City scenes is our weekly feature in which we check out the music scene of a different city around the world. We’re moving through the alphabet each week and so far we’ve been in Addis Ababa, Bristol, Chicago, Detroit, Edinburgh, Frankfurt and now we’re going to be looking at the music scene of Glasgow.
Glasgow Punches way above it’s weight when it comes to music. In fact it’s quite unbelievable how many famous bands have come up through the city's music scene. To name a few, some of them include Belle and Sebastian, Bronski Beat, Biffy Clyro, Chvrches, Franz Ferdinand, Mogwai, Orange Juice, Primal Scream, Simple Minds, Texas, Travis…. And that’s just scraping the surface.
The City holds an average of 130 concerts and music events per week - from DIY punk gigs in peoples apartments to stadium concerts, experimental sound art performances in art galleries or illegal raves in tunnels under the city, Glasgow is a city that absolutely lives for music.
Glasgow has way too big a scene to give a full picture or history of in this half an hour slot that we have so today we play a couple of tracks by some groundbreaking and legendary names from Glasgow and then we focus on the current wave of bands that are active in Glasgow’s underground music scene.
The Jesus and Mary Chain are a band that were hugely influential in the creation of a genre called sheogaze that was popularised in the late 1980s and early 1990s by bands like My bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Ride.
One of the driving forces behind glasgow’s seemingly endless supply of great new bands is the Glasgow school of art which has produced countless famous artists but also famous bands. The art school plays a huge role in the social nightlife of the city through its student union which also acts as one of the cities main music venues and fertile ground for student bands to find their feet and play their first gigs. Perhaps the ultimate Glasgow Art school band is called Franz Ferdinand.
Franz Ferdinand emerged from the Glasgow School of Art in the early 2000s and took the world by storm with their own brand of angular dance rock which was designed as much for the disco as it was for the mosh pit.
And blending genres like that, bringing together dance music and fusing it with guitars without any kind of regard for predefined genres is something that seems to happen a lot in Glasgow. There’s a fearless energy and experimentalism that you see in many young bands in the city and that is due in no small to part to a tiny recording studio in the west of the city called Green Door Studios.
Green Door is an analogue recording studio that was set up in the early 2000s by a trio of sound engineers who wanted to open a space where young bands could come together to experiment without the pressure of time constraints, budgets and rules so they found a way to get funding to run free educational courses for young musicians, teaching them things like how to operate a recording studio, how to make electronic music, how to place microphones on a drum kit but also that there were NO fixed rules that a musician or recording engineer needed to follow in order to make music. In this free and open space, they brought together young musicians from across the city and encouraged them to experiment, play around and make music together and the result was often magical.
Many bands were formed on those courses and every week in Glasgow these days you can see young bands playing in venues like Stereo, The old hairdressers, the flying duck, nice and sleazys and the art school, many of which have been through and even formed on the green door courses like Kaputt, Hairband and Golden Teacher.
Free Love is a husband and wife duo who both also came up through the courses in Green Door. Amazingly, Lewis from the band is now running a course in Glasgow teaching youngsters to make electronic music and carrying on that spirit of introducing young people to new and different ways to make music.
What you hear here is only a snap shot of the music scene in Glasgow but we hope you’ve enjoyed all the music. This was also the last city scenes of the year, we’ll be back for the letter H in 2023.