Some pop-flavoured questions

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I know there'll be someone here who can help - apols if this is off-topic.

* What was the socio-economic situation in small-town Scotland in the 1980s? Was it roughly like Liverpool? Manchester? Were there actually YTS schemes in place if you wanted them?

* What was the situation with sectarianism, outside of the bigger cities? Was it a constant prescence, rather like racial conflict is in small Northern towns, or something that flashed up occasionally cf. Notting Hill, Toxteth?

* I might be wrong here as I've been thinking about other things all day and am a bit fuzzy, but I would say the kind of music working-class kids listen to *outside big cities* tends to be, as a generalisation, happy hardcore or West Coast hip-hop from about 1993. (I'm thinking Bodycount or Cypress Hill here..) Or, if female, chart dance that gets played on TMF. In mainstream terms. You know, small towns that are so...insular that they seem to have a pop culture all of their own, like a version of the Eden Centre but with more graffiti. How different was this twenty years ago? Goths? Heavy metal? The post-punk/indie stuff that came back into fashion in the past few years (remember small towns catch on a couple of years after the big cities)? As a pointer, my sister was sixteen in 1986 and has never heard of The Smiths, but liked Depeche Mode. So I am slightly confused.

* How instilled with ambition were 'secondary modern' kids in the early 80s? I mean,  I could use my sister as an example as she went to one, but her dream was always to settle down and have kids so the idea of going on to career/higher education wouldn't have been there.

* Are there any novels which touch on pop culture (s as much as everyday life/plot, as in, the two are firmly intertwined and one could imagine what song the character might be humming at any given point, say? The only 80s Scottish novels I can recall right now are The Trick Is To Keep Breathing and Lanark - one being magical-realist, one being very much an interior monologue. There are a lot of sub-Coupland pop-lit writers who namedrop bands/artists to fit in with the zeitgeist, but I don't mean that. I vaguely remember a slacker-lit (!) novel with a green cover where the waiters sung REM songs, but that was about it. Amis probably hasn't been near a HMV outside of Christmas time. *Maybe* The Buddha of Suburbia, but I haven't actually read any Hanif Kureshi since I was about sixteen. The fact I am having to think hard about this suggests it doesn't happen very often, and that can't be right.

Comments

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I should be able to give more examples, given this is supposed to be my specialist subject, but I can't think of any!

Legge and Welsh were pals, I think, and used to be in a group which got together to talk about records together. Legge describes something like this, from a very romanticised perspective in his contribution to Children of Albion Rovers, although it's really about the disconnect between their musical lives and their everyday lives. There's some discussion of music in Trainspotting, but it's not integral to any of the characters' lives I wouldn't say.

Also, corrections to other posters: The Wasp Factory is set on a fictional island in the Highlands (I imagined it being East Coast but I don't remember it being specific, and that may just be because it reminded me of Tain); the book set on the Forth (which is not a river) is probably The Bridge, which is a knock-off -- sorry, tribute to -- Lanark.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

There are some references to punk in The Wasp Factory, though.

Banks's Espedair Street (1987) is about a rock musician, but growing up in the 1970s (when Banks would have been in his teens). In fact I guess you'd expect books about 80s music to have been published in the 90s.

Anyway -- my exposure to small town Scottish life (via my girlfriend) came from 1993 onwards. Her friends were into Nirvana, Metallica, AC/DC (I was talking to someone the other day about how the 'cool' / 'not-cool' metal / alternative split happened much later the further you went from the centre. (I remember her brother who later on 'got' indie, saying to someone that I had been wearing a dinosaur Jr T-shirt before he'd ever heard of them. A lot of people were into Runrig -- who I think would have to be one of the few distinctive features of the Highland landscape (central belt equivalent The Proclaimers? Deacon Blue? The Silencers?). Certainly 'classic' rock (Dylan, Stones) was big amongst the kids who were 'into' music (presumably via parent's / older brother's collections. Happy Hardcore is a distinctly regional phenomena in Scotland, focused mostly around Ayr, and to a lesser extent the estate kids from the Glasgow sprawl. There was homegrown hip-hop in Livingstone in the 90s definitely, which contrasted with the homegrown backpacker / hipster-hop from Edinburgh.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Pink Floyd were big too!

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Sectarianism:

This is pretty much a Glasgow phenomenon, where whole estates were either Protestant or Catholic thanks to council resettlement after the slum clearances. (Denise Mina's Field of Blood is a crime novel with a detailed depiction of this in the early 80s.) Although there are annual marches in Edinburgh, and Hibs / Hearts have minor sectarianism amongst their supporters, it's not a big issue really. Tensions in the Highlands were between locals and incomers, mostly English.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I know in the NW it was happy hardcore for the estate kids, while the 'nebs' listened to RATM, the Stone Roses, Nirvana and later KoRn. It was very much one or the other - it was rare to find a kid who listened to indie, or folk, or anything pre-1989. Obviously these are the white kids I'm talking about here.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

Yeah - I haven't read Trainspotting for about ten years but I remember any discussion in there to be football-based.

The Shoe reminds me in some ways of The Commitments and The Van - very similar communities, although Roddy Doyle doesn't tend to concentrate on younger characters much IIRC. I'd reply properly to your excellent comments but I should be packing a suitcase right now :)