What might a work of history look like and sound like if it were shaped in music? That is the question that the Glasgow-based band The Tenementals have set out to explore. A multi-disciplinary, multi-talented group of musicians, artists, and academics, they describe themselves as a “wild research project”. On their first album, Glasgow: A History (vol. I of VI), they use song as a vehicle for experimenting with new narratives of their city’s history, aiming to generate “a radical history of a radical city in a radical way”.
In this conversation we sit down with David Archibald, Professor of Political Cinemas at the University of Glasgow and one of the band’s founding members, to discuss the role of music in Glasgow’s working-class past, the historical links between music and radicalism, and what it might look like for a rock band to Do History, to blur the boundaries between scholarship and art.
Music courtesy of The Tenementals.