THE last time Brent Rademaker toured Scotland, it killed off his band.

Over a decade later and the singer is hoping the same fate won’t befall GospelbeacH, the folk-rock and power-pop California outfit who play Mono on Friday night.

Brent is also a member of Beachwood Sparks, the hotly tipped alt-country band who flamed out over a decade ago, with Brent himself getting hooked on drugs like heroin for years afterward.

“We were riding high and then something happened,” says Brent, who sounds as laid back over the phone as you’d expect a California musician to be.

“I found myself totally lost and didn’t really do much music until Beachwood Sparks did a reunion in 2012 and that led me to sticking with music again. That Beachwood tour before everything went down was crazy, because we didn’t know how to handle everything.

“Imagine you show up at a club in Cardiff for the first night of a UK tour and it is packed with people expecting a great show, and you’re dragging yourselves onstage tired after being at a festival in Spain for three days, where you’ve been watching Belle & Sebastian and Primal Scream and partaking in any party favours you’re offered at it.

“By the time we reached Wales I was on this giant drugs hangover and our drummer was calling Rough Trade [their record label] wanting to book a plane ticket home and we’d be trying to stop him Our tour manager pulled the van over once and shouted at us ‘you don’t know what you’ve got, you’re acting like a bunch of monkeys!’ It won’t be like that this time…”

The Beachwood Sparks reunion came as Brent finally shook off his problems with drugs and depression. It inspired him to start making music again, which is where GospelbeacH enter the picture. The group have just released their second album, Another Summer Of Love, a record brimming with harmonies and hummable pop-rock.

It calls to mind everyone from the Flying Burrito Brothers to classic Tom Petty.

“The music we’re making is that 70s rock that you’d hear on the radio and some people might think that’s cheesy, but there’s a real innocence to it,” adds Brent, who also plays bass with his brother Darren’s indie band the Tyde.

“You have to get down to what you love about rock n’ roll before you write songs like that, these love songs with great choruses. For people to relate to those songs you have to strip everything away and go to an honest place.”

That honesty also saw him write about his partner, Kathleen. For years Brent was reluctant to write any love songs out of fear of jinking their relationship, but after a decade together he felt it was the right time.

“I’m a huge fan of Teenage Fanclub and how writers like Norman Blake can really bring out the raw emotion of a relationship,” he says.

“I mean, I’ve written about people I care about deeply before, but I didn’t want to write anything melancholy about Kathleen because I’ve finally made a relationship work. We’d be playing gigs and she’d say to me ‘I have to listen to all these songs about girls who broke your heart’ and I promised her I’d write her some love songs if we made it, and we did.

“I bounced back from some hard times too with the drugs and depression, and losing the band and everything else. The fact I’m able to still do make music now says a lot about my relationship with Kathleen and the fact she has stuck with me through it all.”

Teenage Fanclub aren’t the only Scottish band he’s an admirer of. An early Scottish show with Beachwood Sparks saw Brent delighted to see some familiar faces from the Scottish scene in attendance.

“A lot of the records and bands I loved had connections to Glasgow and Scotland,” he says,

“We did a gig in Glasgow once and it was full of my heroes from the Scottish rock n’ roll world. There was someone from Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, people from Teenage Fanclub, people from Orange Juice.

“They all had an affinity for the sound of the West Coast and naturally we related to it as well. They all seemed to have great taste in records, guys like Bobby Gillespie and Alan McGee. We ran across him in the 1990s and we all just dug the same albums.”

GospelbeacH, Mono, Friday, £8, 7.30pm

Jonathan Geddes