Cover

SCABBY QUEEN

Kirstin Innes

Dedication

This one is for Bis,
and will always be for Bis

Epigraph

Though cruel Fate should bid us part

Far as the Pole and Line,

Her dear idea around my heart

Should tenderly entwine:

Though mountains rise and desarts howl

And oceans roar between;

Yet dearer than my deathless soul

I still would love my Jean.

ROBERT BURNS, ‘The Northern Lass’

SOME PEOPLE

Adele Roberts – a nurse

Danny Mansfield – a tour manager, a husband

Donald Bain – a godfather (unofficial)

Eileen Johnstone – a mother

Hamza Hassan – a boyfriend

Ida Edwards – a woman on a train

Jess Blake – a comrade

Malcolm Campbell – a father

Neil Munro – a journalist

Ruth Jones – a friend

Sammi Smith – a girl who lives in a squat

Shiv West – a popular musician

Simon Carruthers – a man at a wedding

Xanthe Christos – a former comrade

Q Magazine, June 1990

Ginger Nut

Pete Moss sets to with pop’s newest It Girl

Teatime telly was changed for ever one Thursday evening in March this year. Dads all over the country froze, forkfuls of egg and chips halfway to their mouths. Mothers tutted and turned their heads away, scraped plates jealously. And the kids, pressed up against the screens? Well, they’d never seen anything like it – a young woman defying those stodgy Top of the Pops conventions, unbuttoning her waistcoat to display a curve-stretched anti-poll tax slogan T-shirt underneath.

Clio Campbell has an … effect on people.

Everyone pauses to look at her as she walks into this bog-standard London boozer at lunchtime, in her lipstick, short skirt and casually scuffed Doc Marten boots. Their eyes are drawn by that shock of red hair and held by the fierce, piercing beauty in her gaze. They know her. They recognize her. They point. And she smiles at them, gently, accepting this new-found level of fame. Her eyes meet mine and she poses the question, unspoken. Are you? I nod; it’s me. She folds her legs delicately into the chair opposite me and flashes me a big, bold grin. ‘Fancy a pint?’ she asks.

Campbell is, demonstrably, Scottish. With her head of scorched curls, her milky skin and her honeyed, lilting accent, she seems to have walked straight off the set of Highlander. She likes to keep her origins a mystery (‘Och, I grew up in a tiny wee place. You’d never have heard of it,’ she says, when I press her), but she will admit to a musical apprenticeship around the folk-music clubs and dance halls of the Scottish Highlands.