Music writer and drummer with the Saints

Born: January 6, 1957;

Died: October 16, 2017

IAIN Shedden, who has died suddenly aged 60, was a music writer who brought his experience and insight from touring the world as the drummer with punk rockers the Saints to his writing as a journalist and author.

Having spent almost ten years on the road with the Saints, and with other bands before that, Shedden had seen a warts-and-all-view of the music business and brought a clear eye to interviews with many of the rock and pop world’s biggest names, among them David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Jeff Buckley, Kylie Minogue, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, and Elvis Costello.

Lanark-born Shedden took up the drums in his teens and was working as a junior reporter on the Wishaw Press, which he joined straight from school, when he formed his first band, the Jolt, with university drop-outs, singer-guitarist Robert Collins and bassist Jim Doak, in 1976.

To begin with, they played hard rhythm and blues in the Dr Feelgood, Them and early Rolling Stones style but as they read about the Damned, the Sex Pistols and the Clash in rock weeklies the NME and Sounds, they were already gravitating towards punk.

They played their first Glasgow gig at the now legendary Burns Howff in early 1977, playing on punk’s outsider image with newspaper advertisements proclaiming “They stopped The Pistols! No one can stop the Jolt.”

Soon afterwards, they went against the perceived wisdom that bands from Scotland no longer had to move to London to make it and moved south, presently finding themselves playing in the Marquee, The Hope and Anchor, the Nashville, and the Music Machine, venues they had been reading about just months before.

Coming to the attention of every A & R executive desperate to find the next big thing in punk, they signed to Polydor Records and inadvertently became regarded as a Tartan version of label mates the Jam, with whom they toured and shared bills in Glasgow and Falkirk.

Despite switching to a more song-based approach in the Kinks and Who style and having a song written for them by the Jam’s Paul Weller, the Jolt never converted their status as a strong live draw into record sales and in 1979 Shedden left to join mod revivalists the Small Hours before moving on to the Saints in time to record their Casablanca album in 1982.

Shedden toured with the Saints for the next nine years and also worked with singer-songwriter Howe Gelb in Arizona rock band Giant Sand before emigrating to Sydney in 1992 and returning to journalism, initially as a sub-editor, with the Australian newspaper the following year.

As the paper’s main music writer he enjoyed a career every bit as colourful as, and probably more glamourous than, his years on the road as a musician. He interviewed one of his biggest heroes, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, and was left as a spectator in the early noughties when Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, in Sydney with the re-formed Fleetwood Mac, got into a heated argument about which month Buckingham had left the band and forgot Shedden was there.

In 2010, Shedden had Thanksgiving lunch with Nicole Kidman and her New Zealand-born country-singer husband, Keith Urban in a private suite at the Dallas Cowboys stadium while watching the Cowboys play the New Orleans Saints. At half-time, Urban left Kidman and Shedden to talk among themselves as he went off to entertain the crowd.

Life with the Australian was not all about high flyers, however. Shedden reported on up and coming bands and as a still-working drummer on the local scene himself, when he wasn’t busy covering concerts for the paper, he was generous with his assessments and encouraging towards younger singers and musicians, some of whom, including country singer Kasey Chambers, went on to considerable success and recalled him fondly.

As well as writing features and reviews, in 2010, Shedden brought his realistic prose approach to co-writing a memoir, Hey, You in the Black T-Shirt, with Tasmanian music promoter Michael Chugg. Chugg, who began promoting at the age of 15 in 1962, had seen and done most things in a career involving Frank Sinatra, Guns N Roses, Pearl Jam and Liza Minnelli, and valued Shedden’s ability to translate his personalised sayings into recognisable form. They had recently been talking about working on a follow-up.

Shedden never lost his Scottish accent and among the musicians he worked with latterly was his fellow exile, the Belfast, now living in Melbourne, singer-songwriter Andy White.

He had survived a throat cancer scare in 2014 and it had recently returned. He was undergoing additional treatment when he died. He is survived by his wife, Christine, daughter, Molly, and son, Conor.

ROB ADAMS