Beckoning of Barcelona

Though not a household name, those who were involved in the Scottish music scene in the late seventies and early eighties will remember Pilley's work as a producer with cult Scottish punk band the Rezillos and playing in So You Think You're a Cowboy. He recorded the demo which landed Aztec Camera their first record deal, and worked on Mike Scott's band Another Pretty Face which would later become the Waterboys.

Sitting in his tranquil loft apartment in Barrio Chino (reputedly the most dangerous area in Barcelona), drinking tea, 48-year-old Pilley keeps coming up with surprising little snippets of biography that made this writer feel like a workshy under-achiever.

Without any hint of gratuitous boasting, the quiet and neutrally accented Pilley says: ''Did I tell you about my part in a Spanish film set in Minorca?'' and there was me thinking I was there to interview an artist who had struck that lucky balance of making a living out of a labour of love.

''I've always had my finger in a million pies,'' Pilley says, before going on to reveal that aside from his painting, acting, and music, he also managed to fit in a stint as a DJ on Radio 4, and at one stage drove a butcher's van.

But it is in Barcelona that Pilley has found the inner peace to concentrate on his art. Ironically, however, the guardians of the ultimate symbol of Barcelona - Gaudi's Sagrada familia - at first refused to stock Pilley's paintings in the unfinished church's gift shop. ''In the beginning Sagrada Familia told me the style of my painting of the church was irreverent to the memory of Gaudi,'' Pilley says. ''This seemed a strange attitude to me because I was painting my impressions of this extraordinary building which is quite literally dripping with image explosions, and is so different from any of the buildings around it.

''Now I think they accept it and believe it is a sincere reaction on my part to the impact the building had on me.''

The Sagrada familia guardians may originally have objected to Pilley's surreal illustrative painting style, but they eventually recognised a winner, with the Scots artist's posters now sitting in the No 1 position in terms of sales in the Gaudi shrine, as they are on the city's main tourist street, the two kilometre-long Ramblas. Indeed, in the 10 years of his poster business, Pilley has sold 100,000 of his impressions of the Sagrada Familia and the Christopher Columbus statue at the foot of the Ramblas, making him one of the biggest sellers of the Barcelona image to the world.

Pilley's story of the 13 years he has spent living in Barcelona is inextricably linked to Gaudi and the Sagrada Familia, and not only in terms of the financial success he has achieved through his poster business. In the early eighties Pilley and an ex-girlfriend were looking for a holiday destination, and having recently seen a picture of the Sagrada Familia they opted for Barcelona. ''Coming from Scotland with our Presbyterian ideas of what a church should look like, I couldn't believe that such a building could exist, and when I was on holiday I thought 'I'd love to live in a place that had this huge, melting, organic church'.''

Today Pilley sells images of Gaudi and Barcelona, and with his commercial success says he has become much more relaxed in his painting life away from the business, and he is currently working on a series of new works in his studio in his renovated eighteenth-century farmhouse in rural Castellfollit de boix north-west of Barcelona. He has recently been offered an exhibition in Edinburgh's Bellevue Gallery during the Edinburgh Festival which he is currently considering. ''I'm keen on spending maybe one or two months a year in Scotland,'' Pilley says. But he believes that he will never move back full-time in the foreseeable future. ''For some reason I feel much more Scottish living in Spain, which may have something to do with being born in America to middle-class English parents who brought me up in Edinburgh. I suppose the fact that I was never a heavy boozer or great football fan helped make

me feel like an outsider in my own country.''

Discussing art separate from the poster business, Pilley is currently interested in areas which he sees as an antidote to what he considers the elitism of the art world. His latest vision is to move into mass reproductions of his surreal images on to card. Clearly his experiences as a student at Edinburgh Art School have helped mould his almost Warholian philosophy (a bright red Warhol Campbell soup can watch constantly grabs the attention of my eye). ''At art school I wanted to study illustration and painting together, but wasn't allowed, and at the time (the early seventies) there was a horrible fashion for painting with masking tape.

''So I decided that my painting was too important for me to allow myself to be influenced by the egos of paintings students and the horrible fashions of the day, and was always determined to come back to painting on my own later - which I have.''

Now he is determined to combine his painting and illustrative skills with his printing and marketing know-how from the poster business in an attempt to invade the lucrative postcard market, though one gets the genuine impression that the work is Pilley's thing and not the possibility of massive monetary rewards.

''There is so much snobbery in the art world and to be an illustrator is seen as a lesser pursuit than painting, but if you look at the Scottish painters who became well-known in the eighties - such as Peter Howson, Ken Currie, and Stephen Campbell - they were all narrative and illustrative in their approach. So perhaps it is a question of scale: big is painting, small is not. I am more than happy to paint on any scale and use mass media means to get my work across to people.''

And if that is not enough to keep this self-confessed workaholic and perfectionist busy, he has recently completed his collection of classic valve recording equipment, and is in the process of building a recording studio at his countryside retreat. ''There are bands out there whose music simply does not record well on today's hi-tech equipment, and even though I would never consider a move back into commercial recording there are projects of my own and in collaboration with others that I would like to pursue.''