As festival season approaches and Scotland’s number one favourite band gets another airing before being boxed up ‘til Hogmanay; the Proclaimer twins are a reminder of the joke that surrounds Scottish music scene- a parody of a nation who can be summed up with an end of night disco classic about being that man who wakes up next to you. As long as I can remember I’ve been under my mother’s scrutiny about the music I listen to; yes, Mrs Doherty the closet Cliffy fan and apparent guru of the indie scene, will often pop her head into my room and comment on whatever’s playing on my CD player at that moment, and more often than not I’ll hear, without a note of irony: ‘Och! She’s awfy Scottish, isn’t she?’ How ‘Scottish’ somebody sounds in a song is something that I remain fairly oblivious to until it’s expressly pointed out to me by others. Obviously we’re used to hearing our own accent everyday all around us, but when most are faced with a few colloquial words in a song, sung honestly, they’ll shy away in the fear of being outed as Reid twin aficionados; why are we still ashamed of hearing our own regional accent in music? Ever since I was a wee teen listening to John Peel under the covers late at night, from the first time I heard Tracey-Anne Campbell lull about how she doesn’t know her ‘elbow from her arse’ it seems I’ve been hooked on the sincerity of a good Glaswegian twang. In fact, when checking out local bands I’m prone to quickly losing interest when a clearly Scottish front-person loses any indication of their true inflections when they start to croon.
There’s something refreshing in the expression of self through an accent; it’s brave, it’s honest and it makes everything else in the music seem, consequently, more real. And I’m not strictly all about Scotland either; give me a good Futurehead or good old Johnny Cash; whether it be a Southern drawl or a jerky Mackem, or, what the hell, even Lily Allen doing a Chas and Dave, rhyming alfresco and Tesco; anybody really who’s not afraid to step away from the General American or Generic English which dominated the 90s and the post Britpop years. But still the question remains, is the Scottish accent still seen as something to be ashamed of and still ridiculed even today?
It seems things are changing; it’s clear in recent Scottish compilations (Chemikal Underground’s ‘Ballads of the Book’ or German label, with a love of Scottish music, Aufgeladen Und Bereit’s ‘Get While the Getting’s Good’) that the use of the accent just might be coming back into fashion. Whether it’s the snippets of Gaelic in Foxface; traditional Scots in Mouse Eat Mouse (their politically charged debut album’s entitled ‘Mair Licht’, need you really say much more?) or the aggressive vocals of Adele Bethel from Sons and Daughters; it seems there’s not much stigma left surrounding the use of accent in the music scene itself, in fact, it might even now be becoming a means through which to express national pride.
A band who’ve caused segregation amongst listeners with their blatant use of their own accent is the Glasgow based Popup. While being likened ‘Arab Strap on happy pills’ their pop rock jerky charm is doubtlessly sweetened by singer Damian Gilhooly’s spitfire delivery of witty and observant lyrics with an overtly Scottish appeal. Damian gave his opinion on the recent ‘phenomena’ of the use of the accent in music today:
“I think comparisons or getting grouped together with other bands because of the accent kind of makes you think twice about doing it…but we just do it anyway.
There are bands out there who use the accent where it sounds a bit contrived, where it sounds uber Scottish, you know?
But the whole point, with our band anyway, was that when we started out we weren’t particularly good musicians, but we had good ideas and thought the best way to present them was to make sure you were as honest as possible in everything you do. It [the accent] wasn’t a conscious decision; it was just that when we arrived at it after trying out other ideas that was the first that sounded natural…part of it was just that I couldn’t really sing in any voice other than my own. I’m not making a statement about Scotland or anything; it’s just that I am Scottish and speak in an accent and therefore should sing in it.
It’s not to say that any bands who don’t sound any less genuine; I don’t think there’s anything at all dishonest about what they’re doing. For me it was just about being comfortable singing about what I had to say.
“Certainly all music, pop music or rock music, was something invented by the Americans, and maybe made more interesting by the English 15 years later, so they became a standard; the whole sound became American-English and the accent reflected that; the mid-Atlantic, regional-free accent became synonymous with it.
Scotland has become more important for music; from the end of punk a lot of bands started to creep up, from Orange Juice onwards, that were important and innovative and gradually over the last ten, fifteen years- particularly over the past five- that I think Scottish bands have found their own voice, or their own confidence, and it’s just allowed them to do that.”
After our chat I thought about some of the bands we’d spoken about whom I hadn’t previously considered; bands like The Delgados, Aereogramme, Frightened Rabbit; bands who are well respected, passionate about what they do and are (or, sadly on the most part, were) part of a definite movement in decent music coming out of Scotland, yet bands who don’t have their national identity plastered all over their work. Perhaps their identity is so embedded in the songs that they don’t use inflections to make their work really ‘theirs’. Maybe there’s more to be said about the accent in music, but at the end of the day as long as it’s this good, it doesn’t really matter either way; I guess Scotland’s lucky to have such a strong identity in the music world, whether it’s in the accent or not.
(Many, many thanks to Damian Gilhooly: www.popuptheband.co.uk )
Bands tae check oot:
Dumb Instrument (an urban poet philosophising about condom strewn streets and soft drug use): http://www.myspace.com/dumbinstrument
Goldfish (more quickfire Scottish slang): www.myspace.com/goldfisharepeopletoo
Q Without U (new-wave noise): www.qwithoutu.com
Found (found make music you can move to): www.surfacepressure.co.uk/found