Scots band one of 'great lost combos of Glasgow musical heritage'

The Herald Scotland

26-04-2025

Taken together with archive footage from elsewhere, and with their excellent 1976 debut album, Cado Belle, they show just how good a band they were. Alas, they made only one album, and a four-track EP, though all of the band members enjoyed considerable success afterwards.
Writing in these pages in 2012, Keith Bruce, the Herald's then arts editor, had this to say: 'Among the great lost combos of Glasgow's musical heritage, the name of Cado Belle is recalled with particular fondness by those who saw and heard them. They made just the one self-named album, released in 1976 on the short-lived Anchor label, but it stands up well as an example of blue-eyed soul funk alongside the work of the Average White Band and London's Kokomo (three of whom guested on the disc in supporting roles)'.
Cado Belle arose out of a particularly fertile period in Scottish popular music, before the advent of such bands as Simple Minds and the rise of punk and new wave. 'There were some amazing bands around back then', recalls Maggie Reilly, who was Cado Belle's singer. 'The Average White Band were doing brilliantly. Cafe Jaques, from Edinburgh, and Clifford Hanley's band, the Motels, were both really interesting. You just felt that something was happening'.
Cado Belle, for their part, went against the tide by opting to remain in Glasgow and not relocate to London in search of fame, as so many others did (and still do). 'We made the decision to get up at ridiculous o'clock in the morning in Gibson Street – everybody got into the van and we drove to London or wherever it was', Maggie said earlier this week. 'We weren't going to move [to London]. That was the decision we made, we wanted to be based up here. In a way it was great but in another way it was to our detriment, because of the distance. But it was all very exciting'.
Cado Belle came together in October 1974, the musicians having previously played in two local bands, Joe Cool and Up. They assembled for a jam session at band member Colin Tully's flat in Gibson Street, Glasgow, and realised just how much potential they had. Their first gig came in early January 1975, at Greenock's Regency Bar. Right from the start, they were determined to become self-sufficient when it came to songwriting.
By that April they were attracting the interest of London-based journalists. Melody Maker's Ed Jones, catching them in action at the Burns Howff, in Glasgow, one Saturday lunchtime, described them as 'one of the most promising bands I've seen in many a day'.
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Cado Belle, he went on, 'are new to most of the audience, but they sit up and take notice as guitarist Andy Darby's tasty lines interweave with the mellow sadness of Colin Tully's tenor sax. The rhythm section of Gavin Hodgson on bass and David Roy on drums link up with Stuart MacKillop's keyboards to provide, in a set made up almost entirely of their own songs, an ambitious springboard for the vocal mastery of singer Maggie Reilly'.
To Jones, Reilly was indeed something special: 'A diminutive package of funk with a curtain of long dark hair and bar-room queen clothes, she can holler a blues with the same surprising maturity and authority she shows improvising on a mellow ballad. There are occasional echoes of Kiki Dee, Maggie Bell and Joni Mitchell. On one wordless elegy, her scat yearnings bring an undeniable lump to the journalistic throat. If there's any justice, the world will be hearing more of her'.
There was a distinct buzz around Cado Belle, thanks in part to repeated showcase gigs in London venues such as Dingwalls, and record company A&R staff began sounding them out. The band signed a recording deal with the Anchor Records label in March 1976.
The producer was one Keith Olsen, who was big news at the time. A few years earlier he had produced Buckingham Nicks, a folk-rock album by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, which did next to nothing upon its release. Later, however, he played one of its tracks, Frozen Love, to Mick Fleetwood, drummer with, and co-founder of, Fleetwood Mac. Fleetwood and his bandmates liked what they heard, and invited the duo to join them. Buckingham and Nicks revitalised the Mac, and the upshot was the Olsen-produced 1975 album, Fleetwood Mac, a soft-rock, multi-million-selling classic which contained such hit songs as Rhiannon and Landslide.
'After that", says Maggie, "Keith was looking for a project, and Anchor told him, 'We've got a few bands coming through'. He came with his girlfriend to see us in London, in this really skanky club in [London's] Swiss Cottage - I can visualise it now - and he saw the band and loved what we did, and said he would really like to work with us'.
Olsen, however, was in for something of a cultural awakening when he joined Cado Belle at a recording studio in Wales. 'It was in the middle of nowhere and everywhere we went in anywhere, people started talking in Welsh', recalls Maggie. 'We started feeling like we were in one of those weird films, like we were going to end up murdered!'
Olsen, accustomed to life in the Los Angeles fast lane, was like a fish out of water in the rural tranquility of Wales and, later, the Cotswolds, where further recording took place in the scorching summer of 1976. Maggie remembers him 'spending many hours in a car on the motorway going up and down to London to keep up his energy'.
As the countdown continued to the album's release, critics continued to shower praise on the Glasgow band. One college newspaper critic, reviewing a gig at Hammersmith's Red Cow venue in June 1976, declared: "If handled by the right producer, Cado Belle could have a debut on their hands to equal [Average White Band's] first Atlantic recording. See this band now, when it's cheap".
Cado Belle's album remains a splendid achievement – 10 assured, immaculate tracks that display to striking effect the band's collective musical abilities and Maggie's distinctive voice. It really deserved to chart, but sadly didn't, even though it it did attract favourable reviews, and was received much airtime on Radio Clyde. John Peel was another fan.
In the meantime the band continued to hit the gig circuit, honing their sound and expertise. In October 1976 they supported the US country-rock band Poco; a press ad at the time described Cado Belle as 'totally unknown and absolutely incredible'.
In Jim Wilkie's 1991 book, Blue Suede Brogans: Scenes from the Secret Life of Scottish Rock Music, Alan Darby reflects that in the wake of the album, 'the punk thing happened, the record company went broke, and we had internal problems. Perhaps if we had gone to America, it might have lasted longer'. (In the same book Gillian Maxwell recalls being impressed by Cado Belle when she was a student at Glasgow University, in the days before she managed Deacon Blue in Glasgow. If they had been around in the Eighties, she told Wilkie, 'they would definitely have been a major group').
Today, Maggie Reilly puts it thus: 'The whole punk thing came in and everybody was vying for Billy Idol and the Damned and all of that. They were published by own publisher. We were still bustling along.
'Anchor wanted us to release [album track] Airport Shutdown as a single, and I was in tears about it, because I thought it was a great song, but I disagreed, because I thought it was the least of the great songs we had on the album. I wanted something like Rocked to Stony Silence, something like that, because I felt they were really powerful. Anchor weren't very pleased with that'.
The band was disenchanted with various aspects of their involvement with Anchor Records, including the release of a 1977, four-track EP that included two (rather fine) cover versions – one of Brenton Wood's 1967 hit, Gimme Little Sign, and the other of It's Over, by Boz Scaggs's 1976 album, Silk Degrees. 'We just felt that we had all these great songs of our own', says Maggie. 'We had loads of songs and we couldn't understand why we were doing cover versions'.
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The band also wanted to work more intuitively in the studio than Anchor's laid-down measures allowed.
'I was elected – or I elected myself, I don't remember how it went – and I went down to London and spoke to Ian Ralfini, the head of the company,' she says. She told him that none of the band was happy with the way things were. 'Please let us go', Maggie told Ralfini. After a discussion he agreed that Cado Belle could walk away. When she returned to Scotland, the band was relieved that their future was now in their own hands. They broke up, though, in 1978. That January, they appeared alongside two other Scottish acts - Gallagher and Lyle, and the Average White Band - on TV's Old Grey Whistle Test.
After the band's demise the musicians all went on to greater things. Stuart worked with Abba, Diana Ross, Tina Turner and Rod Stewart; Maggie sang with Mike Oldfield (hers are the lead vocals on Oldfield's international chart-topping 1983 hit, Moonlight Shadow) and she co-wrote several songs with the man who had been responsible for Tubular Bells.
She has also performed duets with David Gilmour and Jack Bruce - former members of, respectively, Pink Floyd and Cream - and has collaborated with the goth band, Sisters of Mercy.
In 1992 she had a European hit with a single, Everytime We Touch, which she co-wrote with Stuart. In 2005 it was turned into a high-energy smash by a German dance outfit, Cascada; later still, it was picked up by the marching band at Duke University, North Carolina, as part of the pre-match entertainment at basketball games there. She also co-wrote Family Man, the Hall and Oates hit.
Colin Tully, who died in June 2021, composed music for the Bill Forsyth film, Gregory's Girl, played sax on What's Another Year?, Johnny Logan's Eurovision winner, and played with John Martyn.
Alan Darby, who died in February 2023, was a brilliantly talented guitarist who performed with both Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, toured as second guitar player in the Eric Clapton band, and took part in sessions with such names as Rod Stewart and Van Morrison.
Maggie today has her own band, touring and releasing solo records. Stuart MacKillop has been her constant musical partner since the days of Cado Belle. What does she think of the album now? 'I don't listen to it often', she says, 'but funnily enough we've been going through a bunch of old DATs, old tapes, that Stuart has found, lurking. We never actually noted at the time what was on them.
'We've been listening to them and there's a whole bunch of things that we made demos of that we never actually recorded. We used to work lot in Brian Young's CaVa studio, back in the day, and Brian said he'd found all those old bits and pieces. He said, you never did anything else with them, you just made the demos. Stuart and I have now been talking about recording some of these.
'I'm going on tour to Germany at the end of April and when we get back there will be a five-day period with my band. So I think we're going to record some of these old songs from the perspective of today, from now'.
* maggie-reilly.net