PEOPLE: Nazareth, Lords of the Hard Rock Chalet

THE wailing guitar, rasping vocals and thumping drum beat blasts through the lounge bar of an empty pub in a dull 60s concrete block, where Scotland's forgotten legends of rock are busy rehearsing.

It's their last practice session - as if they need to practise songs they've played for the past three decades - before the opening gig of a gruelling 2005 world tour.

For the next year, ageing rockers Nazareth will trek across the globe, packing in more than 50 dates, travelling tens of thousands of miles and performing their decades-old brand of hard rock to hundreds of thousands of devoted fans.

"It all starts in Sinky's Pub in Dunfermline," explains Pete Agnew, the band's bassist for the past 30-plus years. "And it ends in - aye, I know it's hard to believe - Las Vegas. And we go just about everywhere else in between."

He's not joking. Indeed, with the band's two leading members nudging 60, Nazareth are about to embark on an exhausting schedule which would leave musicians half their age weak at the knees.

As world tours go, Nazareth's could well fall into the "Spinal Tap" variety. Take, for example, the string of gigs in unpronounceable cities in Russia - Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is just one - where they're regarded as one of the world's top rock bands and where the number of counterfeit Nazareth albums in circulation tops eight million.

There are gigs in Scandinavia, Switzerland, America, Spain and assorted other countries, organised by Pete. Despite some minor blips - he forgot how many days there are in February and booked back-to-back gigs in Nuneaton then Switzerland, leaving barely any time to travel - he has cunningly managed to build in a fortnight off for a summer break.

"We'll be playing Portugal - a Bikers' Festival - then I'm going to Center Parcs in the middle of July," he explains. "Nottingham, of course. I didnae bother with the Lake District one, but Nottingham's brilliant!"

So this is rock 'n' roll . . . Nazareth-style. And if it all sounds off the wall, that's simply because Nazareth don't really do rock 'n' roll the way anyone might expect. For a start, while they can still pack in an entire football stadium of crazed fans in Outer Mongolia and have Norwegian rock fans scrambling and clawing for concert tickets, there's an entire generation of young Scots music fans who don't have the foggiest idea who they are.

And while there's no danger of them being mobbed for autographs in their native country, Pete, along with his lifelong friend and the band's lead singer Dan McCafferty - the only two original band members - can barely walk down the street in some Eastern Europe cities without being accosted by delighted fans.

"Hey hen, we're the Scottish Beatles but naebody knows it!" laughs Pete. "You wouldn't believe the reaction we get over in the Eastern bloc. And we're huge in Norway!"

Back home they don't even register a second glance in the supermarket, despite clocking up more than 35 years in the rock business and being hailed among the main influences for later generations of heavy rockers. Justin Hawkins of The Darkness credits Nazareth as one of his main inspirations and Axl Rose of Guns 'n' Roses pleaded - in vain - with them to play at his wedding.

SO far, they've sold more than 20 million official records around the world, yet Nazareth don't even have a UK record label.

"You need someone in the industry to believe in you," rasps Dan, those gravelly vocal chords which launched Nazareth into the charts in the 70s with Broken Down Angel and This Flight Tonight now even rougher thanks to a lifetime love of tobacco.

"The record companies are only interested if you're 17 years old and beautiful. And naw, we're neither. But I'm no bothered - we don't give a monkey's. They are in the pop business, but we're the music business."

It's been that way since July 1, 1971, when Dan and Pete - who met, aged five, on their first day at primary school - along with original band members Manny Charlton and drummer Darrell Sweet, were persuaded to chuck their comfortable day jobs and become professional musicians, pledging to give it a year and see how they got on.

They left behind very understanding young wives and headed to a communal flat in London, where they were advised to spend some money updating their image into rock stars. In came long, corkscrew hair, wide flares, long scarves and platform boots - none of which went down terribly well on visits home to Fife.

Pete recalled being given £100 by the band's management and told to buy some glamorous stage clothes.

"Dan and I would spend about £90 on lager, and go home with a couple of T-shirts each," he told Classic Rock magazine. "It was hard walking about in seven-inch platform heels - we liked a game of football in those days. As soon as we could get rid of them, that's what we did."

And of course, the band couldn't survive almost 35 years without the occasional bizarre incident. But while other rock bands were busy trashing hotel rooms, scoring drugs and sampling the delights of the groupies, Nazareth were far more sensible.

"All right, so I like a couple of pints," says Dan, who'll spend his 59th birthday somewhere between the Robinson Bowling Centre in Illinois and Fiesta Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, "But all the rest of it? All that, 'Hello, you should take this and it will make you feel like you're Jimi Hendrix.'

"Well Jimi Hendrix is dead and I don't want to feel like that. Besides, my wife would dig up my body and kill me all over again.

HAVE I been tempted? Of course," he continues. "But it's not written down that you've got to get laid every night by some former model because you're in a band. I do rock 'n' roll because I love it, but it doesn't interfere with how I feel about others.

"Our wives deserve Brownie points for bringing up the kids while we were off all over the place."

It's not all been plain sailing for the families. Nazareth were touring with rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd in 1977, when the group's plane crashed into a Mississippi wood, killing three members of the US band, their road manager and the two pilots. In the confusion that followed, the tour's distraught road crew announced that Nazareth had been wiped out too - in fact, they had turned down the chance to travel on a plane they later describe as being like "Gaffer tape airlines".

There are, says Pete, too many wacky incidents in 35 years of touring. Such as one recent gig at a stadium in Outer Mongolia.

"Outer Mongolia isn't as bad as it sounds," says Pete, "We've played worse places. Anyway we were playing in a big football stadium, all was going well when suddenly this car drives on stage. It turned out to be the president in his limo, who decided it would be a good idea to drive on while we were playing. So there's this bloody great limo, about 152 bodyguards and Dan turns around and nearly shits himself! We never did find out what was going on."

He'll write it all down, says Pete, 58, if the band ever gets around to giving up the relentless world tours.

There's certainly no shortage of fans desperate to keep paying good money to see Nazareth, even if their home audience appears to have lost interest. The Nazareth website's fans forum bristles with pleas for tickets and information about tonight's tsunami benefit gig from music lovers as far flung as Norway, Germany and Washington. Typical of them is a 39-year-old Norwegian fan who calls himself the Beerman. He lists his hobbies as "President of the local beer club and collecting beer bottles" and his interests as "Nazareth, web design, Nazareth, family, Nazareth, fishing, Nazareth, beer . . . " and so on.

There's every chance he'll still be tracking down Nazareth gigs in years to come. For there's no sign of Scotland's forgotten rockers - with Aberdonian lead guitarist Jimmy Murrison, 40, and Lee Agnew - Pete's 34-year-old son - replacing the late Darrell Sweet on drums - hanging up their tour jackets just yet.

"I'm still younger than Mick Jagger," declares Pete. "Besides, this is what we do for a living - why would we want to give it up? After all," he adds with a laugh, "it's a bit too late to think about becoming a plumber."
Edinburgh Evening News Feb 2005

PEOPLE: From Rollers to opera via Springsteen, the tour boss who's seen them all

IT was an ordinary hotel in an ordinary English town on a fairly average day in 1980. Until, that is, Ozzy Osbourne arrived.

As tour manager of the Black Sabbath frontman's series of gigs, Jake Duncan was responsible for making sure things ticked along, - from organising transport to pampering to stars' whims - but Ozzy blew apart his carefully-planned itinerary. "He'd just come out of a heavy divorce - this was before he was with Sharon," says Jake, relaxing in the lounge of his Edinburgh home. "He wasn't in a very good way.

"We arrived at this hotel in Leicester but it must have been the briefest stay in history, because as soon as we got to the reception desk to book in, Ozzy unzipped and urinated in the foyer. Let's just say we checked back out again soon after."

Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and unfortunate toilet incidents are just part of life on the road with some of the world's biggest music legends.

Today, Jake is at home in Balerno surrounded by glittering gold and platinum discs from the likes of George Michael and, most recently, Westlife. It's brief respite after a gruelling tour that has seen him accompany Britain's Got Talent opera sensation Paul Potts across the globe.

"I've been working with Paul since July last year and he's had no more than three weeks at home," says the 56-year-old father of two. "Last year he was selling phones, now we're just back from Australia, where he played the Sydney Opera House.

"In just five months we did the UK, US, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and Korea, and we've done ten shows in Denmark. I don't think I've done ten shows there with anyone, yet his is the biggest selling album in Denmark. That's amazing success."

On the road with the rotund opera star might not sound terribly rock 'n' roll, but who could blame Jake from wanting a little less action after 35 years with some of the biggest names in music? Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Bruce Springsteen, George Michael, Westlife and Franz Ferdinand - all appear on Jake's "been there, done them" list of acts that he has worked with.

It all started with Edinburgh's very own superstars, the Bay City Rollers.

"I was in a music store on the Royal Mile, it was 1973 and I was buying some drumsticks when I started chatting with a guy who was working with the Rollers," Jake recalls.

"He was driving to Bournemouth that night alone after his co-driver pulled out.

"I didn't have a driving licence but he said to come along because he needed someone to help keep him awake. I thought, 'sod it, I'll go'."

Jake was 21 and a trainee manager at a city hotel. Nothing prepared him for the madness that would engulf everyone associated with the tartan-clad popsters as Rollermania took off.

"It was largely down to Tam Paton going through teen magazines that used to have girls writing in asking for penfriends," reveals Jake. "He would note down every one and send them a picture of the band to get them interested.

"Eventually the girls went out of control - nothing had prepared me for the way these girls behaved."

The next group he worked was Aerosmith, the wild men of American rock.

Jake laughs as he remembers touring with Steve Tyler and co at the height of their hedonistic days of excess.

"It was 1976-77 and Aerosmith were totally wired pretty much the whole time," he recalls.

"A lot of artists will stick a list on the stage floor to help them remember the song order, but Steve came on stage one night in Birmingham and started off with what was the last song on the sheet.

"He finished, looked at the sheet and was so out of it that he thought that was it for the night so he yelled 'Thank you, goodnight' to the crowd," grins Jake.

"We had to push him back on and remind him he still had 14 songs to do."

Recently Jake saw the band play in Glasgow and approached guitarist Brad Whitford to say hello. "I said, 'Hi, remember me? I was with you guys in 1977'. He just looked at me blankly and said he couldn't remember anything at all from 1977 - and I'm not surprised."

As a lad growing up in Penicuik and then Abbeyhill, the notion that he'd eventually tour the world rubbing shoulders with the cream of the music industry never entered his head. He was too busy dreaming of football - more precisely, Hearts.

When he left Boroughmuir High for a hotel management course at Napier, he had no idea that his life would eventually revolve around hotels but from the other side of the reception desk.

As his reputation grew, Jake became one of the UK's leading tour managers, working with the biggest names in the business, including George Michael.

"I was with George for eight years," remembers Jake, who runs Showtime International from his home. "There'd be five of us in a private jet - George, his sister, his personal assistant, a security guy and me. So I got to know him pretty well.

"We'd bring in new people and they would wonder why George didn't say anything to them. I'd explain, 'If you're not spoken to, then you're doing fine. The time to worry is when you're spoken to'.

"Barbara Dickson is the same. I remember driving her new Saab 2000 convertible with her in the passenger seat. She said, 'do you like driving my car?', of course I said yes.

"She said, 'why don't you put your f***ing foot down or else we'll never get there'. She's a straight talker, and that's good."

But while it might all sound like the height of glamour, Jake points out that it's tougher than it sounds.

"Touring isn't for everyone, the road finds people out pretty quickly," he says. "You need big reserves of strength to get through it. And there's not many women will put up with you being away for most of the year with a rock band."

Jake's relationship with the mother of his two children didn't survive his career. He's now single, while son, Bradley, 22, is fresh from a marketing degree course and daughter Jade, 19, has just started training to be a speech therapist.

"You're not home, you're with rock stars and all that it involves. Most relationships don't survive," he says, although

he's the first to admit it's been quite a ride.

"Yeah, I suppose the whole idea of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll isn't far off the mark," laughs Jake. "There's been plenty of that on the road, but I'm sworn to secrecy on quite a lot of it.

"So I'm afraid the best bits, well, they'll have to go with me to the grave."

BRUCE ALMOST SHOWN WHO'S THE BOSS

HE'S called The Boss, but when Jake brought Bruce Springsteen to Edinburgh, it nearly landed him in trouble with the law.

"It was 1996 and we went to Queen's Park next to the Palace of Holyroodhouse and parked two people carriers there with blacked out windows," Jake recalls.

"Bruce and his agent walked towards Salisbury Crags while a couple of park rangers drew up, naturally suspicious.

"We said we were waiting for Bruce Springsteen but it didn't go down well. One of them said 'I've had a difficult day and I don't need you pulling my chain', at which point Bruce appeared.

"The guy could hardly believe his eyes."
Edinburgh Evening News September 2008

PEOPLE: Gutted Fish on life after love

 

THIS time last year rocker Fish should have been a proud newlywed with a pretty wife 20 years his junior on his arm and a new album of upbeat songs reflecting his romantic peace.

His Haddington home would have been the marital abode for Mr and Mrs Derek Dick - the former Marillion frontman's real name - and there might even have been a chance his new wife could persuade him to think about becoming a dad for the second time.

Should have, would have been. Except it isn't.

Today, Fish is sitting outside a cafe, the contents of his packet of Camel cigarettes rapidly being depleted as he smokes one after another, mulling over his personal year from hell.

"Yeah, last year was pretty traumatic, what with the wedding that turned into a record launch party instead," he says, with a fleeting sardonic smile.

"It was rough, it's been rough for a while. But it's a long time ago now, it's gone. Other things are far more important."

He's talking, of course, about the marriage that never was. He wasn't quite left standing at the altar, but it wasn't far from it.

"Fish gutted as fiancée walks out after refusing prenuptial" sang the headlines. News that the singer and actor's relationship had hit the rocks came out of the blue, just months after he'd proudly announced he'd found the love of his life.

It was late last May, Fish and singer Heather Findlay had been putting the final touches to their August wedding plans. A spectacular string of disagreements between the lovers followed, however, and the nuptials were off.

Dark days followed. Fish threw himself into rewriting his new album, tweaking all those romantic songs to reflect the sudden dark change in circumstances.

Later, the wedding reception for 250 - already paid for - morphed into the album's launch party and the invitations were clear: "No wedding outfits and absolutely NO ruches!" they declared, referring to the frilly-ruffed collar he'd been expected to wear for the ceremony, Heather's feminine contribution to his specially designed Dick tartan.

Devastated as he was at the time, today he insists it's all history. He's halfway through a world tour and adopting a pragmatic approach to one of the bleakest of personal episodes. "Well," he shrugs, "I suppose it was good lyric writing country."

Certainly for an artist who pours so much of his personality into what he writes, having your wedding collapse around your frilly ruffs and tartan trimmings meant there was plenty of raw emotional material to work with.

Not that he was ever short of a bit of angst in his life. He'd already emerged battered and almost bankrupt from a messy divorce from his first wife, German model Tamara Schnell, which also left him looking after their teenage daughter, Tara. That, along with a string of financial rip-offs including one sting by an employee which cost him nearly GBP 70,000, and the struggle to emulate some of the success he enjoyed with Marillion as a solo artist, mean there have been plenty of traumas and upset to inspire his music.

So when the marriage blow came, Fish retreated to clear his head, seeking sanctuary in the strangest of places.

"I remember being a kid and having German measles," he recalls. "I was lying in a single bed downstairs in the house in Dalkeith and the Vietnam War was going on on television. My Uncle Charlie was there - he was an ex-regimental sergeant major with the Royal Highland Fusiliers. He was watching soldiers firing M16s over their heads and he was saying they shouldn't be doing that, they were wasting bullets."

It made such an impression that, earlier this year, Fish packed a rucksack and flew to Vietnam, to explore a country he'd first witnessed on television in the clutches of turmoil, battered and war-torn - perhaps matching his own mood - in search of solving his own personal traumas.

"Songs are just one side of a diamond," he explains. "When you write songs, you deal with emotions in a lyric.

"It's easy to put all those emotions in a box, but really all you've done is tidied up a bit and stuck it away. You put the boxes in a cupboard and you open the cupboard door one day and it all falls out.

"You think you've handled something but you haven't. You've just dealt with one side of it."

Four months of self discovery appear to have done the trick. Head cleared, Fish is now back at work preparing for the release next month of a new single, Zoe 25. He's well into a 120-date tour that has already taken in America - his first full US tour for 11 years - Canada and Mexico. It will climax in the UK in late November.

It's tough going, but with 27 years of touring and 1700 shows already under his belt, he'll cope.

After all, he's played to crowds of 120,000 people in Marillion's heyday and supported Queen. They had mega-group status, over 15 million albums sold, and every possible excess was on the table, from groupies to drink and drugs.

The present-day Fish might not match any of that, but the "Big Man of Rock", at 6ft 4ins, can manage a little rock and roll indulgence. "Oh, we enjoy ourselves," insists the 50-year-old. "We did a bottle count on the bus in Canada. We had 230 empties between nine of us. We even found some cheese as well, very sophisticated!

"Listen," he adds, "when you're doing three shows in a row you've got to be a bit sensible. It's okay for Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse who do one show every three months. The rest of us have got to be semi-sensible.

"I've had my share of wild times, there were some class As floating about in the Eighties, but you get to the stage where it just gets silly. From a legal perspective when you need visas to go to America, it's not worth the risk."

No longer only a singer and writer, he's diversified into an actor, with roles in Taggart and alongside James Bond star Daniel Craig in The Jacket, and writing his own movie scripts. He has won awards for his Planet Rock radio show and next year he'll write a novel based in Vietnam which draws on his personal experiences.

His internet blog, meanwhile, has a cult following with page after page of detail about his life which veers bizarrely from day-to-day trivia to sudden explosive drama.

Between that and his introspective lyrics, it's all out there. Well, almost.

Perhaps still stung by those "Fish gutted" headlines from last year, there's one element of his life he'd prefer to keep under wraps.

"I have got a new relationship," he nods cautiously. "Who is it? Hmmm, someone. It doesn't matter who, or what they do."

He lights up another Camel, takes a long, satisfying draw and shakes his head.

"Just don't ask . . ."

Fish's new single, Zoe 25, is released on October 6. For tour dates and further information, go to www.the-company.com

Dalkeith star's life and rhymes

FISH - real name Derek Dick - was born in Dalkeith in April, 1958, and went to King's Park Primary School and Dalkeith High School.

Marillion finally broke into the UK charts with top ten hits in 1985 - Kayleigh and Lavender. That was followed in 1987 with Incommunicado.

The band were known for Fish's highly introspective lyrics. However, he quit suddenly in 1988.

Marillion have continued with replacement singer Steve Hogarth. Fish joined the band for a one-off reunion gig last year.

Fish has continued to release albums. His last - 13th Star - came out last year. A six CD box set of Marillion material is due to be released in November
Edinburgh Evening News Sesptember 2008

PEOPLE: Snowballing success of ex-News man.

THE scene was one of sheer chaos. There were screams, perhaps the occasional retch as a stomach emptied its technicolour contents and a lot of angry words - some of the four-lettered variety - quietly muttered under exasperated breath.

All ingredients of a typically dark Christopher Brookmyre novel - albeit minus the pints of blood, extreme violence and gruesome killings. Still, as experiences go, it was certainly verging on murder.

The difference was this particular scene was played out at a heaving, over-populated and largely underwhelming kiddies' theme park, where the so-called Tartan Noir author had taken his young son.

"It was awful," he groans, recalling the holiday treat for Jack, eight, that involved standing in a lot of queues for a very long time in the vain hope of a 30-second turn on a not particularly thrilling fairground ride. "Not really recommended," he shrugs.

Unlike his latest book, Snowball in Hell, currently receiving a clutch of five-star reviews and following in the same pulsating vein as his previous bestselling darkly humorous, bloodstained and provocative efforts.

In it, Brookmyre unleashes one of his most disturbed characters Simon Darcourt - revived after apparently dying in his earlier book, A Big Boy Did it and Ran Away - and sets him on a bloody journey through myriad issues close to his own heart, from loud-mouthed journalists to the media's obsession with petty celebrity and blind religious faith.

Think Big Brother meets A Nightmare on Elm Street with outspoken newspaper columnists and religious fanatics as the unfortunate housemates.

Perhaps his theme is not surprising given Brookmyre's personal background - he worked as a sub-editor on the Evening News while perfecting his first two novels and spent his childhood in a community steeped in West of Scotland Catholicism.

"I suppose the character of Simon is a good way of taking your own prejudices and petty annoyances and blowing them up," he says.

The trademarks of Brookmyre's work - blood, terror, murder and chaos emerge just a few pages in, when his violent anti-hero imprisons and methodically slays one particularly vociferous newspaperman after first revealing his victim's pathetic hypocrisy to a captivated nation of viewers.

"The book is a look at the modern media as much as anything," adds the 39-year-old, whose own religious conversion from Catholicism was complete with his recent installation as the Humanist Society of Scotland's new President.

"I thought of these tub-thumping tabloid journalists, the hang 'em high brigade, how would they react if they were put in a situation where they had to choose between coming face to face with a prisoner who had been through rehabilitation and one who hadn't. Which prisoner would they choose?

"The book looks at the way that celebrities, no matter how minor and how little they have to celebrate, are treated as if they from a different planet and everyone else is a lesser being.

"The way kids see talent and celebrity programmes and read Heat," he adds, warming to his theme, "they think all that matters is to be famous and it doesn't matter what you are famous for.

"The book tries to show that there's something more to aspire towards, but just settling down and having a family isn't going to get anyone on the cover of Heat."

Yet it's one of his characters' thoughts on a far more delicate subject - Islam, the burkha and religious fanaticism that could put Brookmyre's latest novel under a more controversial spotlight. At one point his female cop Angelique de Xavia, another character along with magic man Zal Innez revived from A Big Boy Did it and Ran Away, rolls up in a niqab described as a "mobile gazebo" and reflects on religious worship as "mind control".

"I think I offend everyone in this book," he shrugs. "There's the female character who has issues with the burkha and jilbab, but the book also draws distinction in the ways radical Islamists are separate from the rest."

The people most likely to be offended by his books, he argues, are the ones who don't actually read them.

After his three sold-out appearances at the Book Festival, September will see him make a joint appearance at the Liquid Room with acclaimed singer/songwriter Billy Franks, whose fans include Bono, Oasis and Peter Gabriel.

Is there any chance he might return to the Evening News for a stint on the subs' desk? With a string of bestsellers, industry awards and ideas for his next novel already taking shape, you could say - like his book's title - there's not a snowball's chance in hell.

"Hmm, much as I'd like to," he says with a gracious laugh, "I really don't think so."

Snowball in Hell by Christopher Brookmyre is published by Little, Brown on August 14. Tickets for his appearance at the Liquid Room on September 9 with Billy Franks cost GBP 6 from Waterstone's (West End), 128 Princes Street.

A LIFE IN WORDS

WITH around a dozen dark novels now under his belt, each mixing political and social issues with sinister narrative, black humour, crime and usually a fair degree of inventive violence, stirring up strong opinions is nothing new to Christopher Brookmyre.

His childhood was spent in Barrhead and he studied at Glasgow University where he satisfied his urge to work with words on the student newspaper, involved in layout and sub-editing.

There was a stint in London with Screen International which proved handy when it came to overseeing the sale of his own work, including quite Ugly One Morning starring James Nesbitt, to film companies.

These days home is back over in the west, closer to his beloved St Mirren.
Edinburgh Evening News August 2008

PEOPLE: Capital is Marr's spiritual home

BLAME it on the girl, but if it hadn't been for a certain lady who happened to catch young Andrew Marr's eye, then London's political empire might have breathed a little easier.

But, perhaps more importantly, a nation of television viewers might never have come face to face with the small screen's most unlikely star.

Today Loretto-educated Marr is among the country's best known faces - and pair of ears - in television current affairs, balancing incisive political comment with celebrity interviews as host of a Sunday morning chat show and as a regular contributor to a catalogue of programmes and publications.

Soon he will adopt yet another, slightly more surprising persona: that of fearless action man, as he takes to the heavens on board a variety of flimsy flying machines and wobbly sky-borne apparatus to present his new series, Britain from Above.

In it, he tours the country from hundreds of feet in the air, swooping through the Great Glen on a microlight, plunging to earth tied to a skydiver and trying to keep talking through chattering teeth while strapped to a paraglider.

It's all intended to bring us a new perspective on a familiar landscape. Yet none of it might have come about if it hadn't been for a

romantic crush, way back when the young Andrew Marr was carving himself a name in journalism here in Edinburgh.

"My first job was on The Scotsman," he says. "It was quite some time ago now but I remember leaving to go to London thinking I'd only be going there very briefly. I fully intended to be back in Scotland quickly.

"I was chasing a woman, of course," he reveals. "But when I caught her, I fairly quickly realised that I had been the fish and she was the angler - she didn't waste much time in throwing me back."

The story makes him roar with laughter - it is, he adds, the reason why London is now home and not Edinburgh.

"But I very much feel that Edinburgh is my adoptive home," he adds quickly. "I'm from Dundee, sure, but I went to school at Loretto in Musselburgh and I feel very, very close to Edinburgh."

Which might make viewers of his newest television series wonder why the city he feels such a connection with is rather skirted around as the flying Mr Marr skims the nation's horizon, pointing out geological rarities, historical and industrial landmarks, hills and rugged coastlines.

Throughout the series he whizzes over the Welsh Borders in a hang glider, buzzes once secret military bases in the Midlands and soars over Oxford in a biplane. As for Edinburgh...

"The series is driven by stories about ancient history, geology," he says. "But it's completely non-comprehensive in terms of the places we were able to take in.

"The Scottish sequence ended up being the Great Glen - it's like the San Andreas Fault of Great Britain and Europe, it's a huge geological issue. So we did that.

"We did a lot of London too, obviously because of the size, and we looked at Oxford as an example of how a town has spread over the years."

Certainly, filming Britain From Above is about as far from Marr's typical working environment - a stuffy W12 television studio - as possible.

"I can't remember how many different ways I've been in the air but it's at least two or three different helicopters, four or five different planes, including historic planes from the Thirties, a Tigermoth and a silver Synergy jet - which is, apparently, Kylie's transport of choice," he says.

"On my first day I was strapped in a microlight, which is like a motorised tricycle with wings which goes faster, then dangerously fast until suddenly you are a couple of thousand feet up.

"It's an astonishing feeling. Zipping down the Great Glen very low and seeing it from a bird's eye view, a buzzard's binoculars, was spectacular."

He may not give the immediate impression of a James Bond in waiting - Marr's biggest claim to fame apart from his journalistic skills has been in having a set of distinctive lugs - yet it appears the new series has unleashed the action man in him.

Paragliding, he says, was a surprising experience that "essentially involves jumping off a hill holding on to a plastic bag attached to some string".

But most shocking of all was the skydiving. "There's no doubt that the biggest highlight was being dropped out of a plane twice, two miles up, which was completely unlike what I'd expected."

"I thought it was going to be the most fun, full-on moment - partly because you see all these pictures of people skydiving and they look like they're floating.

"I thought it would be a bit like floating. You get out the plane, there's a rush of air and a skoosh and then you would be floating.

"But, I can report, it is categorically not like floating. You are plummeting. You are going down as fast as the human body could go. You drop about a mile before the parachute is opened."

It all sounds terrifying, but having viewed Britain from angles most of us couldn't contemplate, Marr emerged a fan.

"In terms of sheer, unadulterated fun, this has been a wonderful shoot," he adds. "And it does truly give you a completely different perspective on life in Britain."

Dundee-born Marr went to Loretto School in Musselburgh before heading to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to study English. He joined the Scotsman as a trainee junior business reporter in 1981 and left in 1988 after a spell as political editor.

He became London-based, working for a variety of newspapers before hitting television screens as the BBC's distinctive political editor in 2000.

Amidst all of that, he has published five books and more recently evolved from hard news and comment to presenting his talk-based show on Sunday mornings and his documentary series, Andrew Marr's History Of Modern Britain.

Filming is already underway on a prequel to his History Of Modern Britain, Britannia, and a major documentary for BBC Two about evolution - Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

He certainly appears to live up to his workaholic reputation - even if there's a fine line between how much of what he does in the new series is work and how much is sheer personal enjoyment.

"It's been a blast," he says. "Most of us are familiar with being up there from our flights to various holiday destinations. But here we're in smaller planes or helicopters talking with experts who know exactly what they are looking at. The effect is completely different.

"There are so many of us on such a small, historic space the miracle is that we avoid some kind of dramatic national catastrophe," he adds.

"What I hope people take away from this is a sense of how extraordinary it is that we all manage to get along without tipping into utter mayhem and chaos."
Edinburgh Evening News August 2008

PEOPLE: Laying secret ghost to rest

 

MIND, body and spirit. The ethos that one of Scotland's most prestigious and oldest independent boarding schools was built on, a philosophy that moulded generations of highly educated young students.

Twelve-year-old Don Boyd, smart in his Loretto Junior School uniform of blue serge shorts, open-necked shirt and long red stockings, was about to undergo a particularly "special", secret lesson as he crept towards North Esk Lodge.

This would be a private lesson, the first of many. Just the young boy and his charismatic, popular and - although the schoolboy didn't realise it at the time - predatory, paedophile French teacher.

It was a lesson in life that pioneering 19th century headmaster Dr Hely Hutchinson Almond - whose "mind, body and spirit" values are at the heart of a school that counts Alistair Darling, Andrew Marr, Norman Lamont and racing driver Jim Clark among its past pupils - surely would never have tolerated.

Inside North Esk Lodge was Guy Anthony Ray-Hills' bedroom.

It smelled of gelatine cream, aftershave and semen. It reeked of sex and secrets, of terrible child abuse and broken childhoods.

Within this small bedroom on the top floor of North Esk Lodge, a ten-minute walk from the gates of prim Loretto School at the heart of Musselburgh in the late 50s and early 60s, curious, innocent boys - often deprived of parental affection at a lonely boarding school - were treated to Ray-Hills' full and undivided attention. They were stripped, abused and repeatedly raped.

Boyd kept secret how he became one of the outwardly respectable French tutor's "special friends" for decades. It tainted his life and relationships and hovered quietly in the background as his career in filmmaking led to working with stars like Sir Laurence Olivier, John Hurt, Richard Harris and Dame Helen Mirren, producing iconic movies such as controversial 70s film Scum, writing screenplays and directing.

He blurted his secret out, bizarrely, in an explosive moment after his father's death, when a friend showed off a collection of antique guns, fired one and the blast somehow broke the lock on decades of suppressed anguish.

Today he's back in Edinburgh, just a few miles from where Ray-Hills systematically abused him, to work with the Traverse Theatre and launch a new project which aims to beam live theatre to cinema audiences across the country.

It's also an appropriate location to launch his first novel, Margot's Secrets, with its themes of sexual abuse and mind manipulation, deep- rooted secrets and lives warped by depravity which run brutally close to Boyd's own experiences. So close, that one of his key character's own account of being brutalised by his teacher - even down to the animal nicknames Ray-Hills gave his pupils and the school uniform - could not be anything other than Boyd's own story.

"One of the victims is drawn from my own experience," nods Boyd during a break at a rehearsal room in Leith. "And yes, one of the other characters is the personification of what I imagine my former teacher might become as they enter the adult world away from boarding school.

"He is charming and dangerous. Intelligent, perceptive and a very, very clever manipulator of people."

Here in Edinburgh, so close to that small bedroom, Boyd might be expected to harvest fresh bitterness and anger at his betrayal. "But I'm one of the lucky ones," he stresses. "I can come back to Edinburgh which I feel is my 'home' and be completely forgiving to Loretto. It was a brilliant school educationally, there was the highest order of teaching staff and it gave me the opportunity to learn so much.

"One has to move on. You have to rationalise, otherwise you go around with a scar that never heals, a constant reminder of something that happened a long time ago."

He agrees that ultimately Loretto failed him - and other boys abused by Ray-Hills during the 16 years he taught at the Musselburgh school. But he insists it also introduced him to theatre and cinema, music at the Usher Hall and Shakespeare, laying down credentials for what would become a hugely successful movie career.

His 70s production company, Boyd's Co, was at the forefront of British cinema for a decade, bringing to the screen Alan Clarke's groundbreaking and controversial movie Scum - infamous for its brutality and sex abuse scenes - Derek Jarman's The Tempest, Sex Pistols movie The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and Lindsay Anderson's Look Back in Anger.

Boyd has worked with a string of British talent, from Ray Winstone to Stephen Fry, Kathy Burke and Tilda Swinton. In 1988, he worked with Jarman again (pictured below) on War Requiem, Laurence Olivier's final film.

Yet while his career flourished - he's been described as a "one-man film industry" - Boyd's private life and marriage was in turmoil. Events at Loretto between 1958 and 1965 lurked in the background, repressed but the catalyst for his own adulterous and duplicitous adult behaviour.

Boyd was born in Nairn and was ten when he was sent to Loretto while his parents lived in Africa. "School was horrendously brutal but I thought that was normal and life was like that," he recalls.

The abuse began after months of careful, cynical grooming by his tutor when he was 12. It continued throughout his year as head boy at the prep school and into senior school. As he prepared to leave Loretto as a teenager, Ray-Hills accompanied Boyd on holiday to Austria where the abuse continued. "I was ashamed and couldn't cope," Boyd recalls. "Then came hiding it. The impact on your life that hiding something like that has is huge. It caused a lot of turmoil and crises."

When he finally revealed his secret in 2001, Loretto acted immediately, contacting everyone who'd ever been taught by Ray-Hills. "There were 35 letters back from people saying similar stuff had happened to them," says Boyd. One man claimed the abuse had driven him to attempt suicide.

Ray-Hills, then in his late 70s, was charged with a string of sex offences but the case was dropped on grounds of his ill-health. The shame of being "outed" for years of abuse would, Boyd believes, have been enough of a punishment, jail a given if he had stood trial.

Ray-Hills is now dead. "Nothing was ever done to him while he was a teacher," Boyd recalls. "He left Loretto and it was brushed under the carpet in a way that must have been done by lots of organisations at the time - the Catholic Church, public schools. But I don't really hold Loretto to blame."

Today it's in Boyd's past, but curiously events from 50 years ago could also feature in his future too.

His X-rated psychological thriller, Margot's Secrets - based around an American psychotherapist in Barcelona's ex-pat community where everyone has a sexual history they'd rather keep hidden - is already the subject of discussions between his publishers and American film producers as potential movie material.

Although he insists it is fiction and not memoirs, drawing on elements of his own story and unravelling tracts of Ray-Hills' make-up for his characters has been a cathartic experience, Boyd adds.

"I suppose integrating Ray-Hills in a book as a character has been my way of laying the ghost to rest."

Teacher never stood trial to face charges

Guy Anthony Ray-Hills taught at Loretto School for 16 years and later at Cheam, Prince Charles's former school.

Don Boyd's 2001 abuse revelation sparked a police investigation after another former Loretto pupil - a Scottish university professor - complained he too had been abused.

Ray-Hills left the Musselburgh school in 1968 and was living in retirement in Twickenham when the allegations surfaced.

He was later charged with sexual offences against two boys, then aged 11 and 15, which allegedly took place 40 years earlier.

The case was due to be heard in summer 2003 but dropped because of the accused's ill-health. The Crown Office confirmed at the time that the case would not be "re-raised".
Edinburgh Evening News, August 2010

PEOPLE: A novel return to childhood locations

THERE'S just one word to describe the scene outside author Maggie O'Farrell's London home - "dreich".

But she adds: "I was just talking to my mum on the phone and she says the weather in North Berwick is absolutely beautiful."

There is fondness in her voice as she mentions her home town, but it's a very long way from North Berwick to the Big Smoke in more ways than just miles.

Maggie, once a slightly awkward 12-year-old "outsider" at North Berwick school, is now among Britain's best-selling authors, an award-winning novelist whose three books have all achieved critical acclaim and blockbusting sales.

Her life, which once revolved around, the slightly claustrophobic community of an East Lothian seaside resort and summers spent at the outdoor swimming pool, now takes her to book signings, hob-nobbing - she stresses that it's only very occasionally - with the London glitterati and mingling with fellow household-name writers.

All of that and she's a dab hand at changing nappies, too. Maggie added that particular string to her bow 19 months ago, when son Saul entered the world. She very quickly discovered her newborn had his own agenda - one that doesn't sound conducive to allowing mum time to create best-selling novels.

"He was a horrific sleeper," she confesses. "He's good now - asleep by 7.30pm - but for the first six months he just didn't sleep. I found it really, really hard."

Just as well she'd already finished her third and latest novel, The Distance Between Us. Published last January to the same kind of praise that accompanied her first two works, it provided her growing legion of fans with another tense, slightly dark and highly evocative page-turner set in a small Scottish village.

Like its predecessors, the Betty Trask Award-winning After You'd Gone and her second novel, My Lover's Lover, it delves into the complexities of modern relationships, played out against locations anyone with even a vague knowledge of life in the Lothians would find familiar - such as the quaint Italian cafe Maggie puts at the heart of the novel that could only really have been inspired by Luca's in Musselburgh.

She is clearly keen to put her little corner of Lothian on the literary map. After You'd Gone was partly set in North Berwick and followed the twisting and turning relationships of a middle sister with a literary background who heads to London and falls in love with a Jewish man.

None of which is exactly a million miles away from Maggie's own life. Nor is the experience of another of her characters in The Distance Between Us, who falls into a coma after a mysterious brain virus: Maggie was just eight when she was struck by just such a virus which kept her off school for a year and which, even today, can affect her balance.

Drawing on such familiar territory is only natural, she says, but is quick to point out that her books are not autobiographical. Writing out her own life would, she says, be boring. That said, she admits she can't escape the impact her life and her home have on her writing. "As a teenager we are at our most susceptible to influences, but I couldn't live today in a place like North Berwick," she says.

"Being a teenager in North Berwick was very frustrating.

"At every opportunity I'd be on the train to Waverley. When I was a teenager, everyone knew you, knew what you were doing. You couldn't walk down a street without bumping into someone who knew your mum."

Now 32, she is a self-confessed "city girl" having arrived in London ten years ago via Hong Kong and a series of dead-end jobs with the intention of staying for just a year.

Yet even now, she regards North Berwick as her real home, returning every couple of months to visit her parents and her two sisters.

THERE were other places she could have chosen to regard as "home". Born in Northern Ireland in 1972, her family later moved to Wales before her father Patrick's work as an economics lecturer took the family - mum Susan, Maggie and her sisters, Catherine and Bridget, to North Berwick.

"I was about 12 years old," Maggie recalls. "It wasn't that easy settling in and I had been a bit upset to leave our home just outside Cardiff. In retrospect, it was good we moved - the comprehensive in Wales was terrifying! I'd probably have ended up pregnant at 15 or something."

She describes herself as something of an outsider at school, a fan of indie band The Cure who spent much of her spare time shut in her bedroom reading challenging works by Albert Camus and writing the diaries she started at the age of six and still keeps today.

So perhaps it shouldn't have been too surprising to anyone when she won a place at Cambridge reading English. She says: "I didn't really like it. It was a bit of a shock to the system - going from a small comprehensive school in North Berwick to Cambridge. I messed up my finals and I thought I'd be in big trouble at home."

She was in more trouble with her family when she suddenly decided to travel to Hong Kong to teach English. "My mother was really angry with me - I just got on a plane and went out there. I'd never really been anywhere - my family are not big travellers, they've hardly left Scotland. I thought I'd go to Hong Kong because at least a lot of people there would speak English."

It was there she found inspiration for her first book. "I got the idea for After You'd Gone there. That said, I didn't start writing properly for another two years, until a boyfriend's mother gave me a computer. I'd never used a computer before but as soon as I had it, I was flying away."

The result was her first novel, described by enthusiastic critics as "beautifully constructed, unashamedly passionate" and "a first-class trip across the borders of the mind". Others talk of her special ability to combine emotional, contemporary fiction which is both literary and commercial - several levels above popular "chick lit" - appealing to broad generations of readers.

Not that Maggie tries to pay too much attention to what the critics say.

She says: "I read some reviews after the first book, but now I just put my head in the sand. When I read them then sat down to write, there'd be these little voices in my head saying: 'Maggie O'Farrell writes this' or 'is concerned with that'. I found myself writing to fit what they'd said. "I'm also chicken," she laughs. "My boyfriend reads them and he gives me a rough idea if they are good, bad or really rubbish!"

The good ones have far outweighed the bad. And it's not surprising that Maggie's work, with its focus on tangled relationships, dark plots - the genre is described as domestic gothic - spanning often far flung locations, has attracted the interest of film-makers.

After You'd Gone has just been snapped up by the makers of Calendar Girls, which starred Helen Mirren and Julie Walters.

Maggie has no interest, however, in "doing a JK" and retaining control of her characters. "They could well cast someone I think is wrong for a major part and, yes, you do often see films which bear no similarity to the book, but there's no point beating yourself up about it.

"Sometimes you're asked if you want to write the script but I can't imagine anything worse. I'd cut off my hand before I went back to it."

Instead she prefers to look to the future. Despite sleepless nights thanks to the son she has with fellow author William Sutcliffe - and her thoughts turning to having another - Maggie has still managed to complete her fourth novel.

"The first draft is finished but I have a superstition - I like to put it away for a couple of months and ignore it, forget about it for a bit," she explains. "It helps to give it a bit of distance, then I go back and often just rip it to pieces."

And what can Maggie's fans expect from her fourth novel? Again, it seems there is no escaping her Scottish roots.

"It's set in Edinburgh," she reveals. "And it's partly historical. But that's all I'm saying.
"Let's just say that talking about it too soon is another one of my superstitions."
Edinburgh evening News Feb 2005