A FIRST-TIME author has gone back in time to deliver an oral history of those involved in Scotland’s post-punk scene.

Grant McPhee directed and produced the critically acclaimed TV documentaries Big Gold Dream and Teenage Superstars.

The Haddington resident interviewed dozens of people involved in the important music periods, as well as using rare and archive footage to create the documentaries.

Now, he has joined forces with Douglas Macintyre and Neil Cooper to tell more of the stories from that era.

He said: “I did the documentary Teenage Superstars, which was about the Glasgow 1990s indie music scene.

“The film I did before that, Big Gold Dream, was Edinburgh and Glasgow in the late 1970s and early 1980s indie scene.

“When we did that, it was in the mid-2000s to about 2015.

“It was a nine-year project and we interviewed about 70 people and each interview was probably about two or three hours long.

“There were hundreds of hours of interview material and we did the two films, which are 90 minutes.

“There were hours and hours of stories which had not been told.

“One of the collaborators from the first film, Douglas Macintyre, got chatting to me about three years ago about doing something with the interviews to re-explore Big Gold Dream and tell the other stories we could not tell in 90 minutes.”

Since then, the duo have been working alongside Neil Cooper to bring those stories to life.

Hungry Beat: The Scottish Independent Pop Underground Movement (1977-1984) was published yesterday (Thursday).

East Lothian Courier: Hungry Beat is officially released today (Thursday)

Ian Rankin, the author behind the hugely successful Inspector Rebus series, has provided the foreword for the book.

Grant, who previously worked as a digital imaging technician on Outlander, was looking forward to getting his hands on a copy of the book when he spoke to the Courier on Tuesday afternoon.

A launch event was taking place in Portobello that evening, when Grant would see the finished book for the first time.

He said: “We did the book and it got picked up by White Rabbit, who are owned by Orion, who are the fifth biggest publisher in the world.

“White Rabbit is considered the coolest book publisher.

“For us, it is like science fiction that our first book is picked up by somebody like that.”

Covering the period from 1977 to 1984, the book begins with the Subway Sect and the Slits performance on the White Riot tour in Edinburgh before moving through to Bob Last shepherding The Human League from experimental electronic artists on Fast Product to their triumphant number one single in the UK and USA, Don’t You Want Me.

Hungry Beat is largely built on interviews for Grant’s Big Gold Dream film with Last, Hilary Morrison, Paul Morley and members of The Human League, Scars, The Mekons, Fire Engines, Josef K, Aztec Camera, The Go-Betweens and The Bluebells.

The father-of-one, who lives on the town’s Hardgate, said he “never imagined” he would ever speak to some of those involved with the bands he listened to growing up.

A special launch event is also taking place in Glasgow on Tuesday featuring the post-punk supergroup of Douglas, Malcolm Ross (from Josef K and Orange Juice), Campbell Owens (from Aztec Camera) and Ken McCluskey (the singer from The Bluebells).