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The Herald Scotland

'Scotland's great lost rock star' looks back at his band's debut album

It's always interesting to ask musicians how they feel about their debut albums - albums that, in some cases, might be a few decades old. Goodbye Mr Mackenzie's excellent introduction, Good Deeds and Dirty Rags, is a case in point. Released in April 1989, within weeks of such landmark albums as Pixies' Doolittle and The Cure's Disintegration, it sounds as fresh and captivating today as it did back then. It sprinted into the UK charts at number 26, contained some of the Edinburgh band's strongest material, and led to eventful tours of the UK and Europe. Live, too, they were a formidable proposition, one guaranteed to get the audience up on its feet. One review of a London Marquee gig, in 1989, begins: 'What an extraordinary bunch these Mackenzies are! If they ever become famous enough to have a cartoon series or soap opera written about them, the scriptwriters will have a field day'. Many fans of the group have fond memories of the debut and of such songs as The Rattler, Open Your Arms, Goodwill City, and Face to Face, all of which charted. When, a few months ago, the question was asked on Facebook, what's your favourite Goodbye Mr Mackenzie song?, many opted for them. 'Face to Face', said one. 'First time I heard it, have to admit brought a tear to my eye and ever since'. Wrote another: 'Now We Are Married [from the follow-up album, Hammer and Tongs] was the first song at our wedding, but I need to go with Goodwill City. Don't tell the missus'. Does Martin Metcalfe, the band's charismatic singer, feel that the album has aged really well? 'I don't think I'm the person to ask', he demurred earlier this week. 'There are fans who still love it, so it hasn't dated for them, and that's great, but it's not something I can stand back from and say, that was a timeless piece of work or whatever. Certainly, it has stood the test of time, because it keeps getting played on national radio, so I suppose it must have some kind of timeless element to it'. It was, however, something of a turning-point for the group. In a 2019 interview with Narc magazine, Martin did acknowledge that the album had been a 'defining life moment' for him: 'In those days any musician who managed to have a proper album released felt they'd arrived in one way or another. The fact that it went top 30 was yet another life landmark and I suppose would have cemented the 'arrived' metaphor if we'd managed to keep performing at that level'. Goodbye Mr Mackenzie - Martin, 'Big John' Duncan (formerly of the punk group, The Exploited, on guitar, Fin Wilson on bass, Derek Kelly on drums, and Shirley Manson and Rona Scobie on keyboards and backing vocals - were formed in Bathgate, and emerged into a thriving music scene in the capital. 'For lads coming from Bathgate and immersing ourselves in that [Edinburgh] environment, it was actually great', Martin says. 'It was an era when things were really opening up in Scotland, and Edinburgh anyway. 'I know that Glasgow had the advantage over Edinburgh regarding venues, possibly because of the size of the city. But the great thing about those days was that student unions had funding: in Edinburgh you had gigs at Telford College, Napier College, Teviot Row, and Queen Margaret College in Corstorphine. 'You had gigs in Chambers Street in Edinburgh - a huge building that had three floors, maybe four, and on three of those you could stage gigs. Also, you had Potterrow, which was a real centre of young bands. Ents committees wanted to bring local bands in and had a desire to attach themselves to local musicians. 'That college circuit in the UK, which lasted into the Mackenzie's big period, was a genuine support. They had budgets to pay bands a reasonable amount of money. That is something that hasn't happened for a few decades now. 'On top of all of that you had The Venue, on Carlton Road, where bands like Suede kicked off … then along came La Sorbonne [in the Cowgate], which was a fantastic place for bands'. Read more: The band toured widely. In Glasgow, there were gigs at the famed Barrowland venue, in 1987 (supporting the Blow Monkeys), in 1988 (supporting Aztec Camera) and headlining in 1989). Asked how Goodbye Mr Mackenzie's distinctive sound evolved, Martin responds: 'It really came out of post-punk. When punk came along it was like an adrenaline rush, an explosion, but as Steven Severin [bass guitarist with Siouxsie and the Banshees] said, it wasn't that different in a lot of ways from pub rock and rock'n'roll'. He marvels now that, looking back, the Banshees managed to influenced much of the post-punk movement without having released a record, having won invaluable exposure from John Peel sessions in 1977 and 1978. They and other unsigned, groundbreaking acts broadcast by Peel were picked up by numerous other groups across Britain, who absorbed the sound and altered their own musical style. 'Initially, Goodbye Mr Mackenzie wanted to play this punk music but by the time we were starting to play, and were a little bit older, post-punk had taken over. The bands we were listening to, and loving, were Magazine, the Banshees, the Skids, the Scars and other bands like that. And then Joy Division came along …' Good Deeds and Dirty Rags was released on the Capitol label. Listening to it afresh after 36 years is to release the truth of something that Vic Galloway wrote in 2018 - that they 'blended the feral nature of punk, arty intelligence and effortless pop melodies'. It's a well-crafted album, intelligently written. The Rattler remains, perhaps, their best-known song, a perennial audience favourite. In 1986 they performed it on the TV music show, The Tube. That same night, when they played the Hoochie Coochie in Edinburgh, the venue was rammed because everybody had seen them on The Tube. Speaking to Billy Sloan for the Herald in 2021, Martin discussed the song and some of the influences hat went into it: 'We were completely taken aback when [The Rattler] took on a life of its own. I look at Bowie and wonder why his work was such genius. I think he just sucked in information from so many different sources. In the art world you'd call it research. 'I love Iggy Pop, New Order, The Cocteau Twins and Talking Heads. All had direct input into what we were doing. I'd also seen a documentary about Woody Guthrie where he travelled from town-to-town on trains spreading a socialist message, and got up to no good while he was doing it. 'So that had an effect on the song too. It could have been about a rattlesnake but it could also have been a Freudian symbol for sex … a train going into a tunnel. [Scots poet William] McGonagall wrote a poem called The Rattling Boy From Dublin – which is absolutely hysterical – so it's in there too.' Another song on the album, Face to Face, is a provocative piece about a female hitchhiker who was repeatedly raped in a pub, only to see her attackers being acquitted in court on the grounds that she had been 'asking for it' because of the way she was dressed. Yet another track, Goodwill City, is about the Aids crisis that afflicted Edinburgh in the Eighties. 'I had a couple of friends round about that time who affected by Aids', Martin says. 'That was quite a powerful moment in time, quite a landmark affecting a small part of the Eighties. I've got a friend who is an Aids survivor from that period. He's still alive, which is amazing'. Read more On the Record: About the album as a whole, he is philosophical. 'The thing about artists is, not many of them can ever look back at their own work and think, that was great, that was perfect. The word 'perfect' never comes into it. 'Most bands hate the song that they're weighed down by - their albatross, the song that everyone shouts for, the one that everyone films on their phone and ends up on YouTube a million times. But I like listening to The Rattler. And I think it's a really good record'. Unfortunately, Goodbye Mr Mackenzie would go on to be plagued by record company indecision and internal politics. Though there were three further, very fine, albums - Hammer and Tongs (1991), Five (1994), and The Glory Hole (1996) - the band came to an end, with a final live gig at Glasgow's The Garage in late 1995, after Manson and Duncan had departed. Along the way, band members had created a side-project, Angelfish, whose well-received 1994 album was produced by Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads. As for Martin, his later projects have included the acclaimed Filthy Tongues, alongside his old Goodbye Mr Mackenzie bandmates, Derek Kelly and Fin Wilson. Profiling the Filthy Tongues in 2005, the Herald's David Belcher had this to say: 'Martin Metcalfe may be Scotland's great lost rock star. Blessed with the stature to look lanky Nick Cave straight in the eye, a dark rich baritone and the songs to match, in the 1980s and 1990s it seemed he could only pout it all away. Fate conspired to take matters out of his and Goodbye Mr Mackenzie's hands, thanks to eccentric management, and the emergence of Shirley Manson as one of the pop music icons of recent time'. During that Herald interview Martin looked back on his days as such a distinctive frontman with Goodbye Mr Mackenzie. "All that rock star stuff is just acting', he said, 'as Bowie explained with Ziggy Stardust. I used to think people like John Lydon were more real than that, but I remember reading something one of his friends said about him just pursuing the theatre of rage, just basing his character on Richard III and things like that. But I think I did an okay job of playing a rock star'. And of his old band itself he declared: "We were like a family because there were girls and boys in the band, it wasn't your average lads' band, going off and getting trashed and hanging out with women. On tour we were our own unit, we didn't need anybody else, but included our crew in that because we had a special relationship with them as well. Even though we were all quite dysfunctional people, as a band we were quite a functional unit.' Goodbye Mr Mackenzie has had a legacy. In 2007, when Vic Galloway challenged his radio listeners to name the top 50 Scottish bands of all time, they came in at number 31, ahead of Blue Nile, the Cocteau Twins and the Skids. And The List magazine once observed that they 'left behind the most complex and fascinating footprint of any Scottish band'. In 2019 Goodbye Mr Mackenzie hit the road again, to mark the 30th anniversary of the debut album. As he told the Herald's Barry Didcock at the time: 'It happened by accident. Me, trying to make a crust, had decided to try to do the album in its entirety as a solo gig. But the response I got was so incredible that I thought I can't do this without at least asking if Fin and Kelly want to do it.' In that interview with Narc magazine mentioned above, he declared: 'To be perfectly honest, I wasn't excited about revisiting the whole album as we've moved on from 80's subversive pop/rock and as a creative person it's hard not to be critical of your own work but in the end, we realised that (most of) the songs were really well crafted. 'There aren't many moments live where I think this part of the song doesn't work or that part goes on too long. I think we had a solid grasp of song arrangement back then, so in many ways, I'm proud of how we pulled it together'. He has every right to be proud. And the band are still active, still touring, still looking and sounding great on stage. Their forthcoming gig at Glasgow's Oran Mor on July 11 should be something else.