The renowned Scottish band The Associates’ co-founder and musician Alan Rankine passed away at the age of 64. The news was confirmed by Rankine’s sons Callum and Hamish on the guitarist and keyboardist’s Facebook page.
They claimed that shortly after spending Christmas with his family, their father passed away quietly at home.
Together with singer Billy Mackenzie, Rankine founded the Associates in Dundee in 1979, with Party Fears Two serving as the group’s biggest hit.
Prior to Rankine’s departure from the band in 1982, they put out three albums. He was a “wonderful, kind, and loving man who would be sadly missed,” according to his sons.
They said that his social media accounts will remain up so that friends and admirers could commemorate his life.
In his 2015 Scottish post-punk documentary Big Gold Dream, director Grant McPhee, who included Rankine, called the musician a “genuine one-off maverick talent.”
He said to BBC Scotland:
“He had an instinctive sense of how something should sound, and his magnificent music is a perfect example of this.
“He is undoubtedly one of the greatest musicians of all time and arguably the artist with the most natural talent I have ever had the pleasure of speaking with.
Alan possessed a phenomenal amount of kindness in addition to his uncommon ability to play the piano and tell stories.
Gary Clark of Danny Wilson and Duglas T Stewart of the BMX Bandits among others paid respect to Rankine online.
Billy Mackenzie and author Rankine were “the right pairing,” according to writer David Stubbs, who recently conducted an interview with the musician.
“They built a still-living, still vital, unmatched item of numerous, enigmatic and unequaled beauty in The Associates,” he wrote.
Rankine made three solo albums after leaving The Associates and collaborated with artists including Paul Haig and Belle and Sebastian.
In 1992, Rankine established Electric Honey Records, a record company run by Stow College, now Glasgow Kelvin College, for music business students.
The most well-known album on the label is Belle and Sebastian’s Tigermilk; the band’s drummer Richard Colburn has called Rankine the “heart and soul of the course.”
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