When it comes to music, teenage girls are often right. They were right about girl groups, about The Beatles and T-Rex. They’re probably right about Taylor Swift and they’re definitely right about Harry Styles. And they’ve always known that it’s the single, not the album, that is the true currency of pop music.
Here’s this week’s Herald Magazine contention: that any band that hasn’t made a great single isn't a great band.
That doesn’t mean those singles are always recognised, of course. Or even stay in the memory. But then it’s all the more fun to rediscover them. So, here are 10 Scottish singles that deserve to be better known.
Oh Me Oh My (I’m a Fool for You Baby)
Lulu, 1969
Obviously, Lulu’s finest three minutes is her bruised rendition of Don Black and Mark London’s ballad To Sir With Love. But in 1969 the singer headed to the Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama to work with producers Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin and musicians including Barry Beckett, Eddie Hinton and Duane Allman on her New Routes album. Lulu’s take on Hinton’s song Where’s Eddie on New Routes may be the second-best thing she’s ever done, but the single that preceded the LP was this song written by Scottish songwriter Jim Doris. Lulu is always just a big chorus away from being a blues belter, but this is a restrained, rather lovely performance. Proof that Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie could cut it as a soul singer. Aretha Franklin recorded her own version of the song a couple of years later.
Bored
Finitribe, 2001
One of the many welcome pleasures in Grant McPhee’s new book Postcards from Scotland: Scottish Independent Music 1983-1995 (Omnibus Press, £25), is its recognition of the importance of the Edinburgh band Finitribe, pioneers of indie dance - the band’s track De Testimony was big in Ibiza at the end of the 1980s - and a key influence on The Shamen.
Their swan song was this curious, lovely thing which somehow manages to be hugely affecting while aspiring, as the title suggests, to a lack of affect. Katie Morrison’s lead vocal sits on top of an electronic soundbed that’s both arch and artful. The result could soundtrack an acid house tea dance. Deserves to be much better known.
101
Sheena Easton, 1989
Have we forgiven Sheena yet? When she came back to Glasgow in 1990 for the Big Day festival she was pelted with bottles (you can guess what was inside) and forced to abandon her set for - have I got this right? - speaking in an American accent?
Easton was always slightly tainted due to her Esther Ransen-boosted beginning (she was “discovered” by the BBC series The Big Time). And not even her association with the greatest pop star of the 1980s quite rubbed that taint away. It maybe didn’t help that Prince gifted her Sugar Walls, one of his most notoriously lubricious songs. But he also wrote and produced this crisp slice of 1980s R&B. And quite frankly, Sheena sings the hell out of it. It limped to number 54 in the UK chart.
Inside Out
Odyssey, 1982
Am I stretching the envelope too far with this one? After all, it actually reached number three in the UK charts and there’s the small matter that Odyssey were a vocal trio from New York City.
But, firstly, this gorgeous slice of haunted disco doesn’t get as much love or airplay as the group’s other hits Going Back to My Roots or Native New Yorker. And, more pertinently, it was co-written by Scotland’s very own Jesse Rae, the tartan-and-armour-clad, claymore-wielding Borderer who spent the late 1970s in the States working with funk giants Roger Troutman and Bernie Worrell. Rae recorded the song himself, and over the years it’s been covered by Electribe 101 and Roddy Frame. But Lillian Lopez’s defiant, yet broken vocal, gives Odyssey’s version a beautiful craquelure glaze. One of my Desert Island Discs.
Reflections of My Life
The Marmalade, 1969
These days Marmalade (they eventually dropped the definitive article) are probably best remembered for their cover of Ob La Di, Ob La Da by some band called The Beatles (aka McCartney at his most egregiously sentimental). But the Glasgow band (originally called Dean Ford and The Gaylords) had a string of hits through the 1960s and early 1970s, none of them particularly highly regarded in retrospect.. That said, there has been a measure of revisionism going on of late, mostly around this bittersweet ballad which showcases Ford’s vocals and the band’s knack for harmonies. “As shiny as Little Richard’s face,” the music critic Greil Marcus once said of it. I think he meant it as a compliment.
Hairstyle of the Devil
Momus, 1989
Momus, aka Nick Currie, aka Justin Currie’s cousin when (if) anyone ever writes about him, is inevitably labelled “cult musician” when they do. Momus presents as a louche, eye-patch-wearing lothario figure who is, possibly, big in Japan.
Despite recording 39 (?!) albums, this single was maybe the one moment when he had the wind in his sails for a moment. By which I mean Steve Wright (in the afternoon) was quite taken with it. Maybe he heard an echo of the Pet Shop Boys in its D-I-Y rinky-dink rhythms. But you do wonder if the DJ listened to the lyrics which were concerned with sexual jealousy. Still, not even Steve’s beneficence was enough. It peaked at 94 in the charts. A shame. It has all the makings of a great one-hit wonder.
Turn This Thing Around
El Presidente, 2006
Pop music is as much about the eye as it is the ear and there is no question that these Glaswegian wannabe peacock pop stars looked the part. When Dante Gizzi - formerly of Scottish rockers Gun - decided he wanted to start a new band in the mid-noughties he deliberately picked musicians who looked as good as they played.
Turn This Thing Around was the last of four shamelessly POP singles from the band that had a calculated, hook-driven made-for-radio appeal. Not calculated enough, I guess, as none of them cracked the top 20. Even so, Turn This Thing Around is pure candy. And I have a sweet tooth.
Messiah
Prides, 2015
Obviously I have no notion of what a hit sounds like anymore but it’s still hard to believe that Glasgow band Prides didn’t lord it over everyone with this thumping synthpop anthem. Not a million miles away from the template established by CHVRCHES, but still its own fresh thing, it’s a superior slice of contemporary pop. Actually, not that contemporary. It’s already nearly a decade old.
International
Thomas Leer, 1984
Port Glasgow’s Thomas Leer emerged in the 1970s inspired by punk and then German electronica. But in the mid-eighties, backed by Arista, he made a bid for the mainstream. Quite how something as sweet and hooky as International wasn’t a hit is hard to fathom, unless that lyric about global heroin trafficking got in the way.
The Drum
The Impossibles, 1991
And, finally, the most obscure 7-inch on this list. And does it even qualify? The Impossibles were a duo - Lucy Dallas and Mags Grundy - who may have been from London or from Leeds (online accounts vary), but during their short life were based in Edinburgh (probably). According to Herald contributor Neil Cooper - who knows these things - they are certainly remembered in the capital, albeit hazily.
This cover of a Slapp Happy song (which may actually be a cover of a Bongwater cover of a Slapp Happy song) on the Fontana label starts as a post-C86 twee pop strumalong, which is kind of lovely, and then really takes off and soars two and a half minutes in. It’s a gorgeous lost single, so much of its time that it even had an Andrew Weatherall remix.
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