Alan Rankine, an 18-year-old guitarist, was at a gig by a touring black funk quartet called the Fantastics at Tiffany’s Ballroom in Stockbridge, Edinburgh. Yet what caught his ear that day in 1976 was the Dundee-based support act Stan and Deliver, fronted by Billy MacKenzie.
“I saw this guy singing and I heard his voice and I thought, ‘Bloody hell. I’ve never heard anything like it,’ ” he told The Glamour Chase, Tom Doyle’s biography of MacKenzie. “The band was cod funk, not very good, but this voice was just shining through.” MacKenzie’s account of their first meeting differed slightly. “I met Alan through a friend of a friend who said I was a great singer but a pain in the arse,” he recalled.
Within a couple of days MacKenzie had taken up semi-permanent residence in the Linlithgow flat that Rankine was sharing with his girlfriend. The next six months were spent trawling around working men’s bars, miners’ clubs and local hotels, evading the taxman by using different names such as Hideaway for their pop set and the Mike Lawrence Quintet for their balladeering. They were only in their late teens and were taking home about £100 a week, good money for the time.
The pair spent every Sunday writing new songs. “I’d never had it with anyone else,” Rankine said of their intense musical bond. “You’d be listening to a record and something would happen in the music and we would look at each other and we understood each other. It could be a chord change, it could be a sound, it could be a trick that someone had used.”
In late 1977 they booked into Craighall Studios in Edinburgh with an assortment of the city’s session musicians to record half a dozen songs. Doyle relates how they were mostly performed at breakneck speed, documenting the beginnings of Rankine’s frenetic, “finger-sapping” guitar style and the edgy, high-pitched, operatic vocal that would become MacKenzie’s trademark.
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After brief spells performing as Abscorbic Ones, a name Rankine later described as a fantasy band, and Mental Torture, they became known as the Associates and began electrifying the post-punk scene in Scotland and beyond. Their first release, an unauthorised cover of David Bowie’s Boys Keep Swinging, was supported by a gig at the Aquarius Club, Edinburgh, and was played by John Peel on Radio 1. Then came a couple of albums, The Affectionate Punch (1980), an audacious mix of songs with a cover shot taken on the running track of Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London, and Fourth Drawer Down (1981), with its darker and more experimental edge.
The band’s biggest hit was Party Fears Two, which features on their third album, Sulk (1982), and was later used as the theme for the satirical Radio 4 show Week Ending. The song ends with the sound of three cups being smashed and MacKenzie spitting out his gum. MacKenzie claimed that the number, which reached No 9 in the UK singles chart, prompting an appearance on Top of the Pops, had its origins in a tale of two girls trying to gatecrash a party by smashing windows and kicking the door in with their stilettos.
Rankine divined a deeper meaning. “I think it’s more nebulous than a specific event,” he told Uncut magazine last year. “It might have been based on that, but Bill and I were always f***ing outsiders. We never fitted. We felt like impostors. We felt like we’d got in with forged papers. Even when we did get into parties we were bored shitless, but we had to prove to ourselves that we could get inside.”
Yet within a matter of weeks MacKenzie, who had taken to ingesting large quantities of illicit substances, announced that he would not take part in the Sulk promotional tour. “He just said, ‘I don’t want to do it’,” Rankine said. There were attempts at a reconciliation, but in October 1982 Rankine told Warner Brothers, their record label, that he was leaving the Associates. He handed over the rights to the band’s name to MacKenzie and “never really thought about it”.
Alan Peter Rankine was born in Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire, in 1958, the son of a primary school headmaster and a medical secretary. Much of his childhood was spent moving around Scotland with his father’s work and subsequent promotion to schools’ inspector. He started playing the guitar at age 11, inspired by a classmate who could attract the girls by performing The Skye Boat Song on a cheap acoustic instrument. Going one better he learnt Tom Jones’s Delilah, coincidentally one of the key numbers in MacKenzie’s repertoire.
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Rankine became inseparable from his instrument, though he was self-taught because his previous experience of formal music lessons had ended when his piano teacher made inappropriate advances. “The records that really started to get me going were Everlasting Love and Rainbow Valley by the Love Affair,” he told Doyle. “I’d listen to the sounds and think, Wow.”
As a teenager he showed potential on the tennis court, earning a place at the Wimbledon junior finals though he did not go “because I used to wet the bed and was too embarrassed”. By the age of 15 he was living in Glasgow with his parents but struggling to build musical friendships because his talents were often seen as a threat. “When I’d play, they’d just stand agape,” he said.
Eventually he joined Caspian, an Edinburgh-based cabaret band with a residency at a city centre hotel. They were looking for a new vocalist when he heard MacKenzie performing in Stockbridge. “The Billie Holiday thing was definitely there in his voice at that time,” he recalled. “But Bill could sing anything, You’d say, sing Bohemian Rhapsody, and he could do it.”
It was a tempestuous time. After MacKenzie denounced him as “the ugliest bastard you’ve ever seen”, Rankine was subjected to an enforced makeover by a group of flatmates: his long hair was cut and his Afghan coat torn apart, burnt with lighter fuel and thrown from the window. On another occasion they were performing in Broughty Ferry when Mackenzie, fortified with Pernod and blackcurrant, vomited over the edge of a spiral staircase minutes before they were due on stage.
After going their separate ways Rankine worked as a producer and recorded three solo albums: The World Begins to Look Her Age (1986), She Loves Me Not (1987) and The Big Picture Sucks (1989). In 1993 he and MacKenzie worked together on new material, but it failed to create the hoped-for full reunion of the Associates and MacKenzie died in 1997 aged 39. Until 2010 Rankine, who is survived by his sons, Callum and Hamish, worked as a lecturer at Stow College, Glasgow. His marriage to Belinda Pearse was dissolved.
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Last year Sulk, which the Icelandic singer Björk has cited as one of her major influences, was reissued to mark its 40th anniversary, a reminder of the potency and excitement that the Associates brought to their music. “They were wild sessions,” Rankine recalled of making the album. “When Bill and I were in the studio, you exhausted yourself until there was nothing else bearing fruit in your mind.”
Alan Rankine, musician and record producer, was born on May 17, 1958. He died from undisclosed causes on January 2, 2023, aged 64
