Friends Again: Glasgow 1980s new wave band reforms for Celtic Connections gig

Friends Again started in 1981 when Chris Thomson and Paul McGeechan were at school in Bothwell. They formed a band with their friend Neil Cunningham on bass. Chris sang and played guitar with Paul on keyboards. Andrew McGurk and Colin McGowan joined the initial foray before leaving the band in 1982. Not long after James Grant was recruited after a meeting at Cafe Gandolfi, assuming guitar and vocal duties, while Stuart Kerr completed the set on drums.

A demo of one of their songs, Honey at the Core, was picked up for airplay by Billy Sloan on Radio Clyde and the band were signed to Phonogram Records shortly afterwards. At the time there was a ferocious appetite for discovering the next big thing to emerge from Glasgow’s burgeoning music scene. When their second single, State of Art, failed to chart in late 1983, faltering at no.93, the label delayed an album release in favour of a series of singles across 1984, with a five song double vinyl EP The Friends Again EP, which reached no. 59 in the charts.

Their only album, Trapped & Unwrapped was eventually released in 1984. At that point, the moment had already passed. Members of the band found themselves moving in different directions and the call had already been made to move on.

James Grant went on to form Love and Money in 1985, along with McGeechan and Kerr, while Chris Thomson, the main songwriter and focus for Friends Again would form The Bathers. Both groups wrote a more substantial chapter of the Scottish music story - The Bathers released six albums, Love and Money released four.

In an interview with Penny Black Music in 2019, Paul McGeechan recalled: “The album took a long time to come out. We released State of Art as a single, but when that wasn’t a hit the record company kept putting the dates back and by that time James was developing a desire to be a front man. I had forgotten this as well, but we had been trying to get on The Tube for a long time and we were finally offered a slot and we didn’t play it.

I said to Chris, “I wonder why were stupid enough not to do that,” but Chris reminded me that it wasn’t us that decided not to do it. We would have done it but our management wouldn’t let us do it because we had already split up. If we had gone back together to do The Tube, it might have been a different thing.”

On the sound the band found, he said: “James grew up listening to Led Zeppelin and Chic, Chris was into Bowie and Roxy Music in a big way, and I listened to a lot of Gary Numan and Kraftwerk. We had things in common and things that weren’t, but we all fed in and that was what made Friends Again sound so diverse. I think that was a good thing and it pleases me. It meant that we weren’t like other people.”

Although their lifespan was short, Friends Again occupy a respected place in Glasgow’s music lexicon. They represent a strand of early-80s Glasgow pop that sits alongside the ambitions and aspirations of other bands from that period, the musicians and dreamers who could be found in scene hangouts Nico’s and the Rock Garden each weekend in between appearances on Top of the Pops.

Four decades later, James Grant, Chris Thomson and Paul McGeechan will reunite to play together at The Old Fruitmarket, with drummer Stuart Kidd and guitarist Rob McLaughlin, in front of a crowd of 1,500 people, who will hear Friends Again songs played live, some of them for the first time.