I don't know if this is a good idea and I haven't even read it all but perhaps some of you might like to see this article from today's Guardian on the scene in Glasgow, "Britain's undisputable second musical city" (I presume he means London is the first - why?). More mentions of the wispy, delicate and 'unbelievably shy' Belle and Sebastian than you could shake a small bus at, but no photo (ha!). Nick S. Dastoor nick_dastoor.bsho@notes.compuserve.com SCOTTISH BANDS - WEST END PEARLS. By Tom Cox. Exit Central Station, ride the tube four stops anti-clockwise from Buchanan Street, get off at Hillhead, and you're there: at the hub of Scotland's leading cultural outpost, the midstream of a humble but broad-minded metropolis with a fast-accelerating civic pride. After a regional survey, last week's Big Issue magazine voted Glasgow Britain's coolest city, decreeing it was spontaneous, classless, young and vibrant, with a youth population who wouldn't want to live anywhere else in the world. Owing largely to Trainspotting and the 1996 Turner Prize, it's been propitious to be Scottish for some time now. Being Glaswegian, the survey proves, is better still. Canvassing Glasgow's thriving musical community, I arrive at even more conclusive results. When interrogated, nine out of 10 Glasgow musicians stay inexorably loyal to their home city - and opine that Glaswegian pop music is currently at its bonniest ever. This is more than just hackneyed home-town pride. Look at the evidence. Recently, Glasgow has stepped forward as Britain's undisputable second musical city, leaving competitors Manchester and Liverpool in a cloud of sub-Oasis dust. Avant-garde overlord John Peel claims to have aired more records from Glasgow in the last 12 months than at any other time during his four-decade career. Moody sods Arab Strap soundtrack the Guinness advert. The unbelievably shy and delicate Belle And Sebastian get closer to a Top Of The Pops outing with each single. Even Spice Girl Mel C has been seen out watching the really quite ramshackle Urusei Yatsura. After a few years being buffeted around half-invented weekly music press scenes, Glasgow is set to transcend previous tags - lo-fi retro - though sheer eclecticism. In the first half of 1998, expect new albums from Belle And Sebastian, Superstar, Urusei Yatsura, The Delgados, Adventures In Stereo, Arab Strap, The Pastels, The Leopards, Future Pilot AKA, 18 Wheeler and Mogwai. This is a frequently terrific bunch, who - due to the once-unimaginable success of Belle And Sebastian and Teenage Fanclub, and the groundwork of deviants like Orange Juice and The Pastels - can now feel nowhere near as marginalised as they used to. Back in the eighties, Glasgow rock meant Simple Minds and Wet Wet Wet: slick, bloated, arena-ready ego-massaging which said little about its place of origin, let alone the lives of its fans. Anything else was strictly peripheral. `We felt quite disenfranchised by the grandiose sound in the eighties,' remembers Stephen McRobbie from The Pastels, who along with the Jesus And Mary Chain, Primal Scream and The Vaselines, formed an original kicking-against-the-pricks guild in reaction to corporate misery. `We'd all had similar experiences - there was nowhere good to play in Glasgow and a lack of communication.' The difference now, with the stadium pomposity gone, is that the self-sufficient Glasgow band is a realistic commercial prospect - still able to operate on its own terms, but no longer creatively isolated, despite being 500 miles away from music biz central. A proliferation of record labels, clubs and bands ensures constant moral support, without a niggling media spotlight. The effect is such that a band like Belle And Sebastian can earn universal praise and top 40 success with minimal nationwide gigs and still fewer interviews. Their decision is simple: `When it comes to chosing between a gig in London and playing in front of all our friends, we'll go for the friends every time,' explains Sarah Martin, the group's violinist. Martin, a Mancunian who relocated to Glasgow in the early nineties, finds the underworld fellowship of the city both spooky and alluring. `It seems really incestuous in a way - once you're in a band, you end up drinking with all the other bands. Everyone's sensible here, though. No matter how successful people are, you still see them going down to The 13th Note to check out the latest group.' Delgados vocalist Emma Pollock agrees: `Because of what we do, we can just go out and have a party. Nobody's organised it, but you can't turn around without seeing someone you know. Plus, there's no pressure to compliment someone's band just because you're friends with them.' The 13th Note is the premier night-time rendezvous for Glaswegian subculture, a venue with a free plug-in policy, ensuring that fledgling local outfits can always get a gig mere days after first picking up a Rickenbacker. Step from Hillhead tube station into the West End and you're greeted by the other meeting places: the daytime ones. Immediately t o your right is Jon Smith's, the book and record shop where Stephen from The Pastels will sell you the esoterica of your choice. Across the road is a succession of cosmopolitan nosheries. Around the corner, you'll find bohemian backstreet cafes likely to be thronged with at least a million members of Belle and Sebastian, Mogwai or The Delgados at any one time. Glasgow may still be a mean city, and parts of it may look like eastern Europe with better shops, but this is different - safe, cultured and lively. Eight years ago Glasgow was designated European City Of Culture by the European Community. It's difficult to gauge the benefit this had on underground music, but there's a definite residual optimism. Most of 1998's rock population are industrial suburbanites who've been magnetised to the centre by its increasingly ebullient nature. The Pastels' Stephen McRobbie was one of the first. `The West End can be quite deceptive,' he points out. `Most of us actually grew up close to poverty-stricken areas. Our parents were only quite poor but our grandparents were really, really poor.' `Traditionally Edinburgh's slummy, ill-educated in-law, Glasgow is turning the tables, attracting a different kind of person,' reckons Gerry Love, who, like the rest of Teenage Fanclub, hails from the Lanarkshire no-man's land a dozen miles outside the city. `When I was growing up, the whole west of Scotland was like a wasteland and Glasgow was a demolition zone - like That Sinking Feeling, the Bill Forsyth movie. It's become more sophisticated since I moved here.' The archetypal minor Glaswegian rock star is often ascribed an innocuous persona in the music press - sleepy Stephen Pastel, cuddly Joe Superstar, cheeky Gerry Fanclub. Apart from being somewhat patronising, this undermines an inherent grittiness in their backgrounds. Would a bunch of grinning nice-but-dims have a discography as soaringly memorable as Teenage Fanclub's? I think not. There's a personable nature here, but there's also a severe, single-minded one. Love tells me: `There's something bolshy and defiant about Glasgow bands. It's in our genes.' McRobbie defines it as a `swagger bereft of an over-egged rock-star arrogance' - something, as someone who's overseen Scottish independent music since the early eighties, he's recognised in all great Glasgow rock, from The Jesus And Mary Chain to Belle And Sebastian. What other factors are characteristic of the Glasgow band? Patience, for starters. Of the truly special Glaswegian works awaiting release in 1998, the majority come from songwriters who've quietly honed their pop chops over a number of years. Belle And Sebastian's introverted Stuart Murdoch was a familiar nomadic presence around Glasgow for years, DJ-ing in local clubs and distributing his home-recorded tapes of wispy, underdeveloped compositions inspired by the city's bus routes. Adventures In Stereo's fuzzy, Dusty Springfield-echoing mini-symphonies are textured by ex-Primal Scream axeman Jim Beattie. The emotionally intense, soulful Superstar are the brainchild of long-time Teenage Fanclub acolyte Joe MacAlinden, who, in an inferior incarnation, released an album through Creation Records in 1992. `I think what's emerged is a dedication to the art of making music, the same approach of film directors who maintain a high standard for 40 years,' as McRobbie sums it all up. Without a `Conquer the world, quick!' manifesto, the typical Glasgow band reverses every rock'n'roll cliche in existence. `Live fast, die young' becomes `Nae hurry, drink lots of tea'. `You've got a lifetime to write your first album and a year to write your second' becomes `We still need time to develop as a band'. `We're genius, us, our kid' becomes `Give us 10 years and we might be quite good'. With this `Who, us?' demeanour disguising a quiet determination, the Glasgow attitude nestles light-years from its mouthy counterpart south of the border. `There was a nationalism in Britpop that you wouldn't get here. Because we live in a smaller country, we tend to think more internationally,' McRobbie points out. Perhaps this is why the west coast of Scotland in 1998 bears comparison to the west coast of America in 1968. From the city's San Francisco district - a cross-hatched hillside street plan similar to the one which dominates Frisco's centre - to the unprompted Glaswegian support of mavericks like Kurt Cobain, Brian Wilson and Big Star's Alex Chilton, from Belle And Sebastian's beautified appreciation of Simon And Garfunkel to Superstar's interpretation of Stax soul, Glasgow's symbiotic relationship with the US never ends. `I think it's the port mentality, like Liverpool in the sixties - the next stop is America,' laughs Love. While it might not quite have reached Merseysound hysteria yet, something in Glasgow has changed, a shift from wilful amateurism to an ever-strengthening, communally stoked self-belief. The defiant spirit is still there, but now it's got new ambition and an accessible melody. Amazingly, it's honest and vibrant. What's more, the music business is just a little too far away to spoil the party. By its very determination to be unhip, Glasgow is becoming the hippest musical city of all. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- . This message was brought to you by the Sinister mailing list. . To send to the list please mail "sinister@majordomo.net". . For subscribing, unsubscribing and other list information please see . http://www.majordomo.net/sinister . For questions about how the list works mail owner-sinister@majordomo.net . We're all happy bunnies humming happy bunny tunes. Aren't we? -----------------------------------------------------------------------