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| Not bad, also not dead-sexy. |
The Hit
Whether you know it from commercials for ads for a medication that’ll either fix you, kill you, or bring on psychosis (Ozembic?) or oldies radio, you know Pilot’s 1974 hit, “Magic.” That said, if you learned it through the commercials, you might not recognize its surprisingly heavy opening, but it breaks into the familiar chorus about ten seconds in.
It’s a hard song to hate so long as the Ozempic(?) commercials haven’t made you sick to puking of it. Bright melody balanced by a surprising heft on the bottom end, cheery, tight vocals, the whole thing does exactly what it’s supposed to: feel fucking good. Pure uplift in just over three minutes.
There’s not much story about the song itself: the two key members of Pilot - David Paton and Billy Lyall - wrote and recorded a bunch of demos between 1972 and 1974 and “Magic” was the hit. They co-wrote most of Pilot’s material, but a 2012 interview with Paton for a Scottish radio station (Golden Brown, they call the show) suggests Paton took the lead. In it, he talks about talking ideas and melodies into a tape recorder he kept on top of his piano, and having the bones of the song lined up. He got further inspiration one early morning when his wife said something about “I’ve never been awake to see a day break,” a line you’ll hear immediately after the chorus.
The best story, though, followed from the friendly competition that Pilot’s label, EMI, set up between them and a couple label-mates signed at the same time - one called Steve Hearly & Cockney Rebel, the other a band called Queen. All the bands wanted to record the first No. 1 single, of course, and EMI’s suits leavened the competition with camaraderie by way of having the bands eat together and generally mingle. On one of those occasions - and this was after Pilot had landed its first No. 1 - Paton spotted Freddie Mercury and walked over for a chat. When he got there, Mercury’s first question was, why walk over to talk to me? Taken aback, Paton sputtered a polite response. Mercury came back with, “When I have a number one, I won’t talk to anyone.”
For the record, “Magic” wasn’t Pilot’s No. 1. It topped out at No. 11 on the UK charts; it did better in the States, hitting No. 5 on the Hot 100. Pilot’s scored their first No. 1 with a song called “January,” but that was only in the UK. That one stalled on the cool side of the Hot 100. And Queen, of course, became QVEEN! (As in, who doesn’t know them?) There were a couple reasons for that, as it happens.
The Rest of the Story
Both Paton and Lyall came up in a busy, early 1970s Edinburgh scene. Both started as members of the Bay City Rollers, somewhere between permanent and substitute, though neither made it to the band’s glory days. For Paton, at least, two things posed a problem. First, he’d started writing and rating his own material by then and didn’t see that material getting worked into the Rollers’ rotation. Second, and relevant to the matter at hand, from something Paton offered in a retrospective for Goldmine Mag:
“I wanted success, I wanted to be a successful musician and songwriter, but unfortunately along with that comes, the fame. I didn’t react to it very well. I didn’t like the screaming girls, as I had been through all of that when I was in the Bay City Rollers. I actually hated it and didn’t like it at all. It took away a lot of my freedom, because I was a quite a social guy and had friends in Edinburgh I liked to go out with to the pub and whatnot. And that was all taken away from me.”
And yet Paton and Lyall still formed Pilot, which says something about the pull being “a successful musician and songwriter” had on them both. Fortunately, Lyall had a day-job as an engineer at Edinburgh’s (then young, apparently) Craighall Studios and he’d arrange time for he and Paton to get in the booth and flesh out their songs. As noted above, they recorded a collection of songs over a two-year period, which became the original corpus of Pilot’s discography. And now the other side of the story.
A site called Elsewhere posted a “where are they now” article on Pilot, which explains EMI’s thought process in signing all those acts: short version (and, holy shit, I did not know about Badfinger’s dark aftermath), they wanted to sign the next Beatles. Like everyone else. My God, the weight of that band. At any rate, Elsewhere tracks all the twists and turns (worth the read, honestly), notably about how the Beatles started with Apple and then EMI became “the Beatles’ label,” and how a managing director at EMI heard Pilot’s many demos and dubbed them “really Beatley,” and so on.
The full band actually came together during those demo sessions - as did the name “Pilot.” They actually started with “PLT,” a combination of the surnames for the first full-fledged members, Paton, Lyall, and the drummer, Stuart Tosh; as Paton recalls, it was someone’s girlfriend who heard “PLT” and figured Pilot sounded better. The last official addition came when Ian Bairnson, the session guitarist who played on the demos, officially joined the line-up. There was some minor and/or comical label fuckery in the mix - e.g., EMI wanted a “pretty boy” for a guitarist to help with marketing, but Paton and Lyall insisted on Bairnson (not that the label didn’t have a point; see above) - but, put it all together and the stars don’t align much better than that: a talented band with a catalog of songs ready to roll, check; an ambitious label, check; and, once again, check, a couple hit singles. All of which begs the question, how did it go wrong?
The oldest story of them all, for starters: Pilot’s management utterly failed when it came to setting up tours. Their biggest singles did pretty well internationally - they had the States with “Magic,” a decent following in Japan, and Australia, in particular, took to “January” even more than UK audiences - but the band managed only two UK tours for as long as they stayed together. Elsewhere’s article flags a couple instances of impressive candor from Paton where he confessed that they ran out of ideas and, to some extent, got crushed by the (frankly pointless) comparison to the Beatles. The market proved to be another issue. The same article cut to the chase, if not ahead of it with this:
“Their half a dozen subsequent singles tanked everywhere although they continued to knock out albums, to no one's great interest.”
Both Lyall and Tosh had walked away by 1977, leaving Paton and Bairnson to carry on - which they did on a final album somewhat self-consciously titled, Two’s a Crowd. The other, possibly more significant, factor I’ve already hinted at it above: Paton didn’t care for fame and most of the members had already moved onto session/side-kick work. Both Paton and Bairnson played on Kate Bush’s first couple albums, Tosh played with 10cc, and all three later became members of the Alan Parsons Project. Oh, and did I mention that Alan Parsons produced “Magic”? The more I dig into English acts from the early rock era, the smaller that world looks to me.
That’s pretty much the story. And for anyone wondering why I didn’t reference Lyall much in this post, he passed from an AIDS-related illness in 1989 - post-Pilot and pre-internet, a black hole for low-hanging content. The rest of them got together on the band’s 40th anniversary, but it’s mostly Paton who carries the torch at this point.
About the Sampler
I fleshed out the hits, for starters, by adding their other minor hits - “Call Me Round” and “Just a Smile” - to the sampler. The rest I rounded out with a set of songs that matched what I’d call Pilot’s sound, including, from their 1974 debut, From the Album of the Same Name (c'mon, that's clever), the mellow “Lovely Lady Smile,” a piano-driven rocker “Sooner or Later,” “Over the Moon,” and, a contingent favorite, “Don’t Speak Loudly.” The two hits aside (e.g., “January” and “Call Me Round”), I added “You’re Devotion” from their follow-up album, 1975’s Second Flight. Finally, and from an album I’ve only seen referenced in Wikipedia’s discography section, Morin Heights, the fascinatingly funky, “Hold On,” Trembling,” and, finally, a strange assault on California titled “Canada.”
As for whether or not people will like Pilot, I’d say this: if you like Supertramp, Pilot could very well be for you. And I'll get to Supertramp one of these goddamn years...just not in this project.
Whether you know it from commercials for ads for a medication that’ll either fix you, kill you, or bring on psychosis (Ozembic?) or oldies radio, you know Pilot’s 1974 hit, “Magic.” That said, if you learned it through the commercials, you might not recognize its surprisingly heavy opening, but it breaks into the familiar chorus about ten seconds in.
It’s a hard song to hate so long as the Ozempic(?) commercials haven’t made you sick to puking of it. Bright melody balanced by a surprising heft on the bottom end, cheery, tight vocals, the whole thing does exactly what it’s supposed to: feel fucking good. Pure uplift in just over three minutes.
There’s not much story about the song itself: the two key members of Pilot - David Paton and Billy Lyall - wrote and recorded a bunch of demos between 1972 and 1974 and “Magic” was the hit. They co-wrote most of Pilot’s material, but a 2012 interview with Paton for a Scottish radio station (Golden Brown, they call the show) suggests Paton took the lead. In it, he talks about talking ideas and melodies into a tape recorder he kept on top of his piano, and having the bones of the song lined up. He got further inspiration one early morning when his wife said something about “I’ve never been awake to see a day break,” a line you’ll hear immediately after the chorus.
The best story, though, followed from the friendly competition that Pilot’s label, EMI, set up between them and a couple label-mates signed at the same time - one called Steve Hearly & Cockney Rebel, the other a band called Queen. All the bands wanted to record the first No. 1 single, of course, and EMI’s suits leavened the competition with camaraderie by way of having the bands eat together and generally mingle. On one of those occasions - and this was after Pilot had landed its first No. 1 - Paton spotted Freddie Mercury and walked over for a chat. When he got there, Mercury’s first question was, why walk over to talk to me? Taken aback, Paton sputtered a polite response. Mercury came back with, “When I have a number one, I won’t talk to anyone.”
For the record, “Magic” wasn’t Pilot’s No. 1. It topped out at No. 11 on the UK charts; it did better in the States, hitting No. 5 on the Hot 100. Pilot’s scored their first No. 1 with a song called “January,” but that was only in the UK. That one stalled on the cool side of the Hot 100. And Queen, of course, became QVEEN! (As in, who doesn’t know them?) There were a couple reasons for that, as it happens.
The Rest of the Story
Both Paton and Lyall came up in a busy, early 1970s Edinburgh scene. Both started as members of the Bay City Rollers, somewhere between permanent and substitute, though neither made it to the band’s glory days. For Paton, at least, two things posed a problem. First, he’d started writing and rating his own material by then and didn’t see that material getting worked into the Rollers’ rotation. Second, and relevant to the matter at hand, from something Paton offered in a retrospective for Goldmine Mag:
“I wanted success, I wanted to be a successful musician and songwriter, but unfortunately along with that comes, the fame. I didn’t react to it very well. I didn’t like the screaming girls, as I had been through all of that when I was in the Bay City Rollers. I actually hated it and didn’t like it at all. It took away a lot of my freedom, because I was a quite a social guy and had friends in Edinburgh I liked to go out with to the pub and whatnot. And that was all taken away from me.”
And yet Paton and Lyall still formed Pilot, which says something about the pull being “a successful musician and songwriter” had on them both. Fortunately, Lyall had a day-job as an engineer at Edinburgh’s (then young, apparently) Craighall Studios and he’d arrange time for he and Paton to get in the booth and flesh out their songs. As noted above, they recorded a collection of songs over a two-year period, which became the original corpus of Pilot’s discography. And now the other side of the story.
A site called Elsewhere posted a “where are they now” article on Pilot, which explains EMI’s thought process in signing all those acts: short version (and, holy shit, I did not know about Badfinger’s dark aftermath), they wanted to sign the next Beatles. Like everyone else. My God, the weight of that band. At any rate, Elsewhere tracks all the twists and turns (worth the read, honestly), notably about how the Beatles started with Apple and then EMI became “the Beatles’ label,” and how a managing director at EMI heard Pilot’s many demos and dubbed them “really Beatley,” and so on.
The full band actually came together during those demo sessions - as did the name “Pilot.” They actually started with “PLT,” a combination of the surnames for the first full-fledged members, Paton, Lyall, and the drummer, Stuart Tosh; as Paton recalls, it was someone’s girlfriend who heard “PLT” and figured Pilot sounded better. The last official addition came when Ian Bairnson, the session guitarist who played on the demos, officially joined the line-up. There was some minor and/or comical label fuckery in the mix - e.g., EMI wanted a “pretty boy” for a guitarist to help with marketing, but Paton and Lyall insisted on Bairnson (not that the label didn’t have a point; see above) - but, put it all together and the stars don’t align much better than that: a talented band with a catalog of songs ready to roll, check; an ambitious label, check; and, once again, check, a couple hit singles. All of which begs the question, how did it go wrong?
The oldest story of them all, for starters: Pilot’s management utterly failed when it came to setting up tours. Their biggest singles did pretty well internationally - they had the States with “Magic,” a decent following in Japan, and Australia, in particular, took to “January” even more than UK audiences - but the band managed only two UK tours for as long as they stayed together. Elsewhere’s article flags a couple instances of impressive candor from Paton where he confessed that they ran out of ideas and, to some extent, got crushed by the (frankly pointless) comparison to the Beatles. The market proved to be another issue. The same article cut to the chase, if not ahead of it with this:
“Their half a dozen subsequent singles tanked everywhere although they continued to knock out albums, to no one's great interest.”
Both Lyall and Tosh had walked away by 1977, leaving Paton and Bairnson to carry on - which they did on a final album somewhat self-consciously titled, Two’s a Crowd. The other, possibly more significant, factor I’ve already hinted at it above: Paton didn’t care for fame and most of the members had already moved onto session/side-kick work. Both Paton and Bairnson played on Kate Bush’s first couple albums, Tosh played with 10cc, and all three later became members of the Alan Parsons Project. Oh, and did I mention that Alan Parsons produced “Magic”? The more I dig into English acts from the early rock era, the smaller that world looks to me.
That’s pretty much the story. And for anyone wondering why I didn’t reference Lyall much in this post, he passed from an AIDS-related illness in 1989 - post-Pilot and pre-internet, a black hole for low-hanging content. The rest of them got together on the band’s 40th anniversary, but it’s mostly Paton who carries the torch at this point.
About the Sampler
I fleshed out the hits, for starters, by adding their other minor hits - “Call Me Round” and “Just a Smile” - to the sampler. The rest I rounded out with a set of songs that matched what I’d call Pilot’s sound, including, from their 1974 debut, From the Album of the Same Name (c'mon, that's clever), the mellow “Lovely Lady Smile,” a piano-driven rocker “Sooner or Later,” “Over the Moon,” and, a contingent favorite, “Don’t Speak Loudly.” The two hits aside (e.g., “January” and “Call Me Round”), I added “You’re Devotion” from their follow-up album, 1975’s Second Flight. Finally, and from an album I’ve only seen referenced in Wikipedia’s discography section, Morin Heights, the fascinatingly funky, “Hold On,” Trembling,” and, finally, a strange assault on California titled “Canada.”
As for whether or not people will like Pilot, I’d say this: if you like Supertramp, Pilot could very well be for you. And I'll get to Supertramp one of these goddamn years...just not in this project.
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