This guy who turned out to be Sean Dickson came up afterwards and said he was trying to start a band and wondered if I might play the drums – what the hell I thought, I couldn’t really play drums but it didn’t really matter in those days, and Sean seemed like a good guy.

So we got together and it just clicked. It was easy. So The Soup Dragons happened and I stayed for the next 5 years or so, taking a few years out of Art School as things got busier with the band. As I was the ‘arty one’ I fell into designing the record covers which was a great joy and privilege. For me it underpinned and strengthened the tight relationship with our fans, it was the whole package, a true connection, a haptic symbiosis. I knew this well because that’s exactly how I engaged with music and bands.

You might hear something on John Peel or from a friend, make your way nervously to the classic Glasgow record shops of that era, Listen, Bloggs or Bruces, getting fleeced by the punks on the back stairs, asking for some obscure slice of vinyl and be handed a precious 7” single or a glorious effervescent album. You would take it home, close your bedroom door, scrutinise it, devour it, the size of it, the scale, the smell, holding it in your hand, unlocking all the details of who did what, where it was recorded, the pictures, the feel, the vibe, the weight, a mainline to the band. And that was even before you took the vinyl out of the sleeve, holding it up to the light to decipher the messages on the mysterious run off grooves, squinting to read the label, who wrote the songs, all the minutia. And then you put the record on and boom! Your relationship with the band truly explodes into three dimensions (at least).

Now I’m no Peter Saville, that much is clear but to be able to bring Sean’s songs to life with my band-mates Jim McCulloch and Sushil K Dade, then design the sleeves, get the whole package out to 5/10/20,000 folk was a profoundly important experience for me as an 18/19/20 year old in the late eighties. That’s not a bad starter constituency to have as your audience. This was vibrant for a few years, but then as usually happens things eventually shifted in the direction of the band and I left to go back to Art School, no hard feelings.

I’ve now been working as an artist for the best part of 30 years, working at Glasgow School of Art for 20 years, busy exhibiting all over the world building on that early foundation, striving to develop that connection with audiences from Glasgow to Europe, America, China, Korea, Japan, Australia and as many points as possible in-between, exporting and importing an idea of what Glasgow and Scottish culture can be, locally, nationally and internationally. And almost every art project I develop, every exhibition I make, I utilise the experience of that relationship with an audience I first explored as a nascent musician/artist/’designer’ in Glasgow of the ‘80’s. How will the audience encounter the work? How might they engage? How will they parse any meanings from it? How could they ultimately take part in it? How could they take what they need from it and make it into something of their own? Carrying it forward and pushing it into new places, new people. My experiences as a fledgling communicator on these early singles and albums was critically formative in relation to my later thoughts on what it means to ‘be an artist’ and how the things that you make might engage an audience.

In the last years I’ve begun to bring music back into my work as an artist and have put out some records/cd’s as part of exhibitions, events, etc. But it feels different now, music is different, the business has changed irrevocably but I’m
so very grateful to have begun my own creative life during its last hurrah when you could still believe that music and the physical manifestation of art and culture could change the world. I know it’s laughed out the door in these post historical days of fake news and plastic presidents but I’ll let you into a wee secret, sometimes I believe that it still can.