Lost Classics: Bebop Moptop, by Danny Wilson

One of the myths about Spotify, the online music service, is that all the world’s music is on it. No, it is not. There are lots of gaps. Despite the epic valuation which gets investors so excited, the Spotify service is not comprehensive because record companies and copyright lawyers still rule and decide what can be used. Even if an artist’s back catalogue has changed hands, and disappeared into one of the vast consolidated companies that swallowed up rights after the destruction of the old music industry during the online revolution, a track or an album can still be barred from Spotify. Perhaps one of the songwriters won’t sign the piece of paper sent by a lawyer required for release. Perhaps an album just got forgotten and left off the request.

Something of that sort must have happened with Bebop Moptop, the second album by Scottish band Danny Wilson, which was released in 1989. It is not there on Spotify, as far as I can see. I discovered that by accident when a glitch meant my iPad told me it was playing the album not from Spotify, but somehow recovered from my old laptop where I burned my CD copy (remember that?) about ten years ago. A decade on, how did Spotify or Sonos know to find it? Search me.

The tracks on the album are available on compilations, but unless you buy the CD of this 50 minute pop classic you won’t hear it in its entirety as it was designed to be listened to by Gary Clark, Kit Clark and Ged Grimes, that is Danny Wilson.

Who were they? The group emerged from the house band of a Dundee night club, following failed early 1980s attempts to make it in London.

In 1987, Danny Wilson finally found their moment of fame with the single Mary’s Prayer, an intelligent slice of 1980s pop drawn from a debut album modelled on Steely Dan’s work. The song was radio friendly and a chart hit. “It is basically just a simple love song,” said Clark. “In fact I like to think of it as being like a country and western song”.

The simplicity of the song was supplemented and boosted by the sophistication and sheen of high level production, of the kind record companies were prepared to pay for in the 1980s when making records was still expensive. Indeed, the record company model in the 1980s particularly suited Scottish bands prepared to play clever games and create superior pop. The record companies were awash with cash and the holy grail beyond pure pop hits (of the Madonna or Stock, Aitken and Waterman variety that made the most money) was an artist that could potentially cross the Atlantic and make it with wealthy consumers at the top end of the mass market. The record companies could afford to try the unusual. It was capitalism in action.

This meant that smart young Scottish musicians in the 1980s with literary interests and a rich post-punk musical education that took in soul, country music, gospel, the Beatles and classic American songwriters, could get a proper record deal and a large enough advance to live – for a while – like trainee rock stars. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, and then Lloyd as a solo artist, did it best in my view. Deacon Blue ploughed a different but parallel furrow. Numerous other bands had less success but produced interesting work, some of it lost to history. Another missing Scottish classic of that period is Win’s You Got the Power which was a lager advert and then a full extended mix which exists only on expensive or rare vinyl or on a grainy youtube clip.

Literate pop, with a Scottish sensibility, was a key if understated strand of 1980s British popular culture. As a counterpoint to the horrors of the Live Aid Rock Aristocracy pomp that was so prevalent from 1984 to 1989, it deserves more attention.

It was in a promising climate that Danny Wilson entered the studio in the summer of 1988 to begin work on a second album, tinged with Americana and odes to New York. What resulted was an at times challenging listen, an explosion in a music factory with plenty of weirdness alongside the mainstream tunes and ballads such as If You Really Love Me (Let Me Go), or I Can’t Wait, perhaps the best blue-eyed soul record of the period. The radio hit – The Second Summer of Love – was a delicious satire on the Acid movement of 1987 and 1988, a movement that would give birth to rave culture. The Second Summer of Love charted, just.

And then Danny Wilson split, with Clark going on to write for other artists. Manchester in its Stone Roses phase took over. The 1980s explosion of Scottish music fizzled out, although one band – Teenage Fanclub – with different instincts and influences emerged to produce a remarkable body of work that makes their contemporaries Oasis or Blur look lightweight.

What of Danny Wilson? Mary’s Prayer, from 1987 is still heard, but Bebop Moptop rarely gets a mention. That’s unfair. In Bebop Moptop Danny Wilson produced a proper album that fizzes with variety and invention. Yet it works as a coherent whole. Think of it as the 1980s Scottish Sgt Pepper, and give it a try, on CD.

Buy the record here.