RARE EXHIBITS ARE part and parcel of any Museum – but a set from a 60’s pop band is perhaps not the sort of thing people would normally expect.
That is exactly what is to happen this weekend when a six-month exhibition, Bonici and the Beat Scene, opens at the Elgin Museum, featuring a collection built up over many years by music historian David Dills.
The exhibition celebrates musician and promoter Albert Bonici, and his Two Red Shoes dance hall in Elgin – a venue renowned throughout the country and a launch-pad for many local musicians, including ‘Windy Miller’, who played the venue and signed for Albert’s record label.
Now Windy Miller have come together again for Saturday’s exhibition launch where they will play their first full gig in 40 years.
Albert Bonici was renowned as ‘the man who brought the Beatles to Elgin’, the Liverpool band just one of many he signed up to tour Scotland.
Born in Inverness, Mr Bonici lived most of his life in Elgin where it was his interest in the music scene long before Beatlemania took a grip of the world that led to the legend that was to become the Two Red Shoes.
He had began promoting dances at venues all along the Moray coast in the 1950’s so by the time the 60’s music scene arrived Albert had already become one of the most respected music promoters in the UK.
That was good news for local talent – among them Windy Miller, a Buckie band who cut their LP ‘Windy Miller on the Rise’ at the Two Red Shoes.
Bonici and the Beat Scene is the result of years of work from David Dills, who has his own online blog ‘Scotbeat’ recalling the ‘music beats that got Scots dancing in the 1960’s’.
The Elgin Museum exhibition gathered by Mr Dills will comprise of just some of the artefacts relating to the career of Albert Bonici and those who helped him create a “music happening” in the north of Scotland.
A pre-launch article on the exhibition can be found on Scotbeat.
