Altered Images' Clare Grogan gets ready to party at the Night Afore Edinburgh's Hogmanay

Clare Grogan and Altered Images at the Rewind Festival, Scone Palace, Perth, Scotland in July 2022. Pic: Duncan Bryceland/Shutterstock

Clare Grogan is ready to get this party started. That’s the Night Afore Disco Party with Forth 1 to kick start Edinburgh’s Hogmanay events in Princes Street Gardens as she fronts her band Altered Images at the Part of a line up that includes Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Pet Shop Boys.

Delighted to be getting her groove on and climb into her platform shoes Grogan plans to please the crowd with classics such as Happy Birthday, I Could Be Happy, Don’t Talk To Me About Love and See Those Eyes as well as tracks from the new album Mascara Streakz, the band’s first in 39 years, recorded with returning band member and husband Stephen Lironi alongside Bobby Bluebell and Bernard Butler, formerly of Suede.

“If you haven’t seen me play live you will love it,” says Grogan over the phone from her home in London. “It’s like the circus has come to town. I have a fantastic band from a pool of musicians and we get on that stage and it’s just like you’re coming with us! It’s great fun.”

Clare Grogan at the My Old School"screening at BFI Southbank in London this year. Pic: Lia Toby/Getty Images

Grogan’s enthusiasm is infectious and she’s an engaging interviewee, authentic, convivial and laughs a lot. Interested in people and a social animal, it’s no surprise she’s relished having a busy year after the release of the new album and performances at festivals and gigs up and down the country. These included shows in her native Glasgow at the Kelvingrove Bandstand with Edwyn Collins and St Luke’s last week while last year she made the most of the lifting of lockdown by touring with Human League and dueting with Sharleen Spiteri on the latest Texas album.

Grogan was always a bundle of energy, bursting into the business with Altered Images when she was just 17 and riding the New Wave along with other Scottish bands like Orange Juice and Aztec Camera. Releasing three studio albums and a succession of top ten singles between 1981 and 1983, she was the perfect frontwoman as they performed on Top of the Pops and toured with Souxsie and the Banshees. At the same time she launched a parallel acting career starting with the films Comfort and Joy and Gregory’s Girl which continued with TV appearances in Eastenders, Skins, Waterloo Road, right up to this Christmas with My Old School starring Alan Cumming, a documentary directed by Jono McLeod about the 1995 Brandon Lee adult goes back to school story.

“I just feel really fortunate and I think having staying power is really important in this business. I sort of gravitate towards interesting people doing interesting things. How lucky am I that I manage to keep being part of the thing that I love? It really is that simple.”

Grogan was the subject of a recent retrospective at the British Music Experience in Liverpool and also just received a Living Legend Award at the Scottish Music Awards and is realising it’s perhaps time to learn how to take a compliment and some credit.

Altered Images' new album Mascara Streakz, released this year, came out of lockdown and is their first for 39 years. Pic: Contributed

“A living legend, it’s funny, but lovely. I’ve worked really hard and I’ve got a really strong work ethic, I think from my family - they were hard workers. And I just love what I do and the opportunities that come my way. I don’t take it for granted. I have been allowed to keep this career going for a very long time and a lot of it is just my sheer determination not to give up.”

Where does she get the energy to do that from?

“I think a lot of it is quite nervous energy, but with the pandemic we lost that ability to feel in control. It reminded me how lucky I was to have this job. And also it’s that classic freelancer thing, I’m frightened to stop in case I never get asked again!”

However, it’s not just a case of saying yes to everything as Grogan has more of a handle these days on how to allocate her time: “Not exactly picking and choosing but just knowing what works for me,” she says.

Altered Images in concert, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2018. Pic: Brian Anderson/Shutterstock

And what works for her is live stage events such as Edinburgh’s Hogmanay and the new album, which came about when Grogan and her former Altered Images bandmate and music producer turned restaurateur husband Stephen Lironi found themselves at home during lockdown.

“Making the new album took me by surprise. I literally did just start with a song. It was just wanting to get back to doing something other than sitting on the sofa watching box sets. I actually had a really lovely time with Stephen and Elle on the sofa, but there was a point, when that second lockdown came, I thought ‘oh no, no, no, no, no, no, I can’t do this again. I really can’t’.

“When the first lockdown happened I was at Pitlochry at the Festival Theatre and we’d just opened Barefoot in the Park on the Saturday then closed on the Monday and I was back in London on the Tuesday, thinking ‘what?’

“It allowed me to pause and I didn’t know how much I needed that till I got it. It’s weird talking about it because I know people had some really, really terrible things to deal with during lockdown - my dad had passed away the year before and I think to have had a parent that you couldn’t get to see properly is in a way a whole different kind of torture - but for me I just cosied up at home with Stephen and Elle and created some head space and really started thinking about what was I going to do. How did I see things going forward? We’d watched the whole of Ozark so it was ‘yeah, what are we gonna do now?’ And when you’ve got a husband who’s produced some really great albums…”

Clare Grogan was due to headline at Edinburgh's Hogmanay Night Afore Party, 2022. Pic: Contributed

I said to Stephen ‘let’s write a song,” she laughs. “That’s how we first met so there was something nice about that. And although we’ve written songs over the years together for other people it had been a while since we’d done it for our entertainment. So yeah, it started with one song and grew.”

That first song, The Colour of My Dreams, led to more with Stephen, and she also teamed up with Bernard Butler from Suede - recently nominated with Jessie Buckley for a Mercury Award for their album For All Our Days That Tear The Heart - “he’s actually a neighbour”, and her old friend Robert Hodgins, aka Bobby Bluebell.

“We just thought we’ve got to take advantage of this madness in some way. Getting into this again was really interesting. There was no expectation… although I got quite excited when we got a deal, then it was I’m really doing this, I’m really releasing an album. I was terrified of what the reaction was gonna be, but people have been incredibly positive. I didn’t realise how much I wanted to be back in the charts until I was.” She laughs.

The spirit of working with her husband and friends on an album made purely for fun has fed into the music and produced a feel good sound that chimes perfectly with the upbeat Grogan.

“Making an album with people you are attached to genuinely and love was special. It created something really lovely between all of us, just this real emotional connection.”

I suggest to Grogan that her voice on the album has a new timbre, a maturity lent by age and that she sounds more self-assured than in former years. Does she agree?

“With a lot of the live shows before and during the pandemic I realised how much I love to sing and I wasn’t frightened of it any more. I think as a young woman I took so many knocks!” She laughs. “It’s just the nature of this business. But I thought it was great to go, ‘do you know what, I have this thing that I love doing and I don’t care what people think. I’m going to do it for me. I think it came from there, just finding that confidence again. To just go ‘I love singing!’ you know?”

What does she mean ‘the knocks’? Did she feel attacked or judged when she was at the height of her Altered Images fame?

“Yeah, particularly when I was younger I took a lot of… I started at the top, I had only one way to go. My real work in earnest came after that initial period of incredible success and fame and everything that comes with it, when I walked away from that and had to pretty much start again. That’s when I started to really value it and wanted to keep it going.

“I think a lot of this album is a reflection on my younger self. Just being around Elle who was the same age as me when I started off in the band - she’s 18 at the end of December - I started thinking about me being that age. I started to see it in quite a different way, recognising how young I was and that it was an AMAZING experience to have, until it wasn’t.” She laughs.

Now 60, Grogan couldn’t care less about ageing, but she is aware of the years she has lived and the unique experiences she has had, both in public with stardom coming at a young age, and in private with the journey to becoming a mother and the loss of her beloved parents.

“To a certain extent it’s only now I realise that quite a lot of it was also maybe a reaction to turning 60. I’ve never really been bothered about my age, and that is the honest to god truth, I really just always thought there’s nothing you can do about it, you just have to keep going with it, but I suddenly recognised that society does start viewing women of a certain age really differently and I became quite offended by it.”

“I think you should be allowed to be how you want at whatever stage of your life. Not all of us, just because we’re getting a bit older, want to sit down at a gig. We’re all so different and I really hated the notion that in some way I was expected to slow down, or take life a little easier. That’s really not going to happen.”

At the Night Afore the crowd will be kept moving by a combination of tracks from the new album and Altered Images classics.

“It will be an absolute selection of who I am, before and now. The new songs are fitting in well with the classics, Don’t Talk to Me About Love, I Can Be Happy, Happy Birthday, all those, and I’ll throw in a few of the new songs because we do have a few absolute dance bangers on the new album. Changing My Luck goes down really well live, so does Home, because we’ve got the harmonies down to an absolute tee, Glitter Ball is big and Mascara Streakz, people love the title track.”

Dancy and upbeat with a disco feel, there’s also always been a darker edge to some of Altered Images tracks, Dead Pop Stars for example.

“Altered Images always had a bit of an edge,” says Grogan. “Dressed up in a flouncy skirt and a big smile and a bow. For me there was always a bit of attitude. That’s who we are, who I am. It’s just more interesting if it’s got a little bit of a dark side to it.”

“And the new songs are so incredibly personal to me, very revealing in many ways and that took a bit of courage because I’m quite a private person. But I started thinking about… you know people always talk to me about doing a memoir…”

Would she?

“Do you know, I kind of love doing it through songs, so already in my head I’ve got album number two that I’m going to start writing probably early next year. It’s going to be very much a reflection on what’s happened in the last couple of years with Mascara Streakz. It’s been super fun, it really has. I’ve got to do some really great shows and Elle was with me for a lot of them and that is really special, to have my daughter seeing me as that person.”

How does Elle react, seeing her mother up there on stage in a silver lame dress and platforms. Is she in awe?

“I wouldn’t say ‘in awe’ no,” Grogan giggles. “It’s not an expression I would use. But she’s such a good sport. It’s so not her sort of thing. But she’s totally got my number. She’s like ‘mum, calm down’.

No chance of that as Grogan plans to drive through the night to be in Edinburgh for the big Hogmanay Night Afore party - “I’m sort of used to a bit of craziness in my life, so that’ll be fine” then return to London for The Bells at midnight.

“Just to be home and go ‘my god we got away with it again, we live another year,’ you know. For me life is just a beautiful but bittersweet experience - and I’m really good at enjoying the good moments.”

The Night Afore Disco Party with Forth 1 featuring Sophie Ellis-Bextor, with guests Altered Images, Friday 30 December in Princes Street Gardens from 7.30pm to 10.00pm. Tickets from www.edinburghshogmanay.com priced from £32.50 inc. booking fees.

Ticket Information: Gardens Ticket £32.50 inc booking fees/Enclosure Ticket £44.50 inc booking fees/Enclosure Family Ticket £125 inc fees (Limited offer - 4 person family ticket/2 adults max.)

Please note that the Night Afore Disco Party is not recommended for children under the age of 8 years old. The concert will be busy and can be an uncomfortable (and loud) environment for young children. Anyone under 16 years must be accompanied by an adult over 18 years of age.