‘You can seize the moment when you’re not even aware there is a moment…’
Everyone knows about Manchester in the ’90s or New York in the ’00s but Glasgow in the ’80s? Now, that was an interesting scene. Birthing such diverse bands as Teenage Fanclub, Primal Scream and The Pastels, the nascent Glasgow scene saw the fusion of dance music and indie rock, it took in the famous NME C86 mixtape and it also led to the formation of Creation Records. The rest, as they say, is history…
From the mind of writer-director Grant McPhee, Teenage Superstars is a fairly straightforward retelling of what was a true moment in time, but it is the fact that this period has never really been covered before that lends this film some gravitas. The link between the Glasgow indie bands and the burgeoning grunge scene in Seattle is truly fascinating (this will be familiar to anyone who has heard Nirvana’s various covers of songs of Glasgow duo The Vaselines). Indeed, grunge royalty and Sonic Youth member Kim Deal narrates this documentary and her bandmate Thurston Moore also appears.
What I particularly loved about this doc is that aside from the aforementioned Teenage Fanclub and Primal Scream, many of these bands never really became anything other than cult acts, and yet, the reverence with which other bands speak about the Glasgow scene in the ’80s is clearly something powerful and salient.
As with many of the bands it champions, Teenage Superstars will never have anything other than a cult audience, but then that is what these bands and this scene were all about. Making music for the love of it.