Interview: Hamish McGregor, founder of Fat Sams Band

Published on Saturday 6 February 2010 11:12

CONGAS around the restaurant, staff surrounding a table singing happy birthday to a celebrating guest, cheery entertainment from the animatronic instruments – back in the 1980s and 90s, Fat Sams was the place to hang out in the city.

• Staff dressed as gangsters beside a stretch limousine to advertise the opening of Fat Sam's Chicago-style diner and bar on the site of the Edinburgh meat market at Fountainbridge in September 1986.

And not just because back in those pre-TGI days, the city's first themed eatery, designed to look like an American speakeasy complete with pictures of 20s and 30s gangsters on the walls, was cutting-edge.

It was also just so friendly and warm. No-one was allowed to feel lonely. And that even extended to the resident fish. So Percy the piranha, who lived in the tank on the right of the entrance, was found a scaly pal.

Unfortunately it rapidly appeared that Percy preferred the solitary life.

"The new piranha was put into the tank and it immediately turned red," remembers Hamish McGregor, clarinet player and founder of Fat Sams Band, the resident musical act at the restaurant throughout its 14-year life. "Percy was trying to take lumps

'It's important to remember why you were liked' out of the new fish. I can't tell you whether it survived or not but I can tell you that Percy definitely wanted to be on his own."

However, most of the time Fat Sam's delighted rather than horrified its customers. Even today, Fat Sams Band are asked to play a 21st "and then they say to me: 'You played at my seventh birthday at the restaurant'," laughs Hamish.

Not that the father-of-two, who lives in Cramond, minds being so closely associated with the restaurant, which was based in the city's old meat market in Tollcross.

"It was great fun," he says, as he recalls how he'd invite excited youngsters up on stage to join the band or give them his clarinet for a trial toot. "That was the days before health and safety."

But it's not his affection for the long-closed restaurant – its doors shut in 2000 – that keeps the band touring from the US to the Middle East under the Fat Sams banner.

In fact, the band came first, formed 25 years ago this Valentine's Day by Hamish and about to celebrate that anniversary with a birthday gig at the Queen's Hall.

And while Fat Sams has been a huge part of Hamish's life, it has only been one aspect of a musical career that stretches back to his childhood in Colinton, where his father, Cecil, ran an agricultural business but also played in the Edinburgh University band and his mother, Helen, ran Edinburgh's first ballet school.

A latecomer to music, Hamish was the odd one out of the three McGregor siblings – sister Lorraine is a classical pianist and brother Evan is a guitar and banjo player. But that changed when he was given a clarinet for his 16th birthday.

"My father asked me what I wanted and I just blurted that out. To this day, I wonder why. As a kid you blurt something out and suddenly it becomes your life."

From that minute on, any thoughts of academic achievement at Merchiston were forgotten and he taught himself the instrument by listening to records of the greats, such as Acker Bilk.

To the horror of his father, he formed his first band at 18 – Hamish McGregor and the Clansmen – and played gigs on the Edinburgh circuit in the evenings, while hauling sacks and grinding up animal feed for his father by day.

But his big break came while acting as driver for a band he loved, Old Bailey's Jazz Advocates.

He was chauffeuring the group back from a gig in Stirling when the volatile and tipsy manager Archie Sinclair managed to pick a row with every band member and fired each as he dropped them off, ending with the clarinet player. Eventually there was just Archie and Hamish left.

"What are you doing next Wednesday night? You're in the band," barked Archie. The next day, full of remorse and a hangover, he rehired everyone except the unfortunate clarinet player.

That was Hamish's entry into 1960s clubland – first with Sinclair, then later with a ten-piece soul band called Memphis Roadshow. Retro, he believes, is always 40 to 50 years behind – so we have Abbamania from the 70s now, Mobland America, as with Fat Sam's in the 80s, and back in the 60s it was trad jazz, harking back to the black American roots of the music.

The popular clubs in the city in those days – McGoo's, Frisco's, the West End Club, Casablanca and Americano – were generally run by businessmen with penchants for driving Rollers. Hamish would be ushered from the clubs to offices up gold spiral staircases draped with dolly birds and given a glass of pink champagne before discussing business. "If you didn't cross them, they were as nice as ninepence," he laughs.

With a new-fangled strobe light brought up from London and songs introduced by a black guy with an American accent, on stage, the Memphis Roadshow were the biz – except when the frontman's US accent slipped and he returned to pure Leith.

Eventually such clubs faded from popularity, but in 1981 Hamish scored another hit when he and Mike Hart, now artistic director of the Edinburgh Jazz Festival, reformed Archie Sinclair's old band as the Scottish Jazz Advocates.

The band gained huge respect for their music – except perhaps in Sacramento in 1982. The band wrapped up their act with When the Saints Go Marching In, with Hamish on the bagpipes, but on their last night he decided, as a joke, to produce a starting pistol, throw his bagpipes to the floor and shoot them, as they let out a mournful eeoww. "But when I produced the pistol, the entire audience just disappeared behind their seats," he says.

After suffering abuse after the gig from punters who thought he was being disrespectful to the instrument, he and another member of the band threw their equipment into a holdall and dashed off to the airport.

Sadly, Hamish had forgotten his starting pistol was amongst the kilts and bagpipes until he watched it go through the airport's X-rays. "There was this wee red-headed woman on the machine. She suddenly sat up like she'd been hit by 240 volts. You could just tell she'd waited for this moment all her life, the way she pressed those two buttons under her desk," he remembers.

Two burly American security guards appeared and carried Hamish off to a back room. "Suddenly I became more Scottish than Robbie Burns," he says.. He talked his way out of his arrest – but lost the pistol and his sgian dubh.

By the mid-80s though he was becoming more influenced by Joe Jackson's jumpin' jive and the music of his 1940s forerunner Louis Jordan. He left the Advocates and formed Fat Sams in 1985. A year and a half later, after a meeting with businessman John Edmonds, Fat Sams became the restaurant's new resident band, with the eatery adopting their logo as well as their name.

That enterprise came to an end in 2000 amid competition from the likes of TGI Friday's and Planet Hollywood. Fat Sams the band, however, are still going. The line-up may have changed – there's only Tom Finlay from the original band aside from Hamish – but they are still playing festivals, worldwide tours and private bands.

And, while much of the band's repertoire has moved on, Hamish has no snobbery about playing songs from way back when. "We're still playing numbers that we played on day one. It's important to remember why people liked you in the first place," he says.

Fat Sams Band's 25th Anniversary Concert, Queen's Hall, Clerk Street, 14 February, 7:30pm. Tickets 17.50/13.50 from 0131-668 2019 or www.thequeenshall.net. Visit www.fatsamsband.com.