ANOTHER fresh pop confection is currently being cooked up by the thoroughly professional trio who have operated Glasgow's Soul Kitchen for the past couple of years. Songwriters Alan Rankine, Gordon Goudie, and John McLaughlin will shortly be seeking to add to their ever-lengthening list of top 20 hits with a new single, I Can Love You, featuring a sassy new all-girl vocal group, Flow.
Yet however much of a tasty tune I Can Love You is, it's unlikely to wow those self-styled hipsters who live by the repressive Gospel of St Cred (''Fie upon they that walketh in the valley of the shadow of the Spice Girls, for they shalt never be deemed cool'').
Not that the Soul Kitchen team are unduly worried. ''I know that there's generally a stigma attached to an act who aren't a band of boys playing guitars . . . that there are always sneers about manufactured pop,'' says Alan Rankine, who of course in his own not-so-distant boyhood played a major part in the guitar-free top-pop success of the Associates.
''My response to such criticism is always the same, too. Because I know that when Gordon and I are working on songs, we employ the same creative energies in crafting them for other people as we would if we were writing them for a band of our own.
''Plus Gordon has served his tour of duty in a wide range of Glasgow bands, doing all that no-food, no-sleep, crammed into the back of a Transit with four other blokes non stop overnight to Berlin stuff.''
Gordon nods in heartfelt agreement, wearied at the very memory of his stoic sojourn in a disparate range of noble Scottish contenders, everyone from trip-rock-rappers Eight Miles High to blues-a-billy-howlers the Primevals. His decision to locate a home studio next to the fridge and sink in his Partick tenement kitchen has been a less tiring and more profitable one, having led to sizeable hits for 911 and Five, as well as commissions from such chart acts as the Back Street Boys and Connor Reeves.
''Additionally, it's not as though the Flow girls are mindless puppets,'' Rankine continues. ''They've all made their own welcome input as the whole process developed in the recording studio we use in Houston, contributing ideas and opinions.''
But how did the whole process begin, one which united a seasoned Glasgow songwriting team with five young women based in Manchester? It's all a result of Rankine's parallel career as a lecturer at Glasgow's Stow College, where he is co-ordinator of the college's music business administration course.
As an annual part of the course, Stow students have to organise the release of a record on the course's own Electric Honey label. In so doing, they experience each administrative and creative stage of the record-making process. Stow students delve into the arcane mysteries of A&R, finding suitable raw talent and suitable songs. As well as visiting the recording studio, students are given an insight into their disc's pressing. Most dauntingly, they are then encouraged to press the wizened and clammy flesh of the music media in order to promote their product's actual release.
''I'd met Flow in Glasgow in the autumn at In The City,'' says Rankine. ''They were up here looking for songs, and liked the songs we had to show them. Then I went off into the studio with Gordon, trying to work out exactly what vibe Flow were after. Coincidentally, at the same time the students were doing their course-work of listening to loads of demo tapes, almost 100 of them.
''Before they'd reached anywhere near the bottom of the pile, the students had all been afflicted with A&R disease
. . . terminal cynicism. This means that one in every 11 tapes are grudgingly rated 'no' bad' while the other 10 are dismissed as 'total crap'. I only brought in our Flow demos to give their ears a bit of a breather because year in, year out, the Stow demo-tape list just features indie guitar bands.''
Lo and behold, when the apprentice A&R persons heard the poppy, R&B-oriented recipe that the Soul Kitchen had been brewing for their charges, they decided they liked it, opting to go with Flow. The single thus emerges on Electric Honey on June 8, with a live media showcase event - complete with breakdancers and choreographed girl-group moves devised by All Saints's dance-director - due to be staged at Glasgow's Velvet Rooms a week on Tuesday, May 26.
RANKINE adds: ''On top
of that, one of our advanced diploma students has already done a dance remix of the track for clubs.''
The disc has a proud track-record to live up to, Electric Honey having struck gold two years ago with the release of Belle and Sebastian's spellbinding first album. Last year Stow's emergent musicbiz moguls gave a thumbs up to Snow Patrol - then known as Polar Bear - in advance of the band winning major label deals in the UK and US.
What ingredients do the Soul Kitchen threesome add to Flow's overall banquet of sound?
''I'd like to think I've got a good pop head on me,'' says Rankine. ''Gordon is very much a bloke with an ear for cool beats, and inside 10 minutes John can come up with lyrics better than ones it would take me four days to write. Everything meshes really well.
''The only worry right now is the first meeting between Flow and Stow's high heid yins. I can just see the five of them now, coming on all slinky and ruffling the hair of the college's various heads of department, and then playfully setting the principal's bowtie in disarray.''
Pure pop: it can usefully have this effect on folk.
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