Wonderful, wonderful songs. And Danny Wilson write them. Not only that, but they managed to get a deal from Virgin on the strength of some good demos. Tony Bacon discovers how it be done.

"Songs are my passion — I love songs so much." So says 25-year-old Gary Clark, singer and chief songwriter of the Dundee group Danny Wilson. You can hear evidence of this passion on their LP, "Meet Danny Wilson", a record so assured and chock full of well-crafted songs that its debut album status may well come as a surprise.

Gary is sitting in a London hotel where the group are staying during some rehearsals for a TV show. He's already found that some people are unused to dealing with quality songs in the transitory world of pop. "I've done a few interviews where people say where's the politics?" he tells me, puzzled. "They say there's no politics on your album, where's the anger? I try to explain that I find writing and playing an uplifting, spiritual feeling. I've never really written anything out of anger. I suppose I might change." He sounds unconvinced.

Virgin Records were convinced enough by Danny Wilson to sign them up and send them off to record an album before they'd put even a single down on tape. This is unusual. The record company signed them on the strength of some good demos, having been drawn to the group through an ecstatic review of a gig they played in Edinburgh in 1985.

But before all the exciting stuff, Gary remembers how fickle fashion had managed to twist matters around a little. He and Ged the bass player moved to London from their native Dundee in 1982, figuring that London was the place to be to get a record deal.

"You would read a review in one of the weeklies, and it'd be of a band at, say, 'the Bull's Head' in London, and you'd think Christ, people are getting reviews playing in pubs! And you'd imagine there were A&R men leaning on the bar in every pub. Sign here, have a silver suit."

The reality was less straightforward. They stayed in London for a few years, made a few demos, and even played some pub gigs, though these were hard to get and distinctly unpopulated by A&R persons. They were also less than profitable. "They would say you're getting 30 quid: you'd show up and discover there was a PA there that wasn't house, and you're paying for half of it, which would be 40 quid. So before you'd even played a note you'd have to put your hand into your dole money."

Gary and Ged went back to Scotland in 1985 because, as Gary explains, the focus of fashion had shifted. "We were sitting in this slum in London and reading reviews of bands we knew, playing in places back home like The Tayside Bar. The bands still didn't get a lot of money, but there were journalists writing about them."

Which is exactly what happened to Gary and Ged's group, who were now busily working their way through names like Very Important Men and Spencer Tracy, soon to culminate in Danny Wilson. What Gary describes as a "well over-the-top" review in the NME had record company people queuing for their gigs, after which the group found themselves in the strange position of being asked for demo tapes. Nothing strange about that, you say. Well, shall we say an ironic position, then? Gary will explain.

"The tapes we then gave these record company people were demo tapes that they'd already heard and rejected. They said oh, these are fabulous, have you got any more? Oh yeah, we said, here are some more you've already rejected. Actually we pretended they were completely new.

"I've got piles of rejection letters... drawers full of them."

"But we had a lot of demos. We'd sent out a lot of packages over the years — we had some photos done, we'd written our own biog, got someone to type it up to look smart, and each time we got some new demos done we sent them away to all the record companies that we had addresses for. I've got piles of rejection letters, drawers full of them. And here we were being asked by these same people for the same demos."

Did Gary get the feeling that their original demos had been listened to? "No. Somebody asked me this last weekend, a guy that had made some demos in a studio up in Dundee, he said, 'I've got my demo together and I want to send it to the companies, do you think it's worth it?' And I said I think it is worth it to do it, but you do it to learn from it, not to get a deal. I've never met a band with a deal who got it just through sending a cassette off in an envelope."

Had he ever got personal criticisms back after sending out demo tapes, or were the rejection notes just standard form letters, I wondered? "Sometimes somebody would put in a wee note, just a slip of paper that would say something along the lines of 'Liked "Mary's Prayer", any more in this vein please send to me'. That was rare. I think 99% of the time the tapes had not been listened to. You have to sort of create your own buzz, which we managed."

Why sign to Virgin? They were very nearly signed to WEA, Gary says. The group had no management at this stage, and began negotiations with WEA with the help of an all-important lawyer. But Gary detected a certain split in WEA's approach.

"They'd take you to a restaurant and say, 'Everything is fabulous, no problem. You want to work with that producer? No problem. Love your music, fantastic, sign here.' But then when we got to negotiate there'd be things like them wanting to hold on to TV rights, so they could flog something all over the world that you didn't like, and you'd get no money for that. Weird stuff."

This negotiating cost them a lot of money in lawyers' fees, but taught them a lot about record companies. Were Virgin any different, then?

"We decided that Virgin seemed to have a more honest face. The A&R man, Ronnie Gurr, was great. He was honest — if he didn't like something he'd say so, it wasn't all sweetness and light. I also liked some of the bands that he'd personally signed, the Blue Nile for example.

"But then when you've signed, the contract just goes in the drawer. You never think of it as a piece of paper with rules and regulations."

"But then when you've signed, the contract just goes in the drawer. You never think of it as a piece of paper with rules and regulations on it. We negotiated till we got a lot of artistic control — over artwork and stuff like that. But when it came down to it, Virgin didn't want to use the artist that we wanted to work with. They hold the purse strings, you know."

When it comes to the crunch, even the nicest record company will use their casting vote. Is that it? "Most of the time, yeah. You need a good manager, I s'pose. Though I'm really glad we did it without a manager for a while — the amount we learned! We were dealing with the record company face to face, learning about the structure.

"When we were on tour, for example, we went around the record shops with the reps. So you learn how they sell your records, it's all very good for you. I was stunned how easy it is to hype something. You'd go in, have a cup of coffee, and the guy would say 'Your single out at the moment is called 'Davy', is it?' And he'd code it into a computer... I suppose I shouldn't be saying this, I'll get somebody jailed... it would come up on the computer for the chart return, and they would say, 'Here's another five sales for you,' punch in five sales, and then the rep would maybe give them extra of something they knew they were gonna sell. Here's another five Boy George albums and we'd get five singles registered. Still never went in the charts!"

The A&R department is a much maligned section of the average record company. The popular image is that they don't listen to tapes and just sit around, only getting interested in signing bands when other companies start sniffing around a current hot favourite.

"I'd say that's not far from the truth," grins Gary. "But it's amazing the way the A&R department listen to records. You've just cut a single, say, and A&R are on the phone to you saying, 'We're getting a cab to get you over here cos we've got to hear this immediately.' So here you are with your acetate. They put it on the turntable, the needle goes kkkhhhh across the record, and then their phone goes and it's 'yeah well blah blah I'll meet you for lunch next week blah blah' and then they put the record on properly and they PLAY IT LOUD. Loud as anything, all you can hear is the bass rumbling around the floor, and then another phone goes, and they just turn it down, 'blah blah oh a game of tennis fantastic blah blah blah yes well I'll see you then blah blah.' Off they come and they look at you and say, 'Ah, what was it like then?' And you go, 'Oh, er, it was turned down.' And they say, 'Well you have a listen, I've just got to pop off and see somebody else.'"

Where A&R people often come in handy is in sorting out producers. "They have to know what producers are good for certain things and who the good up-and-coming producers are," suggests Gary. But don't they often want certain producers just because they've had hits, not because they might be good for your music?

"That's generally the first thing they think of. We were really lucky — Virgin let us take chances on who we worked with. Their first suggestions were people like Glyn Johns, people with big track records, and people who were maybe working on the new Helen Terry single or something like that, somebody they knew, somebody they were hearing results from. But we decided to work originally with Howard Gray, who as an engineer had worked with a lot of people we really liked, the Cure and stuff, and had some production credits with Scritti Politti which we really liked. So we met Howard, liked his attitude, then had another meeting that was more in detail about the songs. He got into our idea of wanting to use lots of different instruments rather than this week's snare sound."

Howard produced eight of the 13 tracks which ended up on "Meet" — Virgin weren't keen on some of the other productions, so the group redid a few tracks with Dave Bascombe (Tears for Fears, Tom Verlaine, "different from Howard, more of an engineer"). Also, when they suffered from the well known affliction 'can't recreate the demo', they ended up using one of their Dundonian 8-track demos, produced by long-time helpmate Allan McGlone.

And so Gary and I move on into a heated discussion about the recently released demos of songs by Steely Dan, one of Gary's major influences, but soon we're interrupted by a ringing telephone. Gary takes the call, and hears that Danny Wilson's latest single, 'Mary's Prayer', has gone up again in the US charts. "Number 40 with a bullet," he beams, aiming the phone vaguely back at its holder. "Party tonight!" Our discussion moves to celebratory details, and Gary is soon scurrying off to give the other Danny Wilsoners the news. I have a feeling this will be the first of many successes.