Viva Glasvegas !

Viva Glasvegas !

I cannot work out for the life of me why anyone takes Glasvegas seriously. I heard the full album last week and it’s unintentionally hilarious.

They would be a good comedy band if they had an ounce of self-awareness.’ So writes one blogger on the Guardian newspaper website on this very day when the UK’s hottest new musical prospect according to the NME finally release their long awaited debut.

Meanwhile I wish the band well as I do anyone setting out on a career in music, except I tend to wish them well that wee bit more when they come from roughly the same streets that I do.

A tribal gesture on my part perhaps, but surely kind of natural, they might not be from my generation but they are from my neck of the woods and I knew that from the first time I accidentally came across them earlier this year.

Less taken by their sound and their lyrics, which are classic working class/housing estate docu/drama. (A genre well and truly mined by Mike Skinner, Arctic Monkey’s and of course Paul Weller and Billy Bragg originally.) No, I instead focused almost to the exclusion of all else – on the fact that they were singing in Glaswegian dialect, and therefore concluded that that alone made them pretty much unique currently.

And even more so, Alex Harvey apart, if you consider the amount of bands that have come out of the city over the last three decades, and how all of them – unless the truly obscure that managed to skip under my radar – have for whatever reason, resisted the urge to sing in the unmistakable dialect that is natural to the city of our birth. Including yours truly of course!

It is this that has me considering a question part prompted by the aforementioned blogger’s comments. Does singing in a regional dialect risk the chance that an audience ultimately has the tendency to perceive you as part comedy/novelty act? And equally by turning the question on it’s head. Does not singing in the dialect that you were raised with and use in everyday speech reduce a singer to being an actor, or a fake at worst? Let me think about this from my own perspective!

Well, I don’t hear the Cannuck in Neil Young but I feel some of the New Jersey talk in early Bruce. There is none of the Dub discernable when Bono sings ‘One’ and zilch of the Manc when Morrissey sings ‘How Soon Is Now’. No trace of Scouse is to be heard when Lennon sings Imagine, but we can hear New York each and every time Lou Reed opens his mouth. Gabriel has some lovely West Country feel when he talks but you wont hear it on Don’t Give Up.

Meanwhile Chrissie Hynde’s finest moments is when she is in sixties London mode, a la Dusty Springfield. Does that make Chrissie a fake? No chance and uh, good luck should you decide to call her one! Talk about humour, God knows what Roxy Music would have sounded like if lead singer Bryan Ferry had stuck to his guns and sang with full blown Geordie accent. Ditto Sting and the Police!

And on that, who could imagine what success lay in store for Abba if they had like Sigur Ros sung in their indigenous language, and can anyone consider Kraftwerk sounding anything other than they do?

As for the merits of Glasvegas, you will decide for yourself and the real test will be as with anyone, to see how well their music travels and for how long. Will the Texans never mind the Russian’s get it? And if so will be they still be all ears some years down the line. Will anyone in Calabria or Buenos Aires really give a monkey’s for the sound of Glasgow and the knife crime implicit in seemingly any tales that depict our Dear Green Place? (Pitifully, the television success of Detective Inspector Taggart suggests that they may well do!)

As for me, I feel that while it would make things a whole lot more diverse. I do understand the notion of Brian Eno that pop and rock audiences are by enlarge conservative in taste – and that therefore songs sung in ‘dialect’ probably do risk the danger of being viewed as somewhat novelty even if widely appreciated initially.

And on that I am off to listen to the brilliant Anthea and Donna’s Uptown Topranking!

Jim Kerr

photos of Glasvegas by Steve Gullick