BOBBY BLUEBELL ON HIS BAND’S BELATED RETURN AND WHY THEIR MOST FAMOUS HIT HAS A “DIFFERENT RESONANCE” FOR HIM NOW
BETH SIMPSON
Most musicians count themselves lucky if their songs strike a chord with the public once, but Glaswegian indie doyens The Bluebells are among the select few who’ve been pop stars twice over: once in the mid-80s before a Volkswagen TV ad catapulted their most famous hit to No.1 almost a decade later. Now they’re back again with a belated follow-up to their only album, 1984’s Sisters. Shaggyhaired mainman Robert Hodgens explains what they’ve been doing in the interim and why he’s not embarrassed about that song.
So after nearly 40 years why do another album?
We’d been back performing gigs for a few years, doing lots of festivals and that. But after a while you think, ‘It would be nice to have new songs to play other than the same old ones’. Plus I’d had a few I’d done over that period and thought it was time to record them. We’ve got this great record company up here called Last Night From Glasgow, which put out a reissue of Sisters a couple of years back. They convinced us that we should release a new album.
For this album did you just dip back into that existing pile or write specifically for the project?
I tried my best to avoid that. That’s why we’ve called the album In The 21st Century. I thought it would be like, if we were starting now what would we sound like? If you’re an artist or a songwriter you have different things to write about now. We were an up-and-coming band then but now we’re older men with families, you know?
So who is in the line-up these days?
There’s myself and the McCluskeys [Ken, vocals and Dave, drums] still. We’ve got Campbell Owens from Aztec Camera on bass, and Mick Slaven and Douglas MacIntyre on guitars. We’ve got a great wee band now.
How would your 80s selves have reacted if you’d been told back then that an album called The Bluebells In the 21st Century would be the follow-up to Sisters?
The thing is, at the time no band in Glasgow thought they would last more than six months. None of us had any concept of the future. There was no career path, for us or Orange Juice, Altered Images or anybody. There was no idea that we’d still be doing this 40 years later. You take each day as it comes and then suddenly, boom, you’re in 2023!
Sisters has had a lot of retrospective praise over the last few years. Was that a factor in your return?
It has, hasn’t it? The trouble if you have a big hit like Young At Heart i
