Famous Groupies - Black Apple (2024)

The creator of the Famous Groupies project, a young Scottish multi-instrumentalist with a hard-to-pronounce name, Kirkcaldy McKenzie, talks about how he got the idea to create this album. He is a fan of the music of the Beatles and Paul McCartney in particular, he has been listening to it since childhood, because his parents were fans of this music.
Already at a conscious age, he got into the hands of old things of his grandfather Patrick McKenzie, who was a session musician in Scotland in the 60s and 70s of the last century. Among this legacy were demos of several songs recorded by my grandfather under the obvious influence of McCartney and Wings on an old tape recorder in the first half of the 70s. The recordings were in a deplorable state, some were just ideas, sketches and drafts intended only for himself. The younger McKenzie began working with them, trying to combine them into sequential works, adding missing notes and texts somewhere, trying to preserve the aura and style of the time when they were created. The result was an album called Rehearsing The Multiverse.
The fact that the author is a McCartney fan is evident not only from the band's name (in honor of one of Sir Paul's most eccentric songs), but also from the design of the CD cover, referring us to the Red Rose Speedway album (and there is an apple instead of a rose for a reason). But it would be a mistake to classify the disc as a parody album, like another album by The Rutles, or only an obvious imitation of Paul McCartney's style. No, the musical material is original melodies created by someone who was next to Paul McCartney in the 1970s and absorbed these ideas.
This is not the end of the story told by Kirkcaldy McKenzie. Along with the unfinished songs, he found several more photographs where his grandfather Patrick Mackenzie is depicted with Paul McCartney, the Wings musicians, and Linda McCartney acted as a photographer. This whole story about my grandfather makes me wonder: did Paul help him with any of these songs? Or, even more intriguingly, did Patrick help Paul?
The album was released just in time for the 50th anniversary of Paul McCartney's first release after the breakup of the Beatles. It is difficult to understand who the real creators are here - Patrick Mackenzie, Kirkcaldy Mackenzie or the Famous Groupies, who eventually recreated their favorite tunes of the early 1970s together so that they are both fresh, melodic, and modern as before. Let's hope that the entire archive of Mackenzie Sr. has not yet been disassembled by his grandson, and an exciting sequel awaits us…