Alan Rankine

Primarily recognized through his role as one half of Associates, Alan Rankine first entered music in the mid-1970s as guitarist with the Scottish cabaret group Caspian. In 1976, while Caspian searched for a replacement singer, Rankine encountered Billy Mackenzie’s voice during a Stan & Deliver performance and promptly enlisted him. The pair soon left the cabaret circuit behind to target the U.K. pop charts as Associates.

Internal tensions dissolved the duo in late 1982, after which Rankine circled the globe and began producing recordings by the Cocteau Twins, Pale Fountains, and Paul Haig. He joined the Belgian Crepuscule label as a solo artist in 1986. While handling sessions for other roster acts, he also finished his debut album The World Begins to Look Her Age. Virgin issued the wider-reaching follow-up She Loves Me Not the next year, incorporating three songs drawn from the earlier release. Crepuscule put out the entirely instrumental The Big Picture Sucks in 1989.

An attempted early-1990s reunion with Mackenzie collapsed because of unsuccessful label negotiations and the singer’s restless creativity. Throughout the rest of the decade Rankine withdrew from recording and production, instead lecturing on music at a Glasgow college and writing songs for pop groups. He is partly responsible for Belle & Sebastian’s emergence, having required the band to submit an album as a class project; they delivered the now-legendary Tigermilk LP. Alan Rankine died peacefully at his home on January 2, 2023, after the holidays with his family; he was 64.