The Book of Love: A tribute to city music scene legend Lenny Love

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The Book of Love charts Lenny’s influential relationship with The Rezillos

You can make a decent guess at the age of most Edinburgh music fans by finding out which part of Lenny Love’s career stirs their passion most.

It is a bit like calculating the age of a tree by counting the rings in the cross-section of its felled trunk, only in this the rings are all scored on black vinyl discs.

The late, much-loved former Island Records A&R man’s career spanned - and he helped to shape - some of the great musical moments of the past decades with roots in the Capital. 

First up, The Rezillos. Fay Fife, Eugene Reynolds and their new wave gang put the fun in punk, singing Everybody’s on Top of the Pops on, where else, Top of the Pops in 1978. A little over a year earlier, the Edinburgh College of Art students were playing gigs in the Teviot Row students’ union. Guitarist and songwriter Jo Callis would go on to join The Human League and co-write some of their biggest hits. Fife and Reynolds would create an Edinburgh music legend. 

The leap from Teviot Row to a wider audience and then Top of the Pops? That’s where Love stepped in. He released their first single, recorded in a home studio in a Bruntsfield tenement, on his own label, Sensible Records. He was also the young band’s first manager, whose irrepressible exuberance and great industry contacts helped propel the band to national attention.

Then there was Simple Minds. Love used to take acts like Tom Petty and Ian Dury into Bruce’s Record Shop, where he was a regular visitor, on Rose Street. Owner Bruce Findlay would famously become the Glasgow band’s manager and through teir Lenny their popular tour manager. He travelled the world with them as they established themselves through the 1980s as one of the world’s great stadium rock bands.   

Some will find it hard to see past Lenny’s Vegas years. No, he didn’t do an Elvis impression (well, he probably did at some point), but this Vegas was one of the Capital’s greatest club nights in the 2000s. As host and DJ Dino Martini, he helped turn the Voodoo Rooms into the the epitome of swinging, cocktail-sipping retro cool. Such a cool club doesn’t need any outside validation, but the List magazine nevertheless bestowed on it the title of the best club night in Scotland. It really was that good - and a large part of it was down to Lenny.