Gillian McPherson
A MUSICIAN who formed a successful band while serving prison time in Spain for drug trafficking has filmed a music video in Barrhead.
Allan McCarthy started Berlin 90 with fellow inmates at Sangonera jail in Murcia during his six-and-a-half-year sentence.
Their song “Runaway”, written by Allan, was entered into a national music competition organised by Spanish radio.
The group then surprised everyone by winning the opportunity to leave the prison under armed guard to visit a recording studio.
“Stormy Waters”, also penned by Allan, was the standout track recorded during this time and became the opening track in a double album compilation.
Now, more than three decades after this success, Scottish BAFTA Award-winning director Iain Henderson has teamed up with Allan to shoot a video for Runaway, starring the 60-year-old with his guitar in the streets he grew up in.
Speaking of the video, which has racked up “thousands of streams” across platforms, Allan said: “We decided to keep it quite simple.
“It was recorded live in the jail and it’s so funny that 30 years later there’s a video to it.”
Allan, who is now based in Barrhead after years of living in Spain, used to play in bands in the area as a young teenager.
He moved to Spain after attending Stow College and then Glasgow Tech (now Glasgow Caledonian University) where he booked bands as entertainment manager.
It is there he says his introduction to “the greyer side of life” started.
Following this he began working on doors of clubs and running security for them, as well as organising club nights.
Eventually, Allan moved to Spain, where he received his jail sentence and a 65 million peseta fine after being busted with a car full of cannabis in the late 1980s.
He spent the first 18 days after his arrest in a “dungeon” sleeping on a thick blanket on a cobbled floor.
A renowned jazz guitarist, who also ran a music academy, saw Allan at one of the first music workshops in the prison in Murcia and suggested getting a band together to enter the aforementioned radio competition.
The band’s name came about after they were filmed by a TV crew playing to the women’s prison and then unexpectedly caught sight of themselves on a common room television on the news before a segment about the Berlin Wall coming down.
At that very point, the guards asked what the band was called and they decided on Berlin, later adding the 90 to avoid having the same name as the American band behind the Top Gun song Take My Breath Away.
Amid the band’s escalating attention, Allan remembers how they performed songs in the middle of the top 40 show before they had even released a song.
He also explained that prison