Cowboy Mouth - Interview with Grahame Skinner

by John Clarkson

published: 26 / 5 / 2023

Cowboy Mouth - Interview with Grahame Skinner

Hipsway frontman Grahame Skinner talks to John Clarkson about the surprise return of his 90's project The Cowboy Mouth.

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The Cowboy Mouth was an initially short-lived Scottish group of the mid-1990s, which released two albums, ‘Life as a Dog’ (1995) and ‘Love is Dead’ (1995) on the Hamburg-based independent label Marina Records. The group was formed in 1994 by Hipsway frontman Grahame Skinner and Douglas MacIntyre, who runs the durable Creeping Bent label, and has been the guitarist in various Scottish bands including Article 58, The Nectarine No.9, The Secret Goldfish, The Sexual Objects and Port Sulphur. “Douglas and I first met at a party in his flat in 1983,” recalls Skinner, talking on a crackly phone line between his native Glasgow and Edinburgh, shortly before The Cowboy Mouth made their long overdue Edinburgh debut gig supporting the Bathers at a Penny Black gig on the 14th April. “It was his 21st birthday. We hit it off immediately.” The pair shortly afterwards formed their first band together, The White Savages, which also featured Lachlan Allan on bass and future Hipsway drummer, Harry Travers. “We took our influences from Iggy Pop and Lou Reed and 60’s New York loft groups, and never recorded anything,” says Skinner. “We played maybe five or six gigs before splitting.” Afterwards Skinner was catapulted to brief fame with dance rock outfit Hipsway. They toured with the Eurythmics and supported Simple Minds at a massive homecoming gig at Ibrox Stadium on Glasgow. They also had a Top 20 hit in early 1986 with ‘The Honeythief’, their song ‘Tinder’ was used in a national beer commercial for McEwan’s Lager, and their eponymous debut album, which too came out that year on major record label Mercury, also sold well. There were, however, changes in personnel and management. A second album, the under-rated ‘Scratch the Surface’ (1989), took over a year to record, and. much delayed, was poorly promoted by Mercury. Hipsway split up even before its release. Skinner and Hipsway guitarist Pim Jones’ subsequent bands Witness, who were signed to another major label A & M, and The Pleasurelords attracted some acclaim, but little in the way of public attention. The Cowboy Mouth was formed in 1994 by Skinner, who was living in London at the time, and MacIntyre, who was still based in Glasgow. Its first line-up also featured Gordon Wilson (drums) and Paul McGeechan (keyboards), who MacIntyre had worked with in Love and Money. "Sometimes Douglas would send me a cassette as that was the mode back then. There was nothing digital in those days,” says Skinner, recollecting his and MacIntyre’s writing of ‘Life as a Dog’. And maybe I would write words to that, and at other times I would be up in Glasgow and we would sit down with guitars and a four track and would write songs together, and sometimes I would write songs and play them to him. We worked really quickly, and I think that we wrote all the songs in just one or two sessions together.” ‘My Life as a Dog’ was recorded similarly speedily, and in a matter of days. For Skinner it was a therapeutic experience. “We did the whole album in five days. We rehearsed first for about five days before recording it, so when we went in we could record it really quickly. We did some work and made sure that we knew what we wanted to do before we went in. It was for me just much more enjoyable that way. I much prefer that way of working quickly. After all those months in the studio working on the second Hipsway album, it was like a breath of fresh air.” ‘Life as a Dog’ is a dark record, built for solitary, late night hours. MacIntyre’s brooding guitar lines have an element of The Walker Brothers and ‘The Velvet Underground’ album, and are matched in melancholy by McGeechan and Wilson’s sparse, melancholic instrumentation. Skinner’s crooning, deep vocals across songs such as 'My Life as a Dog', ‘Letter from LA’ and ‘Bad Poetry’ reflect on love affairs gone to dust, lost opportunities and things not having worked out as planned. “Yeah, I think that I was,” laughs Skinner, when asked if he was in a black place when he was working on ‘Life as a Dog’. “I was in a post-major record label depression. I was fed up with a number of things. I was probably feeling quite rough, but I actually had a lot of fun making ‘Life as a Dog’. It was good for me making that record.” The Cowboy Mouth split up in 1996, shortly after recording their similarly bleak second album ‘Love is Dead’, the then geographical distance between Skinner and MacIntyre being a major factor in their break-up. They had played just three shows in their original lifetime. Grahame Skinner took a fifteen year hiatus from the music industry, moving in the interim period back to Scotland and finally returning in 2011 with a new project Skinner (eventually The Skinner Group), which also featured MacIntyre and released an album, ‘Back on the Horse’, in 2014. In 2016 after a twenty-seven year absence Skinner and Pim Jones reformed Hipsway. They played sold-out shows in Edinburgh and Glasgow and toured nationally, and self-released a well-received third album, ‘Smoke and Dreams’ in 2018. “We’re on a break for now,” says Skinner about Hipsway’s current status. “I don’t know if we will get back together again.” The Cowboy Mouth may have lain dormant, except for the hip Glaswegian label Late Night From Glasgow, which has released various albums by Scottish bands of the 1980s and 1990s under its Past Night From Glasgow imprint, and which offered to re-release ‘Life as a Dog’ in a vinyl version with a new sleeve. Encouraged by this, Skinner and MacIntyre decided to reform The Cowboy Mouth last June for one of the monthly FRETS shows that MacIntyre runs at the Strathaven Hotel in South Lanarkshire. In a reenactment of two Marina showcase gigs in Glasgow and London in 1995, which included sets from The Cowboy Mouth. the bill featured two other Marina and now Last Night From Glasgow acts. The Bathers and Sugartown. The Cowboy Mouth have since gone on to play shows in Glasgow, including a Celtic Connections appearance at The Oran Mor, and, while they were missing MacIntyre who had a prior booking, they put on a strong performance at the Penny Black show in Edinburgh. They will be headlining a Last Night From Glasgow showcase with The Bathers and Sister John at The Webster Theatre in Glasgow on the 28th May, “Douglas moved back to Strathaven, which is where he originally comes from, some years ago,” says Skinner. “We played that first show with a couple of friends of his who live near Douglas and who were quite sympathetic to playing along with us. The line-up now features a guy called Dougie Hannah on drums and Lachlan Allan on bass who was originally in the White Savages. We are good pals and get on well with each other.” Skinner is very much concerned about looking to the future rather than trading on the past with The Cowboy Mouth. “We are going to try and do another album. We have probably five or six songs so far, and we will write a few more, and then if we are happy with them we will record them.” “We hope that we can reissue ‘Love is Dead’ and the Skinner Group album through Last Night in Glasgow as well” he says in conclusion, “but my main focus is to record the new album.” From an unusual and unlikely comeback, this previously neglected band now has a promising future. The photographs of The Cowboy Mouth were taken on the 14th April by Philip Wark at the Penny Black gig at The Wee Red Bar in Edinburgh.