ONE of the biggest cultural events in Pensacola Beach, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, is the annual songwriters’ festival. Like its predecessors, the 2023 edition, which begins next week, brings together dozens of talented musicians. Only one of them, however, is a Glasgow-born former police officer.
His name is Michael McMillan, a 67-year-old singer-songwriter with more than 30 years’ experience to his name, not to mention eight albums, the most recent of which, the rather fine Heaven Sent Ranch, came out a few months ago. Though not terribly well-known in his homeland, he has made a name for himself in some parts of the States, notably in Texas, Florida and Idaho. He has played in New York, and at The Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas as part of a Nashville Hit Songwriters Unplugged event.
He spends at least six months a year playing venues across America, where a small but dedicated network of fans organises tours and puts him up when the need arises. Earlier this year, they arranged gigs for him across Idaho. He flies out again tomorrow [Mon] to play Pensacola as well as a string of dates elsewhere.
McMillan’s Americana-tinged music, with its distinct storytelling approach, also showcases his Christian faith and values. “I’ve struggled to get any momentum going in Scotland”, he concedes, “but in the States – yes, it’s been good. Quite a few local radio stations have played my music and have advertised the gigs that I’ve been doing”.
There’s a wry chuckle down the line as he observes that “Scotland’s a funny place. It can be a bit cliquey at times, but I don’t mean that in a negative way. People like to go into their comfort zones with the artists they like to book and when it comes to somebody new, they’re not too sure”.
That said, he has played some gigs here, notably the Southside’s Glad Café, alongside Raymond Weir and Jim King, in a show billed as ‘Songs of Life’, on September 12.
McMillan’s interest in playing music stretches back to when, aged 12, he learned to play the bagpipes for a Boys’ Brigade pipe band in Glasgow’s Queen’s Park. In 1967 the band was invited by Frankie Vaughan to join the cast of a show at Glasgow’s highly popular Alhambra Theatre.
“Frankie was doing a show for the gangs of Easterhouse and I met a lot of people through that. We were kids but the stars – people like Frankie, and Jimmy Logan – they were so nice to us. They really looked after us. The show ran every night for a week and we also met Jack Milroy, Rikki Fulton, and Marmalade”.
At the age of 13 he went to see the film that was made about the epic 1969 Woodstock festival. “Me and my friend hid under the seat and watched it again", he recalled. "That was how I got into music. After seeing the film, I thought, that’s what I want to do”. In time, he learned how to play the drums.
McMillan has fond memories of Glasgow’s thriving music scene in the early Seventies. His first-ever gig was the rock band Humble Pie, supported by [Peter] Frampton’s Camel, at Green’s Playhouse in November 1972. “It was a great double bill, it was just the best thing I’ve ever seen”. A year later, at the Apollo (the rechristened Green’s Playhouse) he saw Neil Young, who was supported by a then largely unknown act called the Eagles.
He was still in his teens when he went down to London. There, during a couple of years up until 1975 or thereabouts, he played in a few groups, and met several musicians who would go on to became famous.
“I was down in London playing drums for a few years, and I was good friends there with [Clarkston-born] Brian Robertson, the guitarist who joined Thin Lizzy. I met a lot of name bands and shared a flat just off Baker Street with Stewart Copeland, who became the drummer with The Police, and with various people from Curved Air, like [singer] Sonja Kristina and their guitarist Phil Kohn, and Jack Green from the Pretty Things, the guys from T. Rex. Quite a few people would come round the flat. We had lots of good times.
“London at that time was buoyant. The music business was, too; record companies were signing anyone and everybody. You could go into a pub and see a band, and there’s a guy called Mark Knopfler playing guitar with them”. Glasgow-born Knopfler, of course, went on to co-found Dire Straits in 1977.
In the late Seventies, back in Glasgow, McMillan played drums with a number of local bands, including Fagan, Heidi, Heaven, and the Downtown Fliers. The city also had no end of smaller venues – Burns’ Howff, the Dial Inn – that staged gigs: “you could probably see six or seven bands a night, there were so many venues”, he says.
“I just kept playing but eventually the punk thing came and it wasn’t for me. I gave up playing at that time and became a police officer, up in the Highlands and in Edinburgh. But I kept playing drums, with a Thin Lizzy tribute band called Black Rose”.
Twenty years ago he set about mastering the guitar and finally finding his own voice, inspired by the impulse to tell stories via lyrics and guitar accompaniment. Musically, his influences range from Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen to James Taylor and Crosby, Stills & Nash. His debut album was Cold and Roofless (2007), with observant and poignant tracks such as Everything Tastes Good When You’re Hungry.
Other albums followed: Faith to Faith, Meet Me at the Cross, the award-nominated Cross Country, Missing Person, and Whisky. The last-named was nominated for the Scottish Music Industry Association album of the year in 2019; Heaven Sent Ranch has been similarly honoured for 2023. Coming Home, a track from Missing Person (“This crazy war did some crazy things to me/I’ve seen so many things a man should never see”), topped the British/Irish Country Music charts.
His lyrics have had the relatively rare honour of being collected in a book, In His Eyes, which was launched at a gig in New York’s fabled Greenwich Village. In addition, McMillan has had a “valuable and thought-provoking experience” playing his music at male-only prisons in Scotland, in partnership with the Bethany Christian Trust.
America continues to open up for him, and he has just taken on a booking agent there. On the title track of the rather fine new album, Heaven Sent Ranch, he pays tribute to Dan and DeeDee Kelly, a couple who own a working horse ranch in Texas and have given him staunch support in his career. They went on to represent him in America, and have done much to spread the word.
“I played Pensacola a few years ago and a Texas singer-songwriter said to me, ‘You should play in Texas”, he recalls. “Me being me, I said, ‘when?’ The guy eventually went off my radar but DeeDee contacted me on Facebook to encourage me to play in Texas. They said, “we’ll put you up in the ranch and we’ll book your gigs’. It really just took off from there. They have done a lot for me, booking shows and introducing me to other people in the Texas Hill Country area. I owe them so much".
* michaelmcmillanmusic.com
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