Greenock, Scotland · formed 1976
Panache
Five musicians from Inverclyde who set out to become Scotland's Steely Dan, held down a residency at the Victorian Carriage, wrote fifteen songs of their own, and very nearly got there.
They played covers to fill a room — Kid Charlemagne, Stevie Wonder, Hall and Oates — and originals because they meant to be a band that mattered. Tasty arrangements, five-part harmonies, and at the front the voice of Pat Hamill: sometimes sweet and soulful, sometimes soaring and passionate. By 1978 they had a publisher in London.
Almost none of it was ever released. What survived survived on cassette, on reel, and on a ghetto blaster left running in a rehearsal room — and it is only online now because the band have spent the last few years transferring it, tape by tape.
Start here
- We Gotta Make It
A Greenock rehearsal, captured on the old Akai ghetto blaster.
- Eleanor Rigby
Live at the Victorian Carriage. Left to right: Robert Williams, Alan Mackie, Pat Hamill, George McClarkin, Dougie Campbell. The Beatles tune taken at a fast pace with a few jazzy chords.
- Getting Closer
Recorded at the band’s publisher’s studio in London — Alastair Sinclair on keyboards and Derek Taylor on drums, with Pat, Alan and Dougie.
Before Panache
The band did not begin in 1976. It began in a Greenock classroom, in a group called the 2D Sparklers, with a song written out by hand on a sheet of foolscap.
That last name is the one people recognise. John McGeoch went on to play guitar in Magazine, Visage, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Public Image Ltd, and is regularly named among the most influential guitarists of his generation. Before any of that he was a boy in Greenock in a band called Violent Sabbath with two of the men who would form Panache. The whole story is here →