New music doc to tell story of Scotland’s unsung girl bands

A new documentary film, Since Yesterday: The Untold Story Of Scotland’s Girl Bands, will shine a light on Scotland’s greatest unsung girl groups over the last 50 years.

The feature-length movie will be in UK cinemas from October 18, and will give a voice to many of the country’s most trailblazing, alternative female pop and indie artists, charting their defiant resistance and barrier-breaking innovation in a male-dominated industry over the decades. Tickets for screenings can be found here.

The film has been written and directed by Carla J. Easton, a musician and former member of the harmonious Glasgow band TeenCanteen, alongside co-director Blair Young, who has worked on videos by Belle & Sebastian, Teenage Fanclub and Biffy Clyro.

Since Yesterday will chart the rise of The McKinleys, the first Scottish girl band to score chart success in 1964 with the single ‘Sweet and Tender Romance’, and will take in groups such as Strawberry Switchblade (whose signature song lends the film its title), Sophisticated Boom Boom, The Ettes, The Hedrons, His Latest Flame, Hello Skinny, Lung Leg and Sunset Gun.

It received its world premiere at the closing gala of the Edinburgh International Film Festival last month and will have a special screening on its opening night in Glasgow on October 18, complete with an after-screening gig at Mono with Sophisticated Boom Boom reforming for one night only for a special performance. The McKinleys’ Jeanette Gallagher, songwriting collective Hen Hoose and This Mortal Coil’s Louise Rutkowski will also be performing at the event.

Easton has said of the project: “Since I first suggested to Blair the idea of a documentary about the history of women who had formed bands in Scotland way back in 2016, we’ve been excited about letting an audience hear all the great music we knew about already, and then all the music we subsequently discovered. But more than that, it became about letting people hear the experiences of the women who made the music tell their stories, something they had never really gotten the opportunity to do before.”

Young added: “I’m excited for people to hear this music and meet these amazing characters, both in the film and through the live events happening in conjunction with the screenings and beyond and I hope it can go some way to help change things for the bands of the future.”

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