Glasgow's radical history in song: The Tenementals reveal debut album

The Glasgow-based collective - made up of academics, musicians and artists - has crafted nine powerful tracks that don’t just recount history, it reimagines it. But this isn’t a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Rather, it’s a bold attempt to seize moments of Glasgow's radical past and, in the words of frontman David Archibald, “breathe new life into them and blast them into the future”. 

For Archibald - a Professor of Political Cinemas at the University of Glasgow - the band is, through their music, conducting an experiment to try and work out how the history of a city might sound like rather than being understood through textbooks or conventional academic historical accounts.

He told The Herald: “We’ve got one foot in the university and one foot in the city’s vibrant arts community. The album consists of nine tracks that we hope tell some kind of radical history of Glasgow. We say that we try to tell a radical history of a radical city in a radical way. 

David Archibald on stage with The Tenementals (Image: Julia Bauer) (Image: Julia Bauer)

“The Tenementals’ history is not public outreach work. We don’t have pre-perceived histories or pre-perceived ideas of history that we are trying to communicate to a wider audience. Rather, we set ourselves a question at the beginning, which was that, if a rock band were to tell the history of a city through music, what would that sound like? What would it look like? What would it feel like? What would it smell like? In a sense the whole thing is about the shape of history, and the shape of that history, at least in our first album, is a record that’s 12-inches in diameter.”

The album weaves together diverse narratives, from men who died fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War to militant Suffragettes of the early 20th century. It explores the 1820 Radical War, celebrates the city’s culture of pleasure and excess, imagines what would it be like if The Owl of Minerva was resident on the Finnieston Crane, interrogates Glasgow’s ongoing entanglements with Empire and slavery and speculates on where one might find hope in the city.

Archibald hopes that the songs, all original compositions which combine personal reflections with theoretical musings, operate as “thought bombs or provocations to think and act in a radical way”.

He said: “The songs are about history. About events that happened in the past, but they are also about developing what we might call ‘historical consciousness’, or ‘historical awareness’.  We don’t live in the past, but by spending time with the past, we can recognise that the way  the world is put together is not natural and eternal but changes over time. It invites us to look at our lives today and to see that the present doesn’t have to be the way that it is. We hope, then, that it invites us to conjure radical futures. 

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“There’s a song on the album called ‘‘Peter Pike or Pink’ which emerged when during lockdown I went for a walk up to Sighthill Cemetery where there’s a monument to the people that participated in the 1820 Radical Wars or the 1820 Scottish Insurrection. The monument lists the names of the people that were killed but also those who were deported to Australia and one of the surnames is listed as ‘Pike or Pink’. When I saw that I thought, ‘Well that’s a song’.

“The Tenementals don’t write songs that simply tell you what happened. That’s not the history that we are creating. By creating a history that invites people to think about history, it’s an invitation to think historically about Glasgow.

“Peter Pike or Pink, then, explores how we remember the Glasgow Radical Wars, because when we see that they never even knew his name, for me that was emblematic of that event. What even took place in 1820? For some people it’s too radical. For some people it’s too nationalist. For some people it’s all a little bit murky. So although some historians might say, ‘Well there’s been plenty of books written about 1820’, which there have been, our contention would be that, in terms of how the city understands itself, 1820 isn’t really part of that. It hasn’t really been folded into the history of the city in the way that other events have. The Calton Weavers' strike is an event that took place prior to that and it’s a solid part of the history of the Glaswegian and Scottish labour movements whereas the Radical Wars sits uneasily for some people. The song, I suppose, is about that. How do we remember this event?”

He continued: “There’s also a song on the record called ‘The Owl of Minerva’. It like many of the songs emerged from little ideas that happened when I was walking around the city. I was walking through Finnieston and found myself in Minerva Street and there’s a very famous aphorism associated with the philosopher Hegel about the owl of Minerva taking flight only at dusk, which, very simply might be understood as, we begin to understand things when we come to the end of them. And I began to think what it would be like if the owl associated with Hegel lived on the Finnieston Crane. That song is about the owl flying over Glasgow. The owl flies north, south, east and west and the song is about what it sees. It asks a series of questions, which are quite theoretical, about what history is. Is history just one thing after another? Are there patterns in the past? So that song combines elements that are personal reflections and more philosophical reflections on what history is.”

Since their debut performance at the 2022 Glasgow Doors Open Festival, which saw the band secure the prestigious ‘Outstanding Event’ for their performance of ‘A History of Glasgow in Song’, The Tenementals have performed at events such as the Glasgow Hidden Lane Festival and May Day Glasgow 2023, a year which also saw them perform ‘in the round’ at The Revelator, a unique arts space and fully functioning wall of death located in the former Barclay Curle shipyard in Scotstoun, as part of a memorable collaboration with National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers’ Secretary-General Mick Lynch. 

The band has also gained international recognition, with their interpretation of the Nazi concentration camp protest song “Die Moorsoldaten” now housed in Germany's Documentation and Information Center Emsland Camps archives. Awards and recognition aside, Archibald hopes that The Tenementals can “make a very modest contribution to Glasgow’s music scene”.

He said: “That would absolutely excite us. Glasgow is famous for the bands that are operating just now and the bands that have come before. It has got a weird and wonderful music history that is in some ways much weirder and more wonderful than the history of the city. For instance, when people talk about Glasgow and its ‘hard man tradition’ and all that, Glasgow’s music tradition was much weirder and more varied , it offered up a more varied form of working-class masculinity. We want to be part of that richness and to also sit in with the kind of broader, radical cultural tradition that’s been associated with the city. We want to be part of the city’s broader social fabric, not just musically but also politically. 

“Glasgow is a good city to be a radical band.”

The Tenementals’ ‘Glasgow: A History (Vol. I of VI)’ is out now via Strength in Numbers Records. They will perform at the Working Class Movement Library, Salford, on November 24, before returning to Glasgow for their album launch at Òran Mór in Glasgow on November 27.