Scrapbook Bands... The Needles

The first time I spoke to David Addison, he was pulling a pint.

That, in itself, wasn’t remarkable. This was Drakes, after all - a dimly lit dungeon bar on Aberdeen’s Castlegate, tucked beneath an Italian restaurant. It didn’t feel like it was trying too hard to be cool - which, of course, was exactly why it was. There was a stage, a PA, and the sense that something half-decent might happen if you hung around long enough.

Dave served me my first pint - underage, I should add - which is just one of his many rock ’n’ roll accolades.

One minute he was behind the bar; the next he was on stage, transformed - part showman, part confessional songwriter. His voice filled the room in a way that made you forget just how small it really was.

That was the first hint that Drakes wasn’t just another pub - and Dave wasn’t just another barman. I would witness him perform at Drakes’ open-mic nights a ridiculous number of times in the years that followed, and I still believe he is one of those musicians whose talent far exceeded the recognition he received.

This “first pint” encounter would have been around autumn 1999, by which time Dave’s band, The Needles, had already stirred up a fair buzz on the local circuit. I’d first come across them the year before, through the Lithium Records Vol. 1 compilation - the one that also featured Maple’s Dangerous Boy. The Needles’ contribution was Any Other Girl, a gloriously kitsch pop gem: bright, slightly off-kilter and carried along by a sweet, harmonised chorus.

I went onto pick up a copy of the band’s second single, We Got The Soul, and played it to death.

That summer, me and my muso school pals headed off to our first proper music festival - at least as a collective. My pal Dave, of course, had already beaten us to it (the swine, holds up fist of rage!), having gone the year before with his dad (Dave’s dad strikes again!). Still, this felt like a moment.

There were six or seven of us - all sixteen or seventeen years young - bound by a friendship that had carried us through secondary school. There was little, if anything, in the way of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll; ours was a world of football, long movie nights fuelled by custard-filled doughnuts and industrial quantities of Coca-Cola (I still have the fillings in my molars to prove it), and fiercely competitive Mario Kart tournaments.

You could say we were, er… losers.

But most of all - and most importantly - we shared an insatiable appetite for music, devouring it with a hunger that bordered on obsession.

We were learning to play ourselves - guitars, drums, keys; we had our own bands; we’d started making the trips out to bigger gigs and were just beginning to poke our noses into the local scene.

And that’s when we noticed the stickers, plastered on seemingly every lamppost within a ten-mile radius of the town-centre.

And so we found ourselves heading to Scotland’s biggest music festival, T in the Park - where, as it turned out, I would finally experience The Needles in the flesh for the very first time.

My main takeaways from the show were threefold. First, by the end, the tent was absolutely heaving. Second, Dave somehow pulled off that rare trick of looking completely, effortlessly cool while wearing the loudest Hawaiian shirt imaginable. And third - most importantly - The Needles proper rocked.

Like Andrew Loog Oldham stumbling upon the Rolling Stones - albeit on a considerably smaller scale - this felt like a revelation. For me, The Needles were a gateway to a whole heap of rock ’n’ roll music I hadn’t discovered yet, and I’ll always be grateful to them for that.

More than that, though, they raised the bar. Their blend of showmanship and irresistibly catchy songs changed the way I thought about performing, while their songwriting made me want to become a better songwriter myself.

At the time, I was one of those kids who usually couldn’t get into the band’s over-18 gigs, so it’s funny to think that - despite the number of tiny venues on my doorstep where I’d later see them countless times - the first time I actually caught them live was at the humungous, T in the Park.

More than anything, though - even more so than the Hawaiian shirt - what always struck me about The Needles was their conviction. Every time I saw them in the years that followed, it felt like it mattered; like this might be the night everything changed. My own band at the time, Nero, was lucky enough to share a stage with them a few times, and I always felt grateful for the opportunity. They looked the part, stitching together elements of the 50s, 60s and 70s into something entirely their own, but more importantly, they had the songs and the musicianship to back it up. They felt like the real deal - a band who genuinely believed they were moments away from changing everything. True believers.

And so, this is their story.

Courtesy of Al Soutar.

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