A few months back, I posted a tribute to the late great Billy MacKenzie. A couple of folk thought I was being unfair in ignoring the contributions of Alan Rankine, but as I explained at the time, the timing of the tribute was to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Billy's very sad death and that at some point in the future I'd focus on Alan.
So I thought folk would be interested in reading this lengthy but brilliantly written piece, taken from The Guardian newspaper on 27th April:-
In recent years, the music business HND course at Glasgow's Stow College has become mildly legendary. That's partly as a result of the record label its students manage - which thus far has been responsible for the debut releases by Belle And Sebastian, Biffy Clyro and Snow Patrol - and partly as a result of the number of successful music-industry professionals it turns out. "We've taught all sorts of people," says lecturer Alan Rankine. One recent pupil, he notes, has just been headhunted by all-powerful gig promoters the Mean Fiddler Music Group. You can detect a definite hint of pride in his voice as he says it, and yet, given his history, Rankine is not perhaps the first person you might entrust with teaching what the college prospectus calls "the development of essential business skills and competencies delivered in the context of the music industry" to impressionable youngsters.
For 25 years ago, when Rankine was one half of the Associates, the essential business skills and competencies of the music industries were, by his own admission, fairly low on his agenda: lower than immersing a hired drumkit in water to see what it sounded like, or urinating in an acoustic guitar, or somehow contriving to spend the band's entire record company advance of £60,000 in "about two months", all of which took place during the making of the Associates' celebrated third album, Sulk.
"I don't think there's been any exaggeration about what went on," he sighs. "If anything, I think people have been holding back a bit in their recollections. It was madness."
The result of the madness has a fair claim to the title of the most extraordinary album of the 1980s. Sulk seemed as lavish and excessive and unique as the sessions that spawned it: a dense, luxurious, woozy wall of sound, topped with the octave-scaling voice of Rankine's musical partner, the late Billy MacKenzie. Its release brought about what MacKenzie, a year before his suicide 10 years ago, described as "two and a half of our 15 minutes of fame". Two hit singles, Party Fears Two and Club Country, led to a string of notorious Top of the Pops appearances and brief ubiquity in the teen press.
Plenty of other former indie bands became bona-fide pop stars in the early 80s - ABC, Simple Minds and Scritti Politti among them - but they did so by embracing a gleaming commercial sound and image. In marked contrast, everything about Sulk was deeply strange. Its cover featured Rankine pulling what he later described as a "mental" face, in an attempt to convey "the sort of sultry sumptuousness of the music". MacKenzie's rococo lyrics reached a pinnacle of dizzying impenetrability, with Skipping's infamous couplet "ripping ropes from the Belgian wharfs / breathless beauxillious griffin once removed seemed dwarfed", baffling even his bandmates.
Before Sulk, the Associates were a critically acclaimed but commercially disastrous post-punk band. They had been noted for MacKenzie's remarkable voice and their penchant for a grand, perverse gesture - their debut single was a cover of David Bowie's Boys Keep Swinging, bafflingly released weeks after the original had made the top 10 - but sales were negligible. "Up until April 1981, we were living on air," says Rankine. "We had no money, we couldn't get a bus or a tube, we were literally stealing from people's doorsteps." Their financial situation improved when they signed a major label deal on the back of demos of Party Fears Two and Club Country. They immediately spent half the £60,000 advance on block-booking a studio "for the foreseeable future". The rest vanished almost as quickly in a demented-sounding spending spree.
MacKenzie, Rankine and bass player Michael Dempsey moved into the Swiss Cottage Holiday Inn in north London. MacKenzie booked an extra room specifically for his pet whippets, and began feeding them on smoked salmon from room service. On one occasion, MacKenzie later recalled, he bought "about 16 cashmere jumpers and put them on the bed and rolled around on them".
Vast quantities of cocaine were, inevitably, involved, MacKenzie and Rankine's enthusiasm for the drug apparently undiminished by an unfortunate early experience in which they ended up in hospital after ingesting seven grams of amphetamine, believing it to be one gram of cocaine ("If you snort 40 lines of speed in one evening," notes Rankine sagely, "you're not going to be very well").
"It was a hand-to-mouth existence whichever way you look at it," remembers Dempsey, who at one stage attempted to curb the Associates' spending on taxis, albeit by suggesting they buy a 1962 Mercedes convertible. "We were all ridiculously profligate. But it wasn't entirely ridiculous to be doing things that way because Bill would coax money out of record companies in a kind of mesmeric way. He thought that the more money we owed them, the more obligation on their part to make this work to get their investment back."
"If we hadn't spent the money, the album wouldn't have got made in the way it did," reasons Rankine. "It was mental, but there was also a self-assured cockiness, because we knew we had these songs. We knew they were going to be the motherlode."
Certainly, an atmosphere of abandon seemed to follow the Associates into the studio, hence the costly explorations of submerged drumkits, urine-filled guitars and what Dempsey describes as "the sonic riches of the most outrageously expensive synthesizers of the day, with their unbelievable one megabyte of memory". And yet, despite the druggy hedonism and experimental approach, both Dempsey and Rankine are at pains to stress the Associates' work ethic.
"All the anecdotal stories that go behind these recordings are that it was madcap crazy blokes doing all sorts of extraordinary things, but it was all quite focused as well," says Dempsey. "We weren't sitting around drinking beer and playing pool."
"In the studio, we were obsessive to the point of manic," agrees Rankine. "Every day was like 19 hours of work. We only stopped when we'd run out of ideas. We knew it was going to sound dense. To us, holding back in the first verse or first chorus, we just thought, 'Fuck that.' It's like having a wank and not coming: what's the point? It only lasts four minutes, it's not a symphony, let's just do the fucker. Here's the verse: full on. Here's the intro: full on. Here's the chorus: no difference. The only way you could make it go uphill was down to Bill's acrobatic vocals."
The album's contents were spellbinding and mysterious, swathed in echo and electronic effects: tortured ballads; strange, skittering pop songs; a spellbinding funk version of Gloomy Sunday, the 1933 song that at one stage was fancifully alleged to have inspired hundreds of suicides, including that of its composer.
Party Fears Two was its centrepiece, offering an oblique melody, puzzling lyrics, an astonishing vocal performance from MacKenzie and a piano hook so irresistible that it ended up as the theme for the Radio 4 programme Weekending. It reached No 9 in the singles chart, prompting the first of a series of Associates appearances on Top of the Pops, where the band managed to carry the Sulk sessions' atmosphere of extravagance and rule-breaking audacity into British living rooms. During the first, Rankine sported a fencing suit, samurai make-up and chopsticks in his hair, while MacKenzie sang gazing not at the camera, but at his own image in the TV monitors at the side of the stage.
On a subsequent appearance, Rankine played two guitars made of chocolate - "by Harrods," he remembers, "costing £230 each" - one of which he fed to the audience as the song progressed. "It was just to make it more interesting, less boring. We'd actually planned if we got on Top of the Pops again, I was going to be playing the guitar inside a portable Turkish bath, with my arms sticking out." He laughs. "Why, I've no idea."
But Rankine and MacKenzie didn't get on Top of the Pops again. The Associates' moment ended as quickly as it began. A few weeks after appearing on the cover of Smash Hits, MacKenzie abandoned a UK tour 24 hours before the first date, then rejected a $600,000 offer from a US label. The Associates broke up - as Dempsey puts it, "staggered by the whole experience of Sulk" - continuing in name only, as a MacKenzie solo vehicle, with diminishing artistic and commercial returns, until his death at 39.
A quarter of a century on, Sulk still sounds entirely unlike anything else. "Is it an object lesson in how not to make a record?" ponders Dempsey. "Well, yes. Except that it worked. Most of the time, using this template to make a record, it should fail dismally, it should be a horrible mess, but in this case it didn't and it stands out as a special record. It is an object lesson in how not to make a record, but every now and then people have to make records like that."
Rankine seems unsure whether people could make records like that any more, not least because no record company would allow them to. "I really feel for bands today," he says. "What the hell do they do not to fit into this ..." His voice tails off in exasperation. "Record companies have turned into shit. There's nothing left. Without sounding embittered or anything, it just must be hideous sometimes. You can't imagine it."
So, would he hold up the making of Sulk as a good or bad example to his students, eager to learn the essential business skills and competencies delivered in the context of the music industry? He roars with laughter. "I'd say, if you're brave enough, do it like that. If you don't give a fuck enough, do it like that"
It's fantastic that all these years on that Alan Rankine is given the time and space to articulate so well on something that most folk will associate (pardon the pun) with someone else. His contributions to the sound of the band were every bit as important as Billy's vocals in terms of making the band sound unlike anything else in the pop world of the 80s. I wonder if all of his students at Stow College realise just how lucky and privileged they are to have such a talent in their midst. It's actually quite incredible that he's teaching at a place such as Stow, not that I mean to belittle the establishment.
For those who don't know, Stow is where the kids not deemed quite good enough to go to University undertake their further education - it specialises in what might be termed vocational rather than academic qualifications. But as you will have spotted from the introduction to the piece in The Guardian, it has an incredible track record. And no doubt with inspiration from the likes of Alan Rankine, there are plenty of other students poised to grab our attention.
mp3 : Associates - Arrogance Gave Him Up
mp3 : Associates - White Car In Germany
mp3 : Associates - nothinginsomethingparticular
With thanks to Susan at the marvellous Exiled in Dreamworld for keeping the Associates flame burning so brightly. Please go and visit her and say hello by clicking here.
Read more about Stow College here.
Oh and here's a bonus mp3 for obsessives:-
mp3 : 39 Lyon Street - Kites
