The 16 Dillons

The mid-1980s were something of a golden age for Edinburgh local music. Aside from the indie pop scene that was about to mushroom, it was the time of the first stirrings of the garage revival, spearheaded by bands such as The Green Telescope, The Rubber Dolfinarium and The Stayrcase. The epicentre of that movement anno 1985 was the Waterloo Bar, just off the East End of Princes Street, and it was there that my friend Glen and I heard The Stayrcase and The Rubber Dolfinarium for the first time, having seen a gig poster blue-tacked to the window of Bargain Books! In Edinburgh there was no shortage of places for bands to play, with something happening somewhere almost every night, it seemed. Many local pubs could easily be persuaded to shift enough tables out of the way to allow a band (or indeed record decks!) to set up - remember events in Ryrie's, Nicky Tam's, and, er, Brando's? That doesn't seem to happen as much now. And there were also the student unions, most notably Potterrow. The '16 Dillons' story, if you can call it that, really has its origins in that summer of 1985, when I was just coming to the end of my first year at Edinburgh University. With the summer exams over and being at a loose end, I went along to the inaugural meeting of a new Radio Society following an advert that had mysteriously appeared on the faculty's notice board, as I was mildly interested in local radio. About a dozen people showed up. In fact the notion was to set up a pirate station within Edinburgh, which would have been a great idea if it hadn't been totally illegal! Although enthusiasm for this project initially ran high, with various bits and pieces of equipment being acquired during the summer vacation, the logistics of actually getting the thing up and working proved too exacting for your average second-year student's motivation. Also none of us particularly wanted a criminal record. People drifted away gradually, the station never went on air, and the whole project had more or less fizzled by early November. Two of the other would-be wireless kings were Scott Basham and David or Dave) Watling, both of whom I got to know quite well during this period. Scott, it turned out, was staying in a different block of the same house at Pollock Halls of Residence as I was (Cowan House - a jerry-built '50s eyesore, mercifully long demolished). It didn't take long to discover that we shared a passion for 1960s music. Scott was a huge fan of the Beatles, the Velvet Underground and early Bowie; he also played the guitar and wrote his own songs. Dave Watling was living in a flat in the Canongate, was into all kinds of music but particularly liked modern jazz (Dave Brubeck, Pat Metheny et al), and had until recently played drums in a band. My contribution was a love of whimsical UK 60s psychedelia, and a reasonable capability on the keyboard: then a little Casio, circa 1982, which was scarcely more than a toy and had a definite plasticky 80s sound to it. Although most of the ingredients were there, the three of us didn't actually attempt to play together at all until the end of February 1986, when we had an almost comically shambolic run-through of half a dozen items in Dave W's flat, including 'Green Onions' - the first and last time this particular number was ever attempted by us. There was also the issue of keeping the noise down, as we were in a tenement flat - not easy with a drum kit! Soon afterwards, Scott arranged with his parents that we could practise at their home, as they had a large detached house with an attic on the south edge of the city. Not only that, but we could leave everything set up in the attic in between times. God bless you Mr and Mrs Basham. By May that year, our little band of troubadours had progressed sufficiently to enable the first demo recordings to be made. Scott was (and still is) a gifted song-writer, and the repertoire, such as it was then, consisted mainly of his material. 'No Reason To Cry', '1665' - a love song set in plague-weary London - and 'B Song' were personal favourites, as was his jokey punk shout-a-long '[I Like To] Vomit!'. I had a crack at writing too, but much of my stuff ended up in unplayable time signatures, possibly due to over-exposure to some Dave Brubeck Quartet LPs that I'd borrowed from Dave W. Around this time, enthusiasm started to wane because the band hadn't done any gigs, nor was it likely to without some publicity effort on our part. Scott and I considered submitting a demo to the Pollock Halls Entertainments Committee, or whatever they were called, but decided against it because we still lacked a bassist and we felt that the sound was thin as a result. The group - called Waste Of Time at this point - did manage one 'gig' however, at the 20th birthday party of the girlfriend of one of our friends. I think we got through six or seven numbers before there was a democratic decision taken to put the record player back on. It was getting towards exam time again; and aside from a couple more demo tapes in October, that would be pretty much it for the next 15 months. I can't exactly remember how it came about, but the '16 Dillons' that eventually presented its public face to the world began to take shape in the summer of 1987. During this time George Stott was recruited to play guitar and/or bass. George, a native of Forres, was a true rock guitar prodigy and equally at home playing folk, heavy metal, or psychedelia. Indeed, since his humble Dillons days, he's gone on to play with many groups, including top folk act 'Burach'. (Curiously enough, he had also been the first person I ever spoke to at the University, on the first day of Freshers' Week 1984, when he showed me how to work the coffee machine in the Potterrow Union. Small world.) The name of the group often caused puzzlement. There were never sixteen of us; we had nothing to do with Bob Dylan; or indeed with the Magic Roundabout, to squash three myths to start with. The group of us were arguing, as bands are apt to, over what to call ourselves. We were gathered in Scott's parents' attic one September night, and had gone through dictionaries, thesauruses and encyclopedias, as well as several bottles of beer, in search of a usable moniker. I think it was George who reached up to the bookshelf to seek inspiration from yet another reference book. It slipped out of his hands, and fell on the floor on its front, and on the back was the bookshop's label bearing a stock code: 16 DILLONS As well as having George on board, we had two other pieces of good news. The first was that Scott had managed to get us a gig during the forthcoming Freshers' Week. The second was that I had answered a small ad in the Advertiser and replaced my Casio toy with a genuine 1973 Farfisa organ. Less good news was the fact that it weighed 75kg and took two people to move it. The three of us, Scott, George and I, began rehearsing in early September for the Freshers' gig. Dave W would be in the south of England until later in the month, but he knew most of the material backwards already, and had taken to writing everything down and storing it in a lever-arch file. Meanwhile Scott got hold of some elementary percussion software on his BBC Micro (remember them?) and rigged up its output to the amplifiers in the attic, which at least meant we had something to practise and keep in time to while Dave W was away. Dave W was, of course, an excellent drummer, and perhaps the only programmable human drummer I've ever met. To program him, all we'd do is write down the rhythm of the song in Dave W-readable format - a series of horizontal dashes for beats and vertical ones for bar lines - on a sheet of A4, and give it to him to put in his lever-arch file, which he'd then prop up on his floor tom during practices and gigs. And he'd play it flawlessly first go. Amazing. The Freshers' Week 'gig' on 6 October 1987 was actually scheduled to be a lunchtime spot to drum up recruitment for the Student Television club, with which I think Scott had connections. George had also made many connections on the Edinburgh local music scene by this time, and managed to rope in two members of Sponge - another local group and more about whom later - to provide a sound system for us. The idea was to have the band playing outside, in the middle of Bristo Square, a concrete wonderland near the University. Because of some confusion over timetabling, it was suddenly brought forward to 11 o'clock in the morning and we were on pins for a while in case our sound system guys didn't make it. I suppose we were pretty nervous anyway - for some of us it was our first 'public' appearance. Matters weren't helped by the acoustics of Bristo Square, which meant that in order to hear what note you were singing, you had to wait a second or two for the sound you'd just sung to hit the Student Centre at the other side of the Square and bounce back. So it was, then, that to the astonishment of perhaps a hundred first-year students, assorted Tuesday morning shoppers and other passers-by, 16 Dillons became a 'real' band, with a real gig under its collective belt. We even got some applause. The band's music policy was very flexible. Somewhere along the way we'd established that the sound would be vaguely 1960s-ish, although taking after more of the UK 'psychedelic' side (think Chocolate Soup, Rubble - that kind of thing) rather than the American 'garage' sound (think Pebbles, Back From The Grave) favoured by bands like The Thanes. Scott had produced a new stack of great songs for us to do: some quite Beatlesesque, some a bit Velvet Undergroundish; but most were pure Scott. We'd always start with one called 'Hey! Now' because it was catchy and had the distinct advantage of being dead easy to play. 'Ad in The Papers' was another early favourite, with a sudden key change halfway through George's sublime guitar solo. Conversely, my only original contributions were a sub-one-minute caper called 'Harpoon' and an instrumental in 7/4 time, a hangover from the Days of Weird Time Signatures. Instead I raided the Rubble repertoire for suitable stuff: The Village's 'Man In The Moon', Virgin Sleep's 'Halliford House' and The Ghost's 'When You're Dead' were all regular visitors to the Dillons' playlist. But nothing was ever set in stone: if someone came along with a tune we all liked, we'd have a go at playing it. Unlike with some bands, there was never a set visual image either. It's a pity that there don't seem to be many photographs of us - unless you know differently! Any that are found will probably show a band already suffering from advanced sartorial schizophrenia: George all in denim with long hair going everywhere; Dave W in a sensible round neck jersey, usually patterned; me in a wavy op-art chequerboard shirt; and Scott in a bright orange shirt and tie, long tan coat and knee-high brown cowboy boots. I seem to recall that Scott raided his dad's nostalgia cupboard for that get-up. We were, on the whole, rather pleased with our efforts in Bristo Square, and even more so when (I think) George announced a few days later that he'd managed to score us a second slot, this time for Wednesday 28 October, at the Cavern, a pub-cum-nightclub in the Cowgate. 'There'll be a 60s kind of beat group supporting us,' he said, 'guy I spoke to was Calum.' My jaw hit the floor: all I could think of was The Thanes. Wasn't there a Calum in The Thanes? Surely George hadn't asked Lenny's lot - a group already with many years' experience, and a substantial following - to support us! Of course the 'Calum' that George had contacted was Calum McDonald from The Pterodaktyls and not The Thanes, who had the different-but-similar-sounding Calvin as their drummer. On arriving at the Cavern that Wednesday evening, and meeting the various Pterodaktyls for the first time, I was staggered by how young they all seemed - not much more than sixteen, seventeen surely; whereas we were old farts in comparison, already with a figure 2 at the start of our ages. I immediately got on well with the group's singer, Johnny: as well as our similar musical interests, it turned out that he also had a 2 at the start of his age so I felt somewhat reassured by that. The Cavern, it has to be said, is not a place I'd particularly wish to play in again, given a choice. Because it was a late-night venue we'd find ourselves being obliged not to start playing before 1 a.m. or even 1.30, by which time it was filling up with very drunk people, and chiselling the paltry amount of money we were owed out of the management afterwards took no small measure of perseverance. It's had several name changes since - it's now called the Subway - but the inside is almost exactly as it was then, minus the stage which was set at an angle at the back. I think they've moved the record player (now CD!) area too. It was agreed that our lot would go on first, because The Pterodaktyls, although still a very new band, had a gig or two to their name already. The Cavern was getting fairly full when we clambered on stage for what was our second-ever performance. However, when the first number, 'Hey! Now', ended to almost complete silence from the paying public, I began to get a little worried that this wasn't going to go even as well as Bristo Square. It was Scott who managed to turn the situation to our advantage. He stepped up to the microphone and shouted 'CLAP!' - whereupon the audience burst into (almost) spontaneous applause! This must have won them over, because thankfully he didn't have to do it after every number. I think we even got an encore. The Pterodaktyls also put in a fine show that night: their US-styled garage was the ideal counterpoint to our more 'British' psych-beat, and our two bands shared the bill on several subsequent occasions. For our first, 'proper', in-the-evening, in-a-real-venue concert, I think we acquitted ourselves quite well, and the following Wednesday, 5 November, was more or less a repeat performance, with the only change being that The Pterodaktyls were on first. Unfortunately, the night seemed to go a bit at half-cock, with the venue being almost empty. We heard later that another, more popular beat combo, 'Anthrax', had been appearing at the Playhouse and folk had gone there. Or maybe they'd gone to see the firework displays. I have to admit that we ended up with our very own damp squib that night! Things took a definite upturn with a series of engagements at the Blues Basement, a small venue at the top of Broughton Street. It had originally had two bar rooms, with a corridor between them, but one of the rooms was disused and it was only called into service to accommodate live entertainment. It wasn't the cleanest place I've ever played (!) but as it was only about six metres by four it made a passably intimate venue. Bands would play at the window end, with the bar furthest away; and although the bar itself was still there, it wasn't used for serving drinks, which made it a convenient vantage-point seat for six to eight people. At a pinch I suppose you could get forty, maybe fifty people into the room, if they all stood and didn't mind getting well acquainted. To get a drink - and indeed a few gulps of fresh air, which you'd need after a while - you'd have to cross the corridor to where the functioning bar was. Our own gigs apart, over the autumn and winter of 1987/88 I went many times to see bands such as The Stayrcase, The Helicopter Spies and Sponge, a group on the extreme Hawkwind / Gong edge of psychedelia. They specialised in 10-minute songs and extended free-form improvisations, employing every ear-curdling effect unit they could rustle up and feeding the results through a series of old analogue 'telephone exchange' synthesisers which were museum pieces even then. The whole thing was accompanied by an impressive if highly disorientating stroboscopic light show. Sponge were always very helpful to us, and let us borrow the light show - a baffling array of oil wheels, projectors, stroboscopic discs, and a suspiciously classroomish overhead projector - and its operator, a guy called Ian if I remember, for our own gigs. This was long before you could get a complete electronic light show system from Maplin's for £19.99! All the gigs we played at the Blues Basement went well, in spite of the odd snag hither and yon - the pub was forever running out of glasses (which was bearable) and draught beer (which was not), and one night some idiot spilt a drink on my Farfisa organ and it would only squeak pitifully for two days until it had dried out. Luckily we'd already done our bit for the night when that happened. The repertoire by this stage had expanded, and included the Velvets' 'What Goes On?', the Paisleys' 'Wind', and Hawkwind's 'Quark, Strangeness and Charm', which featured George on lead vocals. (It would be a while before I heard the Hawkwind original, and was surprised to find out that their version was about a quarter the speed of ours!) We were also doing Syd Barrett's 'Gigolo Aunt', which prompted at least one Thane to comment that our rendition should have been on the Barrett tribute LP. We were quite chuffed by that. And there was another Scott song, one I can't remember anything about at all, 'Gas Chamber', which seems to have kicked off the 15 January gig. The last number of the night was always 'Je T'Aime... Moi Non Plus', a tradition inaugurated in honour of the Snake Pit, which also traditionally closed its evenings with that record. Ours, however, required some audience participation: we'd pick on some poor sod and get them to come on stage and do the heavy breathing noises. It's a shame that the Blues Basement folded, which it did at the close of the 1980s, becoming a yuppie wine bar called Doves. It's since gone back to being a pub again, which is an improvement I suppose. Gigs came and went, and in the late spring of 1988 it became known that there was going to be a nationwide charity fund-raising effort coordinated by the TV companies, called 'Telethon 88'. The idea was that anyone who felt so moved could organise their own event independently, but make it an official part of Telethon 88 by registering with the Telethon agents who would provide collecting tins and badges and so forth. So it was, then, that the now legendary 'Calton Hill Jam' took place, on Telethon day, Sunday 29 May. It was a grey, overcast sort of day, but thankfully the rain held off. Four bands were on the bill: The Pterodaktyls, The Inner Chambers, the ubiquitous Sponge, and ourselves. I'm not sure if we actually had official permission from the various authorities to drive a van up Calton Hill, set up the band equipment and a portable generator, and start playing at top volume - I suspect we didn't - but we got away with it, perhaps because it was a Telethon event. Certainly I recall it as one of 16 Dillons' best performances, and it was a pity that the tape I had tried to make of the event was spoiled by the wind getting into the microphone! Apart from a brief appearance at Wilkie House a few weeks later, in which the band ran through about five numbers as part of another charity gig, that was the end of the first incarnation of 16 Dillons. Following graduation from Edinburgh University that July, Dave W was not only leaving Edinburgh but also the UK, to travel round Australia; and drummers being, for whatever reason, more difficult to find than other musicians, the decision was taken to wind the band up. Which was a shame, as we'd had a great deal of fun over the previous two years. However, early 1989 saw a re-vamped 16 Dillons come together briefly, with George shifted on to drums and Andy Gibson replacing him on bass. Only one gig resulted from this line-up, at Moray House Union on 4 March. Two months later, the band travelled to Birmingham to record one track for a compilation LP of new and un-signed bands. The idea was that the record would be hawked around various radio stations, promoters and other interested parties in the music industry, with the intention of landing at least some of the bands recording contracts and such like. The success of this venture can be gauged from the fact that none of the acts was ever heard from again, with the exception of psych wizards Omnia Opera, whose first-ever vinyl outing as part of this record has resulted in its surprising collectability. (I still have a handful of copies. Please form an orderly queue!)

The records arrived eventually in September, but by this time 16 Dillons had already been defunct for several months. Scott was in the process of forming The Spooks, a wonderful Beatles-style pastiche group that would achieve truly staggering levels of popularity on the Edinburgh scene over the next two years; that project would be followed by Zed (briefly) and then Laughter (whom I remember seeing a few times at the Wee Red Bar at Edinburgh College of Art). But that is definitely Scott's story... ========================================================= 16 Dillons were: (1987-88) Scott Basham - guitar / bass / vocal George Stott - guitar / bass / vocal David Nelson - organ / vocal David Watling - drums (1989) Scott Basham - guitar / vocal Andy Gibson - bass David Nelson - organ / vocal George Stott - drums ========================================================= (C) 2004 David Nelson. E&OE. Corrections and clarifications to: dn784533@linux.net. Please don't sue me. I have no money.

Follow this link to Scott Basham'spages about Laughter & The Spooks amongst others.