'Everything stems from that tenement block': Marti Pellow brings his hits home to Glasgow
Music was Marti Pellow’s first love and what’s kept him going through his 40-years at the top
Marti Pellow can remember when he discovered the power of song. Aged five, he was standing in his family home, a room and kitchen in a tenement in Clydebank.
“I remember it so vividly, standing at the Belfast sink beside my mammy who was washing the dishes and sun was streaming in the window onto the side of her face and she was singing, and I connected with her in a way I'd never connected with her before, through song.”
What was she singing?
“The Look of Love by Burt Bacharach. And I was watching her. I believe that there and then I was programmed to be a singer because it was a profound feeling. I connected more with her through the gift of song than the spoken word at that point. I remember she gave me a wee dance and was singing straight to me and I thought, wow. That was really powerful for me. It’s a power, that's what music's all about, connecting.
“So then I continued to do it, all the time. I think everything stems from that. It stems from that tenement block.”
Chatty about everything from architecture and his love of cooking to his musical influences and career, he’s full of stories and upbeat as he leads me on a walk down memory lane to his Clydeside youth. He’s about to leave his home near Windsor, west of London, to return to Scotland once more with his Marti Pellow Love is All Around 30th Anniversary Tour at the OVO Hydro, celebrating Wet Wet Wet’s greatest hits, on 1 November.
Pellow was the megawatt smile frontman of the chart-topping Scottish band for 28 years, from 1982 until they split up in 1997, and again when they reformed in 2004 until he left in 2017. Alongside, he has forged a solo career exploring his broad musical influences from pop to soul to jazz, recording ten solo albums, starred in musicals in the West End and on Broadway (Chicago, Chess, The Witches of Eastwick, Evita, Blood Brothers), performed to a crowd of 40,000 at Hyde Park, written a book (The Lost Chapter) about his musical influences, and in his personal life overcome drug and alcohol addiction, now celebrating 27 years clean.
The Hydro overlooks the former shipyards where Pellow’s great grandfather worked, their closure leading the men in the family into the building trade, and the young Mark McLachlan (Pellow was his mother’s maiden name and Marti a school nickname) into a painter and decorator apprenticeship while forming the band with school friends in 1982.
“The Hydro is one of my favourite venues in all of Europe. I'm looking forward to coming back to be amongst my own. I come up all the time. My family's passed - my mum, my dad and my brother - but I still have cousins and the fans that I grew up with so it's important for me to go back.”
The McLachlan household was full of music: his dad’s Johnny Cash and Bill Evans 78s, his mother’s Burt Bacharach, his own early Marvin Gaye and Sam Cook sounds along with an eclectic range of contemporary music from The Slits, The Clash and The Fall to Linton Kwesi Johnston and Steel Pulse, as well as his Shetlander neighbour singing traditional songs at sing songs on a Saturday night. “Everyone had a song,” says Pellow and his voice was already making people listen.
“My dad would say ‘we’re in the trade. We build things. According to him he built most of Glasgow, “ he laughs. “And I'd say, ‘I understand, but I might have a chance with music’ and then you surround yourself with other dreamers and then it’s a domino effect happening.”
The domino effect saw Wet Wet Wet sign with a record label and hit the charts in 1986 with Wishing I Was Lucky from their Popped in Souled Out album and three more singles from the album, Sweet Little Mystery, Angel Eyes and Temptation. Their 1994 cover of The Troggs’ Love is All Around was the soundtrack to Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), topping the charts for 15 weeks and is still the UK’s biggest-selling love song.
Pellow’s life was transformed, something the granny who delivered him in that Clydebank tenement had predicted at one of his early gigs in Glasgow’s Pavilion.
“It was one of the first big gigs with 2,000 kids inside and 3,000 out on the street and I remember being in the dressing room with her and sticking my head out of the window to give the people who couldn't get in a wave. I said to my granny, come on, sit and have a wee look out the window and my wee granny gave them a wave and turned and looked me straight in the eyes and went, ‘your life is never going to be the same again’.
“And life did change because you're on TV or on a stage or the front cover of a magazine and people interact with you in a different way. Everything's very public about your successes, your struggles…
Forty years on, how does Pellow view how he navigated all of that?
“Well, every day’s a school day,” he says. “There isn't a school for how you navigate success and fame. I equate it to living in the basement and suddenly you're on an express elevator to the penthouse but without the luxury of getting off at each level to take in life there. One minute you’re standing outside, looking into a room where you think fame and success is and it looks lovely and warm and everybody's laughing and having a great time, but it's not until you find yourself in the room that you discover the chairs aren't so comfortable and the room’s a wee bit spikey, and you have to navigate it.”
How Pellow managed was with the support of family and friends and by sticking with the music, exploring songwriting and performing, developing his acting skills and forging a career where he kept on singing. And he credits his fans for his longevity.
“I have a very, very strong fan base who let me go off on tangents and come and support me as I've grown as a musician, whether that's me singing pop music or Sondheim or I find myself on stage in Broadway or the West End or I’m going to do an evening of Bertolt Brecht songs with an orchestra because I want to explore that and experience those writers or songs and see how the resonate with me. They'll come with me on that journey and be supportive.”
At the Glasgow gig Pellow will be singing songs from his 40 year career, including Wet Wet Wet tracks, of which he says:
“I adore that body of work with a passion. Being one of the predominant songwriters within it, I want to celebrate that. I guess this is more about entertaining than educating. I'm not going to change the wheel, but I might give it new spokes. I started writing as a 14, 15-year-old kid and it’s how do I interact with this as a 60-year-old man? It resonates with me in a completely different way.
“You would say to your girlfriend at 16 ‘I love you’, then as a 60-year-old man saying it to your woman, there’s a gravitas in those three words that goes way deeper. That’s so inspiring to me to find another way of extrapolating even more from my work as each decade of my life unfolds. How you interact with it fascinates me.”
“It's like looking at a piece of art, like Salvador Dalí's Christ of St. John of the Cross in the Kelvingrove Museum. Me and my dad would go and look at that all the time. As a young boy I would get the sense of perspective and think wow, that's powerful. But when I go back and look at it as each decade in my life's unfolded, it resonates with me even more. The day that I put my father in the ground I was standing in front of that painting two hours earlier, because I wanted to connect with the multiple times we looked at it.
“And that's what I find in music or books or poems. Being bounced on your grandfather's knee when he's reciting Parcel of Rogues, with his vintage baccy breath and bonfire face, and then fast forward to me as a 60-year-old and I'm going, ‘I get you granddad. I get it.’ And that's happening to me constantly. I think my fan base tap into that in a subconscious way too because we're all growing together.”
Does he see Wet Wet Wet ever getting back together or does he prefer being solo?
“What I love is the songs in the body of work that we created together, and that is my Wet, Wet Wet. That's what's perfect for me. And that lives inside the fabric of the man so I'm always engaging in it. That's where the strength lay, in the body of work. Whether we do it together again, I don't think so. I can’t see that happening at all.
“But what I will do is celebrate it because I love what we did and I loved it at the beginning when all our mums and dads would come to the concerts. That was a magical time that'll be there forever and I look at it and celebrate that. That's the good stuff. That was the time.”
“Everyone grows at different levels and everyone wants to explore different things. Not everybody wants to stand and look at the same vista. It's like, ‘yeah, that's beautiful, but what's over that hill?’ That perpetual sense of movement and growth. I say I’m a solo artist, but I work with other people and I'm constantly being bombarded by other people's imaginations all the time.”
This is what happened with his latest album, his 13th solo, The Game, where he took on board the female perspectives of his backing vocalists and collaborated on the songwriting of some of the songs.
“I said I'm going to make a pop record and it was like a kind of wee circle. What would Sweet Little Mystery be in 2025 or Wishing I Was Lucky? I started playing with those themes and feelings and what am I going to say lyrically now, and my backing vocalist Natasha Bates came up with a female perspective on Takin’ Back My Soul and Narcissista.
“But I like so many different genres of music. I also started looking at music on my doorstep and being inspired by that. I had always looked across the pond, but I had all this old time stuff my old man would listen to, Celtic music. So I would love to go back and look at my heritage and spend a little bit more time with that.
Pellow is intrigued by how earlier generations of Scots took their traditional music with them on their travels and the influences of the diaspora on music, having made an album himself in Memphis with the musician and producer Willie Mitchell, a long time collaborator.
“I love how Scottish music went on a journey to the Appalachian Mountains. If you follow the transition of a traditional song, you see it bobs across to the Appalachians and the hillbillies who were from Ireland and Scotland and then the songs went into the miners and you start to see traditional songs getting a little bit more grease, the playing gets bit more laconic, and influences come up from New Orleans with the cajun and French, and country from Memphis and the Appalachians and North and South Carolina. That's a whole hotpot there. That's fascinating. So I would like to go and spend time in the Appalachians and explore and write in that world because there's so much soul in that.”
At this point in the conversation we segue into country song lyrics and trade favourites. Mine: ‘Big John’s been drinking since the river took Emmy-Lou’ and ‘You’re The Reason Our Kids Are Ugly’. His: ‘Dropkick me Jesus through the goal posts of life’, and Pellow’s laughter fills the room.
Outside of his music, what is the thing that Pellow is most proud of in his life?
“My sobriety. By far. I mean, it's nice to get nominated for this and that and have x amount of records, but if I can get real for a second, that is the thing I’m most proud of in my life because everything echoes from that.
“I'm like, oh, God, you went 27 years now. It's something to celebrate.”
He starts to laugh and says “I'm designated driver. So if you and the girls are having an escape, then I'm your man, you know?”
“I'm around alcohol all the time and have great peace around it, and I just choose not to. I love that that's something I've managed. I’ve seen my dreams become real and I've managed to also navigate some real life shit and come out stronger and better, and it wasn't what defined me, but just part of the makeup of the man. It's an amazing thing. Family and friend support in that is very, very, very important. You'll have a handful of friends that you go to throughout your life. People that come to the forefront, some people you didn't expect, and so there's life lessons to be had.
“So everything else is good, but that's what’s at the heart of it.”
For Pellow it wasn’t just family and friends that helped him achieve sobriety, but also music. How does he think this supported him?
“Well music is total therapy. You put on a record and you're connecting into it. It can get you to navigate through great pain and sorrow. Why do we listen to music and have harmony when we send a loved one on their way? Why do we read poetry? We lean in to the arts. It's so important, and it’s also the power of the collective. I love playing tiny gigs, I love playing massive gigs but all I'm doing is changing my church.”
For Pellow it’s not just the power of other people, but something intrinsic in music itself.
“I'm fascinated by certain chord progressions that open you up. They're called keys for a reason; they either open you up or close you down. And as a songwriter, I'm constantly manipulating the audience by using the keys, up to get us on the tips of our toes, lower to get more melancholy. I'm going to be able to play with your feelings.
“Back in the day, certain core progressions would be spiritual and resonate internally and there are progressions that can help an autistic child for instance, who's closed, or give them a drumkit to hit and they start opening up and light up like a Christmas tree.
“It's fascinating. It's all about frequencies and how people resonate and ping. You’ll get people who walk into a room and suddenly it elevates or there's an energy about them because they ping at a different frequency. They go about life in a certain way and on a subconscious level you tap into and it lifts everybody.”
Modest, he’s talking about others, but Marti Pellow has always been one of those people who can light up a room.
Marti Pellow Love is All Around 30th Anniversary Tour, 1 November, The OVO Hydro, Glasgow, www.ovohydro.com, www.martipellowofficial.co.uk
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