First of all, The Wild Parochial Boy was a song about the Conservative Party's (and then New Labour's) creeping privatisation of British society, not a person.  He was not me.  Next, The Wild Parochial Boy was a bunch of more idiosyncratic, leftfield or solo acoustic songs that my band The Ugly Tree didn't want.  I decided to to save up £100 and go into the old Seagate Studio in Dundee and record a live session of the four songs I had written.  The night before I half-wrote two more which I decided to record since I had time.  I fucked up the lyrics royally and had to improvise the bridge in one of them as I forgot that I hadn't actually written anything for it.  They shouldn't have worked.  But they were good.  Now however, The Wild Parochial Boy was a persona, chaotic yet serendipitous.  Feeling like I was cheating on my band, I called the CD "Tribute to the Ugly Tree" and played a few low-key gigs in a couple of pubs.  The band nicked a couple of the tunes back which salved my guilt. While working overseas, The Wild Parochial Boy performed on a number of occasions in an un-typically Bohemian Southern Italian pub called Umakesh (does the name sound familiar?)  It was a haunt for the most creative people in the town.  It was the only place in town where the bar staff didn't make sarcastic comments when you asked for your sixth drink!  Working alone meant that most of the songs were written acoustically, especially as I only had my trusty Simon & Patrick and no access to my amp effects and electric guitars.  The roster swelled to about twenty original tunes, two or three in Italian, all mixed in with a few John Denver, Violent Femmes and Red Hot Chili Pepper covers to make up the required two hour set.. The thing is, The Wild Parochial Boy is the Jekyll to my Hyde.  He's arrogant, aggressive, political, politically incorrect and completely unapolagetic.  He has no shame and no sense of embarrassment.  I finally realised who he was when I played a gig for a friend at Drouthy's in Dundee.  The first three songs went down well, so I decided to wade in with a few of the weightier comic tracks which heretofore I had only played to Italian audiences with an at best rudimentary grasp of English.  My Dundee audience had a mostly expert grasp of English.  Most had had an irony bypass. The joke about the brothel and the national anthem pissed them off.  The two Drunk Expatriate Scot's Laments twisted the knife.  Maybe they were patriots?  Have you ever seen Back to the Future?  The bit where Marty does the Van Halen improv to Johnny B Goode.  Or like the friend that tells you the first joke you've heard about some cataclysmic disaster.  Still, I don't think any of us were really ready for that Wild Parochial Boy, though a large enough amount of people at that gig got the joke and are still with me today. The Wild Parochial Boy finally accepted that in order to survive he'd have to be a bit more like me.  He was younger than me, only 7 years old.  His youthful exuberance made his performances work.  His arrogance however was costing him in toes every time he shot himself in the foot.  We recorded "Life in Polaroid" together, retaining the edgy irony of his music and shaping it with the rational cself-control and audience savvy of someone 21-years older.  Now I fear that The Wild Parochial Boy is becoming a person. God help us all.
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