Danny Wilson: What the ’80s band’s stars are up to now

Danny Wilson had a massive hit with Mary’s Prayer in 1987.

“Music is like perfume. It’s so powerful. You put it on and you are just transported back to wherever you were at that time. It’s quite amazing.”

Right now Gary Clark is time-travelling. Back to the years when he and his younger brother Kit, along with his friend Ged Grimes, were top of the pops and on Top Of The Pops. A time when the Dundonian trio were in a band together. That band was Danny Wilson.

It is almost 40 years since they released their breakthrough single Mary’s Prayer (though it would take another year before it became a top-10 hit) and more than 40 years since the band first formed. Half a lifetime ago.

All three members of the band have had long, rich and varied musical careers in the years since. They’ve worked in bands, on musicals and films and even on video games. You could be forgiven for imagining the Danny Wilson years must seem far away.

“I honestly don’t go back and listen to stuff. I just don’t,” Gary admits as he sits in his studio in Dundee all these years later. But of late he’s had good reason to.

Last week saw the release of a new box set containing five CDs which brings together the band’s two albums and a gather-up of B-sides, alternative mixes and even a live recording of Danny Wilson at their height.

As a result, Gary, Kit and Ged have been smelling the perfume of their younger days recently. So what follows is the story of then and now.

We begin with the then. The story of Danny Wilson is the story of three dreamers from Dundee in love with Steely Dan and the Great American Songbook who wanted to make records that sounded as good as those of their heroes.

“We had sophisticated tastes,” says Gary.

Ged agrees. “We felt quite individual and I think the records reflect that. Our influences were everything from Sinatra to The Cure to ABBA.”

Indeed the band’s name was a hat-tip to Frank Sinatra, taken from his film Meet Danny Wilson.

“We had a really high bar,” Ged continues. “When we wanted to use orchestration we wanted it to be like Nelson Riddle.”

But Danny Wilson was always more than the sum of its influences, Ged adds.

“I’ve gone on and worked with amazing vocalists like Eddi Reader, Ricky Ross, Jim Kerr, all these amazing singers, but Gary’s voice really stands out as one of the best white soul voices in the country, I think.”

For a while Danny Wilson flew the flag for sophistication and classic songwriting at the end of the 1980s. “I think we left our mark on the pop landscape of the ’80s,” Ged suggests. “We stood out from a lot of the other bands that were creating music at the time.”

Band members Ged Grimes, Gary Clark and Kit Clark.

Mary’s Prayer reached No 3 in the charts and The Second Summer Of Love was a top-40 hit in 1989. For a while they lived their dream. Kit remembers the time the band landed in Los Angeles and were being driven down Sunset Strip in a limo. “And Mary’s Prayer comes on the radio. It’s surreal. And we drove past Tower Records and our faces are on the front of it; a 30ft painting in a place you’ve never been, that you’ve just dreamt about.”

“We did have some crazy things happen to us,” recalls Ged, who these days is better known as bass player with Simple Minds. “We busked on a plane from London to New York. This was at the time when Virgin were allowing performers to entertain travellers on their Virgin Atlantic planes.

“So me, Gary and Kit got on the plane to pay our way. Tea chest bass and accordion and an old beat-up guitar on a 747.

“You couldn’t hear a thing. The engines were so loud. We had to go up and down the aisles and you could see the passengers going: ‘What the hell is this?’”

Danny Wilson had a relatively short lifespan. The band split at the start of the 1990s. Those years, however, set up all three for a career in music, often working with each other. But while the trio have played together on a couple of occasions since, the idea of a reunion seems far away.

“It’s something we’ve discussed many times but the main thing is we would want to make it so spot on and special,” Kit explains. “And it’s a huge and expensive thing to do to bring those songs back to life.”

But all three are eternally grateful for what the band gave them. “For all the other things I’ve done in my career, Danny Wilson is really the launchpad,” says Gary. “So many things have come to me because somebody loved Mary’s Prayer, including the films that I do with the director John Carney. He remembers cycling to school listening to the first album. So many things have springboarded off it. I am extremely grateful for it.”

Gary Clark on writing for movies and musicals

Gary Clark has worked with artists from Demi Lovato to nu-metal band Korn.

After Danny Wilson split up, Gary recorded his own solo album Ten Short Songs About Love in 1993. He then formed a couple of bands, but by the start of the 21st Century he was establishing himself as a songwriter and producer.

Over the years he has worked with a wide range of artists from Demi Lovato to Delta Goodrem. He’s even worked with nu metal band Korn.

“My taste is very eclectic,” he admits. “I’m really just looking for anything that feels like it has soul in it.”

It was working with Natalie Imbruglia that really established his credentials. Gary collaborated with the Australian actress and singer on her second album, White Lilies Island (2001).

“She was an artist who had just come off a big international hit with Torn and I really believe that people didn’t want me doing the album because I was a relatively unknown producer-songwriter,” he says. “And so it really was quite a tough ride for me. But we kept coming up with stuff she loved.

“We had a big international hit with Wrong Impression. I still hear it in the States.”

After spending a few years in Los Angeles, Gary returned to Dundee just over a decade ago and that’s when the Irish film director John Carney tracked him down to write the songs for his film Sing Street.

“I joke that I came back from Hollywood to Dundee to get into movies,” Gary says, laughing.

Of late he has been working on a stage musical version of Sing Street which will open in London this summer. Gary is collaborating with Carney again on a new music-themed film, Power Ballad, which stars Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas. And he’s been writing songs with Emma Thompson, no less, for a musical version of her film Nanny McPhee.

In short, he’s doing what he dreamed of when he was a kid.

“I guess I am. And not many people can say that.”

Ged Grimes on Simple Minds and computer games

In some ways Ged Grimes has had the most unlikely post-Danny Wilson musical career after he started writing for the nascent computer game industry that was establishing itself in Dundee in the 1990s.

“I got a lot of pushback from my friends in the music business,” Ged admits. “‘Computer games music? That’s rubbish.’ Well, no, actually. The great thing about writing for games is you are basically creating this world that someone is spending hours and hours in and the music is an important part of that. So it gives you the chance to open up music to a new audience.”

And when he wants to get his kicks playing live he goes out on tour as the bass player for Simple Minds. “We’re going away to start a world tour in South America in April.

“I knew Jim and Charlie when we were on the Virgin record label in the late ’80s. So it’s incredible that 40 years on I am now Simple Minds’ longest-serving bass player. It’s a privilege to go around the world and people are hungrier for the music than they’ve ever been.”

Kit Clark on playing in bands and writing the Danny Wilson musical

Like Gary and Ged, Kit worked on songwriting and production in the days after Danny Wilson. But he still had a hankering to be in a band. The result was The Swiss Family Orbison, a band consisting of Kit, Gregor Philp, Keith Matheson and a certain Dougie Vipond of Deacon Blue fame. They released their titular debut album in 1997.

“We just had an incredible partnership for maybe six years or so,” says Kit.

Another album followed and then in the years after the band’s split Kit began to work in theatre, collaborating with the likes of Forbes Masson and Hamish Glen at Dundee Rep.

But of late he’s been working on a children’s musical based on the Badger the Mystical Mutt books by Lyn McNicol and Laura Jackson, which is now ready to go. And then there’s the Danny Wilson musical he’s been working on for years. He has now finished the first draft.

It’s not the story of the band, he says – and that’s been the challenge. He’s been working on a story that, he hopes, doesn’t shoehorn songs into a predictable narrative. “As much as I completely adore ABBA, even with something as huge as Mamma Mia you kind of go: ‘That felt a bit squeezed in,’” he says. Equally, though, he doesn’t want to step on people’s memories.

“There’s been almost 40 years for people to know these songs and interpret them in their own way. And the last thing I want is to say, ‘No, it’s not about that, it’s about this.’”

The Complete Danny Wilson Box Set will be released on Cherry Red Records on February 28 – see cherryred.co.uk