Mather's Bar, Broughton Street – Cheap punks and Cliff Richard
DJ Jay Crawford remembers pints with the stars at Mather's.
Mather’s Bar on Broughton Street is a pub that’s unafraid to embrace its past. It combines the modern and the classic very well, with nods to previous Edinburgh pubs and brewers dotted around the place.
In the spirit of looking back, the other day I spoke to Jay Crawford, a founding DJ on Radio Forth. The commercial station began in 1975 on Forth Street, just round the corner, and Mather’s became its staff’s local. Back then, the biggest artists would pass through for interviews to plug their latest records. Very often they would end up at Mather’s afterwards.
The list of names Jay remembers sharing a pint with is impressive: Elton John, Deep Purple, Desmond Dekker, Whitsenake and Glen Campbell all visited. “Most of them, wanting to be one of the boys very often would say, oh, let's go and have a nice pint,” Jay says. “So we’d take them into Mather’s Bar because they had really good pints of IPA in there.” Usually they would sit up at the back, where “usually you just had to shout through this hatch to get a beer.”
Despite the roster of names he was entertaining at Mather’s, Jay says it often just felt like another day at the job back then. And normally fans didn’t know the artists were in, so many sessions at the pub were had in relative peace.
But there a couple of exceptions. Jay remembers “a dreadful interview” with the Sex Pistols at the height of their fame. A gaggle of “30 or 40” fans had gathered outside the radio station, and followed them straight into Mather’s afterwards. They crowded into the back room. “I thought [then landlord] John Walker must be getting a good turn here,” he says. But when the band left, and the entourage followed them out again, “there were only three pint glasses where we’d been sitting, because not one of the fans had actually bought a drink.” Perhaps the punks had spent all their money on badges and haircuts.
However, the artist who attracted the biggest crowds was the polar opposite of the Sex Pistols. “I remember Cliff Richard when he used to come to Forth,” says Jay. “When he turned up, all the women would come out of all the offices” and line Forth Street as he made his way down.
The pub was more than a social space for Radio Forth back then. As well as helping build good relationships with artists, it was equally important to be on good terms with the record labels, who would send pluggers and A&R men from London to the new commercial stations cropping up in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee.
Local bands would hand their demos to the DJs, asking for airtime and for them to pass the tapes on to the labels. From this bloomed a new era of Scottish bands: Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie, Simple Minds, the Rezillos, Texas, Del Amitri, Deacon Blue and Wet Wet Wet were taking over the charts. “They were all getting signed left, right and centre. It was a little bit like the Merseybeat boom in Liverpool in the 1960s,” Jay remembers.
He has been back in recent years, organising a reunion with his old friends and colleagues. “We all got together and sat through the back at Mather’s and we had a few pints of IPA just to reminisce,” he says. “To be honest, it looks a lot nicer now than it did then.”
Jay started a new commercial station, Edge Radio, a few years ago, partly to champion local music. He is excited about the new generation of Edinburgh artists coming through. “We're based in Charlotte Square now, so unfortunately if I've got to go to a Mathers bar now, it's got to be the one on Queensferry Street,” he says. Though meetings with pluggers nowadays are more likely to be had in boardrooms or online. Wouldn’t artists much rather meet down the pub? “We might start that again,” Jay says. “We might start that tradition, you never know.”
Jay Crawford presents 10-2 on weekdays on Edge 2. For more memories of the Scottish music scene back in the day, you can listen to his special programme with Shirley Manson of Garbage and Goodbye Mr Mackenzie.
Mather's Bar, Broughton Street – Sex & gigs & Billy Joel
Read the original review of Mather's Bar from last summer.
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The chaser – Gen Z and drinking
What this latest data shows is that there has been an unprecedented decline in alcohol consumption among young people in high-income countries.
The decline has been startling; between 2001 and 2022, for example, the percentage of Australian teenagers reporting any alcohol consumption fell from 69% to 32%. In Sweden, the proportion of students who had drunk alcohol in the previous year dropped from 83% in 2000 to 37% in 2023. And so on.
Felicity Carter of
is always worth reading on where the industry is going and what might be behind the big trends in drinking.Here, she summarises a new book which explores why the younger end of Generation Z (those born after 2002) hardly drink. What comes out strongly is that this generation is way more risk-averse than its predecessors. That can’t explain all of the drop in alcohol consumption – I don’t think I was consciously thinking about risk factors when drinking as a teenager – but there’s certainly a lot of evidence that compared to previous cohorts, this generation is not up for experimenting with alcohol, smoking or drugs.
