8/2/2023 0 Comments The edge guitar rig![]() ![]() “There were a few guitar players I love that play SGs, but I never got on well with them myself. For a lot of people, Street Fighting Years is their favourite album.” Before we knew it, we had this album that had great big moments… and then there’s other parts where we just felt like we had missed, we never quite got it. “We were working with different musicians like Stewart Copeland and Manu Katché. We had toured with Peter Gabriel so we did his song Biko. ![]() ![]() Then Trevor said, ‘You should do an old traditional Celtic song.’ We were thinking, ‘Really? That’s too obvious,’ but as it turns out, that’s how Belfast Child came out. “For example, with the track This Is Your Land, Jim said, ‘Wouldn’t it sound great if Lou Reed sang on that?’ And Trevor and Steve would say, ‘Well, let’s see if he’s up for it!’ And he did it. Trevor’s quite adventurous, so we set up a studio in a house in the Scottish Highlands and things would just happen. We loved the records that Trevor Horn and Stephen Lipson were making, and they wanted to work with a bona fide band. “ Street Fighting Years was an interesting album. We had 18-minute songs that we edited down to three-and-a-half. “So we were thinking, ‘How is that going to work?’ But it was brilliant, actually, and it allowed us so much freedom. They suggested we work with Steve Hillage, which was really out of the box because Steve was the prog guy from Gong and his own records. “The first thing we gave them was Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call, which was a double album – which was at that time anathema to everybody. I don’t understand why people would buy new guitars when they could pick up a ’60s Gretsch for the same money. Eventually, they came up to Glasgow and signed us that afternoon. “In the early ’80s, Arista were gonna drop us and we thought, ‘Okay, this is where it gets really tough.’ But we had a friend at Virgin who was pushing to get Branson to sign us. We had a great manager at the time, Bruce Findlay, who was like this father figure, making sure you kept your feet on the ground and didn’t get. We were great mates and for the first part of the ’80s we were really enjoying the travelling and being out of Glasgow. “We did have moments when it jumped a few levels, but by and large, it was always a work in progress. Looking back, we were dreadful, but there you go, that’s just at that age. “Being on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1979 was pretty daunting because it was a serious music programme, but it felt like we had arrived somewhere, finally. ![]()
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