The Glasgow PodcART

Almost precisely one month ago, I gathered the Ford Ka-full of belongings that I’ve accumulated over the past quarter century. I adjusted my rear-view mirror, started my engine and slowly pulled out of Copland Place, my destination, as described by the signs I followed – THE SOUTH. I left behind five years of friends and enemies, five years of ringing ears and hardened fingers, a somewhat excellent band and the worst job I’ve ever had.

While deliberating whether or not to accept the job which would drag me from the city that had gestated me in my most recent years, as is the nature of hopelessly analytical human beings I made a list of pros and cons. The hope was that something would jump out and justify staying in Glasgow, but, of course, nothing did.

What the list did highlight, were the things I knew I’d miss, aforementioned friends, flatmates and band featuring highly, but having settled back down here there are things I genuinely didn’t think I’d miss. One is the Scottish ability to re-brand. As a youngster beginning a PR career, I know that whoever it was that managed to reinvent burnt rolls as ‘well fired’ is a genius beyond the combined calibre of Tucker and Campbell. Scottish inventors are also incredible, I’m not talking Baird, Bell or Fleming, and I mean whoever persuaded someone at walls to commission the development of a seemingly tried and tested meat product, settling on square as the optimum form.

Another thing I really didn’t think I’d miss is music snobbery, snobbery might not be the right word, but let me explain. Snobbery has too negative a connotation in this case and I’m really trying to use this analogy to paint snobbery in a positive light, the quality of challenging and questioning art. The residents of the town I now live in don’t so much digest culture, as let it wash over them like a tsunami of mediocrity.

There’s one music venue that can attract acts of a sufficient calibre, which is a leisure centre, so effectively the pinnacle of going to watch live music is done so in a sports hall. These gigs are not attended because the bands are well received or adored, the mindset is purely that because whatever act, whose name has been constantly repeated on Radio One or some other mainstream muck spreader, are gracing Swindon with their presence, the recent Radio One Big Weekend, a potent illustration.

I can’t blame them; it’s safe and comforting, probably, to tread water at the same old pace, knowing it’s impossible to fall below zero. It’s easier to be spoon fed gruel, hand picked largely by the industry. It won’t be delicious, it won’t be interesting, but ultimately it leaves you sustained for another day.

The alternative is to take a risk, live dangerously and go hunting yourself, actively search out art (in this tired and confused analogy embodied by a boar). Sure, there’s more effort involved and it might be longer between meals, there will be days where you go hungry, but ultimately I believe when you finally sink your teeth into that tender boar meat, that’s the reward. That boar, for me, signifies a Tellison, a Why, a Weakerthans, a Maps, an Emmy the Great.

I’m also surprised to miss a vibrant part of Glasgow’s population, most effectively described as scenesters and hipsters. You know the type, folks with so little self awareness that they’ll talk you to death in particular bars about the band that’s playing, and how the guitarist used to be some other band, and look at you like you should know all about that other band and make you feel like an ignorant moron for not knowing. As if you’re supposed to be impressed that this kid knowing the entire musical history of a bloke you could just as easily walk up to and ask if you felt you had so little going on in your life, that you were inclined to learn the biography of a stranger.

We’ve all been there, right? Maybe it’s just me but I used to politely make my excuses go back to my mates and recount with adlibbed jokes my conversation with Coring Bunt.

In hindsight, taking a step back, I think those people are pretty amazing. Recounting the number of “conversations”, I’d generally zone out and imagine in megapixel detail just how disfigured the guy’s feet are from all this name dropping. I now think that these characters are just displaying their pride in the frankly stunning musical landscape that Glasgow is.

They’re showing how proud they are that Glasgow’s a city of hunters, from musicians to journalists, promoters to punters, photographers to bloggers, the average is marginalised, discarded, dismissed. Of course, no town or city in Britain is completely purged of blind open-mouthed, bib wearing consumers, for every challenger there’s ten fluorescent-clad easyjet girls, twenty spikey haired illiterate wastes of life.

But, for as long as the hunters are still searching, Glasgow’s rich tradition will continue, there will be a reward for working hard to create beautiful, out of the ordinary, erudite art. It’s the name-droppers, the biographers, the fanboys, and the scenesters, who create the ideal environment for the latest crop of world beaters to thrive.

I firmly believe there are bands ruling the roost at the moment making achingly beautiful music which would be marginalised and ignored in most of the rest of Britain. Bands like French Wives, Esperi, Seventeenth Century, Admiral Fallow and the Twilight Sad would be largely ignored because they require effort to discover, to appreciate. I recently played a gig in Swindon and my friend told me after, while he had enjoyed it, I was “too wordy, too literate” for a Swindon crowd. I’m certain it wasn’t meant as such, but it’s probably the best compliment I’ve ever been paid.

So thank you namedroppers, your existence, desire and hard work creates the perfect canvas for the great bands in Glasgow to paint on. Every photographer, everyone who talks the ears off unsuspecting barfly’s, anyone who does the smallest thing to further music in Glasgow, take a bow. You’re as important as the musicians.

If you could move to Swindon I’d be much obliged.

Christopher Panks