Boyhood Tour Diary
Part One: Edinburgh Tuesday 7th April 2026
I have so many memories associated with Edinburgh, most of them to do with music or books. Edinburgh was always the psychedelic garage-punk capital of Scotland, the only place you could buy all those endless totemic garage punk compilations albums like Pebbles, Garage Punk Unknowns, New England Teen Scene etc. You could also occasionally score weirdo fanzines like Not Fade Away, Lindsay’s Hutton’s Next Big Thing as well as mysterious photocopied discographies of obscure Sixties punk labels. I still have a massive collection of these. I can spend hours flicking through a garage punk discography, with its eerily photocopied shots of groups that might never have existed. Plus, Edinburgh had all the best of the second waves garage punk bands, like the Offhooks, the Thanes and the crucial pre-Thanes group, the Green Telescope.
I would drive through on a Saturday afternoon with my mum, and I would always make us a cassette for the journey. My mum had square music taste at this point, but I was slowly educating her in the good stuff. We would sit in my bedroom in the loft in the evening and I would play her The North Star Grassman and the Ravens by Sandy Denny or Five Leaves Left by Nick Drake. Her epiphany happened on one of these legendary car trips when I made up a cassette that had Darklands by the Jesus and Mary Chain on one side and the first Velvet Underground album on the other. When my mum heard “April Skies” it was all over. What is this music?! she burst. If you like that, I said, then you are in for a treat when I flip it. Sure enough, my mum became obsessed with Lou Reed, and we made a pact right then that every time Lou came to Scotland, we would go and see him together. And sure enough, we both saw every Lou Reed show in Scotland from the late-1980s onwards, including the Velvet Underground reunion at Edinburgh Playhouse, and even Todd Haynes Velvet Underground documentary, which we went to see in the cinema together.
On March 15th, 1992, we managed to score front row tickets to Lou Reed’s Edinburgh gig at the Playhouse for his Magic and Loss tour, still one of my favourite albums. We were eye-level with Lou’s leather boots. The show was mind-blowing. At the end my mum and I leapt up and began applauding and Lou just looked us in the eye, gave my mum the finger, and walked off. Wow. It was the greatest night of our life. Lou Reed gave my mum the finger. Afterwards, as we drove home to Airdrie, my mum said that if she hadn’t have married my dad that she would have married Lou Reed.
In Edinburgh I was interviewed by Kirstin Innes at Topping and by the poet Len Pennie on her BBC radio arts show. We ate Mexican at Paz on Thistle Street, drank craft beer bar at Salt Horse on Blackfriars Street, had breakfast at Taste of Italy, signed books at the Portobello Book Shop and dropped in to see my man George at the brilliant record/book shop Underground Solution on Cockburn Street.