It’s 1984 and from a distance, Bellshill and the other satellite towns and suburbs from whence The Soup Dragons will emerge could be any one of hundreds of underfunded communities where post-war high-rises loom over rows of artex-frosted two-up, two-downs. But come a little closer and it’s clear that something strange is afoot. A proliferation of rosy-cheeked, pop outsiders are forming bands and give them names like The Boy Hairdressers and BMX Bandits.
Sean Dickson, you have yet to find your co-travellers, less still agree on a comparably cute band name, but when this group finally comes together in the dimly lit rehearsal rooms of Glasgow – Jim on guitar, Sushil on bass and Ross on drums – you’ll have plenty to share with them. Because right now, it seems like you barely need to do much more than give your guitar a shake before – pif paf pouf! – another new song falls out of it. The Great Poprendo! Your football-obsessed dad doesn’t pretend to understand the appeal of the Swell Maps and Syd Barrett songs the band cover alongside your ever-expanding repertoire of original numbers, but he’s swift to notice that something exceptional is stirring and this will be your ticket out of here. Had you emerged from the tunnel at Fir Park in a full Motherwell kit and socked it to Airdrie with an injury time winner, he couldn’t cheer you any harder. And right now, every light seems to be turning green for your band.
On your Saturday job at Flip American Clothing, you hijack the tape deck and play your demo to unsuspecting customers, one of whom is called Bobby and, as well as playing drums for The Jesus & Mary Chain, fronts his own band Primal Scream. Do you want to come and open for them at (the soon to be legendary) Splash #1 psychpunkpop happening in Glasgow? Bassist Sushil edits a fanzine called Pure Popcorn and onto the flexidisc that comes with it, he places a track from your first demo, If You Were The Only Girl In The World. Another green light! Then the guy from NME comes across it and makes it Single Of The Week. Ring ring!! You’re in your bedroom staring at the newsprint in utter disbelief when your mum walks in to let you know that John Peel’s producer loves the song and wants to book you in for a session. Only problem is you don’t have the money to go to London and record it. But still, more green lights. If you can get to Glasgow Queen Margaret Union this Friday, John will be deejaying there and he wants to meet you. So you go along and do as you’re told. He shakes your hand like an old friend, presses £150 into your palm, then asks you if that’s enough to get you all to London.
When you get to Maida Vale, you realise that your friends the Shop Assistants are in the neighbouring studio recording a session for Janice Long, so you get them to join in at the end of Learning To Fall with a mass singalong. At this point, you’re writing them faster than you can record them, so this will be the only version committed to posterity. However, it’s Whole Wide World that will truly set out your manifesto in earnest – a song which single-handedly bears testament to the fact that youthful brio is perishable so you might as well use it all at once. You know it’ll be your first twelve-inch single, so you make sure it stops just shy of two minutes because you want it to be the loudest twelve-inch of all time. Ring ring!! Now it’s Smash Hits! In the resulting interview you spin a playful fib, claiming that The Soup Dragons weren’t named after the eponymous character from The Clangers, described in quintessential Hits fashion as “that Universal maestro of ‘tubular’ dinner ladies.” Well, of course Smash Hits are early to pick up on you. Why wouldn’t they? You tick all the pop boxes. Tunes. Effervescence. Irreverence. Youth. Pleasing to the eye. And with the exception of Jim, who appears to be twelve, none of you look a day over seventeen, same age as me.
And so it’s on this basis that I delude myself that mere geography is the only thing preventing me from being in your band. However, there would be nothing for me to do in your band. I play the drums, but there isn’t a soul north or south of the border who looks as magnificent banging a snare drum as Ross in his mutton chops and tank tops. You guys can’t keep a straight face to save your lives, and that’s exactly what we love about you.
Back in my neck of the woods, 280 miles south of Bellshill, it’s August 1986; there’s a new indie night in town, and next week you’re playing there. Every Tuesday, glitzy Birmingham nitespot Burberries becomes The Click Club. Its usual clientele of would-be Blind Date contestants is supplanted by indiepop believers whose romantic idealism has yet to be dented by the adult world into which they’ve just been let loose. In other words, you are us and we are you. We’re here because we heard the very session that John Peel made possible with his extraordinary act of generosity. What a night! I’ve found my tribe and my new favourite band all at once!
Mighty hooks are something you cough out so casually, Sean, that it genuinely seems to amuse you. A few months after Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer video is made for Spielberg money, you land on The ITV Chart Show with Hang Ten – whose video costs tuppence, is a hundred times more joyful and funny and, what’s more, no chickens had to die for it. Five minutes later, you’re back on telly with another one – which mainly thanks to the sight of Sushil driving a van, signals an impressive leap of maturity. Its title – Can’t Take No More – prepares us for anguish and introspection. This is, after all, a break-up song.
Sean, you probably don’t realise how much effort other writers expend on the business of turning pain into pop, but the glee with which you attack Can’t Take No More suggests you were over it by the middle eight (and what a middle eight, one of your very best). As the song rattles towards its thrilling coda, it’s like you’re speeding away from a heist. You tell Smash Hits that you want strings on your next record: “I want to feel those violins wrapped around my body, I want to feel those cellos,” you say. And you surprise us with Soft As Your Face, a song whose timeless tenderness seems to transcend the parameters of our pop-cultural bubble. In other words, this one sounds like a standard. One we can sing to our significant others in decades to come. And when that time arrives and my kids are as old as you were on the week it came out, I’ll learn that you wrote it when you were fourteen! What will also strike me decades later, listening to the incoming intimations of psychedelia on The Majestic Head, is just how restless you seem to be. Beyond the instrumentation, it’s impossible to guess what the next Soup Dragons single might sound like on the basis of the last one. But then I guess that when you’re that young, six months as a fraction of your life, is an eternity compared to the same expanse 35 years down the line. Now, aged 52, part of me wants to go back in time and tell you to slow down. But then I drop the needle on these songs, and I realise that would be a disaster.
It’s the velocity I love. The fearless velocity. The conviction that it will forever be like this. And as long as we have these songs, do you know what? It will.
Pete Paphides