From Fanclub to Superstars

Ahead of its premiere in Dundee tonight, Michael Alexander speaks to the Fife-raised director of documentary Teenage Superstars about why Scotland should be proud of its indie music scene

When Teenage Superstars – a documentary about Glasgow’s 1980s and ‘90s independent music scene – is given its first official screening at DCA in Dundee tonight, it’ll be a poignant moment for its Fife-raised director Grant McPhee.

While a pupil at Bell Baxter High School in Cupar, the now 42-year-old music lover who grew up in the nearby village of Freuchie, used to travel over to Groucho’s record store in Dundee every Saturday to browse the vinyl.

It was there, in that pre-internet world, that he got to know then Groucho’s staff member Graeme Ogston – now a journalist and guitarist with Dundee lo-fi band Spare Snare.

At a time when he says he was most likely listening to The Smiths and New Order, Grant says his interest in Scotland’s independent music scene and the bands at the heart of this feature-length film stemmed from recommendations given to him by Graeme.

He goes as far as to say that if it wasn’t for Graeme, he doesn’t think the film would have been made, and that’s why he’s invited him to host a question and answer session after the DCA screening.

However, besides the personal satisfaction of seeing the film come together after 13 years of “chancing our luck” by approaching musicians for interview, Grant says there are two fundamental reasons why he felt it was important to make it.

“Indie music is one of Scotland’s greatest exports,” says Grant.

“But something that really frustrates me is we never tell the world about these achievements.

“You might have Primal Scream and The Jesus and Mary Chain being some of the more well-known bands of that time.

“None of these bands have gone on to be as big as U2 or the Rolling Stones themselves. But the bands that they influenced became massively successful.

“Like Nirvana, for example, who had direct links to The Vaselines.

“The Pixies were also directly linked to what was coming out of Glasgow. For Scotland that is such an exciting thing.

“The other reason I wanted to make this film is something the youth of today seems to have lost with the access to technology we have today.

“It’s the DIY indie ethos – the idea that people can just go out and do something themselves.

“It’s just going back to that punk thing that people can pick up a guitar and make a song.

“People have forgotten that they don’t need to ask somebody’s permission and can just go out and do whatever they want creatively in any walk of life.

Much as Grant himself has. Although having worked on movies including World War Z, as well as Game of Thrones and Outlander, as a freelance cameraman, he had a wealth of experience to bring to the project.

With a voiceover by Kim Deal of the Pixies and The Breeders, Teenage Superstars uses archive footage as well as contemporary interviews to acquaint viewers with the key figures of the scene at the time.

It lovingly examines the microcosm in which Scottish music flourished – from Glasgow club nights organised by Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie to bands using their gran’s front room as a practice space – and the lasting global influence it has had.

There is also a detour to the unlikely musical mecca of Bellshill where viewers witness the birth of BMX Bandits, Teenage Fanclub and The Soup Dragons.

Figures such as Stephen Pastel of The Pastels and Alan McGee of Creation Records recount these times, exuding a mixture of confident selfbelief and incredulity that any of it actually happened in the first place.

But just as with its unofficial prequel Big Gold Dream – released in 2015 and examining Scotland’s late 1970s/early ‘80s indie scene – Grant wanted the film to be more about the friendships in the bands rather than the history of the bands themselves.

Teenage Superstars garnered positive reviews from critics and audiences at the Edinburgh International Film Festival last year as well as Raindance in London, and after the small cinema run in Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, there are plans for it to be screened by the BBC and released on DVD. Teenage Superstars, DCA, Dundee, September 20. For more information, visit ww.dca.org.uk

Clockwise from above, Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie ran Glasgow club nights in the 1980s; Frances McKee and Eugene Kelly of influential indie band The Vaselines; Grant McPhee made the film partly to help Scotland’s musical history blow its own trumpet.