Classic Scottish 1984 album is still, decades later, young at heart

The Herald Scotland

a day ago

A week ago, they played Glastonbury for the very first time, playing the Acoustic Stage in a bill that also featured Nick Lowe and the Hothouse Flowers.
Their much-lauded debut album, Sisters, released in 1984, has now been accorded the expanded box-set treatment. In February this year they entertained fans old and new at the Barrowland. And two years ago they released The Bluebells in the 21st Century, their first studio album since the debut.
'The Bluebells are on a really great trajectory at the moment', Hodgens – Bobby Bluebell, as was – told Ellen and Hepworth. 'We've just finished our [next] album. We've had a real kind of Indian Summer, renaissance, in the last few years. I don't know why, to be honest. But all of a sudden, people like Stephen Pastel and [critic] Pete Paphides are all beginning to reassess us'.
He brought up Young at Heart, perhaps the Bluebells' best-known song, which hit number one in the UK charts in 1993, seven years after the band's demise, thanks to its exposure in a TV car advertisement. 'When you have a hit like [that], you kind of get put in that Marmalade category" he said, referring to the Scots pop band whose hits included Reflections Of My Life and Radancer. "And now you begin to realise that Marmalade were a fantastic band, with really fantastic songs and great singers, and I think we're getting a little bit of that again now'.
To revisit Sisters, that splendid album they released back in 1984 – the year, lest we forget, of such colossal albums as Springsteen's Born in the USA, Prince's Purple Rain soundtrack, and Madonna's Like a Virgin – is to recall just how good a band the Bluebells were. The hits are all there – Cath, Young at Heart, I'm Falling – but there are also some sharply political songs, a reflection of those turbulent times: the Falklands war, the early 1980s recession, the miners' strike, and widespread revulsion at the policies of Margaret Thatcher.
The album is now part of a three-CD, one DVD boxset, The Bluebells: Sisters, which blends the original record with bonus tracks, B-sides, single mixes, BBC sessions, live versions, promo videos and footage of the band appearing on Top of the Pops and the Old Grey Whistle Test. (As the band posted on Facebook recently, they played Young at Heart on ToTP on no fewer than seven occasions between 1984 and 1993 - a record beaten only by their fellow Scots, Wet Wet Wet, who performed their single 'Love Is All Around' eight times).
In his introductory liner notes to the boxset, the music journalist Will Hodgkinson has this to say: 'Rooted in classic song craft, exuding cheerfulness even when dealing with loneliness, heartbreak and other lachrymose staples, the Bluebells were the very essence of indie — they helped define its jangling, guitar-led sound — while maintaining an accessibility that went to the heart of their working-class roots.
'It was all captured in Sisters, a classic album of upbeat pop that in 1984 delivered the band something contemporaries like Orange Juice and Aztec Camera only ever managed intermittently: actual massive hits. They rang out from the speakers of fairground dodgems, youth club discos and concert halls across the land for one glorious summer of 1984'.
He surely speaks for many people who were into the Bluebells at the time when he ventures: 'Returning not just to the album but a wealth of radio sessions, singles versions and live recordings all these years later, what amazed me is how contemporary and relevant they sound. The essence of youth, it seems, changes less than we might imagine'.
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The band revolved around Hodgens, a Govan shipyard worker's son in thrall to classic Sixties songwriting, and the McCluskey brothers, Ken and Dave, who had been in a schoolboy punk band, Raw Deal.
Hodgens, who had founded a music fanzine, Ten Commandments, in 1980, initially played his own songs in a band called The Oxfam Warriors, who undertook a handful of shows supporting Altered Images. At the last one, at Glasgow School of Art, Alan Horne, of Postcard Records, Orange Juice's Edwyn Collins and a friend named Robert Sharp held up Juke Box Jury-type 'hit' and 'miss' cards.
Horne told Hodgens that songs were good, unlike the band, and that if a new group could be put together he would try to put them on Postcard. The Bluebells came together when Hodgens ran into the McCluskey brothers - Ken on vocals, David on drums - and they were joined by Lawrence Donegan, on bass, and Russell Irvine, on guitar.
Glasgow had a small and very close-knit music scene then, and the Bluebells received a lot of encouragement, while Collins himself 'was something of a mentor' for Hodgens at the outset. The new band made rapid progress.
'We played with Orange Juice and Aztec Camera', Hodgens told Scots music historian Brian Hogg in 1993, 'and because of this Postcard connection we were in Sounds [magazine] straightaway. There was even a picture of us in New Musical Express after our second concert. Nick Heyward saw it and because he liked my guitar he phoned up and gave us a support slot with Haircut 100'.
In 1981 Radio One presenter Kid Jensen invited the band to record the first of a number of sessions for his show, which gave them invaluable exposure.
In July 1982 Smash Hits said of the Bluebells that they were 'vendors of sturdy guitar-driven pop music with a distinctive ringing tone which, once heard, isn't easily forgotten'. Melody Maker went even further: 'Bobby Bluebell doesn't look like a pop star. He's tall, gangling, wears glasses and should be advertising Charles Atlas bodybuilding courses – as the seven-stone weakling. By the end of this year, Bobby Bluebell will probably be a pop star and the heart-throb of millions. That's where the smart money is'.
It was all happening for the Bluebells. They graced the cover of Melody Maker, and shortly afterwards came a live appearance on the Old Grey Whistle Test in October 1982, when they were as yet unsigned. The gig brought them to the attention of a wide audience. Elvis Costello had already reached out to them, and offered to produce some of their material. Their Costello-produced debut single, Everybody's Somebody's Fool, which had been tentatively been lined up by Postcard, came out, instead, on London Records, the band's eventual home.
Two singles, Cath and Sugar Bridge, had made it to the lower reaches of the Top 100 in 1983. The following year, I'm Falling reached number 11; then Young at Heart peaked at number eight. The cheerful promo video (included in the box set) featured Stratford Johns, the actor best-known for his tough-cop roles in Z-Cars and Softly, Softly, as the owner of a greasy-spoon cafe, as well as Molly Kelly and Clare Grogan.
The album, Sisters, had numerous highlights, aside from the hit singles: the poignant, string-laden Will She Always Be Waiting, on which they had originally worked with Costello; Aim in Life, written by Ken McCluskey at the age of 15 and 'about a lonely reclusive lady that I delivered newspapers to'; and a moving love song, H.O.L.L.A.N.D.,
There was a cover of Dominic Behan's most famous song, The Patriot Game. Behan was a friend of the McCluskey brothers' parents, and the brothers knew him well. 'When we started performing as The Bluebells we asked Dominic to update some of the verses so that it could become more of a universal message for young folk and the futility of war', Ken told the Record Store Day UK website recently.
The brothers also worked with Behan on South Atlantic Way, a clear-eyed look at the Falklands War. It begins: 'I was a raw recruit fresh out of school/and we set sail South Atlantic Way', it begins. Later: 'Well, I've got shrapnel running through my mind/I've glory in my head/Love of country has made me blind/to the living and the dead…'
Among those who reviewed Sisters favourably was Sounds magazine, which said that it contained 'more beauty and fear than most albums you'll hear this year'.
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"We were in a really fantastic location called Highland Studios up near Culloden in the north of Scotland", Hodgens recalled last month when asked by Classic Pop magazine about the making of Sisters. "It was a kind of residential studio and we just had the best time doing the album.
"I'd say there's no greater experience being in a band than recording your first album in a residential analogue studio playing live together, concentrating, the whole buzz. The whole tingle down your spine thing when you hear it all back through the mixing desk on those giant speakers for the first time. It's something that we're trying to recreate with our new album, which we're currently recording in a very similar way up in here Scotland at the moment".
Asked about the political content on some of the songs, he said: "I think in The Bluebells, without sounding too clichéd, most of our parents had been brought up really influenced by their working-class roots. My father worked in a shipyard. Ken and David's father was very affiliated with Dominic Behan and people like that.
"So we were very up in our politics, and very aware of what was going on. I'd just moved down to London and there was a bombing campaign going on there, so it was quite a tense situation. The Falklands War came, and obviously we weren't afraid to bring it up. We would write about anything in the songs, but we didn't really ever do it deliberately, or as a policy. It just came out in a lot of the songs".
Four decades after its release, Sisters fully deserves its remastered and expanded second life. It remains a compelling listen, and one that has no dated in the slightest.
* The Bluebells: Sisters boxset is released by London Records.