Academics form band to recount radical history of Glasgow through song

The Tenementals are putting the finishing touches to their debut album of original songs at Glasgow’s La Chunky studios; songs which focus on ‘the dissidents and dissenters’ of Glasgow’s past and which both ‘celebrates the city’s culture of pleasure and excess’ and ‘interrogates its entanglements with empire and slavery’.

It comes after a much celebrated first gig at the historic Trades Hall in Glasgow city centre for the Glasgow Doors Open Days Festival, a gig which saw the band pick up the award for ‘Outstanding Event’ for their performance of ‘A History of Glasgow in Song’. 

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The Tenementals singer David Archibald, who works as a senior lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, said that the band is conducting an experiment to try and work out “how the history of a city might sound like” rather than being understood through textbooks or historical accounts.

He told The Herald: “The Tenementals are a group of artists, academics and musicians who are trying to do an experimental project or work out whether you can tell a history of a city through songs, that rather than history being understood as academic textbooks or popular historic accounts in the written word, we wondered whether you could work out how the history of a city might sound like, how it might feel like if you watched it or experienced it. 

“We are trying to approach history in a different way by telling a series of songs which look at fragments of Glasgow’s past. It’s a critical history that celebrates the dissidents and the dissenters and works out whether you might be able to find hope in the past that we might blast into the future in some way.”

The Tenementals on stage (Image: Julia Bauer)

As a Glaswegian academic and political activist “who knows and has been heavily involved in the grassroots cultural and political activity of the city”, David, who also writes the band’s lyrics, says their songs are “a history from below” that is “expressed in art”. 

Rather than “presenting grand narratives”, he said the band interested in telling “fragments” of Glasgow’s radical history through their songs. 

He said: “One of the interesting things that happened with our first gig was that a woman who was new to Glasgow said it was a great starting point for her to find out about its the history. 

“We are interested in these fragments rather than presenting this grand narrative that starts at the beginning and ends in the middle of whatever. We are interested in throwing these little thought bombs. Thought bombs that might provoke people to think further. 

“We are not telling you the history of the city, we are giving you some fragments, some stepping stones for people to build on. We wrote a song about Jimmy Reid and we wrote a song about the Glassford Family Portrait. That painting itself is a changing history because it was commissioned by Glassford, one of the big imperial figures of the city. They thought at some point that there was a black servant in the image that had been painted over and in previous history books that what it says. What had been painted was a new face was painted when one of his wifes died and he got remarried. 

The Tenementals (Image: Julia Bauer)

“The song is called ‘Pentimental’. That sort of deals with Empire. How do you deal with the question that Glasgow was involved in slavery and Empire? A song can’t deal with all that but you can write a little song about an oil painting and the way that history works through oil painting. By looking at these tiny things then you hope again that you can open up bigger things.”

Other parts of Glasgow’s radical history explored in song by The Tenementals includes the life of trade unionist Jimmy Reid, the La Passionara statue on the banks of the River Clyde and the Glaswegians who fought in the Spanish Civil War and the demolition of Glasgow’s high-rises. 

And David also hopes that, through their music, The Tenementals can “connect with the city” and find a place within Glasgow’s cultural landscape. 

He added: “Slowly we’ve created these songs and we want to connect with the city. We want to be a cultural part of the city. 

“I would love that people could go into the People’s Palace and next to the Glassford Family Portrait they could put a QR code and they could download the song and listen to it.”

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