Friday is a Fratelli
Channel 4′s Sounds From the Cities: Edinburgh aired recently (and can be watched again here, for the next week) and it was a programme I was really in two minds about. I hoped it would be really good, and feared it might be truly horrible.
A show about music in Edinburgh really could have been awesome, the kind of drive and energy it takes to make things happen here would have made for some very interesting stories, I think. Then when bits of Twitter information and so on started to seep through and I heard talk about Jim Gellatly talking to KT Tunstall and Jon Fratelli at the Electric Circus my first thought was to wonder what on Earth any of that could possibly have to do with Edinburgh.
Then I saw the Cardiff episode, and it was worryingly characteristic of Channel 4 music television – all swoopy cameras and presenters asking awkward, stupid questions to show that they are not being pompous and taking it all too seriously. This kind of style is supposed, I believe, to appeal to kids. Stupid kids, perhaps. Who fucking cares, to pick an example, that Sean Connery happens to be from Fountainbridge.
You can see where my fears started to multiply with this, can’t you. Swoopy cameras, yoof presentation styles, Jon fucking Fratelli (seriously?)… it all just seemed destined to be a big, flash, intellectually vacant carnival of f-list celebrity sycophancy. But I did know deep down that that was just me being a reactionary, cynical dickhead. And you know what, the show itself was actually pretty good.
I have quibbles of course – so many quibbles! For starters, it really wasn’t about Edinburgh at all. The people interviewed were the likes of Aidan Moffat, Stuart Murdoch and Edwyn Collins, while Jon Fratelli is a Glaswegian who was last relevant in 2005 and for all KT Tunstall apparently worked really hard playing small gigs here when she was starting off, she isn’t from Edinburgh either, nor to the best of my knowledge does she live here. Even when they were discussing the Postcard Records era of indie bands they neglected to mention Fire Engines, Josef K, Scars or the Shop Assistants, although maybe they thought the fact that Orange Juice, nominally from Glasgow, had a couple of Edinburgh lads in the band had that covered.
Even with KT Tunstall on the show, Fence Records were not so much as mentioned. So like all things about Scottish music, this was basically about Glasgow. Which is fine, there’s a sort of depressing inevitability to that and it didn’t really bother me, but I wish they had just called it Sounds From the City: Glasgow instead, because I did genuinely hope that they might have mentioned Edinburgh music at least once.
There was one Edinburgh musician on there, Kristina Cox, who was ‘democratically chosen by the citizens of cyberspace’. Her presence is a good thing, at least she is from here, but what that rather innocent-sounding phrase actually means is ‘we exploited the desire of young musicians to make a breakthrough to humbug them into doing our advertising for us’. These internet vote talent show things are basically, as far as I am concerned, large brands conning musicians into passing their advertising message around as many of their friends as possible. It fucking makes my skin crawl, but fair play to Kristina for entering and winning the vote. She sent me her music a while back, and seemed really nice, so for all it wasn’t my kind of thing, you can’t say she didn’t earn her chance.
The other thing which I found rather disappointing was the way Scottish music seemed to cease to exist in 2005. I think the most recently-emerged band to be name-checked was Franz Ferdinand, which is pretty bloody silly if they are were selling this, as I believe they were, as something current. Not one noteworthy band out of Scotland in the last five years, guys? Really?
So you’d think, with all the whining I’ve just done, that I hated the programme wouldn’t you? And actually, I didn’t.
For starters, I have to remind myself who this was aimed at – something we frequently forget in the very inward-facing world of DIY music. It’s not that the production company necessarily don’t care about The Phantom Band or Sparrow and the Workshop, for example, or FOUND, Broken Records, Withered Hand or Meursault, or even The Pictish Trail, King Creosote and James Yorkston. These bands just don’t have the name recognition, and this show was pitched at the necessarily wide audiences with which television deals. Almost none of the audience will care what is actually going on in Scotland right now because it’s nothing they have heard anything about, and even if the show were to cover it, it would be nothing they are likely to ever hear of again, meaning that the series would end up making very little connection with its audience.
If you want to make a show about actual emerging music in a place, and one which eschews the public humiliation of idiotic talent shows, then you are actually dealing with a much smaller niche – as I discussed a while back when talking about where music television might go from here. For an audience that small, Channel 4 simply could never have made the series. So I may quibble with a lot of the format – the comparative under-use of the considered opinions of some very interesting guests being my biggest gripe – but that is in the nature of the medium, and not something I think is fair to really moan about.
So what did they get right? Quite a bit, in my opinion. They may have neglected Fence, but they did identify the very strong spirit of independence running from Postcard Records to Chemikal Underground. Fence are the next natural link in this chain, which continues to the plethora of interesting micro-labels popping up around Scotland today, and is one of the defining characteristics of Scottish music as far as I am concerned.
In fact it’s one of the reasons I find it annoying that they didn’t mention Fence. Postcard and Chemikal basically took the fact that we are quite isolated from the heartland of UK media and culture, decided not let it get them down, and just got the fuck on with it anyway. They turned a potentially huge negative into an equally huge positive and Fence, and in particular their idiosyncratic festivals, are a significant embodiment of that ethos.
They also identified that stubbornness of spirit of most Scottish music people – that urge to do things their way or not at all. Maybe this is another feature of being isolated from the mainstream, such that individuality becomes more of a competitive advantage than conformity. I may not like KT Tunstall’s music, but I thought she nailed it with her statement: “We realised things weren’t going to come to us, so we were going to have to do things for ourselves; organise our own gigs, our own music nights, and put our own music out.”
So the ‘Edinburgh’ bit in the title may have been completely misleading, they may have ignored everything since 2005 or so, the actual format of the show may have been a bit silly (and detrimental to the chances of holding anything more than the most superficial of conversations) and the two bands they chose to highlight may have been ones I think are awful, but to a large degree these things are either matters of personal taste or inherent in the medium itself and the audience it must by necessity address.
But they nailed what I consider to be the some of the defining characteristics of Scottish music, and really captured the spirit of independence and self-reliance that I tend to see up here. They emphasised two of my favourite labels of all time and in general, for what it was, I think that Channel 4 actually did a pretty good job. Surprised? I was; pleasantly so.
