This myspace is my homage to a seemingly forgotten gem of the post punk era: Associates. (I'm just a fan, though.)
In pop music, misnomers lie as thick on the ground as groupies. So it is that Sir Cliff Richard will forever be known as the Peter Pan of pop, a title as misleading as it is lazy. JM Barrie's Peter was a boy who never grew up; a boy determined not to be constrained by the rules and responsibilities of adulthood. A world without play and adventure was an anathema to him. Far from the cute kid of Disney interpretation, he was a contradictory and emotionally brittle boy whose mischievous nature betrayed a desire to belong. In this sense, his pop equivalent has to be the late Billy MacKenzie.
MacKenzie was found dead of an overdose in a hut behind his father's home in Auchterhouse on January 22, 1997. He was 37 days short of his 40th birthday. He had recently signed a recording deal with Nude Records that looked like it might return him to the spotlight. Obituaries described MacKenzie as "a sinister Pavarotti" and the "Sinatra of his generation". During his 39 years, fame, notoriety and the excesses of success were all his for the taking as he brightened the landscape of 1980s pop with the Associates. Sadly, loss, failure and disappointment were also constant companions during his life and career, as is clearly evident in The Glamour Chase, Tom Doyle's biography of the Scots singer. A determined effort to ensure that MacKenzie is remembered as more than a footnote, it collates legendary tales and captures the spirit of a man who once said: "I want other people to get as much out of life as I have. Unfortunately they won't."
It also provides an insight into why it was that MacKenzie shied away from achieving the huge success of contemporaries such as U2. "I think Billy found fame a disappointment," says Doyle, whose path crossed MacKenzie's many times during his career as a journalist with Q, Mojo, Elle and Melody Maker. "He was embarrassed by fame as well," says Doyle. "As soon as he got on Top of the Pops he was scared to look at the camera. And that just said everything really. I think Billy enjoyed the fringe benefits of fame. The fact that he would maybe get noticed or whatever. But that was it. There was also the fear of self-parody as well. He was scared he was going to have to just mime these tunes for the rest of his life on crap TV shows."
William MacArthur MacKenzie was born on March 27, 1957, in Dundee Infirmary. During his life, legends grew around him, partly fuelled by his habit of throwing red herrings to journalists. Ludicrous but true tales concern his habit of booking rooms in top hotels for his beloved whippets (at one stage MacKenzie had toyed with the idea of becoming a vet) and of how, on the day he was dropped from Warner Records over lunch in Kensington, he asked if it would be all right if he booked a taxi on account one last time; he then told the driver to take him to Dundee.
In 1979 MacKenzie teamed up with Alan Rankine to form the Associates. Their debut album, THE AFFECTIONATE PUNCH, was an antidote to the gloomy mien of of goth rock. Their 1982 follow-up, SULK, produced two top 20 hits, Club Country and Party Fears Two. Media darlings, the Associates could do no wrong. America beckoned and then the Associates split. In a Time Out interview a few months before he died MacKenzie cited the reason as cocaine. If that were true, says Rankine, every band going would have folded. "Bill knew what was looming up in front of him," he says. "We had three hit singles. We had a hit album. Everybody loved us".
And I think Bill suddenly thought, wait a minute I'm going to have to sing Club Country and Party Fears Two for the next 18 months before I can be creative again. And I think that just stuck in his craw." Another factor may well have been MacKenzie's well-disguised stage fright that affected him throughout his career. MacKenzie continued to record as the Associates but never reached the level of success he had with Rankine. Where once Warners had been glad to indulge his idiosyncrasies, the company refused to release a newly completed album, THE GLAMOUR CHASE. From then on MacKenzie was left to wander in pop's wilderness, working on satellite projects with everyone from Shirley Bassey to dance outfit Apollo 440.
Conjecture over reasons for MacKenzie's suicide has concentrated on his grief at the death of his mother Lily from cancer. Nobody will ever know for sure, but it is more likely that he underwent something of a mental breakdown in his last months. Withdrawn, and devoid of the humour that so characterised him throughout his life, he was rushed to hospital on New Year's Eve having taken an overdose of sleeping pills. Whether it was a suicide attempt or not - and he was at pains to point out to his family that it had been an accident - by January he was suffering from symptoms of clinical depression. Soon after he was dead.
(Alan Chadwick)
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