by Spitz, Marc
Nearly two decades before Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, Forsyth’s film concerns a gang of similarly broke but resilient young Scotsmen who spend their days musing about the best ways to commit suicide (never acting, of course, just musing). With nothing to lose, the gang, led by the gawky, toothy Robert Buchanan, conspires to rob a warehouse full of porcelain sinks (hence the almost too-cheeky title).
Buchanan and much of the cast worked for nearly nothing. The cast was drafted by the desperate director out of the local Glasgow Youth Theatre, a part of the city’s effort to keep young Scots out of trouble. Under Thatcher, such programs were eventually slashed.
“It was an Arts Council–funded program for teenagers,” says John Gordon Sinclair, who briefly appears in That Sinking Feeling but would be the star of Forsyth’s most iconic movie, Gregory’s Girl. “It was my after-school and weekends thing. We would meet and do acting classes. We’d also rehearse scenes from plays. Then go on tour and do shows around Scotland. Church halls. Other community centers.”
Early in preproduction for That Sinking Feeling, Forsyth realized that he had no money for casting. “Bill wanted to make a movie but couldn’t get the finance for it,” Sinclair says. “But he knew we were a bunch of kids interested in acting. I think he was also a bit scared of working with real actors.” Forsyth found himself strengthened and inspired by the kids’ enthusiasm.
That Sinking Feeling, released in 1979, was a critical hit, but only in the UK. Still, it provided Forsyth with the credentials he needed to secure funding for the production of his next script, this time set in the middle-class suburbs of Glasgow.
Plot-wise, Gregory’s Girl is a picnic compared to That Sinking Feeling’s twenty-minute lunch break. Sinclair’s young hero Gregory Underwood, pale, skinny, and sensitive, must decide how to respond to the realization that he’s finally fallen in love with a new arrival, football star Dorothy, played by Dee Hepburn.
Where the film shines is not in its structure or its acting, but in how it shattered a decades-old formula for films about young people. Blond and beautiful Dorothy immediately proves to be the “jock” in the mix. The male lead is, in contrast, sensitive and insecure, and vocally so. “I bruise like a peach!” he frets loudly at one point. And yet Forsyth doesn’t feminize Gregory or make Dorothy mannish. She is still the object of desire. Only their roles in moving the story forward are completely reversed. “It’s a tricky time for me,” Gregory worries. “I’m doing a lot of growing.” And so is teen cinema.
Forsyth doesn’t pretend that certain realities in coming-of-age tales can be ignored. The teens in Gregory’s Girl are just as horny and hormonal as the teens that ran wild in Fast Times. Virginity and sweetness are things to be quickly unloaded, but in the right way. These thoughtful characters don’t deny their hormones. They are simply smarter—and more honest and deliberate—in verbalizing what they are going through, similar to the kids in all of John Hughes’s films. And yet for all the sophistication, they still sound like kids.
“Bill certainly had the idea in his head—didn’t want it to just be a film, he wanted it to say something,” Sinclair says. “But for a lot of people it was also the first time they saw their lives reflected in a movie. It kind of defined that period between adulthood and being a kid, and the madness that takes hold. I think it captures that very well. It’s something that everyone goes through, something that everyone experiences.”
In the U.S., during an age when Indie film was not routinely a box-office concern, Gregory’s Girl sold tickets and drew critical raves for offering its open-minded, unabashedly affectionate take on classic teenage dilemmas and desires. Today, thanks in part to its impossibly sweet sequence near the end (in which Clare Grogan and Sinclair lie in the grass on their backs at sunset and “dance,” pinned by gravity and cheerfully oblivious to the bicyclists and passersby—“Don’t stop dancing, you’ll fall off,” he warns her), its place in both the Twee canon and the hearts of fans of smart British cinema remains. Sinclair and Forsyth even revisited the character for a sequel, Gregory’s Two Girls, which did little to tarnish the original’s legacy but fared not nearly as well upon release two decades later. Frankly, it was jarring to see the perfectly Twee Gregory as a middle-aged man.
Gregory’s Girl intersected directly with the city’s new independent pop scene, with which it shared its spirit, in the form of the pixie-ish Clare Grogan. Grogan was then the eighteen-year-old leader of a local band called Altered Images, who played sprightly New Wave with smart lyrics about Warholian popscapes. Driven along by Grogan’s schoolgirl voice, the group’s danceable songs shimmered like the best British post-Punk, a quality that would later put a pair of MTV perennials on the board: “I Could Be Happy” and “Happy Birthday.” Their exuberance was half ironic and half sincere to a fault. They wrote songs like “Dead Pop Stars,” but often they sounded like a three-day children’s birthday party.
Grogan was a Catholic-school student and a Punk-obsessive when she was cast in Gregory’s Girl. When she wasn’t rehearsing with the band and honing what would become a signature sound, she was waitressing at a local eatery called the Spaghetti Factory. It was there that Forsyth discovered her, Lana Turner style, and cast her as Susan, Gregory’s true soul mate.
Of the close-knit Gregory’s Girl cast, Grogan in her black turtlenecks, chunky jewelry, and granny dresses with Doc Martens was the most stylish. She knew all about the look of Nouvelle Vague stars like Anna Karina and Jean Seberg. She was also an avid record collector. “I became a bit of a geek about pop music,” she says.
A music scene was forming around Nico’s, a bar near the Glasgow School of Art. “It was very art-school driven. That’s how it was perceived from where I was,” says Garbage singer Shirley Manson, then a teenage Adam Ant fan in Edinburgh. “That kind of elitism felt very intimidating. They were very stylish. They all looked like sixties movie stars from Paris.”
“There was a feeling in this bar that if you weren’t trying to be a writer or a pop star or a painter or a sculptor, there was no way you were going to get a girlfriend,” says Lloyd Cole. “If you wanted to be a part of the scene, you couldn’t just be a hanger-on. You had to be doing something.”
Before any London-based music journalist labeled them the next big thing, a group of hugely talented “pop geeks,” first called the Nu-Sonics and then Orange Juice, were about to put the Glasgow scene on the pop-cultural map. “Growing up in Glasgow, we didn’t have a huge pool of homegrown pop stars to admire and emulate, so for me I was interested to find out that they existed,” Clare Grogan says of Orange Juice. Ironically, it was “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” the theme to John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club in 1985, that really delivered attention on Scotland’s music in the ’80s. Simple Minds had a number-one hit and became the biggest-ever Scottish pop act.
Orange Juice was fated to always be cooler and smaller than Simple Minds. The quartet’s original lineup—drummer Steven Daly, guitarist James Kirk, bassist David McClymont, and singer-songwriter-guitarist Edwyn Collins—had all been in love with Punk in earlier years.
“We saw every Punk show,” says Daly, now a writer with Vanity Fair and the coauthor of The Rock Snob’s Dictionary. “It was year zero—we didn’t believe in people who took drugs or had a thing about guitars.”
Edwyn Collins owned a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and loaned it out to those who met with his favor. “I hadn’t read it,” Daly says. “It wasn’t as much a part of the culture in Britain then as it was in America. [But] Edwyn was very Yank-o-centric, as was I.”
Ian Curtis, the enigmatic lead singer of Joy Division, had been anointed as the new hero of post-Punk Britain. When he died, he left a void. The field was wide open for a figure as charismatic and as handsome as Collins to attract attention. He looked like a boyish Bowie with a great swoop of draping hair. He wrote great songs and dressed uniquely in flannel shirts, New Wave sport coats, and tapered trousers, like a cross between Joy Division, the Byrds, and Cree
dence Clearwater Revival.
The first Orange Juice singles, “Falling and Laughing” and “Blue Boy,” were driven by Chic-style grooves played without Chic-level skill. The aesthetic of their records was similarly sharp but shambolic, put out by a tiny label known as Postcard Records. Alan Horne ran the outfit out of his bedroom turned office. The Postcard logo featured a quizzical-looking cat holding a pair of drum mallets above the label name and the careful and proud: “Of Scotland.”
“Postcard was an anomaly,” the Pastels’ McRobbie says. “They were actually quite snobbish and elitist, but they did it with a sense of humor. Their label had such a strong identity, they seemed more comfortable with a slightly Twee Scottishness—which was very much a middle finger up to London.”
Orange Juice’s “Blue Boy” appeared on N.M.E.’s first cassette giveaway, now known as C81, along with Postcard label mate Aztec Camera’s “We Could Send Letters,” a breezy pop song about pen-palling. The influential weekly music paper had finally twigged to the Glasgow scene after investing whole hog in Manchester, only to be heartbroken by the death of Ian Curtis. In the wake of C81, the Glasgow school was courted by the majors, but only Altered Images ended up signing, recording their debut, Pinky Blue, for Epic. Orange Juice held out, intent on preserving a tether to their faux naïveté, to kick against the corporate pricks and keep the band’s upstart soul. “It was contrived amateurism,” Collins would later tell a journalist.
Horne held his ground and London indeed had come to him, but at what cost? And how long could Postcard resist the fruits of its own wildly exciting and sharp pop vision? Ambition remained a dirty word. Simple Minds, some believed, was an aptly named act, but the “Sound of Young Scotland” and its key faces would soon be on television with Altered Images, joining Duran Duran, Bow Wow Wow, and Adam Ant as some of the first New Wave video stars on America’s newly launched MTV.
With the heightened scrutiny of media adoration, however, came an almost inevitable backlash. It proved a jarring blow to the more isolated, openhearted Scottish stars. When Clare Grogan performed, she did so in the persona of a wildly precocious girly girl, and N.M.E. dubbed her Tallulah Gosh in a notorious profile (the name comes from Jodie Foster’s character in the aforementioned Bugsy Malone). In America, where the band’s first single from Pinky Blue was taking off, Creem magazine described her voice as “itsy little boop de boop.”
“I was playing a role a wee bit. I used to literally walk around with a book of Lolita with me,” Grogan now says. With press and pressure, it was suddenly possible to be too smart, too much a sum of all the right influences, and just too sweet. “I did become aware of the criticism and was slightly horrified and embarrassed and hurt,” says Grogan. Soon the overhead would crush the two biggest Postcard bands. Orange Juice signed to Polydor, and Aztec Camera to Seymour Stein’s Sire Records in America, with their single “Oblivious” joining Altered Images’ “I Could Be Happy” on MTV. Aztec Camera’s full-length debut, High Land, Hard Rain, is the kind of record that can still make a pop geek rave with glassy-eyed nostalgia, but at the time it seemed somehow predoomed, the subtleties of the band’s sound destined to be drowned out by the pounding drum machines and blinding flash pots all around them.
Perversely, Aztec Camera’s biggest American hit would be a cover of Van Halen’s 1984 smash “Jump.” Orange Juice’s lone UK Top 40 hit was the suave anthem “Rip It Up and Start Again,” which took them to Top of the Pops, but just the once.
“They definitely lost a bit of momentum,” McRobbie says. Their obstinacy ran counter to the rigidity and impersonal touch of the big British record industry of the era. Orange Juice could have only ever seen them as square.
“Still, when they went on Top of the Pops, that was a huge deal,” recalls Shirley Manson. “It was heroic. Because the Scottish boys had made no concessions.”
Postcard Records’s roster was cherry picked by the more powerful majors and, while it may have been torn asunder by its own rigidity and closeted ambition, the label continued to function, and has been afforded an immaculate myth by the passing years as well. Today, after the rise and fall of Nirvana and the ultimate collapse of the music industry, its bedroom-run operation seems both prescient and romantic. While they never enjoyed long careers or sold millions of records, Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, and other Postcard bands carry a certain cachet.
“Nobody could have imagined at that point just the kind of influence Postcard would have,” says Clare Grogan, speaking of current artists like Franz Ferdinand, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, the Rapture, and even late-era Arcade Fire, who’ve adopted the dance-floor-ready post-Punk of the early-’80s Scottish scene. “I look back and I love just about every act they signed.”
Chapter 7
Meet the Tweetles
1983–1988
In which the Smiths, R.E.M., and a surprise third contender become genuine rock and roll attractions and cultural powerhouses by retrofitting the bedroom aesthetic for a mass audience and wrestle with established MTV stars as well as their own sense of purity and integrity as Twee bands in the throes of unprecedented, fatal fame.
I think the Smiths were shit,” says Orange Juice’s Steven Daly, expressing what can safely be called, in 2014, a minority opinion. “They were prosaic and they were awful, but what they did was put certain things together in a package that appealed to what I called ‘thick plus.’” In other words, the band took the coy and fey archness of the Postcard bands and other extra-London scene habitués and made it palatable not only for London but for arenas all over the world. “Morrissey dressed all of these quite elevated ideas up for the thick-plus crowd—and so they became very big.” The Smiths and their American contemporaries R.E.M. indeed married the Twee bedroom aesthetic to sporty, loud, and increasingly stonking guitars and a tight, danceable, ultra-capable rhythm section. Their choruses grew anthemic and their box office expanded in kind. Both bands offered an alternative to 1980s fashion, politics, social interaction, and general style as well as a list of personal heroes to share and various reading and screening assignments. They were beyond bands—they were lifestyles for the offering, almost clubs or cults to join.
“Geoff Travis played us the first Smiths album before it was released,” recalls Brian Ritchie of the Violent Femmes, “when we were there on our first tour and said he thought they were doing the same thing as us. [But] there are few wordsmiths of Morrissey’s caliber, and the music Johnny Marr put behind it was very spiritual.”
Never before had something that appeared so marginal on the surface, self-marginalizing even, seemed so ready to market; so appealing to the masses. “The Smiths and R.E.M. had come to light at roughly the same time,” Morrissey writes in his 2013 memoir, Autobiography, “and as a Sire Records executive had remarked, ‘It’s just a question of which of the two will explode in America first.’” R.E.M. won that battle, but at what cost?
As crazy as it seems to those of a certain age, there may be a time in the near future when teenagers won’t know who R.E.M. was. It’s like that old joke where the kid asks his father if Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings. Even though they sold seventy million records, played stadiums, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007—their first eligible year—and were generally regarded in their time as the best band in America, R.E.M. no longer automatically speaks to and for every outsider teen. That isn’t to say the quartet will soon be forgotten by anybody who ever owned a copy of Murmur, Reckoning, or even Green. It’s merely to suggest that sometimes a band can help define the very culture that leaves it behind.
The Smiths, however, are as alive in the hearts and on the digital devices of even more sad, smart, self-styled misfits than they were in 1987, the last time all four founding members spent any time together in a room that wasn’t a courtroom. (Drummer Mike Joyce sued Morrissey and Marr for back royalties in 1996.)
“R.E.M. are more has-beeny,” Paul Morley says of the great but now very late (as opposed to
immortal) R.E.M. “They seem more fixed in time.” R.E.M. may be the better band, but for the Twee race of faux underdogs now, the culture of the Smiths is a better fit. In life, the Smiths grew from a four-piece to a loud, stonking five-piece, topped the British charts, and crashed the American Top 40. They got big enough to fill amphitheaters in the States and were heading toward the same level of fame as their peers who feel so irrelevant today. Then they split. The Smiths, as a group, are dead, and in death they are James Dean perfect, never too far from the bedroom where they began. They are a band with a creation myth and a death cult. Combine that with a few dozen absolutely perfect songs that, as Morrissey astutely if not humbly points out, were only growing in stature at the time. Even today, wealthy, world traveled, and well into his fifties, he is the eternal flame for every lonely teen. One cannot say that about either Elvis (Presley or Costello) or even the Smiths-worshipping Emo stars of the last decade like Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional. You don’t outgrow the Smiths any more than you outgrow your vital organs. They are unrenounceable, and as long as they never reunite (to date they are one of the few bands to decline the fortunes of festival-headlining slots and the nostalgia industry), they remain saintly and pure, innocent, uncorrupted: qualities the Twee values over all.
