Theatre: The broken Britpop dream that turned into a stage play

PICTURE this scene – and then tell me if Andy McGregor is not perfectly placed to write a play with music featuring the trials and travails of a hopelessly desperate young Scots pop band. 
The Largs-born writer/director was once so keen to play, write and record music that he moved into an empty hotel in nearby Fairlie, lived alone in the bar area – while sleeping in a tiny cot bed once occupied (occasionally) by the chef. McGregor, whose new play Battery Park opens in the autumn, then installed a little recording studio in the basement. “I had a great time there,” he grins, while recalling life in the boarded-up hotel. “Other bands would come to my little studio in the basement and make demos. And I had my own jukebox and pool table.” He laughs: “The only problem was, the place stank of s***.”
Andy McGregor grew up in Largs, determined to make the pop dream a reality. “I formed the band, Blind Pew, with some friends from school, in 2007 and we were together for 10 years. My dad worked as a printer and we rehearsed in the old print company, the sound of our band soaring across Largs. We’d rehearse all the time and play gigs all over the country.”
It was tremendous fun. Until it wasn’t. “Then you would find yourself in Manchester at 11am, with no money, and being told you’re not on until midnight.” McGregor was that singer-guitarist who came to know every one of Britain’s motorway service station staff almost intimately, travelling in a rickety van to gigs where only three people showed up.
He was the hopeful who spent a decade writing songs, rehearsing, searching for the right chord pattern and harmony. And then when the band did land a record contract, it all collapsed in a moment that’s straight out of Spinal Tap madness. “We went down to London to record a music video, had lots of venues booked – limousines, the lot – and we really felt this was our big chance. But the record company never released the video. It was only a year later we discovered why – the van with all the recording gear had got a parking ticket and the record company refused to pay the 60 quid fine.”
As a result, the video release was cancelled. “We would have paid the 60 quid ourselves, had we known the real reason.” It was a sign the end was very nigh. “Soon after, the band were offered a gig in Bath, and we said no. We had lost the will.”
Andy McGregor however has used all that songwriting, performance experience to become one of Scotland’s best writers of musical theatre. He set up theatre schools in Largs and Greenock, which became super successful. He studied to become a theatre director. He developed his writing skills to reveal a real comedy talent. 
And it makes perfect sense that he has plundered his own experience to come up with Battery Park, the story of a Britpop band who are on the verge of stardom, but then mysteriously disappear.  We begin in a pub where Tommy McIntosh (Chris Alexander) is talking to Lucy, a young upper- middle-class student studying Britpop, who wants to know what happened to his band. He tells her his story and then we flash back to reveal the story of young Tommy (Stuart Edgar) and Battery Park.
Robyn (Kim Allen) is the frontwoman of the band. She has all the confidence in the world, but she can’t write songs. But Tommy can. They make a great pairing. However, he has a major commitment to his brother that creates a real dilemma. 
It’s clear that Andy McGregor knows you need a good dramatic hook to hold an audience’s attention. “Yes, you need conflict,” he agrees. But what of the storyline? How much of himself and his Blind Pew emerges in the character of Tommy? “When I was halfway through rehearsal, I became aware that I was young Tommy,” he says, grinning. 
“Every decision he makes is one I would have made. 
“It was a bit scary. Plays I’ve written in the past such as Crocodile Rock [featuring a young gay man who discovers drag] were not me. This is me. I have put myself on stage here.”
What about romance during the early pop days when he lived in Heartbreak Hotel? He laughs aloud.  “Look, I’m confident talking to you now, but I’ve always been very shy in real life. I never had a girlfriend until I was 24 – I met her through the band – and we were engaged within six weeks and then got married. 
“And 18 years later we’re still together.”
“My wife-to-be never saw me at the parties after the gigs,” he chuckles. “She assumed I’d gone off to some cooler place.”