‘Young at Heart’: The forgotten Scottish song that met with the wrath of the Pope
In Scottish music, indie is the sword that it lives and dies by. It has been so for the better part of the last half a century, with that juggernaut of guitars not showing any symptoms of slowing down soon.
When this scene first surged sometime between the 1970s and ‘80s, the scene was awash with bands from Simple Minds to The Jesus and Mary Chain to Orange Juice, among a litany of others. But one whose legacy became a little bit more overlooked within these seismic scores was The Bluebells – despite the fact that their biggest hit gained so much momentum that it landed at the door of the wrath of The Vatican.
If there ever was the definition of slow-burning success, you would find it in the band’s single ‘Young At Heart’, which was released no less than on three separate occasions before it wormed its way into the hearts of the classic indie rock canon. Having been co-written by Siobhan Fahey of Bananarama fame, and subsequently released by her band first in 1983 on their album Deep Sea Skiving.
But alongside Fahey in penning the song was Robert Hodgens, otherwise known as Bobby Bluebell, the frontman of The Bluebells. He had moved from Glasgow to London and was sharing a flat with Bananarama when they watched the Frank Sinatra film Young At Heart and got inspired to write the eponymous track.
When he was eventually cajoled into recording the tune for his band a year after Bananarama’s version, it got to number eight in the charts.
However, life went on, and The Bluebells split in the mid-80s. But then, unexpectedly, the song got used in a Volkswagen advert in 1993, and the band were back to the top of the tree. Reuniting to re-release the single, it shot to the top of the charts for four weeks and was a slew of glittering success – until it reached the ears of The Pope, that is.
“The Pope actually complained that the lyrics promoted divorce, which I thought was really funny – although my mum is Italian so she wasn’t best pleased,” Hodgens recently admitted to The Guardian. What a shame that old John Paul II wasn’t a fan of the indie new wave; he was definitely missing out.
But narrowly avoiding a Madonna-style witch hunt from the Catholic church, ‘Young At Heart’ sailed on its way to the league of Scottish indie legend, even if The Bluebells themselves didn’t necessarily follow suit.
This is not to say that their jangly romp of youth and frivolity has ever truly been forgotten, but it just goes to show how packed the Scottish indie scene was at the time, if a band who scored such a massive hit somewhat struggled to have their names remembered over the ensuing years. All these outfits spoke to a surge of electricity in the air that young people had the world at their feet. Perhaps symbolically, in the case of The Bluebells, their legacy will forever be frozen in time for being ‘Young At Heart’.
