IS it a play? Is it a rock gig? In truth, Battery Park – the latest show from writer, composer and director Andy McGregor and his splendidly named Sleeping Warrior theatre company – is both of these things.
The show (which is co-produced by Sleeping Warrior and the Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock) takes us back to the early-1990s heyday of Battery Park, “the biggest band you’ve never heard of”.
Told from the perspective of band member Tommy McIntosh, the piece tells the tale of the titular fictitious rock group, which is described as a “raucous, female-fronted four-piece from Greenock”.
One minute, the band are recording their debut album and preparing to tour the UK as the support band to Oasis. The next, they’ve suddenly vanished.
Sleeping Warrior’s recent hit shows include Crocodile Rock (a moving piece about a young gay man’s coming out, despite the oppressive homophobia of his Millport pub-owner father) and Spuds (a fabulous comedy about the much loved deep fried potato).
“The difference with this show,” McGregor tells me, when I catch up with him during rehearsals of Battery Park, “Is that it’s definitely not musical theatre.”
“It’s a play with songs,” he continues. “The songs that are in the show are the live band playing the songs [as they would in a rock concert].”
This play-cum-gig proved more difficult for him to write than he imagined. “I’ve been making musical theatre for so long,” he says, “That I found it quite hard to just write songs.”
McGregor has, he explains, enjoyed the process of creating a show in which, rather than serving the narrative (as it does in a conventional musical), the music is a separate entity from the story. “I love going to shows where the music does something different for you,” he says.
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He’s taking pleasure in this aspect of his new play, he says. There is something rewarding about the story and the music working on two different emotional levels.
It’s a richer experience, he continues, than creating “a one-man monologue” in which the music is constantly serving the character’s personal narrative.
One can’t help but wonder if there is an autobiographical element to Battery Park. The Greenock connection is certainly his, the writer acknowledges.
McGregor hails from Largs, so, when he was growing up, the place to go for young people who wanted to participate in the performing arts was Greenock. “In my mind, anything theatrical or creative is linked to Greenock,” he says.
More than this, however, Battery Park is, McGregor admits, inspired by his own exhilarating and deflating adventures in rock music. In his youth, he was a member of a band called Blind Pew, named after the sinister character from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
The group didn’t go without some success, he remembers. “We supported bands like Idlewild, The Subways and Reverend And The Makers.
“I remember,” he continues, with a mix of anguish and embarrassment, “We were too busy to support this other band called Arctic Monkeys.” Despite, at one heady stage, being so heavily booked that they had to turn down Sheffield’s finest, Blind Pew ultimately came to a sorry end.
Hacked off with the lack of support from their record company, the band left the label. However, thanks to the dubious contract they’d signed, they found that their entire back catalogue belonged to the company.
“It was a weird thing,” McGregor remembers. “We went in for a band rehearsal and it was like: ‘You know all those songs that we spent years getting together? We’re not playing them anymore’.”
This separation of the group from their work proved too depressing for them to bear. Blind Pew was, the writer recalls, booked to play a gig in “Bath, of all places”.
Robbed of their entire back catalogue, the band members looked at each other and said: “We’re not going to Bath”. So ended the rollercoaster career of Blind Pew.
However, McGregor’s life remained filled with music. For a time he ran a recording studio in Fairlie, North Ayrshire.
His work there brought him into contact with many interesting musicians, including St Andrews rock band Dogs Die in Hot Cars. He also had the opportunity to work with Graham Lyle, the songwriter from Largs whose most famous opus is the Tina Turner hit What’s Love Got to Do With It.
McGregor’s childhood love of the stage never left him and was destined for a career in musical theatre. That path, combined with his experience in Blind Pew, has led to him writing, composing and directing Battery Park.
He hopes the piece will continue what has, in recent years, been an unquestionably purple patch for stage musicals in Scotland. From the success of the Runrig musical The Stamping Ground to Scots (the excellent Scottish history comedy by creative duo Noisemaker), musical theatre in Scotland is in the midst of a renaissance.
In fact, Battery Park opens just as another outstanding Scottish musical, Forever Home (see today’s review), ends its short inaugural tour. McGregor thinks the current blooming of his chosen art form goes back to an initiative of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Students on the Conservatoire’s MA Musical Theatre course were, he remembers, facilitated to stage their debut shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. “That’s where Noisemaker got their first show, it’s where I got my first show,” he says.
“And I wouldn’t be surprised if Alan Penman, who wrote the music for Forever Home, started there, too. I think the opportunity that [the MA Musical Theatre] students had to get stuff on at the Fringe is what helped us all to develop the craft.”
Battery Park marks the coming together of two strands in McGregor’s creative life – namely, a lifelong love of the performing arts and the crash and burn of his career in rock music. It promises to be a fruitful fusion.
Battery Park is at the Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, September 22 and 23, then touring Scotland until October 29: sleepingwarriortheatre.com
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