Last goodbye to a maestro of music

IN all the years I knew Stewart Cruickshank, I don’t think I ever saw his desk. We knew it was there because something had to be holding up the guddle of tapes, cds, vinyl, cassettes, reels, music press releases, newspaper cuttings and posters. But like the red squirrel, it was rarely glimpsed under the Cruickshank Rockpile.

Stewart, a senior producer at BBC Radio Scotland, was always surrounded by the music that he loved. Even on his wedding day, while his mum ironed his suit, Stewart edited a programme about Simple Minds for Radio 1.

Big, bearish, and bearded, Stewart first tunnelled into the BBC via the music library in Queen Margaret Drive, where racks and racks of vinyl in the bowels of the building were catalogued and administrated by Stewart, Sandy and Ewan, three wry, dry musicians fighting a quiet war against broadcasting musical clichés. Woe betide the news producer who went down to ‘Gramophones’ for a musical intro to a finance feature, and asked them for Money by Abba or Pink Floyd…

Radio Scotland desperately needed Stewart’s wide and generous love of music. If you asked him who played bass in Bad Haggis, he could also tell you what gauge of strings they used. Enthusiastic, electic chaotic and enormously engaging, when he took over the music department, his shows gave Jesus and Mary Chain, Wet Wet Wet, the Proclaimers, Blue Nile, and many more Scottish acts their first break. Stewart may not have had the same profile as John Peel, but his influence in Scotland was transformative. When he died suddenly last week, the crowds that turned up for his memorial service on Saturday caused the western necropolis to seize up.

His passing leaves us sadder, and with a lot less music.