Joe McAlinden / Superstar / Linden

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Joe McAlinden / Superstar / Linden

Ex: Superstar, The Boy Hairdressers, Linden, Groovy Little Numbers, BMX Bandits, NOM.

Worked with: Teenage Fanclub, Edwyn Collins, Alex Chilton, Jim Lambie, Alan Warner, Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Captain America
Now: Solo Artist, Producer, Cult Hero™️ Bands: The Groovy Little Numbers, The Boy Hairdressers, BMX Bandits, Superstar, Linden, Joe McAlinden. Worked With: Teenage Fanclub, Rod Stewart, Edwyn Collins, Paul Cook, James Walbourne, Jim Lambie, Ian Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Alan Warner...

21/11/2024

I See ❤️

19/11/2024

Right now.
Tuesday 19th November 2024
Back in the game.
One giant hurdle overcome ✊🏻

12/11/2024

Tonight I’m listening and working on my new creations
View from the bridge at STHQ…

09/11/2024

On a more personal musical note, I have a few things I’ll be putting up for sale over the coming weeks.
The first will be my songwriting/live Takamine EN10 acoustic I’ve owned since new since the early 90s, right back to my early Superstar days, and have used throughout my career.
Anyone interested prior to listing, drop me a message and I can provide more details ✊🏻

02/11/2024

I love the atmosphere in this picture…
Taken performing EDIT live at the Glasgow Film Festival back in the day.
The soundtrack to EDIT is available on clear vinyl… check out Bandcamp for more details.

16/10/2024

I made 2 albums with Edwyn Collins under the moniker Linden - ‘Bleached Highlights’ and ‘Rest & Be Thankful.’
Both albums have now been added to my Bandcamp profile where you can purchase/stream/download here - https://joemcalinden.bandcamp.com/music ✊🏻

09/10/2024

SPIRIT OF MACCA IN ARGYLL
Prepping my winter writing space…
I’m so delighted my beloved Fender Rhodes Suitcase 73 is back. Feels like I’ll be doing a lot of writing on this beauty again!
Amazing provenance… Originally from Abbey Road Studios and given to me by Ian Grimble (a one time Abbey Road engineer who mixed Superstar albums). Ian bought it from Abbey Road and it lived in his shed for years until he passed it on to me.
But the most interesting fact about this particular Rhodes is that Paul McCartney tried to buy it too - Ian told me that he wrote most of the first Wings album on it. He subsequently offered Ian quite a bit of money for it, but Ian decided he would rather hold on to it.
Anyway, the keyboard now happily resides on the shores of Loch Fyne and sounds amazing.
Ya snooze ya lose Macca ✊🏻

08/10/2024

Hello to you all and thanks for taking an interest in my music.
I will be much more hands on from now on and plans are afoot - live streams, online stuff.
I am hoping to play concerts too.
And on top of all of that, I am about to start writing a new album.
Upwards and onwards, Joe ✊🏻

06/10/2024

Feels like I’m gonna start writing again.
How do I know? Spent 2 days updating software and have organised to bring my Fender Rhodes home from storage.
It’s a sign 👌🏻

04/10/2024

💥 BANDCAMP EXCLUSIVE 💥
NOM - Available to stream/buy/download for the first time (NOT on any other streaming platform).
A collaboration between Joe McAlinden and Sace (David Lockhart), recorded at Joe's home in Shawlands, Glasgow and mixed in Soho, London by Goetz B. - Pet Shop Boys, U2, Blondie, Cinematic Orchestra...
The 10 track album was originally released on YoMama label in Germany in 2004.

https://joemcalinden.bandcamp.com/album/nom-2

29/09/2024

Quick question if you don’t mind?
Do you listen to music (any/all) from Bandcamp or are you mostly listening through Spotify, Apple, Tidal etc.?
Thanks, Joe.

All interesting comments so far and thanks for replying.

Looking to diversify my back catalogue - not a huge fan of it sitting gathering dust on Spotify etc. would much rather build a community and be much more hands on with it all ✊🏻

06/09/2024

💋 BANDCAMP FRIDAY SURPRISE 💥

Every item purchased today will receive a copy of Rest And Be Thankful Album on CD (for you or a friend).
Japanese Imports of Where The Clouds Go Swimming, Sound Systems Of The Soul and the NOM album are almost all gone.

joemcalinden.bandcamp.com/merch

01/09/2024

This was/is NOM.
We released an album in Germany in 2004.

https://joemcalinden.bandcamp.com/merch

28/07/2024

The many moods of Joe San 🇯🇵
Oh I’m halfway there
Oh livin’ on prayer 🙏🏻

27/07/2024

Thanks to everyone who purchased the anthology yesterday. It is now SOLD OUT.
If you were hoping to get a signed copy please let me know. I am hoping to get more copies sent over from Japan 🇯🇵

Address

Motherwell
North Lanarkshire

Website

https://joemcalinden.bandcamp.com/music

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Studio Time at STHQ. Let the games begin… #recording #new #music #studio

I made 2 albums with Edwyn Collins under the moniker Linden - ‘Bleached Highlights’ and ‘Rest & Be Thankful.’ Both albums have now been added to my Bandcamp profile where you can purchase/stream/download here - https://joemcalinden.bandcamp.com/music ✊🏻

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Now & Then (a brief history)

My name is Joe McAlinden…

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