THE quality, depth, range and sheer emotional power of the best contemporary Scottish songwriting has been under-recognised for years but is at last coming to be more appreciated.
One of the main reasons is the more recent work of Bobby Bluebell, one of the best-known and certainly best-connected songwriters and performers we have.
Bluebell – real name Robert Hodgens – certainly knows what he’s talking about when it comes to writing hits. For a start he co-wrote the solid gold classic Young At Heart, a staple of almost every 1980s collection on the market, which has proven as good for his reputation as for his bank balance.
What is perhaps less widely known is the number of successful songs he has written, or helped to write, for artists including Texas, Shakespears Sister, Altered Images, Sinead O’Connor, B*witched, Brian Wilson and others.
More recently, he has reimagined and recorded some of the best Scottish songs ever written with The Golden Tree, the band he formed with his mate, Hipsway singer Grahame Skinner.
“Me and Grahame were talking about how to make money from music these days,” Bluebell tells me during a break from recording The Bluebells’ third and, he says, final album in Glasgow.
“One of the most successful records in the world was Rod Stewart’s Great American Songbook series. I suggested we try and do a Scottish songbook because you won’t believe how many great Scottish songs are out there.
“We decided to do it just ourselves, at the back end of Covid as I had a lot of time in my house. The first one I did was the Marmalade song, Reflections Of My Life, which I really love. I was singing and it was not bad, but I knew Grahame could sing it much better. He’s a great singer and it was amazing.
“I spoke to the record company Last Night From Glasgow and asked if we could do the record. Originally, we wanted to call it Golden Hour after those old Golden Hour records [in the 1960s]. Then my daughter, who was in Japan at the time, said there was a golden tree there and I thought that was a good name. Later, I was playing golf at Pollok and there was a golden tree there. I took a picture of it and that became the cover of the album.
“We picked all these Scottish songs, and they just worked out really, really well.”
Their two albums reworked some classic songs, some of which listeners might never have regarded as Scottish. It proved to be a real eye-opener.
The songs on that first Golden Tree album range from the traditional Wild Mountain Thyme to pop classics such as I Should Have Known Better (Jim Diamond, 1985), Gallagher and Lyle’s 1976 hit Breakaway and the Sutherland Brothers’ Arms Of Mary (recorded with Quiver in 1975). It also includes early Simple Minds’ Chelsea Girl and Talking Heads’ beguiling hymn to boredom and ennui, Heaven.
Most were stripped of their more expected instrumentations and presented in a more stripped-down form which allowed the strength of the songwriting itself to shine through.
The only one of the songs Bluebell had a hand in writing to appear on the first album was a very different performance of the Texas banger Black Eyed Boy.
The second album extended the range to include the Bay City Rollers’ Shang-A-Lang, Primal Scream’s Movin’ On Up and Coldplay’s Yellow.
Bluebell argues that many of the songs featured on the albums have always been under-appreciated, on two counts. First because some haven’t even been recognised as being Scottish. Indeed, even a cursory glance at the track listings sent me scurrying to google to work out a Scottish connection. Coldplay? Yellow co-writer, bassist Guy Berryman, is Scottish.
Second because many have been dismissed as insubstantial pop. “I always thought that Young at Heart itself was underappreciated and put in the Agadoo section,” says Bluebell, referring to the cheesy Black Lace hit which spent 30 weeks in the British singles chart in 1984.
“Pop music stands for popular music, but a lot of artists dismiss popular appeal. They want to attract an elite crowd.
“I genuinely love pop music. The Beatles wanted to appeal to everyone. I’ve got a lot of respect for songs like Billy Don’t Be a Hero [the Paper Lace 1974 hit], Black Lace, Marmalade, Pickettywitch [whose biggest hit was That Same Old Feeling in 1970] … songs that really become big hits. They’re fucking hard to write. People who dismiss them are doing them a great injustice. People like Marc Bolan [of T. Rex] and John Lennon, people I really admired, wanted to have songs like these, that were hits.”
Bluebell also believes the fact that some of the songs on the album are not known to be Scottish is no accident.
“The British media undermines anything Scottish – and Welsh and Irish – and assimilates it,” he says. “I was trying to make the point that you don’t know these songs are Scottish because you’re not told they’re Scottish. But you are told constantly that Andy Murray is British. Chris Hoy is British. England won the war in Argentina.”
When Bluebell was growing up he began to notice that being involved with music gave you a particular status with your peers, and particularly with girls. You didn’t even have to play music. He noticed it when he started a fanzine called The Ten Commandments with writer Kirsty McNeil and photographer Robert Scott.
“When I left school I’d got off with one girl in the whole time. I was the goofy guy in spectacles. I was the sort of guy who liked Deep Purple. But the minute I said I played in a band, or that I had a fanzine … all of a sudden you had a status.”
He gravitated to making his own music when he started inventing bands to write about in the fanzine and felt he needed to show they actually existed.
The Ten Commandments was steeped in the Scottish post-punk indie scene.
Bluebell became part of a community that included Orange Juice and Postcard Records, Lloyd Cole, Simple Minds, Hipsway, Clare Grogan and Altered Images.
He would go on to play in his own bands, including the Oxfam Warriors and later – and more successfully – with The Bluebells, formed in 1981 after he met brothers David and Ken McCluskey. They notched up three top 40 singles – all of which Bluebell wrote or had a hand in writing.
“Oxfam Warriors ended when Alan Horne [founder of Postcard Records] told me the band were dead neddy and I should sack them,” Bluebell recalls. “But he said the songs were pretty good.
“The Bluebells garnered a lot of interest quite quickly.
“Glasgow was such a hotbed and we looked cool enough. We were coming along at the right time for the zeitgeist. We learned very quickly to say yes to everything.
“Once you say no you are out of the game.”
Before the band, Bluebell’s lack of success with girls and his annual trips to Italy, his mother’s home country, hadn’t done much for his self-confidence. That was to change.
“I wouldn’t say I was ugly, but I’d go to Italy every year and go to the beach … with my glasses on. All the Italian guys would look amazing and I’d feel like a geek.
“I later learned that guys considered some girls too beautiful to be asked out. I asked one beautiful girl why she was going out with her boyfriend and she replied ‘because he asked me’. That realisation made my head explode. I’ve had a lot of gorgeous girlfriends since then.”
It was while he was living in London with one of those girlfriends – Siobhan Fahey of Bananarama – that they collaborated on writing Young At Heart. It was an infectious, feel-good celebration of a song but with a sadness at its heart when they both realised how much they were missing their parents.
The song first appeared on Bananarama’s debut album in 1983 and the Bluebells released their own, very different, version the following year.
Young at Heart became the band’s biggest hit when it was used in a Volkswagen TV advert in 1993, and it has since come to be regarded as one of the defining hits of the 1980s and 90s.
The band originally split up in 1986 but has since regularly reformed for a number of performances. Bluebell has established a reputation as a songwriter and collaborator on hit songs for a wide range of other artists.
The wider public might not know about his contribution to those hits, but he seems unworried. “It’s still exciting,” he says “It should be about the artist. It’s their thing. They contribute a lot to it; I’m just a bit of it.
“I can get involved in different ways. For example, I wrote a song about abuse for a film and I asked Sinead O’Connor to sing it, which she did and it was great. She loved the song and didn’t want it in the film but wanted to put it on her album. I went to the film company and offered them the money back.
“Songwriting is a very personal thing and that song was very personal to me. But I was happy she took it on and she made it into a fantastic song. We’re collaborators ... that’s what we do. It’s normal.”
He’s frank when he’s asked how he feels about giving the power of how the song is performed to the artist. “I just want to make money and have an outlet.” However, he’s not keen when writing music for others becomes too much like hard work.
“I did a lot of films and TV and I gave up on it. The money was OK but every minute of the fucking day you’d get a guy wanting to make some changes to it. It was quite laborious and hard work. I got into this to avoid hard work so I made a call to stop.”
He’s now entered the company of artists who can make good money from their back catalogue and he’s very aware that the industry focuses on a plethora of heritage acts can now make it harder for younger acts to make money in the early stage of their career.
“Record companies won’t sign bands any more. No-one pays six wages. They’ll just sign single artists. It’s all about economies. Artists like Paul McCartney are still huge.
“Primal Scream … bigger than ever. Texas … bigger than ever. People who love Deacon Blue and Texas are teaching their children about them in the same way as happened with The Beatles and the Stones. The economics that made the Beatles and the Stones and Texas big aren’t there anymore. Or at least, they are there for them but a young band coming up will find it hard to get a company to support them, to promote them.
“When is the last time you went to a concert and everyone in the place was 13? Alice Cooper for me. Now they are all 50 and 60. I’m not knocking it but 13 and 16-year-old kids don’t go to gigs any more. They can’t get in.
“Young people listen to these acts but don’t know the context. I heard my daughter playing The Doors the other day and I told her I had visited his grave in Paris. She said ‘What … he’s dead?’”
When Bluebell was young there was no internet to feed him a diet of music, old or otherwise, so he concentrated on the music he heard in Scotland.
“It wasn’t until I went to London that I realised there were very few Scottish bands that make it. When I was at school I had a jotter and I’d write down every Scottish band that was in the charts. I wanted to feel part of something.
“My mum and dad taught us to be independent, not dependent. Independent is the opposite of dependent. I don’t understand why anyone would want to be dependent.
“To be mocked for that is really irritating.
“Scotland is a strange country. We’ve been trained – like the Irish – that some people are superior to us. They’re better than us because they’re upper class. But we’re better than some others. We’ve been taught our place.
“Our parents, who worked in heavy industry, were striving to get their children into the middle class. Your Thatchers and your Starmers exploit that aspiration to be middle class, but they hate any aspiration to go from the middle class into their class, the ruling class. That’s where you become a fucking problem.
You can be middle class, but don’t you dare assume that you’re going to be their equal. The minute you do that is when you are considered a communist, nationalist, socialist … disruptive.
“I am very pro-independence but I’m not particularly into any political party. People should be licensed to be politicians. It’s amazing that we give power to these people who are not at all qualified in any way. Imagine if Celtic and Rangers just picked a random person to be manager. It’s not going to work, is it? Why don’t we just pick the person who is best qualified to run a country? And that’s not going to be Trump, Keir Starmer or Putin is it?”
On that last point at least it’s fair to say we can expect the country to provide a chorus of approval …
