Image: Tay Road Bridge, approaching Dundee in the slow land (2001), Colin Smith CC BY-SA-2.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tay_Road_Bridge_-_geograph.org.uk_-_97596.jpg
Dundee: once, jute, jam and journalism; now … well, different folk will have their own epithets, but with D C Thomson still in town, journalism is potentially still in the mix, some other industries have come and gone. Music, in various forms, is persistent if not always super confident in itself.
The author of this book, Lorraine Wilson, also writes for the Dundee Courier; searching for her articles in the Courier (“serving the people of Tayside and Fife for more than 200 years … the second largest regional paper in the UK”, see the D. C. Thomson website) shows her to be a regular contributor on local interest and cultural topics.
It’s a measure of the current standing of popular music within Scotland that this book hasn’t been reviewed more widely. Or possibly, a measure of what people think about Dundee as a cultural centre. Which is a darned shame, because this is an interesting book about a brave place written from an interesting perspective.
The title of the book isn’t original. It is attributed to a song by American funk hero James Brown, in which context ‘the bridge’ is the off-middle section of a standard pop song. For Dundonians, of course, “The Bridge” is the Tay Bridge. Or bridges – rail and road.
Wilson grew up in Dundee in the 1970s, and her book pays tribute to the decades from the 60s to the noughties when her home-town grew its own music. What is particularly pleasing in the book are the interviews – a good journalist doing the legwork – that the author conducts with a long list of folk. many credited in the ‘who’s who’ appendix (pp.245-247), and comprising musicians, producers, writers, promoters, venue managers, listed in association with their many bands and performance places. If people make places, this is a loving account of how that happens.
Wilson also has direct memories of the D C Thomson Jackie magazine, which gave many teenagers their first tastes of music fan culture. Dundee women informed national pop tastes, and photographs of Scottish tours of bands like the Rolling Stones went national from the Dundee editorial office.
As well as press, music also needs places. Dundee has an art college – Duncan of Jordanstone – which fed into local music tastes much as art colleges did in many other larger places. The funk / R&B Average White Band formed in London in 1971, but including a core of Dundonians with connections to the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and in Dundee including Perth-born Alan Gorrie. Indie record shops include, from the 1970s, the legendary Groucho’s run by Alastair Brodie aka ‘Breeks’, a musical mecca which alas permanently closed during the covid year of 2020; and Rainbow Music. Wich sold instruments and more.
The style of the book is anecdotal, starting with a short snapshot of the author’s own childhood experience of entertainment culture in Dundee in the 1970s and 1980s: “heading over to Dance Factory at Fat Sams” (p.viii).
The sixties are remembered for their dance halls, as well as for the opening of the Tay road bridge in 1966 (p.30): glitterballs and dance bands morphing into gigs where moving live music was the main entertainment. Dundee had quite a few places for dancing long before Fat Sams opened for business, and the people who played live music there had grown up learning classical instruments as well as jazz, blues and rock. It’s interesting to read of the cross-overs between jazz and folk (p.7-8) in local performance culture (in evidence, Ken Hyder, drummer of Talisker), and of Dundee promoter Andy Lothian’s early role in getting bands like the Beatles, early days, to tour Scotland. Dundee, it is suggested (p,19), was a “microcosm of Liverpool” – a working class seaport with lost of bands. If the cavernous Caird Hall was the biggest venue (and hard to fill), many other hotels and halls also saw service, although the arrival of colour tv in Dundee in 1967 saw some cooling off in numbers for the big nights out (p.34).
The seventies sees hair lengthening and opens with discussion of the contribution of the legendary Michael Marra, folksinger-songwriter, born in Lochee, whose early musical influences included Charlie Parker, Catholic hymns, the Beatles and Beethoven, alongside Cat Stevens (p.48-9), and who performed both as a solo artist, and in several popular bands such as Hens Teeth and Skeets Boliver. Marra is a recurring character throughout the rest of the book. Folk and country venue The Bothy was considered ‘the coolest pub in the world’ by its regulars (p.53), a remark that displays the book’s typical stance of pride amidst self-deprecation.
Dundee is not a large city, and reading this book, it’s tempting to say that this factor – size – has been important in defining what kinds of musical experiences happen. It’s reasonable in a small place to feel rather at the mercy of cultural influences from the world about, but centring in one place, we come to understand how these various winds impact local music making. The eclecticism of musical tastes in a small city is remarkable; there seems to be an inclination for cross-over and genre hybridity which is not necessarily as strong in larger cities with stronger drives to niche markets. Country / jazz / rock / folk / punk / hip hop mashups seem to be a Dundee speciality.
The chapter on the 1980s in many ways sees the trends of the 1970s continue – high-school and art college bands, with new influences. This decade also sees the arrival of Fat Sams night club complex near Dundee University, which quickly became a popular place for live music as well as bopping. The brief moment of fame enjoyed by a band called St Andrew and the Woollen Mill, who sang in accents midway between Scots and North American, are a marker of Dundee’s sense of humour and a unique take on words (St Andrew was the performing name of Andy Pelc, who also lectured at Duncan of Jordanstone): “the character was a Dundonian who had spent many hears performing in America in a hellish version of the White Heather Club” (p.108). Musicially rough, it nevertheless gave Dundonian a place on stage, at around the same time that the Proclaimers in Fife were emerging with their own version of musical Scots. Michael Mara’s Gaels Blue also appeared in this decade, a mix of dark humour and serious musical skill, delivered using a bracingly wide range of musical styles and a range of song topics, many on Scottish historical topics. A quote from Liz Lochead (p.198) suggests that Marra should be seen as a key contributor to the artistic merit in Scots language performance. What I long for in this music is the self-confidence to move beyond parody into its own space, although Marra at his best can do just that.
While there were serious bands around in the 1980s, there is a sense in these stories that perhaps Dundee musicians expected not to be taken utterly seriously by their fanbase: there is something residually of the music hall urge to entertain first and foremost in the tracks from that decade. In the 1990s, indie music at places such as the Westport bar sounds like it begins to be more serious in ambition if not necessarily wider success. For working class Dundee, this was a hard decade. Major employer Timex fell out of love with its workers, who went on strike in 1993 – picket lines and street marches ensued, and at the end, Timex locked its gates and closed operations. Local musicians responded to the moment with benefit concerts (pp.172-3). A notable country-rock-folk-fusion band of this decade was Boogalusa, which enjoyed TV exposure and – thanks to its cross-genre mix – was able to platform at a wide range of different festivals (p.178). Like I said earlier, Dundee does like to mix it up, musically.
By the 1980s, dance culture moved to DJs rather than to live music, something that had changed significantly what live bands played. In the 1990s, the book observes that the art school musicians in Dundee had shifted from bands to DJing (p.204), although live music lived on in bars.
The final chapter of the book – the noughties – feels like an epilogue. Some new names appear – jazz singer-turned-lawyer Alison Burns, for example (p.271). But I have a feeling that at this stage, the author found it slightly difficult to move down a generation to speak to younger artists. Hip hop performance is a factor in more recent Dundee music, which is not much explored here, including the famous fraudulent faux-American hip-hop act Silibil n’ Brains: two Dundee students who pretended to be Californian rap artists and who enjoyed considerable if brief fame until they were unmasked as … just students from Dundee. This final chapter does, however, discuss The View, a serious and successful band (pp.230-241), whose members met in school, played everywhere they could locally (the Red Lion Caravan Park in Arbroath was, they say, their ‘Hamburg’, p.232), before finding a home pub in The Bayview – from whence the band got their name. A ‘world tour of Dundee’ (that self-deprecating sense of humour again) (p.234) and gigs at the University opened up into a successful touring period including to the US and Japan, and playing at high profile places such as Glastonbury and T in the Park. Well done them, especially their contribution in 2011 to Dundee Record Store Day, recording a local track at Seagate Studies and shooting the video in the then still-open Grouchos record shop.
“Just from Dundee” is, it turns out, quite interesting. I come away from this book feeling that Dundee should have more confidence in itself, and its music. Even if the rest of the world doesn’t always quite get it.
A book rich in detail – which needs a wee bit of high level overview narrative to pick out the long term trends from the anecdotes.
Further Reading and Listening
- D C Thomson, ‘The Courier’ on their website accessed 3 September 2025
- Kate Brown, ‘In Pictures: why closure of Groucho’s marked end of an era for Dundee music scene’, The Courier September 7 2022
- Lorraine Wilson, Take it to the Bridge: Dundee’s Rock & Pop History (Edinburgh: Black & White Publishing, 2011)
Further Listening
- Average White Band homepage
- Boogalusa, album 1994
- Michael Marra, ‘Gaels Blue’, album 1985
- Peter & Alison, ‘Highway O’er the Sea’ (1966) – for the opening of the Tay Road Bridge – if not the best song, nevertheless sung with verve.
- The Great Hip Hop Hoax official trailer, 2013 – the story of Silibil n’Brains
- The View official website homepage