Being a musician almost automatically attaches the label of ‘outsider’ – whether it’s an aloof megastar or, in the case of BMX Bandits, quite the opposite.
And the Glasgow band’s twelfth studio album – their most musically ambitious so far – is, they say, dedicated to all the outsiders out there.
‘Dreamers On The Run’ has been ten years in the making, from when frontman and co-founder Duglas T Stewart planned an album about living in two realms; the world of dreams, and of music while trying to survive the real world.
Unfortunately illness prevailed, and the album was shelved, with Stewart instead putting his energies into 2017’s ‘BMX Bandits Forever’.
It was during lockdown that the seeds were sown for the completion of ‘Dreamers’ as Stewart was commissioned to provide the soundtrack for an independent feature film, ‘Dreaded Light’.
To collaborate on this project he chose multi-instrumentalist Andrew Pattie, who had been playing live guitar for the band for a few years. Stewart recalls: “After recording an actual soundtrack for an actual movie together it became obvious to me that Andrew was the right collaborator to make this very cinematic album that I’d dreamt of.
“So many of these songs are like mini movies in my mind, we can see the characters, the setting for the scenes and we want to bring them to life through our music.”
So now, ten years later than originally planned, ‘Dreamers On The Run’ is here. The album was mastered by BMX Bandits’ co-founder Sean Dickson – now known as HiFi Sean, and having left the band to concentrate on the Soup Dragons after their first couple of singles.
Over the years the Bandits 30+ members have also included members of Teenage Fanclub, The Vaselines and Pearlfishers – although there’s a more famous ‘honorary’ member, Kurt Cobain once declaring that if he hadn’t been in Nirvana he would have wanted to be a BMX Bandit.
The eleven track long-player also features guest appearances by indie pop giants such as Swell Maps’ Jowe Head and Calvin Johnson, of K Records and The Beat Happening.
‘My Name is Duglas’ perhaps sums up the album: Stewart remembers growing up where “Sean, Norman (Teenage Fanclub) and I stood out. We felt like outsiders in our own town and so we created our own alternative world of music and dreams.”
“Fortunately I had the arrogance of youth on my side and all the negative attention only encouraged me to be a more extreme version of me. I wore the disapproval as a badge of honour and realised the things that made me not quite right in their eyes were like my superpowers.
“I think it’s tougher now and so I wanted to write something to say don’t listen to the bullies and the naysayers. Listen to the people who love you. Being different makes you special, unique and precious.”
This article originally appeared in the Edinburgh News.
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