Conserving the Past / Building the Future

In 2009, an Edinburgh based band called Saint Jude’s Infirmary released their second album. This was the tellingly titled This Has Been The Death of Us. With a cover image of a painting by artist Jack Vettriano, the group of latter-day Fife émigrés stayed close to their roots even as they wallowed in the soiled r…

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Bob

Bob Last’s initial reticence at revisiting his past for Big Gold Dream and Hungry Beat latterly saw him embrace it in a way that seemed to surprise him as much as anyone else. He appeared on two panels at Hungry Beat events, and was in attendance at La Belle Angele in Edinburgh in December 2023 for what turned out to be the book’s live finale. 

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Hilary 

When Hilary Morrison appeared as part of a panel at Edinburgh College of Art’s Wee Red Bar at the 2023 Edinburgh International Book Festival, it was a kind of homecoming for Morrison. Just next door to ECA, after all, was Morrison’s old Keir Street flat where Fast Product was sired, and which became an after hours hang out for Edinburgh scene ban…

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Joseph Malik - Out of the Ordinary

One of the most striking things about Edinburgh’s Fast Product generation is how the umbilical links between them have spread to forge connections geographically, artistically and generationally. If there is a figure that binds all that, it is Joseph Malik. 

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Gang Culture – That’s Entertainment

The Problem of Leisure: A Celebration of Andy Gill and Gang of Four is a compilation album of songs by Gang of Four covered by other artists. The double vinyl record was released in 2021, and features twenty artists playing songs across Gang of Four’s forty-year career. This includes versions of two songs from Gang of …

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Hey, Lloyd… Fast Boys and Factory Girls

In June 2013, Lloyd Cole released a new album, Standards. Despite the double meaning of its title, the record was made up of mainly original songs. One of these, ‘Women’s Studies’, featured the lines, ‘If Josef K was from Edinburgh / And Fast Product from Prague / That could have been kind of funny / Or maybe not t…

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Rock & Roll, Hey? - Electronically Yours

New Year’s Eve 2017, and the centre of Edinburgh is packed with thousands of revellers who have bought tickets to see in 2018 by way of a high profile concert that runs on various stages on Princes Street. Attention may be on the Ross Bandstand in Princes Street Gardens, where man of the moment Rag n Bone Man is h…

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The Politics of Dancing

As Fast Product/Pop: Aural’s influence rippled down the years, other former charges of the label started to resurface. Boots for Dancing were the original supergroup in reverse, with roots in Dirty Reds, Flowers, Thursdays and The Rezillos, with other members defecting to Delta 5. 

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Yesterday’s Kids - Going Places / Scarred for Life

When Lemon Jelly used a sample of Fast Product era Scars as the basis for a track on the electronic duo’s second album, ’65-’95, released in 2005, it set in motion a set of events that would give Scars the attention they had long deserved. ‘Horrorshow’ / ‘Adult/ery’, after all, was the first Fast Produc…

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Living Fast - The Bongo 

The Bongo Club is an Edinburgh clubbing institution. These days it is based in a labyrinth of vaults in the Cowgate beneath the Central Library on George IV Bridge above. With a programme of cutting edge club nights in what is its third home in twenty-five years, the Bongo occupies a cultural space that is underground both actual…

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Get Up and Use Me - Reformation. Influence. Appropriation

Fast Product’s direct legacy runs on apace. The Mekons sound-tracked Honda Acura Ad might have proclaimed; ’30 Years in the Making’, but in terms of influence, legacy and history making, at time of writing it is slowly edging its way towards fifty. A half century not out. Just Out. 

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Tam Dean Burn - Lust for Life

Another alliance formed during the hedonistic 1990s was between Irvine Welsh and Tam Dean Burn. Since departing the lead singer’s slot in the Dirty Reds after being inspired by his teacher at Craigmount High School and future Coronation Street Star Ken Morley to become an actor himself, Burn has carved out an eclectic and ma…

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Dandy in the Underworld

A week after Paul Reekie’s passing on June 10th 2010, it was reported that Sebastian Horsley had died of an overdose. In 1981, Horsley, the grandson of the founder of the Northern Foods empire, Alec Horsley, sang lead vocals on ‘Uncle Sam’ / ‘Portrait of Heart’, the second single released under Josef K vocalist Paul Haig’s Rhythm of Life banner. The record was released on Allan Campbell’s Rational Records label, and featured a self portrait of Horsley on the back cover.

Horsley went on to become involved with the Gateway Exchange, the centre set up in Edinburgh’s Abbeyhill district by Jimmy and Sarah Boyle with artist Evlynn Smith to help rehabilitate drug addicts and ex offenders using art therapy. Smith and Horsley had married in 1981, and were together until 1990. In 1993, Smith co-founded bespoke art and furniture design company, Precious McBane, much loved by the likes of Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. Smith died in 2003 of a brain aneurysm.

While Sarah Boyle and Smith were key to the existence of the Gateway, Jimmy Boyle somewhat unavoidably became its public face. After being championed by Richard Demarco, Joseph Beuys and others, and creating his Gulliver sculpture for Craigmillar Festival Society, Boyle was now a full time artist. By channeling the progressive ideas of the Barlinnie Special Unit, where he had been first opened up to art, the Gateway was a continuation of those ideas, with Beuys’ notions of social sculpture at its core.

The Gateway’s theatre space - The Mandela - became a significant Edinburgh Festival Fringe venue, with the space spawning a company beyond it. Mandela Theatre toured Lance Flynn’s play, The Dorm, set in a young men’s detention centre, around community venues in Edinburgh. Mandela Theatre performed other plays by Flynn, who also wrote for the Traverse, before the company rebranded itself as Boilerhouse.

Following his own involvement with the Gateway, Horsley embarked on a life of art, excess and myth-making. In 2000, in the ultimate act of self-deification, Horsley travelled to the Philippines to be filmed experiencing crucifixion. The event was photographed by Dennis Morris and filmed by Sarah Lucas, with music provided by lead singer of Bush, Gavin Rossdale. 

This archive formed part of Horsley’s exhibition, Crucifixion, shown in London two years later. At some point, Edinburgh’s private view attending set were agog at the prospect of Horsley’s friend Nick Cave turning up at the City Art Centre, where a painting by Horsley formed part of a group show. 

In 2007, Horsley was in attendance at A Tribute to Billy Mackenzie, a live all-star charity extravaganza that took place at Shepherd’s Bush Empire in honour of the Dundee-born Associates vocalist who had taken his own life a decade earlier. Mackenzie had lived in Edinburgh for a time, where he collaborated with Paul Haig. The pair played gigs together, and recorded each other’s songs.

A memorable 1986 TV appearance saw Haig and Mackenzie duet on a Scottish Television Hogmanay show doing a singular version of ‘Amazing Grace’. Mackenzie initially played it straight, singing a capella before he and Haig launched into a guitar driven art pop rendition that seemed to bring in not just the new year, but a new pop music fit for the twenty-first century. This seemed to tally with Paul Morley’s grand statement four years earlier that Haig - who he had dubbed ‘the face of 1982’ - was ‘the enigmatic fourth man’ of a New Pop quartet that also featured Mackenzie, Jim Kerr of Simple Minds, and ABC frontman Martin Fry.

While pop history may have taken a slightly different turn, in 1999, two years after Mackenzie’s death, an entire album of Haig and Mackenzie collaborations was released on Haig’s ROL imprint as Memory Palace.

At the 2007 Shepherd’s Bush Empire show, Horsley looked resplendent sporting his familiar sparkly scarlet jacket. Standing alone, Horsley watched from the middle of the auditorium as Haig made his first live appearance in seventeen years. This saw Haig accompany the executor of Mackenzie’s will Jude Rawlins and former Associate Christine Beveridge on a version of Simon Dupree and the Big Sound’s slice of faux-psychedelic 1960s whimsy, ‘Kites’. Haig then donned a guitar to perform Josef K’s song, ‘It’s Kinda Funny’, written following the suicide of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis. He followed this with a version of his more redemptive solo single, ‘Something Good’. 

Also on the bill was Claudia Brücken, former vocalist with German band, Propaganda, whose recordings for the ZTT label included a cover of Josef K’s Les Disques du Crepuscule single, ‘Sorry for Laughing’. At Shepherd’s Bush Empire, Brücken teamed up with fellow ZTT alumnus, composer Andrew Poppy, for a version of Mackenzie’s song, ‘Breakfast’, returning with OMD’s Paul Humphreys as One-Two to play Propaganda’s 1985 single and arguably their finest moment, ‘Duel’. 

In 2008, Horsley published a memoir, Dandy in the Underworld, named after the final album by T.Rex, released in March 1977, six months before the band’s driving force Marc Bolan was killed in a car accident aged 29. By the time the book came out, Horsley had constructed himself as a latter-day dandy and a fixture of bohemian Soho whose entire life was his art.

A one-man play based on the book was adapted by Tim Fountain and produced at Soho Theatre. Fountain’s previous theatrical outings included Resident Alien (1999), based on the writings of Quentin Crisp, with Bette Bourne - a veteran of New York drag theatre company Hot Peaches and his own Bloolips company - playing Crisp in Edinburgh and London.

Fountain also wrote Julie Burchill is Away (2002), a one-woman show drawn from the experience of former NME writer Julie Burchill while a columnist for the Guardian newspaper. Burchill had been one of the NME’s ‘hip young gunslingers’ hired in the wake of punk alongside her future husband Tony Parsons. Paul Morley joined the NME at the same time.

Fountain’s take on Dandy in the Underworld featured Milo Twomey as Horsley. Horsley attended the first night of the show, before being found dead the next day in his Soho flat of a suspected heroin overdose . He was 47. Those attending his funeral included Marc Almond, who had been championed by Jeff Nuttall as an art student in Leeds before becoming a pop star. 

In 2015, Edinburgh radio presenter and actor Grant Stott, who in 2021 would become a regular in the Stephen Greenhorn devised TV soap, River City, played Horsley in Willie and Sebastian. This was a stage play written by Rab C Nesbitt creator Ian Pattison, and presented at the Gilded Balloon venue on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Willie and Sebastian focused on the love triangle between Horsley, writer and satirist William Donaldson, aka fictional letter writer Henry Root, and former Page 3 model, Rachel Garley.

Coming a week apart, and in very different circumstances, the deaths of Paul Reekie and Sebastian Horsley were tragedies that could have been avoided. While they came from opposite ends of the social spectrum, Reekie and Horsley’s mutual affinity with Edinburgh’s post punk underground saw them each find their artistic voice, rubbing shoulders in the same social and artistic bubble, autodidacts and dandies in the underworld both.

Love’s Rebellious Joy 

On a rainy Sunday night at the fag end of August 2011, Edinburgh International Book Festival hosted an event called Love’s Rebellious Joy. The event took place in the festival’s Spiegeltent in Charlotte Square Garden, just off the west end of Princes Street and on the tip of the New Town. The night formed part of a series called Un…

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Trainspotting 

When Trainspotting was published in 1993, Irvine Welsh’s Edinburgh set novel about a group of friends growing up in the 1980s was arguably the logical result of the sort of auto- didacticism that had fired out of Keir Street, The Tap and Edinburgh’s other less sung institutions. The book’s fragmented vignettes about friendship, addiction a…

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The Wee Red 

The Wee Red Bar is Edinburgh College of Art’s student union. Situated in the Link Corridor, which forms both a physical and symbolic bridge between ECA’s Old Building and the Hunter Building, as its name suggests, the Wee Red is a small room painted scarlet. The venue opened in 1982 in a move spearheaded by graphic design and photography stu…

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New Reekie 

Cities change. Edinburgh is currently in the throes of a twenty-first century reinvention that will alter its skyline forever. This is as true today of the shiny latter day follies thrusting upwards out of assorted traffic stopping building sites as it was with the building of the New Town and the structures that made it Athens of the North b…

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The Illusionist 

Bob Last’s move into producing began when, alongside film theorist Colin MacCabe, he co- executive produced thirteen out of sixteen episodes of Century of Cinema. Made between 1994 and 1999, this ambit…

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Sound and Vision 

It is said that Bob Last had a pile of TV sets all stacked on top of each other in the Keir Street Fast Product arts lab. Rumour has it he’d have them all tuned to the same channel as he watched. This was apparently so he could more easily see directors edits, cuts, lighting etc across each screen simultaneously.

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Sheffield. Edinburgh. London.

By the end of 1981, Sheffield’s electronic musical pioneers had gone global. The post split Human League line-up topped the charts with their poptastically inclined Dare (1981) album, with single ‘Don’t You want Me’ becoming Christmas Number 1. Heaven 17, formed by ousted League members, Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware, with…

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