Guest Blog: Katy Lironi: ‘matilda in the middle’, family, music and mayhem
We’re delighted to host a lovely guest blog from Katy Lironi ahead of the publication of her memoir matilda in the middle, a musical family memoir. Katy is a fixture of the Scottish music scene and is in permanent creative overload with her band The Secret Goldfish and record label Creeping Bent (both with husband Douglas MacIntyre).
matilda in the middle is published by Into Creative and can be pre-ordered here
Katy will be appearing at events in Glasgow and Edinburgh (details below) and tickets are available now, don’t miss out…Over to Katy…
Writing matilda in the middle was a protracted process that started at some point in the first decade of the century when my children were all still young and I was only juggling being a stay-at-home mum to 5 kids in 6 years, as opposed to also being a working mum. (I waited till the twins started primary school to add this extra layer of military planning to my already overextended organisational abilities. Working mum/ working dad….what do those terms really mean? A conundrum for another time.)
So when they were all small and chaotic, I tried to grab the luxury of kitchen table scribbling to make me feel like a semblance of myself. The person I used to be before they arrived, one after the other, and then two after the third, and stop. Breathe. Try to reclaim something that used to come naturally – music and writing. No easy task with the proverbial pram in the hall. Except mine was a triple buggy piled high with the elders’ schoolbags. So while my offspring wrestled in the other room, ran around outside like puppies, or binge watched The Simpsons, I attempted to carve out creative moments. When I wasn’t cooking, cleaning, running, shouting, mediating, playing, singing nursery rhymes, feeling guilty or glugging wine, I would write it all down – at least my own version of events. It was mainly memoir, writing to keep me sane and as they grew, more about the fact of our middle daughter having Down’s syndrome and the growing impact that came to have on her, our and her siblings’ lives. It was a joy to capture her spirit and exploits as they played out, and I found turning the drama and reality of our sometimes utterly exhausting lives into something almost comic, tender and relate-able, a creatively fulfilling exercise, even if just for me.
For Christmas 2013 I got the Tracy Thorn autobiography, Bedsit Disco Queen. I loved it and it spurred me to stay up far too late writing my own musical memoirs for no particular reason but the joy of writing about something other than the here and now, and immersing myself in half-forgotten memories.
Fast forward 10 years and I had assembled many more blog pieces, while family and music continued to be the mainstays of my life. As I saw it, I had two disparate pieces of writing. It took my husband, bandmate and dad to our 5 kids, Douglas, to point out that my musical memoir and family blogs could be part of a more cohesive whole, with the maelstrom that is Matilda at its core, documenting how music has played its part in her and her siblings’ lives, while reshaping and enlightening our own appreciation of music. And so matilda in the middle began to take shape.
Here are some of the songs, of course only a few, that have been at the centre of our story so far.
Maybe not my first single though, I can live without listening to Little Jimmy Osmond’s ‘Long Haired Lover’ from Liverpool ever again, much as I may have loved it as a 6 year old and played it over, and over and over again. More palatable now is the next record gifted to me on my 7th or 8th birthday, ‘See My Baby Jive’ by Wizzard. I am a June baby, and as we all know, in the 1970s it was always blazingly sunny in the summer. So birthdays were outdoors affairs and this one involved us dancing in the garden, long dresses being the mid-70s style of choice my mum had taken me to M&S and bought me a long nightie and insisted it was a dress. So there I was, swaying obliviously along to ‘See My Baby Jive’ in the back garden at my 8th birthday party, in what to everyone else, was very obviously a nightie. Happy Days.
Moving ahead to pre-teen years, Grease was much too important to me as a 12-year-old not to be included in a playlist. And while I remained intoxicated by John Travolta for too many years, it is the theme tune by the Bee Gees that brings back the excitement of queuing round the corner at the Odeon cinema in Glasgow for my first glimpse of him in the musical smash hit of 1978. Grease was my awakening to both 1970s disco and 1950s retro rock-n-roll.
As I plummeted into teen years we were on the cusp of the 1980s, lots of musical danger zones out there. By this time my family had started holidaying annually in the Costa Brava and from the tender age of 12 I was immersed in the nightlife of the Corner Bar in a small resort on the outskirts Estartit. While my parents partied round the piano in the main bar, I was learning the rules of teen life, ostensibly overseen by my older brothers, in the backroom disco; dancing to a mixture of ‘D.I.S.C.O’, ‘Funky Town’, ‘One Step Beyond’ and the everlasting highlight, ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by the Sugarhill Gang. Schooldays back home in EK with their dining-hall discos would never be the same after these summers of musical mayhem, sunshine and freedom.
As teen years advanced, my best friend Pascale and I discovered alternative night at Crystals, our local EK disco. After the onslaught of mid 1980s new romantic bands that we had been subjected to at school, Boys’ Brigade and parochial hall discos in our younger teen years, we were ready and willing to embrace the more enlightened sounds, as we saw it, of Talking Heads, Aztec Camera, Orange Juice, Soft Cell and our Crystals favourite, Hey Elastica’s ‘Eat Your Heart Out’.
Pretty soon it was time to leave EK behind and head for Edinburgh where my own musical story began. It took leaving EK for me to be introduced to one of its main musical exports of the time. I started at Napier College in Edinburgh in August 1984 and after a few weeks, was introduced to the sound of East Kilbride’s The Jesus and Mary Chain’s ‘Upside Down’ at the Green Banana Club at Potter Row. This was music as I’d never heard it before and the drunken shove around the sticky dance floor was dancing as I’d never experienced it. I was hooked. A whole wide world away from EK school discos and foretelling a pivotal time in where my life would eventually meander.
After college years and being in bands, came my years of travelling and working with Ann, my college friend and Fizzbombs bandmate. I had some very eclectic mix tapes during this extended period in my life which saw us ricocheting between Southern Italy, Edinburgh, Northern Italy, Edinburgh, Prague and Eastern Europe, London, San Francisco, back to Prague and eventually, we both found ourselves back in Glasgow in 1993. My personal soundtrack at the time combined Everything but the Girl, Dionne Warwick, Buzzcocks, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Lemonheads, Dinosaur Junior, Simon and Garfunkel. The travelling years consisted of plenty heartache, trans-European bus journeys and the unpleasant peculiarities of Italian men to deal with – a broad spectrum of music seemed right. Tracey Thorn and Everything but the Girl saw me through the aftermath of many a heartbroken, long-distance phone call.
Back home in Glasgow, music and romance entered my life once again. I formed The Secret Goldfish with my future husband, Douglas, in 1994, and was introduced to his vast and diverse music collection and encyclopaedic knowledge. We were married in 2002 to a Jonathan Richman soundtrack, ‘You’re the One for Me’. I performed it with Mick Slaven from the Leopards on guitar as a surprise on Douglas’s 60th Birthday and our 20th wedding anniversary in 2022. Modern lovers.
I would say, and then came children, but 2 of them were there at the wedding already. A constant throughout our lives with the children has been my ever expanding love of the Flaming Lips. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was our eldest daughter’s favourite album as a toddler, and it lives on loudly in our kitchen on most Sunday-dinner-cooking playlists. Long live Yoshimi!
matilda in the middle is a combined memoir about music and family and the enmeshed nature it has in our particular story. Matilda has taught us more than we can ever teach her about the nature and power of music to transcend everything else. There is nothing left to say.
Katy is appearing at: