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Scotland

Glasgow, 1996 — a college project

Belle and Sebastian

Stuart Murdoch and Stuart David met on a Glasgow college course for unemployed musicians. Some of the tutoring came from ex-Associates guitarist Alan Rankine, and the course funded one single a year. Murdoch had written so many songs that the school let him record a full album instead, and Tigermilk (1996) came out in a first pressing of just 1,000 copies. What followed included a Best Newcomer BRIT Award, a film Murdoch wrote and directed himself (2014's God Help the Girl), and a 2017 tour mishap in which the band left drummer Richard Colburn behind at a Walmart in North Dakota.

1983 — feedback and a near-riot

The Jesus and Mary Chain

Brothers Jim and William Reid formed the Jesus and Mary Chain in East Kilbride in 1983. They paid for their first Portastudio with their father's redundancy pay and ran Velvet Underground noise straight through Beach Boys melody. Early shows got properly chaotic: a 1985 London gig ended in a near-riot and got the band banned by more than one venue. The debut album that followed, Psychocandy (1985), is still the record people point to. Thirteen years later, 1998's Munki was the last album the brothers made together before the first of the band's several breakups.

Kurt Cobain's favorite band

Teenage Fanclub

Teenage Fanclub formed in Glasgow in 1989, and their contemporaries nicknamed them the "Bellshill Beatles." They broke through with Bandwagonesque (1991), which Spin magazine named album of the year ahead of Nirvana's Nevermind. Kurt Cobain, touring Europe with the band as support that year, reportedly called them the best band in the world. Records like 1995's Grand Prix kept them a reference point for the generation of bands they'd helped inspire, from Nirvana to Oasis.

Edinburgh — defiantly tasteless

Country Teasers

Songwriter Ben Wallers, who also records solo as the Rebel, fronted Country Teasers the whole way through. The band formed in Edinburgh in the 1990s, playing lo-fi satirical songs meant to provoke. One critic described them as "Burroughs leading Joy Division through art-damaged country and western." Their second album, Destroy All Human Life (1999), came out on the American blues-punk label Fat Possum.

A voice Björk and Bono admired

Billy Mackenzie

Billy Mackenzie formed the Associates in Dundee in 1979 with guitarist Alan Rankine, and by 1982 they were in the UK Top 10. That was largely down to his voice, which moved easily across registers most singers wouldn't try. Björk has said she admired how he "used and manipulated" it, and Bono once said it was a voice he could never rip off. Mackenzie died in 1997, at thirty-nine. Recordings he'd made in the 1990s kept turning up for years afterward.

1966 — psychedelic folk pioneers

Incredible String Band

Robin Williamson and Mike Heron formed the Incredible String Band in Edinburgh in 1966 and pioneered a psychedelic strain of British folk. Bob Dylan praised them, and by Robert Plant's own account they later influenced Led Zeppelin. They played Woodstock on August 16, 1969, in a rescheduled, rained-out slot, but were left out of the eventual film and soundtrack. That's one reason their set is far less remembered than the era's other, more famous ones.

Glasgow, 1981 — no move to London

The Pastels

The Pastels formed in Glasgow in 1981, led by Stephen "Pastel" McRobbie, and worked up a deliberately raw, melodic sound across scattered early singles for Rough Trade, Creation, and Glass. They appeared on NME's influential C86 tape while pointedly rejecting the "twee" label that often got pinned on that scene. Sonic Youth and Kurt Cobain both praised 1987's debut album, which still didn't sell much of anything. The Guardian later credited the band with proving Glasgow groups didn't have to move to London to matter, and Belle and Sebastian and Mogwai followed that example.

Two albums, then thirty years gone

Shelagh McDonald

Shelagh McDonald was being talked up as a successor to Sandy Denny when she recorded two acclaimed folk albums for B&C Records, starting with 1970's Album, with players including Richard Thompson and Danny Thompson. Not long after she finished sessions for a third, a severe reaction to LSD at a party left her convinced her voice was damaged. She fled to her parents' home in Scotland and dropped out of public life for roughly three decades, living off-grid. A 2005 newspaper feature finally led her to come forward and, eventually, to sing again.

From "Big Music" to Irish fiddle

The Waterboys

Mike Scott founded the Waterboys in London in 1983, and their early records chased what he called "the Big Music": widescreen rock loaded with horns and piano, built, in his words, to search for "God's signature in the world." By the mid-1980s the sound had turned toward Ireland entirely. Fiddler Steve Wickham joined, Scott moved to Dublin and then Galway, and Fisherman's Blues (1988) traded synthesizers for traditional Irish instrumentation.

A demo tape handed to Will Oldham

Alasdair Roberts

Alasdair Roberts was born in Germany to a Scottish folk-musician father and grew up near Callander. He formed Appendix Out as a teenager in 1994, and after a 1995 concert he handed a demo tape to Will Oldham. Soon after, the band signed to Drag City, the Chicago label Oldham recorded for, and the meeting started a collaboration between the two that has run for years. His 2003 solo debut opened a catalogue that keeps mixing traditional Scottish and British ballad forms with his own songwriting, which has grown denser and more myth-soaked over time.

Robert Smith's own support act

The Twilight Sad

James Graham and Andy MacFarlane formed the Twilight Sad in Kilsyth in 2003. Graham sings in a thick Scottish accent over MacFarlane's dense, shoegaze-leaning walls of guitar, and the band calls the result "folk with layers of noise." Their 2007 debut, Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, was well received and set the template. The Cure's Robert Smith is a vocal fan, and in 2016 he picked them as his own support act for arena and stadium shows.

Literate, provocative, prolific

Momus

Nick Currie, performing as Momus, released his solo debut Circus Maximus on Creation Records in 1986. It was a concept album built around Biblical and Roman figures, and the first of more than 40 albums across four decades. The lyrics are literate and frank enough that both Jarvis Cocker and Brett Anderson have cited them as an influence. When synthesizer composer Wendy Carlos sued him in 1999, Momus paid for his defense in his usual unconventional way: thirty songs, each commissioned by a different patron for $1,000 apiece.

Falkirk, 1995 — frank, funny, local

Arab Strap

Childhood friends Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton formed Arab Strap in Falkirk in 1995, bonding over a shared taste for Smog and Will Oldham. Their songs are blunt and often explicit, about drinking, sex and small-town life in west-central Scotland, and mostly sung in Scots dialect. Belle and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch borrowed their name for his band's 1998 album, The Boy with the Arab Strap. Moffat was irritated, since it ran across the cover in bigger letters than Belle and Sebastian's own name. It was one skirmish between two very different bands from the same small scene.

The Collection