Soundyngs normally signposts research outputs, but here’s research-in-the-making, or, practice-based research; singing about history, making history.
People Make Places: a day of chatting about and making popular music in St Andrews on Saturday 4th October, 2025.
Open to the public, free, from 10:30am.
* To help us to plan, please tell us you are coming using the form here.
This is the first of 2 one-day events, the second to be held in Glasgow in spring 2026. These are part of a wider project called “Popular Music and the Academy” which asks, can being in a band be a form of research?
At the heart of the project is the work of Glasgow rock band and collective The Tenementals, whose first album (released November 2024) creates a new history of the city through the medium of music (see the featured image at the top of this post).
The “People Make Places” chat-and-perform days will explore how popular music can radically imagine urban community identities within and outwith the academy. If making popular music is how people both express and imagine themselves and their communities, can performance-as-research both reflect and help to (re)imagine communities in modern Scotland?
The St Andrews event will comprise morning discussion of research in progress (speakers from Glasgow, St Andrews (Art History, Music Centre, and the Radical Urban Lab), Dundee and Fife College), and afternoon performances by The Tenementals and performers based in Fife and Tayside, both in the Laidlaw Music Centre, St Andrews. A student-led event in the St Andrews Student Association in the evening will explore new-made student songs.
Soundyngs is eclectically fond of all kinds of Scottish music, from psalms to folk ballads to post-punk. We think that popular music is a central part of the story of Scottish music and important to many Scottish people who like music.
For more information email us via the Soundyngs Contact page, with the subject line ‘People Make Places’.
Further Listening (we’ll be adding to this – watch this space…)