1979
Of the three or four times I saw Joy Division, oddly the occasion I remember most is the time I didn’t. Because I couldn’t get in.
The Glaxo Babies may be the most underrated band of the immediate post-punk era; or all time. They certainly deserve to be celebrated in the pantheon of Bristol bands alongside The Pop Group, Portishead and Massive Attack.
I don’t normally go for novelty songs because they quickly get on your nerves even when they’re not awful in the first place. In this case that’s true of the former but not the latter; probably because it was on Stiff Records.
In the summer of ’77 Skids formed in Dunfermline, which is in Scotland and not to be confused with Dumbarton.
Does anyone remember The Freeze? Probably not unless you were living in Scotland in the early days of punk.
Here’s another of those great first-wave postpunk bands from Edinburgh. I’ve still got their debut single, Horrorshow, and their only album, Author! Author!
Flowers were another of the Scottish postpunk bands that blossomed briefly, recording only 11 songs over the course of their short career.
Song of the Day
Frank Tovey was the first artist to be signed to Mute Records and Back To Nature was the second single to come out on the label.
Cowboys International didn’t last long. They released a handful of singles and a solitary album, and by the end of 1980 they had disappeared after about 18 months together.
The Jolt were the first punk band to play a gig in Glasgow, and the first to sign with a major label when they inked a deal with Polydor. But they seem to have been forgotten, even in their native Scotland.