My friend and colleague Kenneth Gloag, who has died aged 56 of cancer, was a leading authority on 20th-century British classical music. He was at the same time one of a generation of scholars whose own background in the popular culture of the 1960s and 70s helped to cement the status of rock and pop in UK academic musicology.
Ken was born and brought up in Edinburgh, the son of Alexander Gloag, a roof tiler, and his wife, Violet (nee Peel). He attended Bruntsfield primary and then James Gillespie’s high school in Edinburgh, Muriel Spark’s alma mater, but he found school uninspiring and left with few qualifications. He worked in the Phoenix record shop on the Royal Mile, played rhythm guitar in the band Ducktail, and coordinated community arts. Gaining his highers through night school, he took a two-year diploma at Napier Polytechnic, followed by a BMus at the University of Surrey, an MMus at King’s College London and, in 1995, a doctorate at the University of Exeter.
Sing Like A Bird 