Joan McAlpine: Tuning up to pick the very best of Scottish music

HOW many of us, in an idle moment, fantasise about our very own desert island playlist? Sharing our personal soundtrack with thousands of attentive listeners has to be the ultimate indulgence – the mid-life equivalent of miming with a hairbrush before the bedroom mirror.

Most never get that call from Kirsty Young, therefore the fantasy remains tucked away in our head. So when STV invited me to join the judging panel for Scotland’s Greatest Album, a four-part series which presents the top 60 tracks of the past 40 years, I didn’t spend much time dithering.

The format is straightforward: six judges are thrown into a darkened room where they attempt to agree on the best 15 tracks produced respectively in the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s. The public then votes for the top three in each decade. At the end of the process, you get what might once have been described as the nation’s definitive LP or Scotland: The Download, to be bang up to date.

The programmes were recorded in April, when there was the small matter of an election campaign to win. But for one night only, thoughts of the future gave way to nostalgia for the past.

Scotland’s reindustrialisation and 100 per cent green energy were momentarily suspended to consider whether the Proclaimers should be represented by Letter from America, Sunshine on Leith or Cap in Hand. And if Rod Stewart qualified, so must the Talking Heads whose frontman, David Byrne, was born in Dumbarton. If Fifa rules applied, then anyone with a Scottish-born grandparent would be eligible – so we could end up with Chas & Dave backed by the entire cast of EastEnders. Getting the SNP re-elected was a dawdle by comparison.

Still, the invitation was irresistible. Plus, I’d get to meet footballing legend and sometime DJ Pat Nevin, a fellow judge. The rest of the panel were similarly impressive: songwriter and pop impresario John McLaughlin, Glasgow’s answer to Simon Cowell and the man behind Westlife; Steve McKenna, the sharp-tongued presenter at Real Radio; Jim Gellatly, the mohawk-headed font of all knowledge on the Scottish music scene; and the chairman Geoff Ellis, founder of T in the Park.

So how did I qualify, aside from the fact that I was alive and indeed buying vinyl in the 70s and 80s, something I wouldn’t normally chose to advertise?

Well, back when my eyeliner was as thick as my platform boots and I could still carry off animal prints (they make you look edgy when young, trashy if over 35) I wrote for the New Musical Express. Celtic rock chord progressions, as opposed to Calman tax rates, were my writer’s raw material. For several years, under the nom de plume Joan McCourt, I was the rock and pop columnist for this very newspaper.

Not that this history made things particularly easy. What struck me, watching the footage again, was the wealth of talent that grew from small-town Scotland in an age before the internet. What confluence of factors came together in Dunfermline to give us a band as exciting as the Skids? What was it about Perth and Dundee that produced one of the most sampled funk outfits in history – the Average White Band? And how does one explain the incongruence of Grangemouth and the dream pop of the Cocteau Twins?

Forty years ago, if you wanted to hear exciting new music, you had to go to a gig or pick up a guitar yourself. There was the church of John Peel, of course, and the fanzine movement, but until the emergence of Postcard at the end of the decade, obtaining a London record deal was the only route to success.

The pioneers were the DJs on commercial radio, such as Billy Sloan who played demos on Radio Clyde, and the pub and club owners who gave bands a chance.

The early 1970s – which really was before my time – has the romance of distance. So much of the music grew out of the folk revival, even if the folkies, such as John Martyn and Gerry Rafferty, played rock and roll and blues in those same venues as Hamish Imlach and the Incredible String Band.

The pre-punk 1970s was a decade, not just in Scotland, when different genres of music overlapped, so someone with a hard-rock fanbase such as Alex Harvey had his roots in blues and soul but could embrace Kurt Weil. Harvey once brought a piper on stage, with his now forgotten but brilliant song Anthem, but how does one define Scottish pop music?

I was surprised when my championing of the AWB invoked cries of “but they don’t sound remotely Scottish” (you’ll need to watch tonight to see if I won the argument). Are the “jangly guitars” of the indie era any more genuinely Caledonian than the blue-eyed soul that followed it in the mid 1980s? Are the Proclaimers, Glasvegas and Biffy Clyro, who all sing in Scottish accents, somehow more authentic than, say, Deacon Blue, the Fratellis or Hue and Cry, who sing about life in Scotland with an American twang. One could argue that looking stateside, whether to Nashville or Memphis, is a particularly Scottish trait.

And where do we place acts such as Runrig and Capercaillie – surely Gaels have to feature on the album as much as a Midge Ure or a Simple Minds? And what of bands such as the Fire Engines or the Mull Historical Society, who enjoyed critical acclaim and a passionate following but never filled stadiums?

The 80s was the most challenging and controversial decade because of the plethora of good music that emerged, a phenomenon that deserves a whole series to itself. I have offered a few clues about what may or may not make the final cut, but in order to cover the spread of talent, some big names get left on the studio floor. How does one choose between the Associates, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Jimmy Somerville and Danny Wilson? Never mind pop will eat itself, after tonight, will Scotland eat us for breakfast?

• Scotland’s Greatest Album starts tonight at 9pm on STV. Joan McAlpine is an SNP MSP for the south of Scotland