I used to have a band called Superstar who were originally signed to Creation Records in 1992 by Alan McGee and, up until 2000, released around seven albums. I have played/written/collaborated with many people including Teenage Fanclub, Rod Stewart, Big Star/Alex Chilton, The Boy Hairdressers, NOM, BMX Bandits, Matthew Sweet, Jim Lambie, Alan Warner, Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and lots more. I continue to write and produce music from Single Track HQ up here in Argyll and am now running a joint venture mentoring/development music company with ie:music (Robbie Williams / Craig Armstrong / Passenger...) called Single Track. Our current roster includes JR Green, Ess Gee and Maebh.
Sometimes a record comes along that grabs you so completely that for a time you actually can’t listen to anything else. Right now that record is Linden’s Bleached Highlights, an album so full of rich, melodic highpoints that it’s hard to know where to start, but as this is an Official Record Company Biography I should at least try. So, singer and songwriter Joe McAlinden describes this record as being, “probably the most upbeat album about loss ever written,” and, frankly, I’m going to struggle to top that, so let’s move swiftly onto the music because the music is completely beautiful.
You may have heard recent single Brown Bird Singing, which takes Haydn Woods’ 1922 original and perches it on a sunlit Laurel Canyon cliff top, but then you probably won’t have heard the lush and airy ringing chords of Round And Round, or the dream-like melancholic uplift of Something Wonderful. You, like me, may find it hard to stop hitting rewind every time the supreme swing of If I Had Wings approaches the two-minute mark, then there’s that sun-filled brass curling around the words on the title track. McAlinden, frankly, has a masterful touch, but then, he has form, doesn’t he?
20 years ago Joe McAlinden formed Creation Records’ perfect-pop overlords Superstar. Coming from the same Bellshill, Glasgow streets that had already offered up Teenage Fanclub, Soup Dragons and The Vaselines (and Sheena Easton), Superstar made music quite unlike anyone else. The classically trained McAlinden, who had been in the BMX Bandits and arranged the strings and brass on Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque and Thirteen albums, was raised on Jimmy Webb, the Left Banke and Pet Sounds. Consequently, Superstar’s wonderfully titled 1992 debut, Greatest Hits Vol 1, was a record full of Bacharach pianos, keening vocals and expansive arrangements. Their second album had a guest appearance from Big Star’s Alex Chilton and was picked up in America by SBK (also then home to Blur) who promised to have the band, “tour America like crazy”. Well, tour America like crazy they certainly did – the label had them travelling between colleges for months on end often in support of Barney the Singing Dinosaur. Sadly the particular months that the label chose were the ones when there were little or no students on campus.
Superstar played some incredible shows in Barrowlands and they toured Japan multiple times. I saw them destroy an eager London crowd more than once and they counted Na**lm Death among their biggest fans. But by 1994 Superstar were being steamrollered by a musical world increasingly dominated by heads-down, post-Grunge scream-ups on one side of the Atlantic and the ci******es and alcohol (and powder)- fuelled abandon of label-mates Oasis on the other.
“It’s the usual old story,” Joe says now. “We were dropped by the record company without the energy needed to carry on. I didn’t enjoy the last few years anyway as I was always compromising myself to keep everyone else happy. Being in a band can be too much like kindergarten…”
Throughout all of this Joe had looked to his father, a principal music teacher, as his inspiration, but in June 2002 his father died and soon after Joe found he had stopped listening to music, stopped singing and stopped writing.
“I closed a door on it all,” he says. “It was too painful.”
So Joe sold his house in Glasgow and moved to rural – very rural – Argyll. He only meant to stay for six months but it’s now been nine years. Joe met his wife there, had his kids there, and keeps a restaurant and his prized log shed there. “I found happiness there,” he says.
In 2009 Joe witnessed, “the best gig I have ever been to”, when Edwyn Collins, still recovering from the double brain haemorrhage he suffered four years earlier, played a show with Joe’s old friends, Teenage Fanclub.
“Edwyn is my hero and (Fanclub singer) Norman (Blake) is my best mate, so I went early,” laughs Joe. “We ended up spending the day together with Edwyn and his wife Grace we had such a lot of fun. Edwyn is such an inspiration and the gig was amazing because the Fanclub were accompanying Edwyn on all the old Orange Juice songs and they were so out of their musical comfort zone, so on the edge, it was like hearing all those early Postcard records live. It was magical.”
It was that night that Joe realised that he’d left music behind when his father died, but he didn’t want to be away from it any longer. It took a good friend pointing out how he had a studio at home, records lying around everywhere and a turntable just sitting patiently and waiting, but no music ever played in Joe’s house to change things.
As is the way in this modern age, after meeting Edwyn and Grace the three had started following each other on Twitter. A mutual friend of all of theirs was former Rough Trade man and 1965 Records founder, James Endeacott. Joe had known James since the latter let Joe’s band the Boy Hairdressers sleep on his floor after their first London show supporting Dinosaur Jr and Primal Scream at ULU in 1986. One evening Joe got a DM from James saying he was speaking to Edwyn and Grace about him and thought it would be a good idea for Joe to come and do a few tracks at West Heath Yard Studios with Edwyn producing.
“I thought it was a bloody sick wind up,” Joe smiles, “but then I got a message from Grace inviting me down. And the rest, as you say, shall soon be history! God bless Twitter.”
Now fully refreshed he’s finished not only this fantastic new album, but scored the first of three soundtracks and begun work on a big art and music collaboration project. At the end of April Joe sang live for the first time in 10 years.
“Seeing Edwyn blew my mind and gave me a kick up the arse at the same time,” he laughs. “I was straight back into music, discovering it all over again. I’m no old, jaded fool. I’m like a wee kid in a sweet shop. I’m in love all over again!”
That love and that thrill at being immersed in music again is all over Bleached Highlights. Even when Joe tackles an immense sorrow – Hear My Name chronicles his reactions to watching his father spend three weeks in a coma before he died – the mood is always uplifting, there’s always redemption. Joe describes the song If I Had Wings as his, “crossover track”, the place where loss and happiness meet.
“If my dad had never passed away, I would never have moved and I would never have all the beautiful things I have now,” he says. “If only he were here to share them.”
Ultimately the album is shot through with a very real sense of grace – it’s a truly beautiful collection of songs that show a songwriter at the very peak of his creativity.
“Thinking about it now,” Joe says, “the album’s not just about loss, it’s about me finding a new and different happiness. It’s the story of how something wonderful just got better…”
Rob Fitzpatrick May 02 2012
