The Scotsman

‘What they did then mattered’

◆ Carla J Easton tells Fiona Shepherd what drove her to make her new documentar­y, Since Yesterday: The Untold Story Of Scotland’s Girl Bands, which has its premiere later this month

Here’s a pop quiz poser for you. Can you name the last Scottish girl band to have a Top 30 hit? Spoiler alert (and answer): it was Strawberry Switchblad­e with Since Yesterday in January 1985.

This Sibelius-sampling Scottish pop gem – the prettiest song ever about nuclear holocaust – reached No 5 and hung around the charts for 20 weeks. Strawberry Switchblad­e were the first band I ever saw live, so their polka-dotted pop explosion is indelibly etched in my musical scrapbook. A year later, this extraordin­ary duo had split up and have remained a cult footnote in Scottish pop ever since, fondly remembered by some, championed by a few, unknown to most.

A new documentar­y feature, Since Yesterday: The Untold Story Of Scotland’s Girl Bands, premiering on the closing night of the Edinburgh Internatio­nal Film Festival, aims to reclaim “the Scottish girl bands missing from bedroom walls”.

Depending on your vintage, this gorgeous film may stir memories of swinging Sixties sister act The Mckinleys, or ballsy punk trio The Ettes, or the sublime soul of Sunset Gun, or the grrrrl riot of Lungleg, or the fierce rocking of The Hedrons. All have been traced and interviewe­d by the filmmakers – musician and artist Carla J Easton and music video director Blair Young – who capture tales of DIY gigs and handbag roadies, TV appearance­s and stadium shows, scuppered opportunit­ies and squandered potential.

For Easton, it’s personal. She is a girl band veteran, fronting Glasgow-based indie pop outfit Teen Canteen for five years from 2012. “At the time that we launched we felt quite alone in terms of who we were,” she says. “I didn’t really feel like I was seeing my experience of being in a band represente­d.”

Young directed one of their videos and a conversati­on about a perceived lack of girl bands hailing from Scotland spawned the idea for a documentar­y. “That was the moment,” says Easton. A week later, they had tracked down Jeanette Mckinley and were interviewi­ng her in Dunbar. Coming from a DIY background, Easton is used to reaching out to make creative connection­s, but months of detective work followed as the majority of the featured musicians had disappeare­d from view after a few years.

“Meeting some of the women, they were so surprised to even be contacted,” says Easton, “but for me it’s really important that they know that what you did mattered and it still matters today when we’ve got festivals not signing up to 50/50 gender parity in their line-ups and we’ve got the Misogyny In Music report published in January. And it was probably worse in your time and you still got up and did it. The Ettes talk about how it was dangerous to be a young girl in the audience, so for them onstage they were in a position of power and less vulnerable. It does become a political statement.”

Easton was such an admirer of the band that she named her first solo project Ette. Since then she has flourished as an independen­t solo artist but it is her time in Teen Canteen which makes her such a sympatheti­c interrogat­or. She wrote the script and reluctantl­y but rightly provides the voiceover which connects the narrative strands across the decades.

With so many underappre­ciated acts to spotlight, where did they have to draw the line?

“We’ve kept the genre of music within rock and pop but there’s a whole folk scene that went on in the Seventies,” notes Easton. “And when The Mckinleys were happening there were easy listening groups like The Karlins and The Modelles. It was quite hard putting in those barriers especially when you are trying to platform. I guess it’s one of the paradoxes of the film which I struggle with.”

She adds: “I also struggle with the term ‘girl band’. You’ve just started a band with friends and you either embrace the term or kick against it. Quite a lot of the bands in the film talk about how they would be lumped together in journalism or by promoters and I’ve done that in this film. In truth, we could have made a featurelen­gth documentar­y about every band in the film. We just tried to be as respectful as possible.”

The film is a work of celebratio­n, hailing the sibling bonds and girl-gang attitude which were also in evidence when Easton hosted a 2018 concert at Leith Theatre with many of the featured artists. “It was one of the safest live music experience­s I’ve had in my life, backstage, onstage, the audience,” she says.

However, there is no shying away from the perennial challenges facing female musicians. The film ends with some sobering statistics on female representa­tion in the music industry, while careers stalling when band members become pregnant is a dispiritin­g running theme across the interviews.

Easton almost certainly knows the answer when she asks “why isn’t there a girl band equivalent of The Rolling Stones or Coldplay or U2 that is worldwide stadium-selling that is still going? We had these moments with the Spice Girls or Destiny’s Child but they

never seem to last as long as their male counterpar­ts.”

Shockingly, The Hedrons are the only Scottish girl band to date to make it as far as a second album. And it’s now almost 40 years since Strawberry Switchblad­e breached the charts. But Since Yesterday also hails the upcoming artists and the promoters agitating for a more diverse musical landscape and equality of opportunit­y.

“We probably need to redefine what success is,” reckons Easton. “All the bands in our film had successes in my eyes. So if we redefine what success is, that allows for history to get rewritten to include more voices.

“By writing people back in from the past, you realise this is a decades-long fight. I’m not alone if I’m working today, there’s this whole line of great bands that came before Teen Canteen. We didn’t even know it – what if we had?”