Joe Egan and Gerry Rafferty were in their mid-twenties and comparative veterans of the music scene when they landed a record deal with the A&M company. They were pleased to sign with a major label, but were not overly enthusiastic about having to sit through a celebratory dinner with music business executives and their wives.

“I don’t know why I came here tonight, I’ve got the feeling that something ain’t right,” they wrote a couple of days later when they laid down the lyrics for the song Stuck in the Middle With You.

Stuck in the Middle With You was to become an international hit for their group Stealers Wheel in the 1970s and was given a whole new meaning and reached a whole new audience 20 years later when Quentin Tarantino used it as the soundtrack for the torture scene in his stylish thriller Reservoir Dogs.

“Do you ever listen to K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the Seventies?” Mr Blonde (Michael Madsen) asks the tied-up cop. “This is my personal favourite,” he tells him, before doing a little boogie, looking supercool in white shirt and black pencil tie. The policeman cannot answer because of the tape over his mouth.

Joe Egan – wearing glasses – pictured during a Stealers Wheel recording session

Mr Blonde then calmly slices off the policeman’s ear with an open razor, while Stealers Wheel continue the tale of Egan and Rafferty’s own torture at the record business dinner party: “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”

Reservoir Dogs was Tarantino’s first feature film, shot by the movie geek and former video store clerk with a tiny budget and a huge amount of panache. Despite the despair of the lyrics, Stuck in the Middle With You is a fairly bouncy folk-rock number.

But Tarantino was so sure that it would work with the scene he had in his mind’s eye that he spent a huge chunk of his music budget on the rights.

Years later in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine Tarantino recalled: “The first time somebody actually did the torture scene to that song, the guy didn't even have a great audition, but it was like watching the movie. I was thinking, Oh my God, this is gonna be awesome!"

Egan and Rafferty had known each since schooldays in Paisley, where Joseph Egan was born in 1946.

The family were originally from Ireland, but like many others they had relocated to the West of Scotland. Egan and Rafferty went to the same primary and then St Mirrin’s Academy.

Rafferty was a year older than Egan and they really just got to know each other when they started playing in bands on the local music scene. Egan was also a contemporary of Scottish international footballer Archie Gemmill – he of the solo wonder goal against the Netherlands in the 1978 World Cup finals – and Egan had hoped to become a professional footballer too.

Egan was singing and playing guitar with a band called the Sensors at weekends and recruited Rafferty as vocalist and rhythm guitarist. Egan later said the music scene in Paisley at the time was “buzzing”.

They both liked the Everly Brothers, hit it off on harmonies and went on to play in several other bands together, including The Mavericks and The Fifth Column, often playing covers of Beatles and Stones records.

They parted ways when Rafferty teamed up with Billy Connolly in the folk group The Humblebums.

Connolly subsequently developed his career as a stand-up comedian and Rafferty formed Stealer’s Wheel with Rab Noakes. Egan had been working part-time as a singer in Mecca dancehalls. He joined and Noakes left. Then came the A&M contract and that famous dinner party in Chelsea.

A&M had high hopes for them and teamed them up with superstar American producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for their debut album Stealers Wheel, with the group expanded to a quintet with Egan and Rafferty as leaders.

The album came out in 1972 and included Stuck in the Middle With You, an original Rafferty-Egan composition. But the relationship between the two principals was always volatile and by the time the LP came out Rafferty had left the group and returned to Scotland.

Rafferty had sung lead on the song, with Egan on harmony. But for the video Egan had to mime Rafferty’s part. The video reprised the nightmare of that early dinner, with a number of grotesque guests, including a clown, a bowler-hatted businessman and a woman eating cream cakes. The clown continually prevents Egan from eating.

Beyond the dinner party, the lyrics obviously refer to relationships that are going nowhere, which seemed to be the case with Egan and Rafferty, until the song was a hit – No 8 in the UK, No 6 in the US, No 2 in Canada. At which point Rafferty returned to the group.

He said later that he thought things would be different with a major success behind them. “But it was the same old shit,” he said. They made another two albums together as Stealers Wheel, Ferguslie Park, which took its title from an area of Paisley, and Right or Wrong.

Rafferty went on to enjoy considerable success as a solo artist, most notably with the albums City to City and Night Owl and the single Baker Street. Egan made a couple of solo albums in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Out of Nowhere and Map.

Egan and Rafferty did work together in the 1990s. They composed some songs together and Egan sang on a couple of albums. They kept in regular contact until Rafferty’s death in 2011. Egan also had a music publishing business.

He spent his later years back home in Renfrewshire with his wife Sylvia, who survives him. Their daughter predeceased him.

Obituaries

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Obituaries: Joe Egan, musician who partnered with Gerry Rafferty in Stealers Wheel