Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley Remembers Andrew Midgley

Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne checked in with fans on the group’s blog at MySpace (@saintetienne) on Wednesday (November 3), remembering the life of Edinburgh Evening News journalist Andrew Midgley, who died October 28th at the age of 45 after collapsing at the gym. Stanley writes:

It’s very hard to believe that Andrew Midgley, the pop art terrorist also known as Boy Naughty, is no longer about. He died last Tuesday after he’d been at the gym. The gym! Safe to say he’d have thought that was about the daftest way he could have gone.

I met him when I was working at Virgin Records in Peterborough in 1985. Customers’ tastes ranged from number one in the chart to number two in the chart, it was a pretty uninspiring job. So when this skinny kid walked in looking like a brylcreemed Kenneth Williams and asked for the Primal Scream single (their first one) it was quite a shock, and I pounced on him. It turned out he lived up the road from me so we went for a pint and I met his gang of mates - Andrew, Bobby and Chris - who would help to make my life a lot more interesting and a lot more fun.

He got me into a ton of new music, especially the coalescing C86 scene, at a time when I was listening to Roy Orbison, John Barry, and almost nothing new. He even changed my name; because there was already a Bobby in the Peterborough gang I became Stan. We’d go to gigs in Bedford and Lincoln, and Naughty would heap cheeky abuse on ratty indie support acts and below par soundmen. But he was more excited at the prospect of Frankie Howerd or Norman Wisdom coming to town (I saw the former but skipped the latter, to my shame). He laughed like Syd James, and he laughed a lot.