Calvin Harris by Douglas Wight

Author:Douglas Wight [Wight, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845029814
Publisher: Black & White Publishing
Published: 2015-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

As the service ended and the coffin was lifted to be taken out of the church, we played our final song for him. We had chosen Calvin Harris’s ‘I Get All the Girls’ [sic] – one of Ben’s favourites, despite him never getting all the girls. The church erupted when the music began to play – people were laughing, crying and dancing in the aisles.

That his music was bringing some comfort to the family and offering light into the darkest of places must have meant a great deal to Calvin. While nowhere near the same scale as the tragedy that had befallen the Kinsellas, Calvin had experienced the nasty side of yob culture during a recent visit to Dumfries and revealed that he felt he could barely ‘walk the streets’ of his home town because of the level of grief towards him from a loutish minority.

Announcing that he only returned to the town of his birth to visit his parents, he said, ‘If I ever go back home to Dumfries, I go to my mum and dad’s house. I have a nice meal, sleep there and then I leave. You’ll never catch me going out in Dumfries again.’

Clearly, he had suffered some serious unwelcome attention the last time he had gone out and decided the best policy was to remove himself from the situation to avoid it happening again.

‘It’s not a good place to be. It’s one of those towns, like hundreds all over the place, with a big drinking culture,’ he said. ‘Though the majority of people are great, the bad ones spoil it. I have been given grief there in all sorts of ways. I wouldn’t put myself in that situation again and I wouldn’t want to put someone else who was with me in that situation.’

‘I know folk who detest me,’ Calvin said, ‘and there are enough of them for me to take notice.’ On one hand the lyrics of ‘The Girls’ made it popular with fans who got Calvin’s irony. On the other it attracted flak from people who got the srong impression from the same lyrics.

Calvin spent the rest of the year working on his album but in a year when he wasn’t touring or having to promote a new record to have scored one of the biggest-selling singles of the year – ‘Dance Wiv Me’ was the twelfth-highest bestseller – was an unexpected boost.

And he received another when the BBC announced that the once legendary chart show Top of the Pops would return with a special Christmas edition – and Calvin was invited to perform.

When the BBC had axed the show after forty-two years and 2,204 shows, Calvin must have thought that his chances of appearing on it were gone forever. However, thanks to a campaign by a national newspaper to revive it, the BBC performed a U-turn and agreed to bring it back, ensuring that Calvin would be the most prominent Scot to appear, probably since 1982, when Dexy’s Midnight Runners performed ‘Jackie Wilson Said’ in front of a giant picture of popular Scots darts player Jocky Wilson.

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