Goodbye Mr Mackenzie

Few Scottish bands of the 1980s have a story as tangled as Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, a rock group formed in Bathgate, a town just outside Edinburgh. Martin Metcalfe started the act in 1984 after leaving his earlier band, Teenage Dog Orgy, and borrowed the name from Jean Rhys's 1931 novel After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. Shirley Manson and Rona Scobie, who played keyboards and sang backing vocals, were part of the line-up at the band's commercial peak, and the membership changed over the years, with John Duncan on guitar and Derek Kelly on drums among those who shaped the sound.

Their first release was a split single of "Death of a Salesman", issued through a Bathgate College course in 1984 and limited to 1,000 copies. After signing to Capitol Records in 1987, a re-release of "The Rattler" reached No. 37 in 1989, and the album Good Deeds and Dirty Rags climbed to No. 23 on the UK Albums Chart. Parlophone later cancelled the planned follow-up, Hammer and Tongs, and the band split in 1993. Manson left for Garbage in 1994, and the group reformed for a tour of Scotland in 2019, the year Good Deeds and Dirty Rags was reissued. In 2024 a re-release of Five debuted at number five in the Scottish albums chart.