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)?