five or six years later I remember I still felt my hair rise a little and a slight sweat prickle on my skin. There was energy there; Christine exuded it, and Milne had captured it on the record. Energy; excitement. You know it when you see it, and when kids see it, when they hear it, they go out and buy records.

All well and good. Yahoo for us. But we started out with a gesture of exploitation, of sex and violence, and of male-against-female violence at that; we took some stick from the women's movement, and I didn't blame them. Some bands earn their fame; we bought ours.

God, there were letters to the papers, there were headlines in the papers, people wrote in and phoned to the BBC, we must have come fairly close to having questions asked in the House of Commons. And a couple of million adolescent boys wanked to the memory of Christine that night, and then went out and bought the single on the following day. Well... not two million, not buying it, but a lot. We made number two, which around Christmas means a lot more copies sold than the majority of number ones throughout the rest of the year. The album suddenly became Eagerly Awaited the morning after the programme was shown, and when Frozen Gold and Liquid Ice did hit the shops, it sold out. Even most of the critics liked it, which really was extraordinary. Pressing plants went onto three shifts. Christine turned down vast sums to appear nude for the sort of magazines my flatmates used to buy and I used to borrow from them.

All those young boys had come, but we had arrived. It was Fame City, and we'd been given the key.

Weirdness. Years later I'd look at old papers, or at Mickey's scrapbook, and I'd see photos of us at some party or celebration, with really famous people; other musicians, popular comedians, politicians, minor royalty, and there they'd be, and there I'd be, in the background, and I couldn't remember anything about it at all. Nothing. Nada. Total blank. If you asked me, Have you met these people? I'd swear blind I hadn't. No memory of it whatsoever.

The whole next year after that first hit passed in a daze. It was exactly like getting steaming drunk and waking up the next morning not knowing what the hell you'd done, only this lasted for a year, not a night. I look back on it now and I wonder how the hell I didn't walk in front of a truck, or sign away the world rights to all future compositions, or say something outrageously slanderous, or just drink myself to death or start on heroin; I was on the same automatic pilot that somehow (usually) sees utter drunkards through their binges, stops them from falling out of windows or off kerbs or picking fights with entire gangs.

'Another Rainy Day' (sung by Dave, but if you watch the TOTP programme we played it on, the camera spends more time on Christine than it does on Dave) got to number three in February '75. Dave, who'd insisted as being credited as 'Davey' on the album, and was becoming known as that, was disappointed we hadn't had a number one single yet, but the album had been number one album for five weeks, so it wasn't too hard to bear. It was probably only because so many people had the song on the album that they didn't bother buying the single, even though they were different versions of the song.

I think the main reason Dave was worried was that he wanted to be the band's usual lead singer, and was worried ARC would favour Christine over him because the single she'd fronted had done better. And I'd thought he'd just wanted to be a guitar hero.

Two things: one; shortly after that first TV appearance, I mentioned to Dave how much better Christine's singing was; not so much technically, but in the way it came across, and how much looser she seemed to be, moving about the stage, confident, in control. She had seemed almost prim when I first saw the band at Paisley Tech, and now she was, well, I don't think I actually used the word 'raunchy', but that was what I was getting at. I put it down to the influences of Mike Milne and Big Sam, and just the fact of being in the big time now. Dave grinned and said, 'Na, all she needed was a good fuck,' winked at me and walked off.

Now, I'd always assumed they'd been at it constantly since long before I knew them (over a year previously by then), and apart from that... shit, I just objected to the whole idea, and not solely because I was jealous. Asshole, I remember thinking.

Two: middle-class planning again. A few years ago I asked Rick Tumber why even when we had a perfectly good mix on an album, ARC always re-mixed the songs before issuing them as singles. Rick grinned the way people do before they put a Royal Running Flush down on top of your three aces. 'For the singles album, Danny boy,' he told me, 'your real fans'll buy everything you've ever released, but even some real fans never buy 45s; they wouldn't buy a singles album either, if they already had all the material on the albums they've already bought, so we make all the mixes different and then they have to buy the singles album too and so you and I make even more money than we would have made anyway because they've bought seven albums not six, or eight not seven or whatever it is or however you count it, but what the hell; we sell more albums even though it's all the same material and it's cost the same amount of studio time and so on, not that that accounts for much of the unit cost but you know what I mean, and....' This explanation lasted another ten minutes. Never guess he'd just filled his nose with Columbian Ajax, would you?

But do you see the point? Jesus, I'd never have thought of that. They were looking at least four or five albums and maybe the same number of years ahead; that's real forward planning. That's middle-class thinking. That's looking ahead. The middle classes are brought up like that. They get salaries they make last all month, they'll take out Life Assurance without getting the hard sell, they'll invest in the future, they'll buy a wee stupid car so their kids can go to a good private school (and it makes good sense anyway; so economical). They can keep drink in the house without having to drink it all. Not like your working class at all. If you've got it, spend it; if it's there, drink it. Hence the weekly wage and the local off licence.

But there are common denominators everywhere. I can remember when it was a matter of real importance to know of a group more obscure than those your friends knew about; not just any old group, but a band playing progressive music. If that band then went on to become really famous (even though that would be regarded as selling out), then your status as a person of immense good taste was assured. It's called gambling, or investing. Looking for a horse they've been shoeing with lead until now, or a stock quoted low but about to rise. Everybody plays the same game; it's just some people make more money out of their version.

Then came All Wine Tastes Sour. From that, 'Old Budapest' (the song about the note lying in the grate) only made number eight, but 'You'd Never Believe' hit number one, and stayed there for three weeks. Davey sang that. He was very pleased. It was only knocked off the top spot by Rod Stewart's 'Sailing'; so, no disgrace.

The first album went gold the same week the second got to number one. The songs on All Wine... were credited to me. Dave and Christine shared a twenty per cent arrangement fee. That had led to some tension, but I felt I was in a position of power; nobody else in the band had written anything worth recording on anything other than a cassette machine. If what I said didn't go, I would. Take it or I'll leave.

Dear God, such arrogance shames me now.

UK tour; breaking in the States so over there for a two-week whistle-stop promo tour, answering the same questions and waking in Holiday or Ramada Inns and staring at the ceiling and wondering, Where the hell is this?, then back into the studio to record Gauche, and then, thank God, a rest.

Why do I remember these pastorals?

We'd recorded Gauche at Manorfield Studios, in Herefordshire; Lord Bodenham, socialite and photographer, had put us up at his little place while we were working. This wasn't just sixties style Hey-look-how-hip-I-am; he was a major shareholder in ARC. Took the snap on the back of the first album, even though everybody remembers the photo on the front; a solid tear of 24-carat gold caught with very fast film as it smashed into blue-stained water with a thin covering of ice (publicity made a lot of the fact that it was real gold and the tear-shaped blob weighed sixty pounds and there were three security guards in the studio when the shot was taken... all my idea, I am half-ashamed and half-proud to admit).

October again already, my goodness. Lord Bod had pissed off to Antibes, but he'd encouraged us to stay, so we did. We'd used backing singers on the UK tour, and kept them on for Gauche. One of the three girls was a lady called Inez Rose Walker. Tall, raven and ravishing, statuesque and stately, always well-spoken and occasionally foul-mouthed, Inez had impressed me no end. I suspected she'd impressed the good lord rather a lot as well, but nothing seemed to come of that.

Set the scene. The Sex Pistols were still in captivity, a year away from bringing the language of every street corner to a single television studio. Malcolm McClaren was presumably still fine-tuning the neat concept of turning the turntables on the big record companies; instead of a band selling lots of records and them not getting any money, he had the Sex Pistols act so unpleasantly that although they didn't sell any records the companies gave them lots and lots of money just to go away. Springsteen had just released 'Born To Run' in the States; the shock waves had yet to rock Britain. And Led Zeppelin were still selling very well indeed, thank you.

Mind you, so was James Last. Oh, and Disco was big.

Party time. ARC were saying 'Thank you' because Gauche had entered the album charts at number one, on advance orders alone. The fact that we had now completed our three album deal and could now go wherever the hell we wanted for as much money as possible had, of course, absolutely nothing to do with such conspicuous extravagance.

ARC brought a small circus to Lord Bod's. Lions and tigers and elephants too. Fire eaters and jugglers and trapeze artistes, multitudinous chimps and a human cannonball, not to mention three alcoholic clowns with real red noses.

I'd never seen a lady trapeze artiste in the flesh before, and immediately fell in love with the one that turned up. God, those muscles. It was only thanks to Inez that I got over her; I fell for Inez instead. As well. Both. Oh, Christ, I don't know. There was no safety net, I'll tell you that.

'You don't know what you want to do, do you?'

I looked aghast at her. We were walking up a narrow road in the place called Golden Valley, between a village called Vowchurch and another village called Turnastone. It was a bright autumn day, blue sky and fresh wind. The leaves were just starting to fall off the trees and we were walking up a clefted road between the two villages, high banks of earth and trees to either side, red, brown and yellow leaves beneath our feet.

'What?' I said. 'Of course I do. I know exactly what I want.'

'What then?'

'Well...'

'Ha! See?'

'No; come on... be fair. I'm thinking.'

'Oh, dear; you think that's an excuse?'

'Hey! Stop giving me such a hard t-time here...'

'Oh well, I'm sorry. . ,

'... I know exactly what I want to do. I want to... change the world!'

'Oh, I see. For the better?'

I laughed. 'Of course!' (I never could see when I was having the piss taken out of me.)

'Oh, well, good. That'll make a change.' Inez nodded, stared ahead up the slope of the steeply banked road.

'I'm not just in it for the mmm-money, you know. I know what it's like to be p-poor. I mean... "European" and "No Lesson For Us";' — she'd sung on both — 'they've both got mmmmessages. I don't know if you could call them protest songs, but they're...

'Commercial. They're commercial songs. Bits off an album. Don't kid yourself.'

'Jee-zuz! You're really so cynical, aren't you?' I was amazed. Inez walked beside me, arms crossed, marching up that slope through the scattering of golden leaves.

'I'm cynical!' She laughed.

The sun broke through the clouds then, and at the same time a wind blew up from behind us, stirring and swirling the goldenbrown leaves around our feet, lifting her hair and mine and combing our faces with it, and belling out her long dress. The wind settled and strengthened, the leaves started to move, and as we walked up that short hill between the dry banks, the breeze filled, and it shifted the tumbling leaves along with us, moving them slowly uphill like a strange stream backing up against the pull of gravity, spreading them and rolling them slowly up the slope at the same speed as we were walking, so that for a long and dizzying moment we seemed to walk and stand quite still together, travelling islands caught within that bright, chaotic flow, our ankles tickled by the brittle flood, our eyes tricked by the relative movement of those charging, rolling, whispering leaves.

The effect lasted for only a few seconds before the wind blew stronger and the leaves outdistanced us, but for that brief time it was magical, and something so powerful and odd I could never express it. It remained something we shared, alone. Never could give it to anybody else, no matter how hard I tried.

I remember taking rather a lot of drugs that autumn, staying in that grand, impressive house. Once I climbed a tree and reclined on a long oak bough, quite at my ease, head buzzing, while watching a juggler on the gravel path beneath me. I lay there, elbow on branch, head in hand, looking down at the circus juggler, and watched the Indian clubs whirling up towards me and then back down, and thought that there was something quite profound and remarkable about watching juggling from above, especially when the juggler was too intent on his skill to notice the observer. It was one of those perfect metaphors one only ever experiences under the simplicities of a drug; at the time it is both obviously unique and impregnably apt, and — afterwards — utterly unfathomable .

And several times, in those balmy autumn days, I thought, This is the life.

Do you blame me?

By Gauche I was no longer trying to prove anything about what a wonderful song writer I was. My own name wasn't actually mentioned once on the writing credits on that album; instead I used a variety of rather silly aliases. The songs were variously credited to O'More, Sutton, Sundry, Thistle and Hlasgow; only I knew these were Justin O'More, Oliver Sutton, Alan Sundry, Patrick Thistle and Gerald Hlasgow (the Scotsman). Ah, good Lord preserve us from our own in-jokes.

One joke fell thoroughly flat in a privately embarrassing way; I'd called the company which published the songs 'Full Ashet Music'. People at ARC had looked puzzled, but didn't raise any objections. I'd thought my little pun was at least mildly amusing, but I hadn't realised that an ashet was now only a Scottish word for a serving platter, and not one recognised any more by English people, let alone Americans. As I was trying to fool myself that I was a nonchalant, debonair and sophisticated man of the world at the time — a real international citizen and discreetly famous person — I found this accidental parochialism a terrible loss of face, even if nobody else ever brought up the faux pas.

I hadn't realised how much of my speech marked me down as from north of the border; not just the obvious accent, but the words and phrases I used, too. I didn't know people in London didn't say 'neither it is' or 'back the way' or 'see what like it is' or 'see the likes of me?'; I didn't know English people didn't call shopping 'messages', or little fingers 'pinkies'; and I didn't realise that knowing all those other words would, to some people, make me seem ignorant.

I knew I wasn't. I knew I was a clever big bastard. I also knew I would never be quite as clever as I'd once thought I was, but I was content, and happy with myself in a way which at the time seemed not to come with a time-limit attached. I'd set out to do something and succeeded, if not beyond my wildest dreams — no seriously ambitious person ever does — then certainly not far away from them. Nothing was so tough. Nothing was impossible if you put your mind to it. The world could be tamed. I knew it all. And there was more to come; this was just the start. Just watch me now.

I recall vaguely considering whether to adopt a higher profile in the band; perhaps even do a Bowie, and change image and/or name for each different album, but Captain Captivity, Walter Ego and Eddie Currents never did get further than the planning stage. Just as well too.

We had gone back to Paisley together only once, on the Scottish leg of the UK tour, though the others had been back individually a few times. I went to see my ma; she was still living in the flat in Ferguslie. I'd tried to persuade her to move out and let me buy her a place, but she wouldn't let me. What she had done was fill the flat with gaudy junk. Whole walls were covered with Woolworth's repro paintings; dusky maidens with flowers in their hair, white horses galloping through moonlit surf, moonfaced waifs leaking crystal tears... all on a background of red flock wallpaper .

There was a lot more stuff like that, but I didn't hang around to do an inventory.

We threw a party at a local hotel for our old pals; I think we all worried about it being an embarrassing failure. Would they think we were being patronising? Would some of my mates, and maybe Mickey's, break the whole thing up? Would people just not turn up? Would they mix at all if they did attend?

We were right to worry. If we hadn't worried, we might have been too complacent and, just by our attitude, put people off.

Instead we worked hard at making it work; persuading people to come, making the arrangements, having a local band play music but having a couple of new songs worked out so that — if we were pressed — we could do some acoustic stuff by ourselves late on. Not to mention providing free beer and three minibuses to shuttle people back to their homes after it was over (there were jokes about an armoured car to make the run to Ferguslie, but as far as I know minibus and driver both survived).

It worked. The party was a great success. We said we'd do it again next year, we were so enthusiastic and enjoyed ourselves so much, but we didn't; we were on the European tour then and just didn't have the time. We always meant to make the time, sometime, but other things kept cropping up, and after a while after a surprising number of years had slipped by, almost without us noticing — we were slightly ashamed at ourselves for not having kept our promise, and there was, I think, an unspoken agreement that it would be easier all round not to repeat the party, and to pretend we hadn't broken our word.

Jean Webb came to the party, with a boyfriend.

I hadn't seen Jean for nearly a year, and hadn't thought of her for months, I suppose, and I was partly surprised and partly annoyed with myself for feeling jealous when she turned up at the party with a tall young gas fitter called Gerald, who wore glasses. The truth was, I'd either forgotten how bonny she was, and how nice, or she'd become a lot more of both during the time I'd been away.

I wondered what she might have said, and what might have happened, if I had asked her to come away to the big bad city with me, a year before. It was a fleeting feeling though, and I slipped easily into the role of local-boy-made-good-but-not-bragging-about-it when I talked to Jean and Gerald.

She was working as a secretary with the gas board. She had all our records. Her mother was still bad with the arthritis. Her father was out of work, but the brother at Inverkip was still bringing in some money; her other brother was going to business school to study accountancy. No, she wouldn't be going to art school. They were a good crowd at the gas office.

Gerald wasn't one of our fans — he was more of a Soul man — but he thought it was good to see local people doing so well, and liked Dave's guitar playing.

At one point, when he'd gone for the drinks, Jean, her hair a red-brown halo of curls, and her fuller, less girlish face peeking out from that tangled mane, smiled at me and said, 'You're lookin well. Are ye happy, Daniel?'

I think I must have shown my surprise. Before I could reply, she laughed and squeezed my hand, briefly. 'Daft question, eh?'

I shrugged, unsure what to say. 'It's... everything's hhhhappened hell of a fast, but... yeah, I'm pretty happy, I suppose. Ask me again in a year or t-two, when I've caught up with myself.'

Jean nodded, smiling, looking from one of my eyes to the other. ' Aye, we've missed you, Daniel. Old place isn't the same without ye.'

Stumped again, but for longer this time, all I could manage was a great show of humble embarrassment, and, 'Aw, gee, shucks ...' said in a silly voice, before Gerald came back with the drinks.

Intervals. Brief frozen disconnected moments, time passed on other worlds.

From the fairy tale setting of that great, ancient house in the soft, undulating English countryside, my whole life took on a curiously foreshortened and rosy look, and even Ferguslie Park assumed a hazy aura of nostalgia. Going back there blew a hole in that particular fog bank, but it closed up again pathetically quickly; a month after visiting my ma and her collection of mass-produced crap, I was thinking about how cosy the place had been, and what a fine crucible for forming my precocious but not yet fully-plumbed talent.

Well, I was still young.

How do you work out when you were most happy? Dunno myself but, however you measure it, I was happy then. It was a more relaxed, fulfilled happiness than that I'd felt just after the contract was signed, or after I'd heard my song on the radio for the first time, and, of course, part of it — I still don't know how much — was due to Inez.

My first real lover; my first proper (improper) relationship.

Inez with her dancer's body and her wild tempers and her rough-house, rowdy, roguish sexuality; holy shit, the trapeze artiste could not have been more athletic. What did I excite in her? She must have seen something, and she can't have cared for the money (I said 'Mmm-marry me' and she said 'Nnn-nope'), so what was it kept her with me, fairly faithful and unfairly jealous, for those years? I never did work it out. I asked her, direct, often enough what she saw in me, but all she ever did was frown deeply and tell me it was absolutely none of my business.

The breathtaking nerve of that floored me, every time. Fair enough, I thought, unbloody but bowed. A couple of times she insulted me in front of people, and once Davey said afterwards I was stupid to let her talk to me like that. I can't remember what it was she said; I can't remember what it was I said in reply to Davey. But I didn't do anything.

Inez and I slept curled up together, her front against my back, and often I would wake during the night, feeling her breath against me in the darkness, warm and fragrant, and find that she had, very lightly, I think always unconsciously, cupped her hand around my balls, so that my scrotum lay in her fingers and palm, like a nest within the bowl of a tree. She never hurt me, and I don't think she ever woke up like that — she'd always have changed position later on in the night — but I must have woken up to find myself held gently like that dozens and dozens of times.

It seemed to me then a sweet and endearing gesture.

But it was a magical time anyway, in that old house.

Once when I'd gone back indoors to fetch a cardigan for Inez, and have a pee (oh, ye gods, during a game of croquet, would you believe?), I stood in the second-floor bathroom washing my hands and looking out through an open window.

Before me were the grounds; a strip of parkland backed by a low hill strung with tall young trees; birch and maple and elm. To one side I could see an edge of the circus tent, pitched on the deeply shadowed park, its pennants fluttering in the wind. It was late in the afternoon; the circus' band was playing on the far side of the house, on the terrace. Music drifted on the breeze like smoke.

The wooded hill opposite me was bright in the autumn sunshine, and people were walking on paths within the wood, their clothes picked out by the gloaming light. As I watched, another strong gust of wind came and shook the trees, and leaves dropped from their branches like rain from a sunlit cloud; glorious and glittering in the warm air. My mouth dropped open, and I watched, quite overcome, as the fluttering shower of golden leaves burst down upon the walking people, like confetti for the wedding of some unseen woodland spirits.