The first Scottish girl band to break into the charts were the McKinlay Sisters in 1964, a pop duo formed by Jeanette and Sheila McKinlay. The McKinlays played with the Rolling Stones and toured with the Beatles but, says Jeanette, looking back, they were exploited – not paid enough to even live on. They celebrated Sheila’s 20th birthday in their London bedsit with a bag of chips. When the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein offered to manage them, the band’s label said they already had a manager. It was a lie. Not long after, that same label dropped the McKinlays and they faded into obscurity.
It’s just one of the episodes in this brilliant documentary about pioneering Scottish girl bands that will leave you raging. And there’s more music industry misogyny where that came from; as recently as 2010, the Hedrons heard that investors were reluctant to back them because they were at “that age” where one of them might go and get herself pregnant. And yet, despite the blood-boiling anecdotes, the film is three parts joy to one part fury. It’s a celebration of the joy of making music, of putting on eyeliner with a felt-tip pen, DIY fanzines, and the pure joy of mucking about with your mates and having a laugh.
The film is made with love by Carla Easton, a singer-songwriter formerly of the indie-pop group TeenCanteen, co-directing with Blair Young. What the pair have done is to take Scotland’s forgotten (or at the very least under-remembered) girl bands out of the footnotes and put their posters up on the walls. From punk band Ettes, to the Twinsets, Sophisticated Boom Boom and Lung Leg, girl bands finally get their due.
Most entertaining of all are Strawberry Switchblade, a duo from Glasgow who were the first Scottish girl band in the UK Top 10, and who seem to have ended up victims of their label’s attempts to turn them into the next Bananarama. The pair are glorious: “We didn’t care if people laughed at us because we looked like Christmas trees. Fuck off. This is my life, and I’m living it.”
• Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands is in UK and Irish cinemas from 18 October.
