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| Billy Mackenzie |
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Billy Mackenzie was The Associates.
Sure, there was Alan Rankine, who wrote the melodies. But
melody was never why you remembered The Associates. It was
for Mackenzie's extraordinary voice. If pop was opera, then
Billy Mackenzie was the diva of the early 80's.
1980 was Scottish pop time.
There was Postcard and Orange Juice, Simple Minds, Scars,
Altered Images and, God forbid, Josef K. There was a buzz
about the Scottish scene which has not been replicated since.
And then, from Dundee,
The Associates burst onto the scene with "The Affectionate
Punch", a blistering debut. They disappeared in 1983
when the band split and only briefly resurfaced in 1997 when
Billy Mackenzie committed suicide. There's an epitaph for
you, huh?
But they left indelible
impressions. "Sulk" was the NME album of the ear
in 1982. The NME award was THE award to have at that time
in pop history, pre-the Brits and television's recognition
of the marketing, punter-pulling power of awards.
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| Mackenzie was The Associates |
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It was pre-telephone poll-rigging
territory. Punters had to buy an NME, cut out the bloody voting
page, fill it in longhand, put it in an envelope and send
it in to the paper. Today, if you want to rig the poll and
vote 40 times for the same artist, it would take 20 minutes.
In 1982, it would have
taken 2 days to fill the bloody forms in, cost forty quid
in NME's and twenty quid in postage. Oh, the joys and benefits
of Internet polling.
For a better epitaph, the
man himsel':
"Drugs? Och, I detest
all that decadent Warholian crap and I'm no' into coke anymore.
I'm not going into the world to sing to a lot of stoned bastards
and I'm no' gonna be stoned when I sing.
I'm saving the drugs and
books for when I'm 65 and I can't do it anymore. "
There are many eloquent
tributes to The Associates avaible on the web. Perhaps the
best is at .
ASSOCIATES TRIVIA
FOOTNOTE
The Associates were signed
to WEA, one of the mega-labels. They were a London-centric
label. Not many folk at the label had Whippets. Whippets were
Mackenzies' passion, possibly more so than music (for the
uninitiated, Whippets are a breed of dog, slightly smaller
than a Greyhound, but roughly the same shape).
A story is told of Billy,
only days after the band had split (unbeknown to WEA), of
taking six whippets on a train journey from Dundee to London
and on his arrival at a posh London hotel, demanding a doggy
minder. Which, of course, being a major label rock star, he
got. The bill, which went to WEA, contributed to his being
"de-rostered".
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