Can there be any more literal definition of a cult hero than an artist who dresses every day in full Highland battle dress – kilt, helmet, claymore sword and all? The story of this self-styled “funk warrior” from the Scottish Borders town of St Boswells may be one of the weirdest and most maverick untold tales in British pop.
After initially making his way to the US as the bassist in a heavy metal band, in the 1970s and 1980s Jesse Rae became a close companion and collaborator with some of the great American funk musicians of the era – Parliament-Funkadelic and Talking Heads’ synthesiser guru Bernie Worrell, the talk-box loving Roger Troutman of G-funk progenitors Zapp and Roger (as sampled on 2Pac’s California Love), as well as Keith LeBlanc and Doug Wimbish from the Sugarhill Records house band (as featured on White Lines and The Message) and many more. Between 1979 and 1987, with a little help from his friends, Rae penned a raft of slick, groovy, camp and not a little bit silly synth-funk singles, full of Celtic bon mots, sung with a thick Scottish flourish and accompanied by surreal, self-directed videos. Yet he failed to set the heather alight. Aside from writing Odyssey’s 1982 hit single Inside Out, Rae never touched the top 40 here nor in the US, and more or less disappeared having released just one major album, 1984’s The Thistle.
I first became aware of Rae only last year after a friend booked him to play a show in Glasgow on 18 September – the night of the Scottish independence referendum (no prizes for guessing which way Rae voted). Quite apart from him being the kind of raving eccentric who rarely fades into obscurity quietly, how had a Scottish artist who had worked with so many musicians I admired passed me by? On further investigation I’d have found a lot of his biography impossible to believe had he not had the films to prove it.
Rae was way ahead of his time in advocating DIY video-making, and used to carry a camera with him everywhere he went. Search his YouTube channel and, among various self-shot promos, you’ll find such bizarre gems as Troutman in Scottish clansman gear riding a flatbed lorry around the streets of Edinburgh rocking a synthesiser, Rae, Worrell and Troutman performing a show in a Borders field for a bunch of baffled-looking kids, and Bernie Worrell sending an election-day message – Rae was an independent candidate in last week’s UK general election – “We all should work together. We will, because the Scots are … funky.”
After using the aforementioned metal band as his ticket across the Atlantic in pursuit of funk in the mid-1970s, Rae subsequently spent years bouncing around the States working casual jobs and experiencing Forrest Gump-like brushes with celebrity and infamy, be it winning an award – judged by Francis Ford Coppola – for his film-making prowess, or working as an assistant at the legendary Record Plant recording studio in Los Angeles around the time its owner Gary Kellgren drowned mysteriously in a swimming pool in 1977. Rae’s ingratiation with the American funk elite began when he literally ran into one of them – Worrell – in the elevator of the Holiday Inn in Boston, each of them spilling tapes across the floor. They quickly bonded, and soon Rae was connected with Sly Stone’s ex-partner, the English singer Ruth Copeland, whose Daryl Hall-produced album Take Me to Baltimore he featured on; and subsequently doors opened to his solo career.
Although that solo career began in 1979 with the single D.E.S.I.R.E., Rae made his impact on the British public in the mid-1980s when he launched his highland warrior persona, which proved to be a perfect match for the Channel 4 show The Tube, which featured his video for the 1985 single Over the Sea. There’s a fine line between brilliance and ridiculousness in funk, and this audiovisual auteur toed it to the inch with the insanely catchy and just plain insane likes of Chainsaw and The Thistle (his stunts included hanging off the front of a moving steam train). Over the Sea, though, was his finest achievement, a deliriously funky ode to Rae’s pipe band drummer future wife back home in Scotland, which reached No 65 in the UK charts in 1985. Look beyond all the shortbread tin schmaltz and the cheesy motif of a claymore of love flying across the Atlantic, and there is some stunningly ambitious footage in the video – particularly the bit juxtaposing dramatic helicopter shots of Rae waving a flag on top of a Scottish mountain with shots of him playing a guitar solo on his sword on the top of Brooklyn Bridge, flanked by Worrell on keys in a matching kilt. (Rae never bothered to seek filming permission from the New York authorities incidentally – he and Worrell just slung their stuff over their shoulders and found a way up the tower.)
Rae’s career ground to a halt in a depressingly familiar story of record-label bureaucracy and misguided A&Ring, compounded by – and this is the least noble part of his story – Rae’s stubborn mistrust of the English (he refused to fly south for meetings). He was courted by Warners in the mid-80s, but wanted to sign directly with the label in the States where he had such strong connections already, but he had settled back in Scotland by this time, and residency rules required that he had to be on the label’s European subdivision WEA. For all their clamour to seal the deal – rumour has it they jeopardised a Madonna album in order to secure his signature – WEA never quite knew what to do with Rae, assuming him to be a kind of novelty act and not an artist who wished desperately to be taken seriously.
After a breakdown in his relationship with WEA, financial troubles and legal battles dogged Rae for decades, his expensive videos having more or less bankrupted him. But he has made a minor re-emergence in recent years, and there have been signs of renewed interest in his music. In 2010 Rae – who ran unsuccessfully for the Scottish Parliament in 2007 and 2011 before this year’s equally unsuccessful UK campaign – opened for kindred spirit in extravagant costumes Adam Ant at shows in London and Glasgow. In 2012 Roddy Frame performed an acoustic cover of Inside Out at a show in Paisley, after recounting how when he was in Boston recording with Aztec Camera in the 1980s, he repeatedly used to be asked about the mysterious Scot in the kilt who had come in search of American funk before him. His 1984 album The Thistle was reissued last year, and Rae still resurfaces now and again today for gigs, in full Highlander regalia. Next time he appears near you, head along and give this forgotten funk warrior a salute. He’ll be the guy in the kilt and helmet wielding a claymore.
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