FLA 07: Alasdair Mackenzie
Alasdair Mackenzie has been a writer, a DJ, a teacher, and for the past 20 years or so, has worked in politics; he currently works in Parliament as an outreach manager. I met him in April 1990, when we were students at Cardiff University, and he has been one of my closest friends ever since. We’ve been in a house share, we’ve worked in a record store, we’ve written together, and yes, we’ve talked a lot about music. When I first had the idea for First Last Anything, he very kindly agreed to participate in a test session to see if the format actually worked. We recorded it on the afternoon of 3 April 2022, and I thought it went so well that I asked him if he was happy for it to be included in the series itself. And he said yes.
We talked about all sorts of things here, and its wildly eclectic content helped me set the tone for all the episodes that have followed. I am incredibly indebted to all my guests in these early episodes who took part even before they knew – or even I knew – what the finished format might look like, but most of all I want to thank Alasdair, because without this pilot episode, I might not have gone any further. What really made me think the series might work, above all, was that even after knowing him for 32 years, I did not know anything about some of his defining choices. He still told me some things that surprised me.
(At one point, we discuss Eurovision, and obviously we recorded this before the 2022 Song Contest on 21 May, which – as almost everyone will know by now – was not only won by Ukraine, but also saw the best response in 25 years for the United Kingdom entry.)
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ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
As a kid, from the age of five or six into my teens, we listened pretty solidly to Capital Radio, before Radio 1 was on FM, and Radio 2 was a bit soporific for us. Capital was quite exciting back then. Its playlist was constructed along the lines of the demographics of London, rather than the modern method of commercial playlisting, editing tracks, minimising channel hopping. So there was a more creative playlist and a more creative roster – as well as daytime DJs like Mike Allen and Graham Dene, there was hip hop at the weekend, and after about 10.30 at night there was Dave Rodigan playing reggae. To this day, I associate reggae music with late night.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Yes, even on Radio 1 you’d mainly hear reggae on John Peel, or The Ranking Miss P, also late night.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
Yes. So by osmosis, I did pick up a lot of different sounds, but on Sundays, my mum and I would listen to the Top 40, taping things we liked, and by my teens I started doing my own tapes. But I didn’t buy records, I didn’t consider myself a fan of particular bands. I was just a magpie. You’d hear a song sometimes, that you’d never heard of, and think, I’ll tape that next week. And by next week, it had gone.
FIRST: TIM SOUSTER/Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1980, single, Original Records)
Extract: ‘Journey of the Sorcerer’
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
The first time I came across The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was on television, rather than on the radio where it started. At that time, I would watch anything that was sci-fi on television or in films, so I was drawn to it, and just completely fell in love with it. It was funny, it was imaginative, and I loved the music.
Much later I read about how Douglas Adams, with the earlier radio programme, brought a lot of his interest in music into the show – and the theme tune he chose was a piece of music called ‘Journey of the Sorcerer’ by The Eagles, on the grounds that it had a banjo in it and he felt that banjos evoked the notion of hitch-hiking.
JUSTIN LEWIS
The tradition of the troubadour, perhaps? It sounds a bit like a lute!
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
And as you know, the theme as was broadcast was not The Eagles’ version but by Tim Souster. I don’t ever remember having regular pocket money, so this might have been with a record voucher, but I bought it from a record shop in Stockport. This was 1980, so I was probably 9 or 10 years old.
The Souster version was an extract from the specially made album, not from the TV or radio series, and on the other side, it was the Peter Jones narration about the band Disaster Area, followed by a song purportedly by Disaster Area called ‘It’s Only the End of the World Again’. So although I had no recordings of Hitchhiker at the time, I had this wonderful little bit of it I could play, and also this rather unusual song.
Around the same time I bought an LP called BBC Space Themes which featured, among other things, the theme tune to Tomorrow’s World by Johnny Dankworth, which in later years at college I would play at the end of every DJ set, as the lights were coming up.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I remember it well. It’s got a fantastic flute solo.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
The full version is just superb. It was a brave soul who would try and dance to that.
JUSTIN LEWIS
So that first version of the Hitchhiker’s theme that was commercially released had nothing to do with the radio programme at all. It was specially recorded. And Tim Souster had quite a career. Very little of it online now, unfortunately – a lot of stuff you can’t get easily.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
I found one thing on iTunes.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Was that Equalisations, that combination of a brass ensemble and electronics?
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
Yes.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I liked that. And also, in 1970, he collaborated with a group called the Scratch Orchestra, who were opening act for the Soft Machine at the Proms, playing Ring Modulator. And in the 80s, it would appear, he did the music for the St Ivel Gold adverts. With a Michael Jayston voiceover: ‘Get your figures straight! Butter! Eighty per cent fat!’ I’d always assumed the music was someone like David Sylvian. You’d get quite avant-garde music in mainstream adverts sometimes.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
There were all sorts of musicians in the 70s and early 80s who did this kind of thing. My dad had an album by a man called Dave Greenslade called The Pentateuch of the Cosmogony. Essentially it was like a soundtrack to a story. So you had the story in a booklet with the LP and it was sci-fi. There were lots of quite quirky electronic musicians straddling that bridge between prog concept albums, also people like Tomita and Kraftwerk.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Obviously the other thing with theme tunes in those days, is they’d be advertised at the end of programmes. ‘Viewers may like to know that the theme tune is available in the shops.’ They used to play TV theme tunes on the radio. At one point the theme to In Sickness and In Health by Chas & Dave was on the Radio 2 playlist.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
My girlfriend at the time, her parents had Radio 2 on, in the days when it was more conservative than it is now, and it would play the theme tune to Last of the Summer Wine.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I almost miss that. (I don’t really.) Or Ennio Morricone’s ‘Chi Mai’, from The Life and Times of David Lloyd George.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
Which my mum bought.
JUSTIN LEWIS
‘Journey of the Sorcerer’ really doesn’t sound like an Eagles record, does it? It’s like finding out that the Blake’s 7 theme was really by REO Speedwagon.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
The music is such an integral part of Hitchhiker’s, or Hitchhiker as Douglas called it. He wanted it to sound like an album and there’s all sorts of really interesting pieces of music which they used, like Terry Riley’s ‘A Rainbow in the Curved Air’. The end sequence of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe was inspired by ‘Grand Hotel’ by Procul Harum, as the sort of backdrop to it, although they weren’t able to use the piece itself. Douglas Adams was really ahead of his time – there’d been these big sci-fi films like 2001, with its incredible use of existing classical music, and the unique orchestral score of Star Wars – but to make a sci-fi comedy that used existing popular music… which is now a very voguish thing to do, if you watch something like Guardians of the Galaxy.
Hitchhiker has this contrast between mind-boggling crazy distances and the remoteness of space, and this very small human experience, which pop music reflects really well. I think unbeknownst to me, buying that single was actually not just the first step into a wider world of pop music, but a whole load of other things I came to really love later in life. So – an appropriate first choice of single.
LAST: GO_A: ‘Kalyna’ (2022, single, Brynza Music/Universal Polska)
JUSTIN LEWIS
Now, I didn’t really follow Eurovision last year, 2021, and so this came as a surprise.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
They were Ukraine’s entry. They’re called Go_A, pronounced ‘goa’.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Apparently, means ‘go back to your roots’.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
Under our radar, in this country, Eurovision has become a fascinating festival of music. And in particular Eastern European countries, since they started entering in the early 1990s, have brought their own music and cultural background into pop music. And to me, Go_A are one of the most interesting and exciting examples of that fusion that I’ve ever seen. Both their Eurovision song last year, ‘Shum’, and the one I’m selecting, ‘Kalyna’, are adaptations of Ukrainian folk songs. So the lyrics, the imagery, are very traditional, but they repurpose those into these very high-octane dance tracks. Maybe the closest in sound is that early 90s rave era, like The Prodigy. ‘Shum’, which they entered in 2021, was already a single and they rejigged it.
JUSTIN LEWIS
And I think they edited it, because you only get three minutes at Eurovision for a song.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
There are two videos to ‘Shum’. There’s the Eurovision video, very entertaining, but the original video before it is amazing. It was obviously made at the height of the second wave of the pandemic, and the song is about spring. So in the video, they have hazmat suits, which brings that imagery of distancing and fear of infection. Then it ends with them joyously throwing off these masks and dancing. But they foreground the instruments. You’ve got one guy on synthesiser, another on tin whistle, and there’s a guy with some kind of drum-synth but he’s hitting it with a stick. So there’s this wonderful crash of very traditional music with contemporary music, and there’s this lead singer, who looks like she’s come from another planet, Kateryna, who’s like a sort of ethereal disco diva.
JUSTIN LEWIS
There’s a particular style of singing she uses, which is known as ‘the white voice’, I believe: ‘controlled yelling or shouting’.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
That’s right, so it has this extraordinary power. And so when you saw them perform at Eurovision, they just absolutely blew everybody away. I have a false memory in that I thought they came second last year…
JUSTIN LEWIS
Second in the public vote.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
And fifth overall. Yes, the winners were Italy, with one of their most popular bands, Måneskin, which is like Coldplay entering for the UK, and even that, while not really my cup of tea, was an extremely impressive performance. But ‘Shum’ is very evocative about coming out of Covid, and the arrival of vaccinations and things like that, and then when they did the video for the Eurovision entry, it shows the former site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which has got this extraordinary structure covering it over. Very much a sense of this bold, confident Ukrainian voice.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Where do you think your interest in Eurovision and in international music came from?
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
I grew up watching Eurovision with my family. At that time, the United Kingdom were regularly in the top three, and the songs were usually big hits. My sister became a huge fan of Bucks Fizz, who have undergone something of a reassessment in recent years – I think Bob Stanley wrote an interesting piece in the Guardian. They were possibly the last of the great British pop bands where all the material was written by somebody else.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Now you mention it, that’s a good point. There’s been the odd exception since – Girls Aloud, obviously.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
But Eurovision was never part of my mainstream love of pop music. It was self-contained, I loved it for what it was, Terry Wogan was still more witty than bitter about the scoring, and obviously there was that lovely unpredictability of live television. But as it evolved, into the late eighties, early nineties, it maintained my interest, and when all the extra Eastern European countries started to enter, I was really interested in what kinds of new music might come through this. Around that time, I had already heard The Wedding Present’s Ukrainian John Peel Sessions album, fell in love with that, and also got hold of The Trio Bulgarka’s album, so I was already very interested in Eastern European sounds and music. Very evocative, and for me, there’s also a weird overlap with dance music. There was also this Romanian guy, Toni Iordache, he played the cimbalom, hammers on piano strings, passion, crisscrossing rhythms and really odd sounds. I loved all that.
But the Eastern European entries gave Eurovision a bit of a shot in the arm. The songs submitted by the main countries who founded Eurovision were pretty lame, you were getting soppy Irish ballads, or the doo-wakka-day-type things. Most of those countries joining the contest were taking it incredibly seriously. The economic and political circumstances of their being part of the European Broadcasting Union means a lot to these countries, and the artists representing them to this day tend to be big stars in their own countries. We once saw this documentary about Eurovision [‘Nul Points’, TV Hell, BBC2, 31/08/1992], and one pundit was saying, ‘Why would you not have Right Said Fred entering for Britain?’
JUSTIN LEWIS
That was Bill Martin, who co-wrote ‘Congratulations’, and ‘Puppet on a String’.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
That’s him. We haven’t really taken it seriously.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Another thing in that same TV Hell documentary: you would hear types of music in Eurovision you weren’t normally familiar with. European pop music was seen as a bit of a joke, despite Kraftwerk and Serge Gainsbourg and so on. And obviously, Scandinavia is one of the biggest influences on world pop these days. One thing that happened is that, after ABBA won, there was a sizeable backlash from some people in Sweden who felt that Eurovision should be pushing for traditional Swedish music, rather than appropriating American pop music. And I can see both sides of that argument, but I like hearing things that are specific to a country. Obviously, these days you get a lot more of the same records being hits everywhere, and it wasn’t always like that. Also, it was interesting to see how different countries presented the contest on television. You heard different types of music, but you saw different types of television – Israel, say, would do it differently from… Denmark. There’s a bit more of a house style now.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
I think one thing that needs nipping in the bud: the idea that Britain have not done well in recent years because we are disliked as a country or because of the Iraq war. Because France hasn’t done well either, or Germany. And they weren’t in the Iraq war. They’re the founding members, but they’re the ones who lost interest, and don’t take it seriously. Conversely, one of the things that became a pain in the arse with Wogan, was the countries voting in Eastern Europe for each other wasn’t political. There’s no reason why a Serbian would vote for Bosnia. It’s the music. The Eastern European acts who do well in Eurovision are massive stars in Eastern Europe and sometimes beyond. So they will put into Eurovision the people who are getting number one hits in their countries. And those hits will be played in Bulgaria, in Romania, in Serbia, in Croatia… It isn’t simply cultural proximity, because why wouldn’t Belgium give France twelve points every year, why wouldn’t Ireland give United Kingdom twelve points? It isn’t just cultural proximity. It’s not politics. It’s to do with the songs.
And then of course we come to the recent events in Ukraine, and I noticed that Go_A had released this new single, ‘Kalyna’, which is available to download. The proceeds from it are going to the Return Alive Foundation, and the group have also urged people to donate to the organisation. ‘Kalyna’ is about a rose, a broken kalyna tree was a sign of trouble and tragedy, and abuse of this tree was a shameful act. So this song chimes with modern Ukraine, while also looking into folklore. The group are touring this year, and the dates were delayed initially because they’ve been ‘fighting the enemy’!
It’s very powerful hearing these songs, at the moment. And it feels like a fitting milestone to me, having watched Eurovision since I was a child, not knowing as a child it was founded after the Second World War, to promote European harmony, co-operation and unity. Watching this very entertaining, often ridiculous, and very uplifting competition, going through all these different stages, the stage after 1989 at the end of the Cold War, taking us into this bigger Europe, and I think it still stands.
We’ve had Brexit, but we’re still part of that bigger Europe, so many of us still have experiences with people from Eastern Europe living in our neighbourhoods and being our friends and our colleagues, and now we’re seeing war in Europe in a way we haven’t seen for many years… all those virtues of Eurovision which sometimes seemed slightly silly are thrown into sharp relief. Seeing Go_A feels like a very powerful message of unity. So I downloaded the song partly because it’s a powerful thing, but also I really like them as a band. And Eurovision has brought me, even at 51, a new band. I would not have predicted that.
JUSTIN LEWIS
There’s nothing quite like hearing a brand new band, is there? It’s exciting.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
Yes. And that same feeling happened with Metronomy, too, I remember The English Riviera felt like an important eye-opener, challenging and incredibly melodic. I am very pleased to say that, at the age I have now reached, I am still listening to new music, which is taking me to new places, and I hope that doesn’t stop.
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ANYTHING: PETER GABRIEL: So (1986, Charisma/Virgin Records)
Extract: ‘Mercy Street’
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
There was a sudden moment when I really got into pop. During what would now be called Year 11 at school, I must have seen the video for Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’ on the television and really liked it and really liked this song. And someone at school lent me everything he did, which led to me trying to find other records by Genesis with Peter Gabriel. And in those days, of course, no streaming, so you were basically borrowing people’s records and stuff out of the library.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Not long ago [26/03/2022] was the last-ever Genesis gig and Peter Gabriel was in the audience, and you said about that, ‘Can you imagine if he got on stage with them?’ The place would have erupted.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
I think he probably didn’t go on stage for that reason.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Generous spirit.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
Once I got So, things seemed to happen very quickly after that. I got into The Jam, The Police, The Clash, post-punk stuff, a whole range of things. I started buying music magazines. I remember reading about Thomas Dolby’s Aliens Ate My Buick, and thinking, That sounds like something I’d like.
JUSTIN LEWIS
When I first met you in 1990, we obviously started to talk about music quite quickly – in fact you lent me the cassettes of the first two Thomas Dolby albums – and you appeared to have heard all music as far as I could tell. I must have asked you, when did you properly start buying records, and it was ‘about five years ago’. I was thinking, How have you done this?
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
A big part of it was working at HMV. I got my first part-time job working there in summer 1989, and in those days you were allowed to borrow up to three items of stock at a time. Which was useful partly because sometimes something wouldn’t work, so it would have to be sent back, but also because it was useful to know about what you were selling. And you got a staff discount. In 1989, I was earning what then was one of the highest salaries on the high street. HMV and Marks and Spencer were the two best paid. It’s all relative, but it’s enough if you want to buy records. And I was living at home, I wasn’t paying any rent or bills, this money was going in my back pocket.
The other thing about working in a record shop, you learn about what people are interested in, even if you have no interest in it. You get to know about things. And I wanted to know as much as possible about the music, rather than the people.
JUSTIN LEWIS
It’s interesting that you’re not, I think, really a musician.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
Not at all! A mutual friend of ours once said to me, I’ve never known anyone with so many records who doesn’t play an instrument. I think If I’d been growing up in different circumstances, I would have been a drummer, or possibly a bassist. The rhythmic aspects of music are what I like the most, and it might be why the music I least like is hard rock, heavy metal, which feels very treble.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Going back to Peter Gabriel. I don’t think I’d heard one of his solo albums before So, I knew some of the singles. But I discovered things like ‘Milgram 37’ and was like, what’s Milgram? Turns out, it was, who’s Milgram?
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
Yes, and Kate Bush, via ‘Don’t Give Up’, so that’s leading me down other roads musically. And ‘Mercy Street’, probably my favourite track on that album, which led me to Anne Sexton. I went to London and found an American import of her Selected Poems [edited with an introduction by Diane Wood Middlebrook and Diana Hume George], which I still have. She’s still one of my favourite poets. So yeah, I mean, that album just opened me up.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Without wishing to paint the past too much as endlessly great, you did feel back then that artists in pop would reference books they’d read, films they’d seen. Not just their own lives, fine as that can be sometimes. Did you know who was going to be on ‘Don’t Give Up’ with Peter Gabriel?
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
…I can’t remember.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Dolly Parton. Potentially a very different song. And unusually, for a classic album, the sequencing of So is now slightly altered. ‘In Your Eyes’, previously at the start of side two, is now at the end of the record. Where do you feel the song belongs?
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
The other day, I was listening to it, I’ve got the remastered version, and the running order did catch me off guard, slightly.
JUSTIN LEWIS
‘Mercy Street’ is not an obvious side opener, is it?
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
The original running order is very imprinted in my brain, so side two is a very different thing now to me.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Doesn’t happen very often, rejigging the running order of a major album.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
There’s Rumours which now has ‘Silver Springs’ [originally the B-side to ‘Go Your Own Way’] on it, at the end. That’s canon now.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I can’t think of any others apart from Morrissey ones, and let’s not get into that.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
I went to see Peter Gabriel at Earls Court in 1987. My first concert, I’d just finished my O levels, that’s how old I am. I went on my own, and I was dropped off by my dad. He had such a great backing band, really impressive stage presence. And amazing lighting rigs – there was one point where he was doing, I think, ‘No Self Control’ and these lightings were kind of like hacking down at him like giant birds. He’s got a great sense of stagecraft, even when he wasn’t dressing up. And then the opening bars of ‘Don’t Give Up’ began, and I was thinking, ‘Well, how is he gonna do this? He can’t sing it on his own.’ But apparently that’s what he had been doing.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Singing the whole song.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
Yes. But on this occasion, Kate Bush emerges from the wings, wearing a big baggy jumper and leggings, like she’d just come from home. The whole place went crazy, because she’d not appeared live on stage in a big concert since 1979. It was an extraordinary thing to watch. But it wasn’t until after the event I realised I’d been present to something extremely unusual.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Because she never did it again.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
I have a feeling she did it at an Amnesty concert that he did in America at one point. But it’s not normal. So I was very, very, very lucky to see that. In some ways, going to see Peter Gabriel at that time as your first concert was probably a bit of a tactical mistake, because it set such a high bar!
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You can follow Alasdair on Twitter at @Alasdair_CM.
ALASDAIR MACKENZIE
PLAYLIST
Track 1
‘Journey of the Sorcerer’
Tim Souster
[The Spotify version of this playlist has the Eagles version as the Souster remake is currently unavailable on there.]
Track 2
‘Tomorrow’s World’
The John Dankworth Big Band
Track 3
‘Equalisation for Brass Quintet and Live Electronics’
Tim Souster, Equale Brass Quintet
Track 4
‘Chi Mai’
Ennio Morricone
Track 5
‘Grand Hotel’
Procul Harum
Track 6
‘Davni Chasy – John Peel Session’
The Wedding Present/The Ukrainians
Track 7
‘Nauchil Sai Dobri’
Trio Bulgarka
Track 8
‘Ca La Breaza’
Toni Iordache
Track 9
‘Shum’
Go_A
Track 10
‘Zitti e Buoni’
Måneskin
Track 11
‘Kalyna’
Go_A
Track 12
‘Everything Goes My Way’
Metronomy
Track 13
‘Mercy Street’
Peter Gabriel
Track 14
‘Don’t Give Up’
Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush
