Sir Ian Rankin says he formed a punk band as a teenager after being inspired by the late Skids and Big Country legend, Stuart Adamson, who went to the same school.
The Rebus author, who grew up in Cardenden in Fife, said pupils from Beath High in Cowdenbeath often seemed destined to work in local factories or the Rosyth dockyards.
But Adamson, who was two years above him at the school, showed that “anything was possible”.
Adamson, who died in 2001, founded punk band the Skids in 1977 when he was 18, and had hits like Into The Valley and Working for the Yankee Dollar, after their music came to the attention of legendary Radio One DJ, John Peel.
Rankin, 65, said the Skids inspired him to start his own punk band, The Dancing Pigs, who dreamt of similar success and played gigs in Cowdenbeath, before splitting up and pursuing different careers.
He was speaking on the A Kick Up The Arts podcast hosted by Nicola Meighan and said: “In Fife, the middle of nowhere, punk seemed to be happening a long way away from us.
“But the lesson of punk was if you want to do it, you go and do it, give it a go. And at Beath High School we had Stuart Adamson two years above me.
“The Skids, I remember their first single, Charles, was for sale in an electrical shop on the High Street in Cowdenbeath and I went and bought it.
“They played everywhere. The Pogo-A-Gogo Club in Kirkcaldy was my favourite – there was no stage so the Skids were on the same level as the punters and we were all pogo-ing up and down.
“The owners would come and complain that the ceiling was going to cave in.”
Asked about the influence of someone like Adamson coming from Beath High School, Rankin – who had a job in a chicken hatchery at the time, replied: “It meant anything was possible. It didn’t matter what background you were from, give it a go.
“So we almost immediately, a few of us… formed the band The Dancing Pigs. We were actually going to ask Stuart Adamson if he would produce our first single but we never quite got that far.
“We never did make a single but we did make some tapes which we sent to John Peel, but he never played them. They might be sitting in his archive somewhere.
“So we had some fun. The first gig we ever played was at the YMCA or YWCA in Cowdenbeath which was opposite the stock car racing stadium and it was a gig for special needs kids on a day out.
“At the end of the gig one of the kids came up and said to me ‘Are you the Ramones?’ I said yes and he gave me a wee scrap of paper and I signed it Joey Ramone.”
Rankin published his first book, The Flood, in 1986. Dubbed the “King of Tartan Noir”, he has now sold more than 30 million copies of his crime novels.
His breakthrough novel Black and Blue – the eighth in his Rebus series – featured The Dancing Pigs as a massively successful global act, in contrast to the reality of “Fife’s second best punk band”.
The writer, who has performed vocals in a number of bands, said: “They appear in one Rebus novel. In Black and Blue they’re a huge band – that’s one of the beautiful things about being a writer, your dreams can come true in fiction, although they didn’t in real life.”
