Image: Still from Since Yesterday, photo credit Euan Robertson
A packed Dundee Contemporary Arts centre was the venue for those from the Tayside area who joined Soundyngs in catching up with this documentary film on its Scottish tour: as Screen Scotland’s website says, it’s “the story of Scottish pop music from the 1960s onwards told by the visionary women who got on stage and made music together”. The woman sat next to me agreed that the bands we remembered from our school days (whatever happened to ….) were brought clearly to mind, while we both began to understand a bit more about why there hadn’t been more of these.
Directed by Blair Young and Carla J Easton (herself a singer), the movie opened with a small girl in a bedroom full of pink fluff but no posters on the walls – a neat metaphor that transformed as bands were introduced, until the set was plastered with photographs and posters about the ‘girl bands’ in question. Although as one interviewee wryly mused, it would be great to get to the point where people were simply in bands rather than in ‘girlbands’, it’s important to have as models ‘people who look like us’.
While ultimately most of the stories told were of early promise fizzling out prematurely, the cross-generational interviews and memories brought into the room from many talented women musicians helped us at least to imagine an alternative narrative. By the end of the film, the single child of the opening scene had been joined by a gang of friends all bopping away and dressed in all styles from punk to grunge. It’s a nice conceit: bands provide youth with models of musical adult normalcy, and maybe the film can help to change the future narrative.
The narrator – Easton, formerly of band Teen Canteen – explained that the content of the film would track chronologically through the decades, even though most of us don’t necessarily encounter bands ordered along such a neat timeline. There could be room for even more exploration of how family listening shapes childhood expectations, although reasonably enough, the film went with the evidence of the interviewees, who appeared roughly in the order of the decades where they enjoyed brief fame.
This was an effective strategy, allowing us to see both (small) changes in pop music culture and, distressingly, some of the-same-old difficulties arising from a male-dominated industry. It was breathtakingly shocking to hear one of the Hedrons – a recent and still performing group – recalling that a music executive had been reluctant to sign them because, “at their age”, any one of them might just get pregnant and drop out. Stories from other bands were of exactly that happening – sometimes because the women themselves didn’t support their pregnant bandmates enough to be able confidently to imagine a maternity break and return to work.
“Boys” in “boy bands” no doubt have their own share of woes: the music industry is relentless in wanting to control and limit the commodities it owns. However, watching this film, it was clear that women have found it rather more difficult to be understood and taken seriously as musicians (a song about nuclear war by the Strawberry Switchblades was interpreted by one reviewer as a love song); and to manage successful long-running careers, from contract negotiation to sexual assaults gigging and touring. Cultural conditions and mentoring that would support and grow long term careers were glaringly and painfully absent.
The story was told through interviews with bands from the (surviving) members of featured groups: The Mckinleys (the earliest group, sisters from the 1960s); The Ettes, Strawberry Switchblade, The Twinsets, Sunset Gun, His Latest Flame, Sophisticated Boom Boom, Hello Skinny, Lung Leg, Melody Dog, Sally Skull, and The Hedrons.
In the 1960s, groups like duo the McKinlay sisters (who supported the Beatles and the Rolling Stones) might be hugely talented but typically supported the male acts in working conditions that were marginal and financially fragile. Nobody was properly looking out for them, and they also lacked confidence both in themselves to know how to leverage themselves further.
As time went on, some women got more street-smart in using fashion (gloriously, Strawberry Switchblade’s punk polka-dots), and in using fanzines, “rriot-girl” style (a parallel North American post-punk third-wave feminist music), to build communities of fans on their own terms. Their music was raw but as one of the interviewees said, if you go on tour, and just keep playing and practicing, you really do learn how to play your instruments (in her case, drums, traditionally a male preserve in many schools and youth clubs).
The film wasn’t just gloomy: it was funny and warm, and above all, a testament to the better moments when women making music together might simply be joyful. If it comes near you, see it.
Further Reading:
- Since Yesterday homepage
- Screen Scotland (Sgrin Alba) – Since Yesterday