We were a typical working-class Edinburgh family. The parents worked hard and the kids played hard - making our own entertainment when there was none to be found, which was often. We were a musical family in the sense that there was always music to b
e heard in our house.
My earliest memory of music is of my mother’s lovely voice. Mum had sung with the Women’s Royal Army Corps and was always singing. If ever I was upset, she would sing traditional Irish folk songs to send me to sleep. My dad was deaf, so he was never able to appreciate his wife’s beautiful voice.
It was at work that mum met my dad. He was a tailor, born in Ballymena, Co Antrim, in 1911. Some time after they met she spotted an advert in a paper placed by the Edinburgh textile firm, Manclarks. They were desperate for skilled tailors and seamstresses so they decided to leave for Scotland as soon as possible.
When they arrived in 1949 they got married, and it wasnae long before their first son, Ronald, was born, soon followed by Harold, then Brian and, finally, me. It was November 12, 1955.
My dad’s loss of hearing had been caused by a bike accident when he was four that severed the nerves in the back of his neck. From that point on he didnae learn any more speech and soon stopped talking, so we had to develop other means of communicating with him - our own form of sign language. Mum and dad had moved to the Broomhouse area of Edinburgh, aka the Irish ghetto, soon after they married. The estate was fairly new and was brilliant compared to the high-rise blocks in other schemes. Our bit consisted of three tenement blocks, bordered on one side by government buildings and on the other side by an industrial estate. Beyond that there was miles of hayfields.
We used to climb over the walls to taunt the security guards. There was money to be made by acquiring Golden Wonder crisps by the boxload and empty Schweppes soda bottles. If you bought a bottle you could take it back to the shop and get money back. A crate of them would keep us rich for weeks.
Family life was also rich, as you would expect it to be when there are four young boys living in one small house. As the baby of the family, I got special attention from my mum - at least that’s what my brothers seemed to think.
But when I was nine I contracted meningococcal meningitis, probably from drinking dirty water at school summer camp.
A few days after I came home I didnae feel right. Mum wasnae taking any chances and called our GP and I was rushed to hospital. They said that if I’d arrived there half an hour later, I would have been dead.
I was held down by four doctors so that they could stick a needle in my spine. The slightest movement could have paralysed me. I had never been so scared in my life. Mum said that I was never the same again after the meningitis. She said I became "high strung" and tense, and stayed that way until quite recently.
Like all of my brothers, I went to Broomhouse Primary. I loved going and had a fantastic teacher called Mrs Simmons. But I worried about moving to the "big" school. Bad things seemed to happen to everyone I knew who went to Forrester High.
Roni was OK there for the most part but got into some kind of trouble and ended up in a special school for a while. Hari was there only a few weeks when his friends raided the school tuck shop and he was the one stopped by the police.
A few days later, he walked to school along the railway embankment unaware that it was private property. The police caught him. Then they caught him mucking about on a friend’s scooter. He was nicked and banned from driving for 25 years. At the age of 11 and a half.
The social services were notified. They convinced mum it would be best for Hari if she handed him to them. He was taken off to a home for young offenders and on his first night was raped by the night-duty officer. He was then moved to the Mossbank Approved School in Glasgow where he stayed for the next three years.
He ended up in a dorm with 36 Glaswegian gang members. If you delve into the most sordid realms of your imagination and multiply it a hundred times, you’ll get the picture of what happened to him.
There was no-one to help him and there was no escape. He sank into despair and a downward spiral that reached an all-time low when a contract was put out on him in the late 90s.
He suffered a broken jaw, fractured skull, permanent damage to the spinal chord and loss of feeling in his face. I wish I could have done something and I still do, but I dinnae know what.
So it was no wonder that I was nervous as I walked through Forrester’s gates for the first time. At first I got picked on for being small and also because of my dad. But after a year or two, I eventually found a way to discourage this unwanted attention - by misbehaving and gaining respect.
As far as lessons went, I wasnae interested. I developed a healthy dislike of teachers with one exception - Mr Cunningham. As a result, I enjoyed my art lessons, but he was by far the scariest teacher in school. In those days, it was acceptable to discipline a child with a belt. Getting belted by him would scare you s***less.
IT was when I was 15 that things got out of hand. There was a posh kid in my year who wound people up and I did my fair share of hassling the lad. One afternoon he was sitting in an open-top car with his brother, who jumped out, spat in my face and told me to leave his little brother alone.
I found some bricks and other missiles and proceeded to smash the car to pieces. He called the police. Logic deserted me. I was a bit overzealous and the posh kid ended up in hospital. The next day, Mr Cunningham and another teacher beat the living s*** out of me in a classroom.
I decided to get them back by vandalising the teachers’ lift. It was easy to recruit co-conspirators and they were happy to contribute the requisite ammunition.
My scheme was carried out like a military exercise and timed to perfection. Seven years later, the IRA used similar "dirty protests" in the Maze to demonstrate their anger.
I was expelled, but it was worth it because operation "make the f*****s walk up the stairs" was successful. I also ended up in court being done for malicious damage to the convertible and grievous bodily harm to the boy. Mum paid out £10 or so in fines.
Outside of school, my brothers and I were all into scooters, on which I used to follow Roni to discos. After a while he’d let me go with him. It was brilliant. The girls wanted to look after the wee brother and there were lots of slow dances to be had. Because I was small, I usually found my head nestled in their chests.
Mostly, though, we’d sit in playing records. We’d whack up the volume and argue about whose turn it was to pick the track. I’d always choose Bowie, Roxy Music and Deep Purple or Led Zeppelin. We weren’t hanging around the streets like lots of the other kids, getting into far more trouble than we did.
In 1971, aged 15, I had to think about finding a job, and having been cast out of the education system before my time, the prospects weren’t good. I didnae like what I could see coming my way. I began to work on an escape plan.
My friend Jimmy Redpath’s dad was a captain in the Merchant Navy. To a forlorn, puberty-ridden 15-year-old, the idea of sailing the high seas, far and away from Edinburgh, was very, very attractive.
I filled in the forms and fell asleep each night imagining the exotic places I would go to. I was absolutely devastated when my application was rejected because I’d been expelled from school. I cried for ages. I wanted to see the world and now I couldnae have the job to let me do that.
Eventually, when the disappointment died down, I began to work on another escape plan.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved music, not just listening to it, but singing it especially. People used to say I had a good voice.
My first public performances were at the local community centre. There’d be bingo and a band and when they finished they would invite members of the audience up on stage to sing.
"I was always the first to volunteer and when I’d finished, everyone would stand up and applaud. One day it dawned on me that this was something that could be developed. I began to take a more serious interest in music and the industry as a whole.
So I decided, if I couldnae be a sailor, I’d be a pop star. Getting into music was definitely the only route open to me and I went full steam ahead towards that door.
At weekends, I began visiting the Radio Edinburgh Studios, just to find out what went on and how things worked. Radio Edinburgh was a recording studio run by a guy called Neil Ross. I used to hang out there, just to soak up the atmosphere. I made cups of tea for Neil and the technicians and constantly bombarded them with questions.
I was in awe of the bands that recorded there and wanted more than anything else in the world to have one of my own. That would, of course, require money and as I didnae earn any money at the studios there was no alternative but to get a job to finance my dream.
I had a girlfriend whose dad was a foreman at the S&N breweries and they were looking for a lab assistant. The interview was a formality. I got the job and started on my 16th birthday, in the winter of 1971. I was given a proper lab assistant’s white coat and an access-all-areas pass - it didnae take long for me to catch on that the access rights were a highly exploitable perk. I could go where the beer was brewed and siphon off the unpasteurised beer, an elixir to my fellow workers. I remember often cycling home, off my wee head, which seriously worried my poor mum. Sadly, though, one day I was discovered and got fired.
I got a new job at a soft drinks factory. My new truck was a nifty little number, and one day I whizzed out of the warehouse into the car park and drove straight through the MD’s Merc. I didnae see any point in hanging around, waiting to get fired!
I had God knows how many different jobs after that - delivering bread, working in a laundry and then a chemical factory. There was also a stint as an electrician’s apprentice.
All the time I was dreaming of the day when I would have my own band. I decided to seize the initiative and set about finding other members for my band by advertising in the Edinburgh Evening News and Bruce’s Records, in Rose Street.
BRUCE’S Records was the hub of the music world in Edinburgh, because its owner, Bruce Findlay, had his own music charts which all the radio stations in Scotland used. He went on to manage Simple Minds.
My brother Hari was also on the case. He knew a lassie called Pamela Cormack, who ran the fan club for a well-known Scottish band, the Bay City Rollers. The club was run from the Prestonpans home of their manager, Tam Paton.
As Tam was an important, if not the only, music industry figure in Edinburgh, Hari felt I should meet Pamela, so off we went.
While we were there a phone call came through from a guy called Alan Wright. He was putting together a band called Threshold with his friend, Alex Valente, and said they were looking for a lead singer. Within seconds I was on the line and my "brass neck" got me the job.
I went along to meet Alan, who was the bass player, and Alex, the lead guitarist. Also in the band were John Walker on rhythm guitar and Jon Gillam on drums. We began rehearsing together at each other’s houses. By the time we started to get gigs, my brother Roni was a DJ of note in Edinburgh, and we hit on the idea of selling Threshold and Roni as a package. It worked really well and the gigs rolled in.
Threshold were your typical long-haired rockers - we wore mainly jeans and T-shirts to start with, but I did invest in a black crushed velvet jacket that I was particularly fond of.
Then my dad started to make some stage gear for us. Having watched Top of the Pops in forced silence, he concentrated on how the bands looked and decided he could make us stand out from our contemporaries. He gave us a visual edge and, with the music and the look established, we started to attract quite a substantial following of young lassies. Within a matter of weeks, they were coming from as far away as Aberdeen to camp outside Alan’s mum’s house in sleeping bags.
I was in my element - part of the Edinburgh "scene" and on the receiving end of a lot of very attractive offers from those lassies that it would have been rude to decline. Alan also increased my appreciation of music with marijuana.
I’d only ever smoked tobacco and remember thinking the first time I tried a spliff that it wasnae having any effect. Then I started to laugh a lot and it seemed like I was thinking on another dimension. I loved it.
As our reputation spread, we started to get booked for gigs farther afield. We started to travel all over Scotland to perform. Those were great times. Threshold was a surreal, enjoyable apprenticeship and I was living the dream.
But while Threshold was going from strength to strength and shagging for Scotland, I was being fired from countless jobs for being too tired to show up. Eventually, I landed a job at a paper mill for the princely sum of £70 a week - a hell of a wage in 1972.
My big salary meant that I could help to buy more stuff for Threshold, like a PA and our own van. That meant we actually started to realise a bit of a profit.
Our bookings were still increasing, and managers were starting to inquire about signing us up. Although I dinnae recall the event, some of the guys reckon we approached Tam Paton.
Jon Gillam says that he can remember going to see him.
Apparently, Threshold were told that they would have to change their image, be generally more clean-cut to make any serious progress. He also wanted us to stop playing rock and move to pop. Obviously no-one liked the idea, so we carried on as we were.
In November of 1973, we had a gig in Dunbar. As usual I was wearing really cool gear that my dad had made for me - on this occasion, a pair of bright-yellow flares, made of stretch nylon fabric.
I was following the Scottish tradition of not wearing underwear. Yellow stretch flares looked much better without a visible panty line. At the time, I thought I looked the dog’s b******s. I didnae much care that most people were finding it hard not to look at mine.
I didnae know, on stage that night, that one member of the audience in particular was especially drawn to those tight trousers. After the show, Tam Paton and Eric Faulkner came to see me backstage.
• Shang-a-Lang: Life as an International Pop Idol (£15.99 hardback) by Les McKeown with Lynne Elliot, foreword by Irvine Welsh, is published by Mainstream on October 20. To receive your copy (p&p free) call The Book Service on 01206 255800 or visit
www.mainstreampublishing.com Les McKeown will be launching his book in conjunction with Ottaker’s at Acanthus on Waverley Bridge on October 8 at 7pm. To purchase tickets, priced £3, call Ottaker’s on 0131-225 4495. Les will be signing copies of his book at WH Smith’s at the Gyle shopping mall on October 9 at 1pm
