Music preview: Love and Money

The Glasgow band will be playing their most commercially successful album Strange Kind Of Love, and their most critically acclaimed record Dogs In The Traffic, in their entirety.

Emerging from Glasgow in the 1980s, when the music industry was driven by money to the flagrant exclusion of morals, Love and Money had it all. In Stuart Clumpas they had a manager who established his company DF Concerts as a major Scottish promoter.

In James Grant, right, they had a songwriter with a God-given knack for a killer pop hook, and in Phonogram, a record company with deep pockets.

The debut album, All You Need Is Love And Money, was as cocksure as the title suggests, yet laced with the cynicism and irony that were Grant's hallmark, and served as a funk rock calling card.

The second album, Strange Kind Of Love, sold 250,000 copies but was still frustratingly short of being the major breakthrough the investment demanded.

Grant was increasingly conflicted by the financial pressures. "How can I go home to see my mother in Castlemilk and tell her that I am one million pounds in debt?" he asked in a radio interview at the time. There were stories of him getting the train to London then getting off halfway down and heading back to Glasgow.

He and fellow founder member Paul McGeechan had been supplemented by former Set The Tone bassist Bobby Paterson, then further by guitar and bass player Douglas MacIntyre and drummer Gordon Wilson. This was the line-up that made what many consider to be the band's finest album, Dogs In The Traffic.

Its serious tone and sombre themes - My Love Lives In A Dead House and Papa Death being but two examples - were confirmation that Grant had succumbed to his dark side and given up trying to play the part of a happy-clappy rock star for the record company. The result was a hugely rewarding and complex album which underperformed commercially.

It clearly indicated Grant's future direction as a solo artist, primarily on Donald Shaw's Vertical Records. I Shot The Albatross was one of the best albums to come out of Scotland in the last decade.

Bobby Paterson went into the licensed trade and established the Glasgow boutique hotel St Jude's before his death in 2006, but it is Douglas MacIntyre who has made the biggest impact on Scotland's music culture in the last ten years and more.

As founder of Creeping Bent Records, he runs a label which flies the flag for the left field, and the 7" vinyl single, and has picked up the bass again as one of The Sexual Objects, the critically acclaimed new group formed by Davy Henderson. All of which would suggest that sometimes love will take you further than money.

Love and Money play Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 16 January

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday, 9 January, 2011