THE manager in the Burns Howff was having none of it. “£10, take it or leave it, Thin Lizzy have played here and you’re no’ getting any more.”

We were a pretty awful band and I was the suitably hopeless drummer, but we thought we could go places … even though we were playing ham-fisted blues and country rock and it was 1981, and everyone else was getting into U2 and Echo & the Bunnymen.

By contrast, schoolmates in The Plastic Flies knew what they were doing, their anger-thrash bagging a support slot for The Clash at the Apollo the same year.

How many people now being represented by Paul Gilroy QC in Manchester courts know he was a drummer for a Glasgow punk band?

We had an American guitar player (well, he was brought up in Newton Mearns) and he reckoned we could be the next Grateful Dead so we were known as The White Lines (geddit … ?) despite the obvious fact that The Dead never did much in the UK and the closest we were to hippy capital Haight Ashbury was the Moss Heights.

But we tried. We booked some gigs at the few venues taking bands – the Howff on West Regent Street, the Dial Inn (£40 … the big time), the foyer at the McRobert centre – but we never made it to Doune Castle in Shawlands before we’d had enough and went our separate ways.

The singer, bass player and I struggled on for a bit, and I roped in David Wells, a pal from school days who’d been H20’s guitarist and who re-arranged all our material for another go at the Dial Inn.

Being someone who could actually play made all the difference and we went down a storm.

But being much trendier than us, David left us to it and we had one last go in The Grange at Stirling University where, if memory serves me incorrectly, I drank so much I could barely see the drum kit.

And that was it. My career in the music business was over. But I’ve always liked live music bars, like the old Cathadamara about which I’ve written before, but even better was Upstairs Downstairs on Jamaica Street where George McGowan’s Big Band also had a residency.

The place used to bounce every Sunday evening, especially the night jazz drum great Eric Delaney sat in. Now he could rock.

So I was quite heartened by the news last year that Edinburgh’s notorious Jock’s Lodge Bar, boarded up for years because of trouble that reached its dramatic peak in 2010 when a drug dealer was shot and pistol-whipped during Karaoke hour, was to re-open as a music venue.

Under new management, it has re-opened as the Barrelhouse Bar after a major refurbishment to turn it into a blues-fusion music bar and Cajun-themed restaurant.

With its booths, inside it looks cosy and atmospheric, but when I went past the other week the exterior took me aback, designed to make it look like a Mississippi Delta-style corrugated-iron shack, which is not what most people would expect to see in an Edinburgh Street.

It’s the kind of thing Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen used to do to people’s hallways in Changing Rooms.

As it’s in the Edinburgh City Council ward in which I’m standing for election I said as much in a leaflet to highlight a few developments in the area.

Well, what a stushie it seems to have caused; a page lead in the Evening News by its venerable political editor Ian Swanson, followed by pelters in the comment streams and on Twitter.

One lady said how shocked she was at what had come through her door. Sorry, madam.

And apparently I’m a snobby d**k because, in the accompanying picture, I was wearing a Barbour jacket ... three years ago when it was taken, the same admittedly poker-faced one you see above this article too.

Was it because of stuff about how the council is effectively selling half of Meadowbank Stadium to itself for below market value when it’s stumped for cash?

Or was it support for community objections to a seven-storey block of student flats? Or calling for a review of the 20mph speed limit?

Not a peep. But write one paragraph that says a pub looks a bit naff and whoa. Welcome to local politics.

Still, it’s publicity for the pub – it can always take down the corrugated iron when they get fed up with it – it’s a bit of PR for me and there’s been a wee debate about local design so everyone’s a winner.

And, as one of my new friends pointed out, at least no-one got shot.