TAKE ME TO THE PILOT

I was very pleased to read the interview with David Paton of Pilot in issue 369. The group (above) always seemed to me to be unfairly bracketed with The Rubettes side of things when, as he suggests, their musical peers were clearly the likes of 10CC and Sparks and even, it sounds to me these days, Badfinger.

Their first album came to me in an unusual way; as a schoolboy I took part in the pilot (no pun intended, by me anyway) episode of the TV show Pop Quiz, which was made at the old Yorkshire Television Studios on Kirkstall Road in Leeds – this was long before the format was taken up by the BBC and Mike Read. David Paton was the special guest and, as we won the contest, he presented us with autographed promo copies of From The Album Of The Same Name. Listening to it at home on my old Fidelity UA4 record player I found an eye-opening mix of intense melodicism and pleasingly rich pop complexity that I still enjoy today; later on in the transmitted series we also won albums by Roy Wood, Lynsey De Paul and David Essex, but the Pilot was the only one I hung on to!

Second Flight worked hard to consolidate pop success but Morin Heights, despite being somewhat overcooked by Roy Thomas Baker, has some of their best tunes – Running Water is still a thing of great beauty, for example. The article mentions no UK release for Two’s A Crowd, but I’m sure I bought mine as a regular issue on UK Arista. Regardless, thanks for the piece, an overdue nod to a great and severely underrated band, and part of the tradition of super-melodic Scottish pop that stretches from Marmalade, through Pilot and Blue, up to Teenage Fanclub and no doubt on to contemporary bands I’ve yet to hear!

by Peter Mills
<< Back to Issue 370

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