Ken McCluskey So & So Interview

Interview with Ken McCluskey of The Bluebells who recently co-curated the excellent What Presence! retrospective of the work of photographer Harry Papadopoulos.

The stunning and comprehensive collection of Harry’s iconic snaps is, after a hugely successful stint at Glasgow’s Street Level Photoworks, currently being exhibited in Edinburgh, at Creative Scotland’s Waverley Gate until the 22nd June.

This is one of five interviews which feature in Racket Racket sister project, the So & So fanzine made in partnership with designer and budding photographer Denise Ross of IDENTI. The zine is a Glasgow based publication in which Denise and Racket Racket’s founder and editor, Andy McColgan chat with inspiring people who are involved with music related projects and pursuits in the city of Glasgow. The photograph of Ken, above, is taken from the So & So zine. You can purchase copies of Issue 1 on the So & So website and plans for Issue 2 are currently underway.

Ken McCluskey made a name for himself as one of the integral members of Scottish indie-poppers The Bluebells in the 1980s. Since then he has gone on to work in various sections of the music sector and now lectures on the Music Business course at Stow College. Recently Ken curated What Presence! a retrospective of lensman Harry Papadopoulos’s iconic snaps of the post punk vanguard in the 70s and 80s.

Can you tell us a bit about Harry Papadoplous?

When I was in The Bluebells we travelled down to London a lot to do radio sessions and gigs supporting bands like Orange Juice. There would always be a couple of photographers about. One was called Harry Papadoplous. I knew Harry before that as well from him selling his prints of gigs and bands around Glasgow. He would go to gigs at The Apollo and other venues and take pictures of Roxy Music or whoever was playing and then sell the prints outside, processing and developing them himself at night.

When we started going to London more he would be at all the gigs (working for Postcard Records) taking photos. He had a flat in London and had a job with Sounds. This was round about 1979. We ended up getting to know Harry and the Sounds writers pretty well. Harry was a very generous guy and let us all stay at his house in London. He was self taught and the slightly rough and ready nature of his photography suited the DIY music of the time and the types of bands that Harry and Sounds wanted to capture.

What was Glasgow like when you were starting out as a band, in your early teens?

When we were 15 or 16 the older guys (the 18 year olds) were all hippies or into heavy metal and there weren’t many punk bands. Me and my mates were all punks but it took three or so years after punk for bands like us to properly develop into good acts. Punk was banned in Glasgow when we were teenagers and you had to go to Paisley to hear gigs. There was the occasional gig in places like the Mars Bar where you would hear punk stuff sometimes. That was on Howard St next to where Rubadub is now. My brother and I had been in a punk band called Raw Deal and we played with all the punk bands in Paisley at the time. Playing with all the bands on the Groucho Marxist label. Then the scene evolved after that and up sprung bands like the New Sonics later to be Orange Juice and Altered Images, Aztec Camera and a few more… We liked what they were all doing so we started hanging out with them. It was interesting times especially because of what they were listening to and being influenced by. When you went round to the notorious West Princes Street, Postcard flat everyone would be listening to Chic and the Velvet Underground and lots of Staxx stuff. Punk had turned crap really quickly to be honest and we were looking for something more sophisticated. What the bands I mentioned there were beginning to do really fitted the bill and we started to take notes. We supported all these bands in Scotland and the rest of the UK.

The scene evolved after that and up sprung bands like the New Sonics later to be Orange Juice and Altered Images, Aztec Camera and a few more… We liked what they were all doing so we started hanging out with them.

So, initially you went to London to support the likes of Aztec Camera and Orange Juice?

Yep, we supported both of them. We were unsigned and did the Old Grey Whistle Test down there! We had only ever done about 7 or 8 proper gigs but we were part of ‘The Sound of Young Scotland’. That’s how it was all packaged up. It would be the equivalent now of playing Jools Holland when you’d only done three gigs! We were planning to release a record on Postcard but the label fizzled out. That was the right thing for the label though. It was great – lasted two years and that was it.

We were very skint at this time. We got signed to London Records and went on tour with Elvis Costello soon after that. He had became a fan after seeing us with Orange Juice and he started producing our music. Costello was massive at the time. He had just moved from Stiff to Warner Brothers and had a slightly older crowd to what we had been used to. A great experience though. After that tour we done another one with Haircut 100 which was all wee girls and boys in the audience. Two massive tours with completely different audiences so a great experience for us – We then got asked to go to America to tour. We were lucky and everything we done early on went well. Apart from our first two singles… They were both flops!

Then there were a few singles that got into the top 40. Cath, I’m Falling and Young at Heart all did ok. We went on a tour after those singles for a year and a half. We came back and The Smiths had arrived. They fucked us! The phenomenon of The Smiths took over in terms of credible guitar music and we didn’t have what they had going on. We had moved away from the Postcard thing. We had to have hits to get radio play and to sell and sustain ourselves. We were also very interested in touring the world. That’s what we wanted to do and we could. America, Germany, Spain and Scandinavia loved us. France didn’t. We couldn’t get arrested in France!

We came back and met Harry again a couple of times. I wanted to move back to Glasgow and The Bluebells disbanded in around 1986. Every year on Boxing Day the band and all our pals would have a party at the Sub Club though. We did that for ten years between 1986 and 1996. We would see Harry every year at that.

What was the nature and purpose of the party?

We were pals with the people who ran the Sub Club and no-one had anything to do on the 26th Dec. Most bars were shut on the 26th and the people who ran the Sub offered to let us do a yearly party. We all loved the club. Harry loved it too and he would come up from London every year and see us. So, when in 1996, these parties stopped I stopped seeing Harry. Didn’t see him for ages after that.

Was Harry still a photographer at this point?

He had gone on to become the editor of Care Bears magazine and Scooby Doo magazine. Both of these funny fantasy children’s comics.

How did the What Presence! exhibition come about?

Six years ago his brother, an electrician, was doing some work for me at my old flat. I asked how Harry was getting on these days and his brother replied, “Do you not know?” I then found out he had had a brain aneurism. I asked where he was based and started to visit him regularly. He wasn’t very stable and wasn’t looking after himself properly because he couldn’t. It was a real shame.

One day I was over seeing him in Maryhill and I noticed all these photo negatives that were clearly getting knackered and damp. I thought we had to get them out of there before they get completely destroyed. I bought a wee scanner, flicked through them and started archiving them a bit. Some nights I would spend 6 hours on it… I’ve got varifocals now as a consequence! It took me about 9 or 10 months to do them all. Literally 1000s and 1000s of photos. I knew who about 90% of the artists were but there were a few who I would have no idea about so I asked Stephen Pastel and he helped with those ones. Then Malcolm from Street Level, the gallery we used, had all the Sounds magazines from when Harry was working with them so we could cross-reference.

When I was about half done I took them down to Street Level and Malcolm was really up for the whole thing. They had better scanners to use and offered to do a lot of leg work as well. They said that the ones I had scanned already would be good as little postcards and photos. And the big ones could be re-scanned. That took about a year and then the whole thing built up nicely from there. The aims were for it to be as educational as possible and, obviously, for as many people as possible to see Harry’s work. We did some talks as well with people like Stephen Pastel, Malcolm Ross, Davy Henderson and these kind of guys which was great. The whole thing has legacy as well in that we have had offers from other galleries. There is definitely scope for the exhibition to go to Edinburgh, Greenock and around the regions. Might even go down south to England at some point and a gallery in Holland are interested.

The most important things are that Harry is delighted and that all the images are now saved.

It really did seem like a who’s who of interesting 70s and 80s post punk and new wave bands and artists. What were your favourites?

The first one I that gobsmacked me was The Clash at The Apollo from 1978. That gig blew me away and I remember seeing Harry on the night taking photos. If you look closely you can see big chains swinging down in the background. The venue was falling apart! Health and Safety would have a field day nowadays! There’s a few from Glasgow Tech (now Caledona Uni). It had the best Union of any of the Glasgow universities in the era. So, the photos there of The Cramps are amazing. The Fall, Orange Juice and lots of other great photos from there. Then the beautiful people – Edwyn Collins, Paul Haig, Roddy Frame, Billy MacKenzie. I don’t know if those guys used beauty products but they certainly looked after themselves and compared to us they were totally beautiful! They are great photos. Alan Rankine looking like Omar Sharif.

You touched on some of the venues you were hanging out in in Glasgow through the years there. Can you tell us a bit more about some of them?

We played the Mars Bar once as Raw Deal when I was 16 and my brother was 14. We had to smuggle David in through the fire exit and one day the police busted it and we were sat drinking pints. The police man, in plain clothes, came up and asked David how old he was, to which he replied 14! We just thought it was some punter. Later on, in the early 80s we got a Sunday afternoon residency in the place but it burned down a few weeks later. It was notorious for under age drinking but a great wee place.

When I was 17 I got a job in the Rock Garden, now called La Cheetah. That was a really cool place to hang out because it was next to a great record shop called Graffiti. I worked there and through hanging out there and in Graffiti, I got to know a lot of the fanzine writers in the city. Bobby Bluebell was one of them. He had reviewed Raw Deal at the Mars Bar gig and it was a cracking review. We think he probably wanted to be in our band… In the end our band became his band which was fine.

We played the Mars Bar as Raw Deal when I was 16 and my brother was 14. We had to smuggle David in through the fire exit and one day the police busted it and we were sat drinking pints. The police man came up and asked David how old he was, to which he replied 14!

Did Bobby come up with the name then?

Yeah, when I first met him back then he had a band with a girl singer and they were called the Oxfam Warriors. He asked David to join first and one by one we all eventually joined his band. That was how The Bluebells came about.

It’s interesting that you mentioned the Sub Club parties earlier. You are good pals with Harri as well, right?

I didn’t know Harri until about 1987 after The Bluebells. Back then he would be playing soul, funk and dub while another friend of mine, Gerry would be playing more electronica stuff and then Graeme, who owned the place would be playing a really diverse mixture of stuff – Nina Simone, Grace Jones, Chic, Kraftwerk. This really begat the Chicago house stuff. I lived in a flat with Harri in 1988. It was a hoot!

What was the Sub Club like back then?

A run down, 1970s sparkly dive! It was incredibly trendy though. In a good way. The posers would hang out in Maestros on Scott St (where the CCA bar now is). The Sub Club was always about the music and a bit cooler than other places. It has retained that coolness and credibility but it definitely became a bit crazy when acid house took off and I stopped going so much.

The Bluebells split up in 1986. What did you do then?

In 1986, I started working on music with my brother, David. We put out a record on Thrush Records (an unfortunate name) in 1987. Our agent ran the label and he gave us some money to record a short album, an eight track mini LP called Aware Of All. Stuart Cosgrove wrote a brilliant review of the album for NME. Sadly though, London Records told us we were still signed to them for five years which was a bit of a nightmare. We had to delete the Aware of All album. We didn’t get out of that contract with London until 1992.

So, we played live a lot through those years. It was more folky and traditional. Really different from The Bluebells. We managed ourselves and suited ourselves. We played a lot in Spain and in Ireland as well as Scotland, England and a little bit in Germany. We then done a few LPs on our own label, KIngfisher which had evolved from Thrush. Then in 2000, I went to University. I was fed up playing the same venues all the time. It didn’t feel like we were going anywhere fast so David got a job and I went to Uni. After Uni, in 2004 I got a job at Stow College lecturing Music Business and still do that today although we both still play live a lot as The Bluebells and McCluskey Brothers.

Tell us about your surprise pop hit in the mid 1990s?

In 1993 we were about to go on tour as the McCluskey Brothers with Capercallie and the record label, London Records, who had stopped us releasing the first McCluskey Brothers record, phoned up to say “Hi guys, you’re going to have a hit record!” And they then asked if we could do TOTP. We said, nope, we’re on tour. Remember those guys you stopped making records? Well, we’re on tour with them. They said we could stand to make a lot of money.

I wanted to play TOTP, of course, but I said to them that us playing would be in breach of our contract and they would have to help us out with that. We could have got out of the tour anytime we wanted. We told them it would be a very substantial amount plus expenses for us to go down and do TOTP. We got that very substantial and agreeable amount between us every week while it was in the charts. Four weeks at number one! That was our compensation for them messing us about when we left The Bluebells. When we left The Bluebells they said we owed them a crazy amount… Our manager, Pete Jenner (Ian Dury, The Clash, Pink Floyd manager) really knew his stuff and was also a very good businessman. He went to London Records and said that basically this pop hit situation was a windfall for them. The thing had sold half a million records. They then turned around and said we owed them a further £250,000 after having the hit!
How does that work we thought? They didn’t have a leg to stand on though because they had lost all the original paperwork. Pete said to them, let’s just call it quits, you’ve made this amount and they owed you that amount etc etc etc… give them this amount plus royalties going forward and the label eventually agreed with him. A great manager managed to get a lot of money for myself, David and Bobby. And we still get royalty cheques every year for the tune.

It’s the easiest thing in the world playing TOTP to be honest! If they recorded you on Wednesday you could mime but if they recorded you on a Thursday it would have to be live. I would always make a point of sending up other pop tunes in the charts when I was singing down there. 2 Unlimited’s “techno, techno, techno” and Shabba Ranks’ “Shabba!” which I got the sound engineer to put a reverb effect on the mic so it went “shabba, shabba, shabba…” when I sang it! It was a lot of fun. Great experience.

You can buy Issue 1 of So & So on the official So & So website and also in Street Level Photoworks and in Glasgow’s finest bar/cafe/restaurant/record shop/zine shop/general space/hang out, Mono.

(Image of The Apollo courtesy of the Bouncing Czech blog)