Cult heroes: Davy Henderson – still a free indie spirit after all these years

There’s an argument that indie music was born in Edinburgh. Not the act of circumventing the majors and releasing independently itself, but indie music as we knew it in the UK throughout the 1980s and beyond – pallid boys and sometimes girls, “Dear Diary” lyrics, choppy guitars produced with enthusiasm over professionalism, the burning desire to earn a Peel Session.

Before Manchester’s Factory, Liverpool’s Zoo and London’s Rough Trade and Cherry Red emerged in 1978, Edinburgh DIY impresarios Bob Last and Hilary Morrison started Fast Product in a tenement flat next to the city’s College of Art in the last month of 1977. In the brief but bright-burning two years that followed, they released the first singles by the Human League, Gang of Four and the Mekons. Last and Morrison’s fellow Edinburgher Davy Henderson came late to this story – his first band of note, Fire Engines, put their first recording out on Fast’s successor label Pop:Aural in 1980 – but his diverse and stoically individual career since provides one of the finest examples of the independent spirit of those post-punk years.

Henderson was born in 1961 and raised in a council house in the Edinburgh suburb of Clermiston with unlikely local influences – an early incarnation of the Bay City Rollers shared a house nearby. As a child he wanted to be a Beatle, but it was the Clash’s White Riot tour in 1977 that made this dream appear accessible. At 17 he moved into a flat in town with a group of friends and they formed the Dirty Reds; soon after their singer, the stage and screen actor Tam Dean Burn, was replaced by Henderson “in the friendliest way possible” and they became Fire Engines.

The band’s sonic amateurism became their calling card. Drummer Russell Burn (brother of Tam) played without cymbals, preferring a deep, energetic thump, and Henderson – sick of figuring out barre chords with the Dirty Reds – settled on picking out single, spiky notes. Influenced by Richard Hell and the Voidoids and particularly James Chance and the Contortions, they transposed New York No Wave to Edinburgh (let’s call it New Town No Wave) with feverish energy, from the lithe, disturbing sexuality of Get Up and Use Me to the ramshackle, boozy joyfulness of Candyskin.

They were reassuringly all-but-ignored at the time (although Peel did grant them a session, Henderson’s first), the true measure of Fire Engines’ enduring influence came in 2002 when James Murphy name-checked them on LCD Soundsystem’s debut single, the hipster listening checklist Losing My Edge, between Pharaoh Sanders and Swans. They were a deep influence on Franz Ferdinand, who released a split EP with Fire Engines when the latter briefly reformed around 2005, and LCD contemporaries the Rapture, while early Creation Records signees Meat Whiplash and Oxford Britpop pretenders the Candyskins were both named after their songs.

They were together for just two years, releasing the album Lubricate Your Living Room (1981) and three singles. “It felt like much longer,” says Henderson now. “A year is a long time when you’re a teenager. A day is a long time. We must have been up 23 hours a day, we packed a lot in.”

If Fire Engines were a reaction to the intended structure of the Dirty Reds, Win was a different kind of response, this time to the Fire Engines’ near-complete lack of traditional formula. Very briefly forming a group called Heartbeat with Hilary Morrison, Henderson scrapped it for the Win project with Russell Burn and a new band as he made a conscious attempt to move into the mainstream. They were signed by Postcard Records founder Alan Horne to his Swamplands imprint, part of the London Records group, and later taken on by the parent label.

Commercially, Win were a resounding failure – despite being named by Manchester United striker Brian McClair as his favourite band in NME – but they left behind a lot of strong music that stands up to this day. Henderson describes the idea of his songs being released on a major as “perverse”, but he enjoyed the challenge. Their biggest hit, Super Popoid Groove (No 63 in 1987), was too self-consciously DayGlo and of its time, but the trumpets’n’gospel Shampoo Tears and the rousing You’ve Got the Power are great pop songs. Had, say, Simple Minds released either, they would be standards to this day; instead, the latter’s most well-known as the soundtrack to a 1980s Scottish lager commercial.

There’s an irony to the fact that Henderson spent the 1980s trying largely in vain to earn radio airplay with Win and walked back into Radio 1 when he dissolved the group and started Nectarine No 9 in 1991. His cause was taken up once more by John Peel when he heard the new band. Nectarine No 9 were a more lo-fi and confessional proposition, with Henderson’s stripped-back Scots accent pushed to the fore and a wayward, Beefheartian aesthetic at their core.

In real terms the group existed until 2004, starting out with Horne’s reconvened Postcard label and moving to the Glasgow indie Creeping Bent and then Beggars Banquet for the final two of their eight albums, Received, Transgressed and Transmitted (2001) and I Love Total Destruction (2004). The latter is one of Henderson’s favourite of his own recordings, for its lo-fi simplicity and wayward playfulness; the appropriately named I Am Stop Taking Pot Man sounds like the bastard child of Daniel Johnston and the Beatles.

Henderson now lives in the East Lothian coastal town of Dunbar, around the corner from Bob Last. Nectarine No 9 still exist – now as the Sexual Objects, their name changed to facilitate a break into a more singles-focused release schedule, the result of his having young children and less recording time. When I speak to him on the phone he’s meant to be rehearsing for a one-off London performance in support of the Nectarine No 9’s 1995 album Saint Jack, newly reissued by Heavenly, but first he has to save the family’s pet rabbit from a rainstorm that’s just breaking.

Now, as when he started out, Henderson’s an independent artist again, a position that has allowed him to build a uniquely diverse and individual body of work. “Everything I’ve done has been a reaction to what has gone before,” he says now. “I’ve learned and I’ve tried something new. It’s never been worked out.” One of the benefits of independence, you might say.