NEW ALBUM: reviewed by NORRY WILSON

Since their first gig two years ago, Glasgow band The Tenementals have played solidly round the city and elsewhere to full houses and released several singles. With a line up of eight musicians, and sometimes more, they sing the history of Glasgow into being and conjure up the glories and the disasters, and the pride and the shame of it before the citizens. Norry Wilson of Lost Glasgow will introduce them on stage at the launch of the first album in Oran Mor on Wednesday 27th November. Here he tells us why he is delighted to present them on the occasion of the release of their first major recording.

Glasgow: A History, (Volume I of VI) by The Tenementals

Be careful who you speak to in pubs, less world’s collide, and your home city – at once familiar, wabbit, and a little bit woebegone  – is born again before your eyes and ears, all pounding, industrial rhythms, catchy, singalong, choruses, gallus swagger, and lyrics that make you look again with fresh eyes. This is Glasgow in 2024, and this is The Tenementals. But back to the pub…

Two years ago, after a Doors Open Day hoolie at the City Chambers – all cheap cooncil plonk, dull speeches, and polite applause – I’m sitting in The Piper, on George square, while the band’s main man and motivator, David Archibald, is trying to explain to me just what they are trying to do. And I’m no getting it.

‘So, you’re trying to condense this city – its past, present, all its contradictions, and myriad potential futures into song. Aye, right – good luck with that mate…’

Like the eejit I am, I’d missed their first, award-winning gig – in the unlikely surroundings of the Trades House, on Glassford street – but I’d heard great things about it. Sometimes, occasionally, Glasgow’s jungle drums – the musical bush telegraph – beats in time to your own heart.

Roll on a couple of months – more beers and boozy blethers (and the rest!) later, and I’m standing in the darkened basement of the now lost Admiral Bar, at a fundraiser for the city’s striking postal workers, and I’m about to get my ears pinned back good and proper. Forty minutes later, I’m a convert, a champion, a bloody evangelist for this band, this music.

I hear tight, Krautrock rhythms, which almost spin into Indian ragas, the drone sound of bagpipes and Garage Rock, sweet cellos, the urgency of Post-Punk, and, bloody hell, is that the voice of late UCS union firebrand Jimmy Reid bellowing from the speakers? My God, it is too! The gang’s all here.

I re-emerge onto Waterloo Street, en-route to a night’s dancing to DJ mate Andrew Divine at the CCA (currently bereft of beer, music, creativity, and magic), a changed man. Music as metamorphosis, for me and our ever-changing city.

Now I get it. As I hope you will too.

Roll on another couple of months, and I’m freezing my nuts off inside The Revelator, Glasgow’s own motorcycle wall-of-death, where Mick Lynch, of the RMT union, is introducing the band. This is just bloody weird, but bloody brilliant, and bloody cold (I can’t feel my feet!).

The Tenementals might not have all the answers, but they are certainly asking the right questions. How we, and the city, answers them will define Glasgow for future generations.

Roll on Wednesday November 27, and I’ll be introducing the band onstage at their album launch at Òran Mór. As I said, be careful who you speak to in pubs…

This LP, a Glasgow Golem – shaped and formed from the sediment of the Clyde, the ‘noise and smoky breath’ of a thousand half-forgotten, half-remembered pub philosophers – shimmers and shifts like the light on our river; one minute poetical, the next dark and foreboding. Here’s a Glasgow kiss, with the steel teeth of the Gorbals vampire – a breathtaking sonic hug with a chib at your throat.

In Mungo’s city, musical miracles can still be forged anew, hammered into shape and form by endless rehearsals and long nights in the studio.
What I try to do with words and photographs via my Lost Glasgow nonsense, The Tenementals have captured, corralled, and condensed in sound and fury.

As the metaphysical poet William Congreve wrote back in 1657:

“Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
I’ve read, that things inanimate have mov’d,
And, as with living Souls, have been inform’d,
By Magick Numbers and persuasive Sound.”

‘Magick numbers and persuasive Sound’ – isn’t that what we are all seeking in life; the ying to our yang, the positive to our negative, the lost chord that completes our internal harmony?

The songs would play well on radio – 1, 4, 6, take your pick – but their lyrics, pitching back and forth through time, through struggle, joy, and sadness, challenge you to prick up your ears. From the opening onslaught of The Owl of Minerva – an avian-eyed overview of our twisted and tumultuous city – to the piningly-beautiful A Passion Flower’s Lament, mourning Glasgow’s brave International Brigaders of the Spanish Civil War, here is a new type of ‘folk’ music.

In Alasdair Gray’s ‘Lanark’, he wrote: “Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?”

“Because nobody imagines living here… think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.”

Bit of a hostage to fortune that passage, as generations of Glaswegians, including Gray, you, me, and this band, live in this city’s imagination, just as this city’s imagination lives in us.

The LPs closing track, the slightly tongue-in-cheek ‘People Make Glasgow’ is a gallus two-fingered salute to the marketing men who would try to sell this city – our city – (they’d sell their grannies!) to all kinds. Why, I ask, is Glasgow constantly doubling for US cities in Hollywood films when we have so many of our own unique and universal tales to tell? Are we, our stories, lives, loves, foibles, humour, and labours to be ignored, only fit to be rolled out as tired comedy tropes in even more tired sitcom formats?

No. We, you and me, our city, deserves and should demand better. If not us, who? If not now, when?

In a Glasgow that currently feels like it has lost its compass, its mojo, its raison d’etre, which way’s North from here?

This LP is both an anchor and a Pole Star; one that reminds us of who we were, what we are, and can be still, and lights the way to all those possible, potential, and beautiful futures.

In the words of the late great Andy Weatherall, ‘Fail we may, sail we must’.

Well, tie me to the mast of the Clyde-built Tenementals. I need to know where this shared voyage leads…

Glasgow: A History (Vol. I of VI) is released by Strength in Numbers Records and will be launched at Òran Mór on 27 November. Tickets available: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1034910313607?aff=oddtdtcreator

The album can also be bought online at https://strengthinnumbersrecords.bandcamp.com/album/glasgow-a-history-volume-i-of-vi