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Can a band tell the history of a city? And if so, what would that look and sound like? That’s what Professor David Archibald and his band, The Tenementals, are setting out to do.
In this episode David, a Professor of Film & TV at the University of Glasgow, discusses with Niall and Fay the innovative project which aims to make and tell history through music rather than traditional academic means. The conversation explores how the band, composed of academics, artists, musicians, and filmmakers, challenges conventional historical narratives.
Despite the challenging landscape of the music industry The Tenementals have resonated with audiences, particularly young people, and have so far received an enthusiastic response - they’ll be releasing their first album later this year.
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Highlights:
- ‘Liberated from books’: How The Tenementals’ history is told and made in song
- Why one song, Peat Bog Soldiers, has already made history
- Hear a little of The Tenementals live in Glasgow
Key Moments:
- 00:00:00 — Can a rock band make history?
- 00:01:15 — The Tenementals, a wild research project
- 00:02:00 — Constructing a transmedia history of a city
- 00:18:37 — Songwriting process
- 00:33:01 — Hope and Revolutionary Histories
Learn more:
- You can follow The Tenementals on Facebook @TheTenementals and on Instagram @Tenementals
- Follow Glasgow City Heritage Trust on social media: @GlasgowHeritage #IfGlasgowsWallsCouldTalk
- Produced by Inner Ear (innerear.co.uk) for Glasgow City Heritage Trust
- Sponsored by Tunnock's (tunnock.co.uk)
Creators & Guests
Host
Host
Niall Murphy
Niall Murphy, who is the Director of Glasgow City Heritage Trust, is a conservation architect and is heavily involved in heritage, conservation and community issues in Glasgow. Niall is also Chair of Govanhill Baths Building Preservation Trust and was previously chair of Pollokshields Heritage, Planning Convener for Pollokshields Community Council and a member of the Glasgow Urban Design Panel. Between 2016 – 2018 he was a member of the Development Management Working Group for the Scottish Government’s Planning Review. Niall regularly lectures or does walking tours on architecture, heritage and urban design issues. Niall has won the Glasgow Doors Open Day Excellence Award for Outstanding Talk (2023) and for Inspiring City Tour (2017), the Glasgow Doors Open Day Above and Beyond Award (2014), the Sir Robert Lorimer Award for Sketching (1996) and, in addition to nominations for Saltire Awards and GIA Awards was nominated for the Scottish Civic Trust’s My Place Award for Civic Champion in 2015.
Producer
Editor
Katharine Neil
What is If Glasgow’s Walls Could Talk?
A podcast by Glasgow City Heritage Trust which focuses on the relationships, stories and shared memories that exist between Glasgow’s historic buildings and the city's communities. Presented by Glasgow City Heritage Trust’s Director Niall Murphy and journalist Fay Young, this series features guests discussing with Niall and Fay a specific area, type of building or aspect of Glasgow’s heritage, not only from a historical and architectural point of view, but also from the perspective of the community; drawing on the guests’ personal experiences, thoughts, knowledge and memories.
Our history is an unfinished history. It's a messy history. It smells of the inside of a recording studio. It smells of black vinyl. It smells of screen printing.
Professor David Archibald:We make this history together as much as we hope to make a future together. So please welcome to the stage the Tenementals.
Niall Murphy:Hello, everyone, and welcome to If Glasgow's Walls Could Talk. I'm Neil Murphy.
Niall Murphy:And I'm Fay Young.
Niall Murphy:So for today's episode of the podcast, we're gonna ask the question, can a rock band make history? Not pop history.
Niall Murphy:We're talking history with a capital H, liberated from books, history told, and made in song. So today's guest is going to take myself and Fay on a rousingly radical route through the radical history of her radical city. So we usually start by asking guests to tell us a bit about themselves and how they came to be doing what they are doing. So professor David Archibald disarmingly takes a different approach. So the professor of political cinemas at Glasgow University is a founding member and front man of the Tenementals, and he wants to start with a band that is setting out to make history.
Niall Murphy:So over to you, David.
Professor David Archibald:Well, the Tenementals is what I would call a wild research project. It's wild because it needs to run to the logic of a band rather than run to the logic of an academic research project, which has its own you know, has to operate within its own kind of logics and regulatory frameworks. So the Tenementals, the main thing that the tenementals are involved in just now is trying to work out whether a band or a a group of musicians could tell a history of a city. And if they could tell the history of a city, what would it sound like? What would it look like?
Professor David Archibald:And what would it feel like? So they're interested in constructing what I would call a transmedia history of a city, So the history that we would create and that we're in the process of creating is a history in song, but it's a history also in perhaps the way that we may write about the song of the songs or the way that we might write about ourselves. Or, in fact, this podcast, I would I would suggest, is a part of that history. The the way that we create artworks which reflect the work that we are doing, artworks which, you know, we might use to promote our work, covers for singles and so on, And those artworks are often in conversation with artworks from previous radical movements, whether it be in this country or elsewhere. And and, also, just the the band's, ephemera, you know, and what we the things that we might say about ourselves on social media.
Professor David Archibald:And we create an audiovisual archive of our work. At some point, we might make a film about the Tenementals. So all of these things together, we hope that we are creating some kind of very messy transmedia history of a city. Now people might argue, and some historians might look at popular song and and recognise that, you know, some versions of popular culture might be places in which history might be produced. Most academic, or perhaps an understanding of history might be that it's what historians make when they go to work.
Professor David Archibald:And when they go to work, they produce products or outputs, which are primarily, you know, essays between 6, 8000 words or monographs, singular, books that are, you know, shaped between 60, 80, 000 words. And now they might look at, other forms of popular history. They might look at, you know, music or songs about events and and and accept that perhaps that could be a history too. But I think we wanna flip that around and say, can the historians make music? Can the academics make a history which would be fundamentally different in form to the form that is the, the dominant one.
Professor David Archibald:And and that's quite that's not just a that's quite a fundamental question about you know, from an academic with my super academic head on, that's a question about the ontology of epistemology, which means, in in shorthand, what does knowledge look like? You know, what what does what does knowledge production look like? Yes. Why is it that history has a certain shape? And why is it in certain cultures that history may have a certain shape in a certain period, and in other cultures, it may be different?
Professor David Archibald:So Mhmm. Mhmm. The the canonical great book of the Haitian Revolution by C.L.R James, the black Jacobeans, started its life not as a history book, but as a play, as a drama. And it was staged in in in the it was staged in the West End, in the West End of London. Right.
Professor David Archibald:But if we look at academic history and and, you know, in in the West, it tends to have followed the scientific model, dom that that where where writing dominates. And other forms of knowledge production, other forms of making history have been, have been rubbed out. You know, it's what some academics might call epistemicide. Different ways of knowing are privileged over other way ways of of of knowing. And I mean, another example is, Lynton Quaysay Johnson.
Professor David Archibald:When I was a a youngster, I listened to the music of Linton Kwesi Johnson. And in the mid eighties, he actually made an album called Making History. And he talks about how as a as a as a poet and as a as a as a singer, he was writing the history of his community. So we're interested in in in looking at popular forms and and forms of history production, which might be from the groups minoritised or oppressed groups or oppressed ways of making popular culture, working class culture, and then saying, but can we flip that around and put that with an academic setting? And then I suppose what we're interested in saying then, if we do that, what would be won and what would be lost?
Professor David Archibald:You know, I read books. I read 60,000 words academic essays. There's considerable value in them. We're not jettisoning existing forms of history production, but we're interested in in exploring, if we bring something else to the table, what would we be bringing to the table? And I suppose, fundamentally, what we're asking there is a question which is, what can art do?
Professor David Archibald:What can art do to create forms of knowledge and forms of understanding? So the Tenemental's history of the city of Glasgow, it's not about reaching audiences. It's not about, so that we can engage with people that don't read books. It's That may that may happen, and that would be good if it happened. But that's not the primary question.
Professor David Archibald:The primary question is to explore, actually what history is and what art can do Mhmm. In the making of history. Mhmm.
Niall Murphy:Mhmm. That's really fascinating. I suppose think about it, it's like the fact that you're doing this in song is quite interesting too in a way of being able to convey ideas and then making sure they're lodged in people's memory. You know, thinking about back over kind of, you know, anybody's life, you can remember things like, you know, here in the other day, a human league song. And, suddenly suddenly being back in the 1980s and remembering exactly where I was and what was going on at that time, and, you know, the whole message of that song kind of releases all of these other memories and associations about something, I think is a really interesting it's a it's a really interesting way of conveying something.
Fay Young:Yes. And and the song itself is more easily remembered than words in a book.
Professor David Archibald:Yes. Uh-huh. Yes. So that's the songs so we wrote a song about Fossil Grove. We think maybe the first song about Fossil Grove.
Professor David Archibald:And I just got I just remember getting taken to Fossil Grove when I was a a kid and being totally, you know, blown away by the concept of Mhmm. You know, these kinda these trees, you know, the monumentalised trees
Fay Young:Yes.
Professor David Archibald:And trying to get my head around concepts of, you know, fundamentally questions about deep time. Yeah. So an entirely different way of thinking about you know, history is often thought about just in terms of the things that men men and women do. But if we think about history in relation to the processes of time and the and the non-human so we've got a little simple song, which is really just about a child being can been having their mind expanded by an an an engagement with, you know, concepts of time Yeah. In in Fossil Grove and and White Inch Park.
Professor David Archibald:So in that sense, what that song does, it ties together the auto with the theoretical a little bit by kinda engaging with questions about time and how does and how does time operate and work and how may a child understand it. So you've got a song like Fossil Grove, or then we've written a song called Universal Alienation just to jump ship a little bit. So Universal Alienation riffs off Jimmy Reid's very famous, speech to alienation speech in 1972 when he was elected as the director of the University of Glasgow. I mean, on the back of it is the role that he played in the occupation of the the shipyards, and the Clyde in, you know, in 1971 when the workers were involved in taking over the yards and running the yards in an attempt to stave off their closure and, you know, relatively successful in in in its time. And Reid became a world famous figure.
Professor David Archibald:He was on Parkinson. And,
Niall Murphy:Yeah. Fantastic.
Professor David Archibald:And so he became a famous, trade union figure, rightly so. And he was, a fantastic orator, self taught. Fantastic orator. And he makes a magnificent speech in the in the in the Bute halls, the University of Glasgow, about alienation and about the rat race and about why people should not just, you know, get drawn into the kinda, you know, chasing chasing every little thing that's thrown in in ahead of you. The compromises that you might make before you know before you know it.
Professor David Archibald:As Reid says, you're a fully paid up member of the Rat race. And Yeah. I mean, I've worked in the I've been worked in the university for a long time, and I think that when Reid made that speech, perhaps people wouldn't have thought that Reid was talking about working conditions inside the university, not just the University of Glasgow, but higher education generally, which I think for many people might be regarded as a much, you know, much more relaxed, working environment. But in the reality, in the last few decades then, you know, all the issues about alienation that Reid was talking about are certainly applicable in, in in higher education generally. So we've updated that song called the universal alienation.
Professor David Archibald:But, also, there's a line or 2 in it about Jimmy Reid and the miner's strike because when I was a kid, I worked in John Brown's. And I was at you know, I was a big trade union activist, and I was collecting the money for the miners. And I used to go around, and I was in charge. I was in what was called a union called AUW Task, which was the white collar workers' section of the engineering union. And I had raised the idea of the levy, so I was gonna get charged for collecting it.
Professor David Archibald:And so every every steward had to collect a pound a week from their group, and then they would give it to me. And then I had to go and persuade all the people that didn't want to pay it, on a Monday morning that they had to give me the pound.
Fay Young:How old were you?
Fay Young:Oh, I
Professor David Archibald:was a wee boy. I mean, I was, like, 20 I was 90 in 80 4, 85, yeah, I was 20. You know, I was 20, but I was I had all the energy that maybe Reid would have had when he when he was 20. You know? And, the tournament was I'm not interested in simplistic histories.
Professor David Archibald:You know? We're interested in the the messy past. Mhmm. If the if the history itself that we make is gonna be quite messy, then we're also interested in the complexities of the past. My views haven't changed, but my capacity for arguing has been tempered a little bit, you know, and a more greater capacity to see the other the other side of things.
Professor David Archibald:Yeah. But but my fundamental views actually haven't changed.
Fay Young:So you you listen to what others are saying as as well as formulating your own response. Do you listen first? And does it change your mind ever?
Professor David Archibald:Yes. I mean, yes. One of the great things about being a teacher is about how much you learn by reading other people's writing Mhmm. And, and and and and analysing how they are how they make an argument and looking for the evidence that they put in their argument. And and often it's often the case that young, opinionated people write really strong arguments with sometimes little evidence.
Professor David Archibald:Mhmm. So by spending a lot of time looking at writing, that's been a very good thing for me. And when I was doing my PhD, I did a PhD on the Spanish Civil War in cinema, and I I published a book on that afterwards. And but when I was doing my PhD, I I had this great, great job where I went to schools and specific postcodes in Glasgow that were identified as, you know, low in low, intake areas for the universities.
Fay Young:Mhmm. And
Professor David Archibald:I did this, bridging course for the the 5th 6th years. Mhmm.
Fay Young:How
Professor David Archibald:they might be where they are and how they might get to university. And the university had just introduced that course that that whole program, and I was in the first year of it. So they spent a lot of time training us, about working with young people and study. And and I learned so much doing that, and I learned much.
Niall Murphy:That must be an absolute fascinating.
Professor David Archibald:Absolutely. To go back to the to they were kids. You know, students university students aren't kids all. But, of course, but but school students. So I learned so much.
Professor David Archibald:I remember, you know, some of the things that you take, but in the universities and about possibilities and about speaking to kids from working class areas about class in a in a different way. And it's about whether you talk to them about how class delimits what they the position that they're in, which it absolutely does.
Niall Murphy:A totally
Professor David Archibald:. Same time, giving them the power to talk about what they can do. And that and I learned a lot about that. I learned a lot about that from working with the from working with the kids. I spent a fair bit of time in Castlemilk.
Fay Young:Just going to ask if you had helped people over the bridge, you know, if if some of the kids that you were speaking to, if they went on into higher education.
Professor David Archibald:Oh, many many of them would, but, I mean, this is 1999. I started doing that, so they some of them will be coming up for retirement. But, no, that was that that was a while ago. But, sure, definitely. Definitely.
Professor David Archibald:We had a great affinity with some children in in in Castlemilk, but I don't I've I've got no idea what they're what they're doing now. And I and I I think like a lot, you know, like a lot of academics from working class backgrounds, then I don't know if it's a responsibility, but they certainly spend a lot of time in working class areas. And, I mean, local history is a very powerful educational force, you know, to because it makes a very specific connection. Mhmm. You know, it makes a connection with with you and the people that walked on the ground that you walked in Mhmm.
Professor David Archibald:You know, 10 years ago or a 1000 years ago. And it really helps, I think, for people to conceptualize time
Fay Young:Yes.
Professor David Archibald:And the and the and the passing of generations and and and where they may stand in relation to that and that people are gonna come after them and so on. So there's nothing parochial or narrow minded about local history.
Fay Young:No. And as as you say, song is such a powerful way of keeping it alive because the way cities are now, streets get demolished. Well, certainly buildings get demolished, but sometimes whole streets get dug up. So locating yourself in the place isn't always the most useful thing to do, but the song can keep those echoes vibrating or reverberating. Yeah.
Fay Young:I'd love to hear more about the songwriting. And when we spoke earlier David you gave a really lovely description which reminds me of a lot of you know sort of Simon and Garfunkel writing process. But perhaps it we would need to meet your band first before that story makes a bit more sense, your co-writer, for example?
Professor David Archibald:So the band is, myself and Simon. Simon Whittle is the guitarist. Simon also does all the design work. He's a he designs all their artwork, and and and, you know, I'm biased, but the the work he does is really fantastic. And Simon's a punk.
Professor David Archibald:He's, he's Carlisle's greatest punk, punk rocker. But he lives in Ibrox now, and he's, well, he's been in Glasgow for a long time. And, and he's and he's a great guitarist, and he's got the capacity to write these really beautiful little kind of riffs and guitar moments. And so so me and Simon write the songs in the main meeting, and these songs start with an idea. You know, they start with an idea.
Professor David Archibald:So they don't they tend not to start with a piece of music, but they start with an idea. So like, you know, Fossil Grove, you know, we've got that idea, or or Passion Flowers Lament is, you know, the the the song about the statue on the, on the backs of the Clyde.
Tenementals:I stand here eternal, fists clenched to the sky as reaching for futures, not pasts of the night. My soul is scarred by memories of hearts broken and flowers crushed in the darkened shadows of Candel de Fells.
Professor David Archibald:So they they usually start with an idea, or they always start with an idea, and and, usually, I overwrite some lyrics, and I've got some lyrics with too usually far too many and probably not in very good shape. And I and I I don't really know what the song sounds like. I maybe have a sense of whether it's soft or you know, but not really. Right. And then Simon comes over.
Professor David Archibald:He comes over to my house. We have we drink a bottle of wine, and we and, like, in half an hour, or or, well, within the with with the time the wine's drunk, then we got something, which we think is brilliant. And then we usually go to the Arlington bar and drink another couple of pints and go home. And then the next morning, the song is not as good as we thought it was, but it's enough for us to build on.
Fay Young:Right.
Professor David Archibald:And it usually takes us three if we had a budget for each song, it would be three bottles of wine. But maybe we would take three maybe we would take about three goes at creating the song before we would then have it. And in the meantime, what we would do is I would I would then kind of rearrange the shape, the structure, the lyrics. Simon would develop the music a little bit more, and then we would come back together. And so that's that's generally the the way we would write the song.
Professor David Archibald:And then we would take it into the the studio. And then everybody builds on builds to create the version of this the the initial song that will be that will be released or that that will be that will be created. And that and that's a really beautiful process. We recorded a song, just a one off song with Monica Queen, who's a very celebrated, voice, you know, really a really unique, absolutely unique singer. And, and we brought we brought out a song called Te Recuerdo Amanda, which is by the Chilean singer and poet, Victor Jara.
Professor David Archibald:And and we did that because we were doing a gig in Saint Luke's, and we were doing it the day before the 50th anniversary of the the day when Victor Jara's body was found after he had been arrested in the aftermath of the coup in Chile in 1973 when a right wing military dictatorship overthrew a democratically elected government.
Fay Young:They
Professor David Archibald:took him to this, football stadium, broke his fingers, shot him dead, and dumped his body in the street. And, you know, it was what I loved about that when we recorded that, it's been played a few times on the radio, but it was played in Govn Community Radio, Sunny Govan Radio.
Niall Murphy:Sunny Govan. Yep.
Professor David Archibald:And we wrote a little bit of a press release, and the, the person who was I think it was Daffy's name. I don't know him, but he he was talking about the song. And he was you know, maybe called some of the stuff from the press release that we had put out, but he'd he'd done his own work as well, and he talked about about that. And what I loved about that is that that song was gone out in Spanish because we sang it we recorded it, and Monica sang it in Spanish. Mhmm.
Professor David Archibald:And that song went out in in kind of working class areas in in in the city, a song which was entirely new because Yeah. I think if you if you're gonna record a song, a a cover of a song, that's you know, it's nice if you can do something new with it, but, actually, to to record that song and to put it in kinda Scottish working class areas, a song about what Daffy said is they killed him. I'm paraphrasing, but he said they killed them because of the power of his music. And I thought, no. That's really lovely.
Professor David Archibald:It's true. Absolutely. Absolutely spot on. So I was really it made it made my heart swell to hear local radio DJs playing, you know, songs that the Tenementals are are are bringing out in Spanish. You know, there's not many Spanish tracks on Scottish radio these days, understandably.
Professor David Archibald:But we thought there was an element of solidarity attached to to doing it, and that and Monica sang it so beautifully. I mean, it was just amazing when she when she sang it at at Saint Luke's.
Niall Murphy:I saw that performance. It was wonderful.
Professor David Archibald:I mean, it was stunning.
Niall Murphy:Mhmm. It really was. It was a great performance.
Fay Young:And, of course, you've got the German song as well, haven't you?
Niall Murphy:Yeah. The Peat Bog Soldiers.
Professor David Archibald:Yes. I mean, this is a way in which the the band operates not as an academic project. Because an an academic project would arrive, and it would have probably an agenda, a problem to solve, maybe a research question, and it would have a maybe a time frame in which to do that. Whereas the Tenementals have, you know, a small foot in the university and then a big foot in the music scene in the city, And that means that we operate on the logics, not of an academic research project, but on the logics of a band so that we have to go not where the academics want to go, but we have to go where the band needs to go. Yeah.
Professor David Archibald:So if a band's playing a gig, we then it follows not with the academic side, but it follows what the band needs and what the gig needs. When we were doing a a striker's benefit gig in January, early February 2023 in the Admiral downstairs in the admiral, Every time you do a gig, you might be trying to do another song just to to to do something different. And on that night, we came up with the idea of doing a song called peat bog soldiers, which, emerged from a conversation that I had with a filmmaker friend of mine filmmaker academic friend of mine called Holger Mohaupt, who lives in North Berwick and teaches in Liverpool. And I've been doing some work with a colleague in Catalonia about the Spanish civil war and and sights of memory. And we'd filmed a few things, and we were looking to put some music or some old music that we could get, copyright clearance to use.
Professor David Archibald:And I had been I was speaking to Holger about this German song that was about the Spanish Civil War. And he says, well, you know, die moorsoldaten Black Soldiers. And I I said, I don't really know. He said, that was a big song in Germany. He said, he calls me Dave.
Professor David Archibald:He's like, Dave, it's the big song when you're a teenager on the on the demos. It's the big song. And I didn't really know it. And then I read a little bit about it, and it had been sung. It had been recorded by, you know, Pete Seeger and recorded by Paul Robson and Mhmm.
Professor David Archibald:Many covers of it, protest covers of it, but mostly quite a while back, you know, in terms of it being well known. So I thought, well, let's let's do that. And then I had heard Holger's daughter, Lily, who's, you know, Scottish but has been speaking German for for for a fair bit. So German is, is pretty good. And, I had heard her singing on some, some of Holger's films, and I knew she had a beautiful voice.
Professor David Archibald:She was, you know, maybe 18 at the time. So she sang it. Did she just pitch up on the night? Or maybe we had one rehearsal the night before. And it was just beautiful.
Professor David Archibald:And because it was first performed on the 27th August, 1933, in Borghamur concentration camp by for A camp for left wing political prisoners. It's not overtly political. Well, it it completely is, but the words are, you know, the words it's about mask. The protest is about, you know, is is not in your face. So the reason that it became a big song in the Spanish Civil War is because a lot of the German members of the communist party and the left leftist generally, because fascism because Hitler had come to power in 1933, Spanish Civil War breaks out in 1936.
Professor David Archibald:The German Communist Party actually instructed all their members with military service to experience to go and fight in Spain. So there was a lot of Germans in Spain. And they brought with them this great song, Die Moorsoldaten which is to a kind of to a marching beat. So it became a big
Professor David Archibald:song in the Spanish Civil War. So the versions of it are a little bit beaty and, you know, meaty and militaristic, and then mostly sung by men.
Professor David Archibald:So to put a young woman, a young female teenager, in the in the lead of that, it was, you know again, it's just trying to make a new song in some ways. And that was just so lovely. She sang it so lovely, and then we recorded 2 versions of it. There's a 6 length a 6 verse version, which is, you know, very, very rarely performed. But we just recorded the that in in the entirety.
Professor David Archibald:And then we we did a kinda new translation of a a three verse, and then we sang one verse in German, one in English, one in German, one in English, one in German, one in English, one in German, one in English. Again, so to try and make a kinda new song, and, and she just sings that so beautifully. And then and then you and then you just put it out there, and you you hope some you hope It's hard it's hard making music. There's so many it's amazing because there's there's so much music out there. That's good that there's a lot of music being made, but it's actually hard getting the attention, getting people's ears.
Professor David Archibald:So you just have to put your put your music out there and then hope that it finds the right ears, I suppose. And what happened with that song is just out of the blue, I got an email from the the former archivists who deal with the the concentration camps in Borgenborough in that area. And and they I mean, they just said some really beautiful words. And they said also that they wanted to archive the song, the materials related to the song in an archive. They've got a special archive just about that song, Daimler sold that and Peat Bog soldiers.
Professor David Archibald:So we were we had some conversations with them, and we and we've we've we've sent some materials there already. We've sent, you know, we've sent, a CD and some other materials, and we've got we're sending them some more materials related to that, some a DVD and so so that was just so incredibly moving. Mhmm. I mean, that was, you know, that that was moving. You hope that I don't know.
Professor David Archibald:If you're a band and you bring out a track, then you hope that, you know, someone might write some nice words about it, you know, because that helps spread the word. Mhmm. So so to get some to get some words from to get some kind words from the archivists in the concentration camp was just extraordinary.
Niall Murphy:It is. It's com completely fascinating. By complete coincidence, I was reading Hans Follada's diary, kind of that period. Just we can't complete coincidence I hadn't come across this article then. And, yeah, it's the the night of the burning down of the Reichstag .
Fay Young:Yeah.
Niall Murphy:And they know, you know, what's gonna come. And it's just that whole period is just so fascinating and horrific. And, yeah, to hear that in that song.
Professor David Archibald:Mhmm. Yes. Uh-huh. It's hard to imagine these things. Mhmm.
Professor David Archibald:You know, I think maybe maybe what art can do is that maybe art can, I think, begin to help us understand the things that just the the written word cannot, actually? So, maybe Art can help us understand emotions.
Niall Murphy:Oh, definitely. Absolutely. In, Cabaret when the the the future belongs to me, that song. And in the film, when you see them and they they're dawning a realisation, this is what's happening, and everybody joins in eventually. It's this terrifying moment.
Professor David Archibald:Yes. Exactly. So so art, song, painting, you know, they they can do they can create another form of, knowledge, experience, about the past.
Fay Young:I mean, in in the article that Neil referred to that was published in The Conversation, you talk about looking for hope in the work that you're doing in in the the radical histories, but also talking about the future. And that's what the songs are doing, drawing on, recreating the radical history for now, for our understanding now. And does it help us, especially in The Passion Flowers Lament, where you talk about the fascist boots marching again and we have to learn from what happened before to be alert to what could happen again, what is already happening in some places. So it's sorry to repeat, you know, to just to get a sense of whether you feel there is hope, in in or are you finding hope as as you work on this radical route?
Professor David Archibald:I think that, there's a fantastic phrase that was developed in the in the aftermath of the Paris Commune about, you know, the defeat of workers, movements, and someone coined the phrase the great federation of sorrows Mhmm. Which is beautiful. The great federation of sorrows. But one of the things that we're interested in is the capacity of art and culture to be points of opposition and to point towards possibilities even in moments when it seems absolutely impossible.
Fay Young:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Professor David Archibald:Peat Bogs soldiers is a great example of, you know, workers coming together group of workers coming together to sing in the face of a cataclysmic thing that's coming in their direction, which they probably can't even begin to comprehend Yeah. The thing that's happening to them. Art shows you that in times like that, they they create possibilities when other things are forced down. Mhmm. So that's one thing.
Professor David Archibald:The second thing, I think, is that there are moments when it appears that there cannot be any hope because the thing that you're facing is is so, is so overwhelming. And, I mean, the new director at the University of Glasgow made you know, it's controversial that he's been elected. 80% of the students have voted for Abu-Sittah . And he made a really interesting point in his speech last week, and he said, I'm paraphrasing, but that's not a quote. But he says, never would one have imagined that in 1987, when this the University of Glasgow Students elected Winnie Mandela to be the rector of the university.
Professor David Archibald:No 1 could have envisaged that in a generation further down the line, multiracial or a non apartheid South Africa would charge Israel with genocide at the at the International Court of Justice. There's a lot in there. You know? And the the point I'm pulling out from that is that I remember that period of of apartheid in the 1980s. You know, I got arrested in Benneton's or Gail Street amongst other things for occupying it.
Professor David Archibald:But at that at that at that point, apartheid seemed impregnable. You know, in in the mid 1980s , it's it it it did not seem that, you know, a kind of emancipate black emancipation or movement against the white state was was possible. We would go to see all these films which finished with I can't remember the what what film. We'd finished with a list of all the the black men killed in prison, how they slipped on a bar of soap or, you know, all these pathetic excuses. And if you were black and you were in a township in South Africa in the mid 1980s , it must have felt, you know, where on earth is the hope here?
Professor David Archibald:But, actually and and that's when I I was in a little choir called the Moses Mayekiso choir. Moses Mayekiso was a he was the leader of the, metal workers union, and someone I knew had come back from South Africa with a tape of trade union workers' songs, and we sang them probably very badly. But we used to sing them we used to sing them in the streets. So people have always used art and culture as vehicles for maintaining some kind of possibility, if art if maybe art can do that, can maintain some kind of possibility, and also conjure a new world. I an idea of a new world when the beyond the idea that the current world seems the only one that's there.
Professor David Archibald:It's impossible to see anything else other than the overwhelming size of your oppression. And I think that you know, I was a socialist. I was a young socialist when I was a teenager. I'm I'm an old socialist now. But at the the the fundamental ideas that I've that I've that people told me when I was young, They said to me when I was younger, well, you'll grow out of that.
Professor David Archibald:You know, you'll you'll grow up, and you'll realize how the world works, etcetera, etcetera. And I haven't actually, I haven't, and, actually, everything that I've and and when I was young, I thought it was I thought it would be better if socialism was the way that the world was organized. I thought it would be better. It would be fairer. But now, actually, I think that, and I think this is a reasonable, by an analysis of the evidence, conclusion to draw, that if capitalism continues, it's quite difficult, I think, to see how the end of the planet or a planet which is not massively impacted negatively colossally by climate change the in the newspaper.
Professor David Archibald:So for me and, of course, I'm in, like, a minority, a very, very small minority of academics who would stand up and say, I'm a socialist, and argue for socialist ideas. And in the academy, a lot of people might say things like, well, we may have to imagine worlds where we may live together differently. We may breathe together differently. I mean or they may talk about post capitalist futures. I'm I'm not afraid to name the tenemental's object of desire, which is, you know, a socialist world Mhmm.
Professor David Archibald:And, and to campaign for that. Now I'm a teacher. I'm at the university. It's not my job in the university to propagandize for a certain set of values, And I don't do that, apart from anyone else that's extremely conservative, to think that you can just, you know, communicate your own ideas to other people and that they'll gonna be 1 we won over 2 of them. Your job as a teacher in the university is to to create as much capacity for critical thinking.
Professor David Archibald:Yeah. Yes. So, actually, the first thing, if your student if your students reject what you said but reject it with a, you know, a good argument, then that's that's an a. You know, that's that's that's totally fine. So it's not about my role in the university in terms of socialism, but and and I think that perhaps at the moment when it seems least likely you know, there's not that many there's not a big massive movement for socialist change in Britain at the minute, to say the least.
Professor David Archibald:But I think what is least likely, then that's actually the moment when you have to say that it's necessary. Yeah. And if you restrict yourself to what is possible, then if we look at all these things that have happened in the past, they would never have taken place. They would never have taken place. It would never have seemed possible to overthrow Ceaușescu in Romania or the apartheid state for some people in in in in the eighties.
Professor David Archibald:Change always looks impossible until it happens. And then it looks as if, of course of course, it had to happen. Of course, it had to happen. So we are not afraid to say that we're in in favor of absolute, fundamental change in favor of working people.
Niall Murphy:Fascinating point. This is, yeah, a bit of a sidetrack. I was on an Erasmus architectural summer school, which was in the USSR just before the coup. That that was fascinating because you had no idea that this kind of really major moment in history was about to happen. And then in hindsight but when you piece it all together and it's like makes complete sense.
Niall Murphy:And it was just like we we were so kind of oblivious to things like all the tanks in the street. And you were like, well, that must be what the USSR always does. But it wasn't because they were all gathering for the coup. And, you know, you had no idea. But it was it was fascinating to think that was all going on at the same time.
Professor David Archibald:No. I think these things are they're always connected, history and hope. You know, they're connected. And Mhmm. Is it Seamus Heaney who uses the saying, you know, when when hope and history rhyme?
Professor David Archibald:You know? Mhmm.
Fay Young:And I
Professor David Archibald:think, you know, I'm sort of interested in that line. You know? And I do think I'm sort of old fashioned in a certain sense. It's not that history predicts the future or, you know, or that we could learn the lessons from history, and then that means we won't make the make the mistakes again. I don't think that that's the the case.
Professor David Archibald:But I think that we can be inspired by moments of possibility in the past. And I think that the wealthy know that because they they always, always repress the memories of absolute revolutionary changes. When Mhmm. So the Paris Commune 1871, a big attempt to erase that the the the whole memory of that in French in French education and French popular culture. So these moments of actual when workers actually took control of things, The Spanish revolution, 1937 Mhmm.
Professor David Archibald:1936, rather. You know, Spanish Civil War gets a bit messy, and that's some of the stuff that we talk about and ends in, of course, terrible defeat for the for the for the workers and the peasants. And, you know, Franco's probably not a fascist, but certainly aligns with the fascists and stays in power until 1975. That's a major, major a major, major defeat. To return to that question a phrase I said earlier on, the left always tends to talk about the great federation of sorrows.
Professor David Archibald:Why did we lose? Who killed him? He betrayed him. We are interested in that, but we're interested in finding moments of possibility
Fay Young:Mhmm.
Professor David Archibald:And blasting them into the future. These moments when things did happen, when things when things changed, even if momentarily, they create another they they create another option. If it happened once, it can happen again. Yeah. And that's why revolutionary histories are often are often repressed by the powers that be, the powers that be that are above them.
Professor David Archibald:So it's those moments of possibility. Whether that be international revolution, these grand things, or even that small thing like the poll tax. You know, the poll tax. Yeah. As I was on a I was on a radio, they they they I felt quite old.
Professor David Archibald:They got a lot of the oldies back to talk
Fay Young:about Absolutely.
Professor David Archibald:The first poll tax demonstration that took place in 1989.
Niall Murphy:I remember all of that. I was there I remember going on them. That was fascinating.
Professor David Archibald:They were getting it. And if you didn't, they were saying, you know, what was it like? And it was quite it was quite weird. I felt I felt very old. But these these moments of of of radical change when people won Yeah.
Professor David Archibald:And they changed history when it seemed like that could not happen. Mhmm. If I understand that history, it helps us do that as well. And that's that can often be a local thing, you know, teaching, you know, students or learning more about the Chilean revolution or the Paris Commune, the Spanish revolution, how people resisted, Hitler and the Nazis. Great.
Professor David Archibald:That's good. That's fantastic. The history of the UCS working, when the when the shipyard workers occupied the yards and helped to stave off the closures, the history of the poll tax campaign, how local communities came together to stop sheriff officers coming into communities to to remove pieces of furniture from people's houses and to conduct what are, at best, Victorian, Victorian practices. And people stopped that. People stopped that.
Fay Young:And the interesting thing was it wasn't just it wasn't first class. It was across a broad community. You had so many different kinds of people working together, learning from each other actually. I remember going to supper parties where, you know, property owning people with, people being evicted from, you know, very different kinds of properties coming together.
Professor David Archibald:Yes. Uh-huh.
Fay Young:And it's such an essential fundamental thing, security in your own home. That has to be everybody's right.
Niall Murphy:Yes. Uh-huh. Yes. Yeah. Very very much.
Niall Murphy:It's very similar to the rent strike and Mary Barbour and all of that and how that, you know, spread from government all the way across the UK. And that that how terrified the government were of it at that time. Very similar.
Professor David Archibald:What that's a great example of is this, I think. Mhmm.
Fay Young:That
Professor David Archibald:there are these episodes which seem to be historical, and then they get blasted into the present. Yeah. When history and struggle rhymes in a certain sense, and you think, well, what would be the lessons of the 1915 rent strikes? You know, that's like that's gone. That's the last thing that's something that happened ages ago.
Professor David Archibald:And yet that was a key thing that people talked about during the poll tax campaign. And then about 2 or 3 years ago, just when we were coming out of the lockdown, I got an email from an activist in in, in America who knew about the rent strikes who knew about the red strikes in Glasgow, but what he wanted to know is what the poll tax activists learned from the red strikes activists so that the new generation of rent strikes activists in the United States learned about what they could do. So that's kind of continuation of struggle, a kind of conversation, a dialogue through time, and then these little moments of of success, of struggle, and how they are kinda passed on, and sometimes in an interrupted way, not in a kinda a kinda continuous way, but how one episode sort of gets taken out and Mhmm. Thrust, you know, thrust forward.
Fay Young:It's
Niall Murphy:just it's really fascinating about how you can work that kind of thread, you know, this great radical history that Glasgow has, and you can work it into your songs. You know, it's it's just it's it yeah. Find that really interesting. Mhmm. So what about the critics?
Niall Murphy:And what do you think they say about your your stance and how the Tenementals kind of work? And how would you respond to that?
Professor David Archibald:Art, creates conversations. It's the starting point for another way of talking, I think. So, you know, we live in a world dominated by, you know, a corporate media which has specific interests. What art does is it can create a different conversation about something else entirely. And what a band can do is just it can just sidestep the existing conversation, and it can say, this is a song that talks about this.
Professor David Archibald:That's one of the great things that Art can do. And so we're interested in in having conversations. You know, we've had very favorable press, actually. I mean, there's been a whole series of articles about the tournamentals and the and the Herald, which has been amazing. It's been they've been very interested in in what we've, what we've been doing.
Professor David Archibald:I suppose we've been engaged with as a concept, you know, primarily as a concept.
Fay Young:Mhmm.
Professor David Archibald:We brought out two singles, and, you know, people don't really review singles. You know, people would tend unless you look famous, but you're a big band. But people will review an album. You know? So we'll get we'll get some album reviews, and that and then and then and that'll be amazing.
Professor David Archibald:That'll be amazing in the sense that, you know, Malcolm McLaren says something late about the Pistols, you know, the trick is the the the Sex Pistols are the concept. You know? Don't the trick is not to let anybody hear the music, you know, before the before they they brought the they brought the music out. So I don't care. Maybe some did not.
Professor David Archibald:But, but we, you you know, we've had quite a lot. We get quite we've had quite a lot of press, and, but we've not had a lot of press in the music press. You know? So we've actually been we've been we've been written about as an idea and as a news story, and and and, of course, that's amazing. Well, there's been some video plays, but and there's been some blog in which they which they wrote about.
Professor David Archibald:But we expect that when the album comes out, then that we'll be written about as a band, which is, of course, if you want to operate as on the logics of a band, then you then you then have to go, you know, Archibald's lyrics are banal, You know, Ronan Breslin's keyboard playing as as whatever. You know, you then have to and but that that's it. That's good. You know, I've I've I've written a lot of arts arts criticism. So it'd be amazing to wake up read a review of a Tenemental album.
Professor David Archibald:That would that would make my year, probably. So we look forward to that. The songs have to be good enough to carry the concept of can a can a band tell a transmedia history of a city? And I feel very fortunate to have worked together with, you know, such talented people.
Fay Young:Do you think it could influence, conventional history making, the way historians tackle?
Professor David Archibald:I mean, a historian has a very specific skill set, you know. And and in terms of construct and historical outputs, certainly, the conventional history is historian has a their skill set is about writing, what I would maybe call the classic realist text. You know, it's got a a linear essay, beginning, a middle, and an end, and an argument with footnotes. You know, Dovit, who I was working with, I've I haven't heard him, but, apparently, a very good violinist. We might we might we might work together on an album project.
Professor David Archibald:I don't know. But I think to explore other forms of history, production poses a fundamental question about what history is, about what historiography is, what is the shape of history.
Fay Young:And,
Professor David Archibald:of course, that's I I repeat, but Dauvit Broun is also professor, that Dauvit Broun is also interested in that question of, actually, what is history? What does it what does it feel like? I think the the more people doing that, then then the better, you know, then then the better because I think if you've got a greater understanding of the form of what you're doing, then you've, you know, you've got a capacity to critique of of of self critique.
Niall Murphy:Okay. This is a a loaded question that we ask everybody who comes on the podcast this. And always very interested to hear what your opinion is on something. So it is, what's your favourite building in Glasgow, and what would it say if its walls could talk?
Professor David Archibald:If its walls could talk. Oh, well. The I have a long answer and a short answer.
Niall Murphy:The Go go
Professor David Archibald:go. My long ans my long answer would be that the great thing about the city is space, which allows the buildings to be seen. That's what I love about Glasgow, the the parks, and the buildings that might sit in the parks and the but the walkways. I'll I walk a lot. I do a lot of thinking and walking.
Professor David Archibald:Mhmm. It's a methodology, actually, walk walking to and not to think, but just to walk. But, eventually, lot an inordinate amount of time in Glasgow Film Theatre. I mean, I've spent a lot of time there
Fay Young:Mhmm.
Professor David Archibald:As a school student
Fay Young:in in different ways. So I went there for the first time
Professor David Archibald:to see Polanski's Macbeth, nudey Macbeth, as we all called it at the time. I went as a as a Labour movement activist to some of the the May Day screenings that the GFT had. They had films like mate one, John Sale's film in the in the mid 1980s . I went there as a student all the time when I was a I was a film student, a PhD student. I went there when I was a teacher to teach the the classes in the in the education room.
Professor David Archibald:I've introduced scores and scores of films there, and I've just did so many amazing viewing experiences there. My tip for audiences is there's a layout quirk in the seating arrangements, which is that the fourth row in GFT1 has got a little bit more leg room than any other than any other than any So you reckon that one? I recommend that. Yeah. So that's, that's my favourite view, viewing position.
Professor David Archibald:But, no, I think that that cinema has got a special place in my heart and this and the city's heart because it's a noncommercial cinema, but it it would be it would be the GFT. And if the GFT's walls could talk, then they would have stories from every country in the world, from every of all the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of films that have been screened there. So that would be a that would be a multicultural, multilingual, conversation about cinema and art and what it can do.
Niall Murphy:Oh, fantastic. Very very good choice. That's a good choice. Nobody's nobody's liked that one before.
Professor David Archibald:Oh, good. No.
Niall Murphy:You're you're a first.
Fay Young:Amazing. Yeah. Oh, that was that was terrific.
Niall Murphy:Yeah. Thank you very much, David. That was very very much appreciated. A really really enjoyable conversation.
Fay Young:And to play us out, here are the Tenementals with the owl of Minerva from David's Professorial lecture, which was held at Webster's Theatre on May Day earlier this year.
Tenementals:She comes to settle on a red wooden roof. She ponders. What will rise from these broken banks of utopia? New future, new presence, or new pasts. And still the river flows.
Professor David Archibald:Thank you, We are the Tenementals . Good night. Okay.
Katharine Neil:Glasgow City Heritage Trust is an independent charity and grant funder that promotes the understanding, appreciation, and conservation of Glasgow's historic built environment. Do you want to know more? Have a look at our website at glasgowheritage.co.uk and follow us on social media at Glasgow Heritage. This podcast was produced by Inner Ear for Glasgow City Heritage Trust and is sponsored by Tunnocks.