The Pastels Sittin Pretty Zippered

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Next month The Pastels release Slow Summits in what's being touted as their first new album in 16 years. Quite why long distance collaborations with Japanese artistes and film soundtracks are discounted as albums I know not.

On Sittin' Pretty the Pastels reveal themselves as one of the more unique-sounding C86 bands, moderating their twee jangle-pop sound with occasional influences from noisier and more avant-garde genres, with perhaps the peak of this crossover coming on the epic Ditch the Fool. The Pastels - Sittin' Pretty (1989) A classic in the indie pop/alternative genre. A great mix of catchy guitar riffs with a raw sound to most of the songs. Reminds me a lot of The Replacements. There's 1-2 weaker songs on the album, but I believe they're more than made up for by the gems. Check it out, a solid release. Curiously enough, after the noisy Sittin' Pretty the Pastels would develop their sound towards a subdued version of a band they partly influenced: kings of shambling U.S. Style Pavement. Viewed in this light, a second singles collection entitled Truckload of Trouble: 1986-1993 could equally pass for a transitional record.

To be honest, I have only payed a passing interest in The Pastels since the original line up went their separate ways soon after the release of their overlooked second album Sittin' Pretty. Subsequent releases in the first half of the nineties sounded like more of the same, only lacking the spark of the eighties incarnation propelled by the inimitable pulse of Bernice's beat. No doubt influenced by the Slint-inspired bands emerging from the Glasgow scene, 1998's Illuminations was a surprising development from their oft-dismissed shambling beginnings, but their foray into post-rock was dissatifying to my ears.
Having heard snippets of songs from the new album, it sounds like a welcome return to their pioneering Velvety Richmond take on indie pop of the eighties. Before you accuse me of being puritanical, I recall around 1987 a publication entitled The Pastels Are Dead circulating on the 'zine scene'. The perpetrators claimed the Glasgow four-piece had betrayed their indie roots upon releasing debut album Up For A Bit. The person(s) unknown even had badges made bearing the name of the fanzine which were given out freely to audience members at the group's gigs! It appears some small town sections of eighties neophobic youth couldn't come to terms with The Pastels discovery of 'weightlifting' and 'Rustler magazine'.

The Pastels Sittin Pretty Zippered Bag

Tipped for big things in 1984, possibly by Alan McGee, whose overzealous enthusiasm made good copy for the hype machine, this was the only session the 'classic' line up recorded for Peel. Their most realised studio work up to this point, the session featured superior versions of the two songs that comprised their debut single for Creation. Trains Go Down The Tracks was an early stab at what became Breaking Lines; despite being potential album closer material, the song would end up on the flipside to Truck Train Tractor a couple of years later. Tomorrow The Sun Will Shine, a regular feature in their live set around this time, never made it onto record.
It would be almost 14 years before The Pastels next featured as session guests for Peel.

Peel 17/1/1984
Stay With Me Til Morning
Trains Go Down The Tracks

Legend has it that when the producers of the Kid Jensen Show received the master tapes for this session, they bulked at what confronted their ears. No doubt a bunch of bearded long hairs weened on bloated drum solos and precision engineering axe fretwankery in their foggy proggy student hay daze, they unreservedly deemed the performances as substandard and therefore unsuitable for broadcast.
By summers end, Jensen had quit the show (to be replaced by Janice Long) for an unsuccessful television career presenting The Roxy - ITV's equally unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the institution that was Top Of The Pops.
Three of the songs would later receive an official release on Suck On The Pastels - one of Creation's many so-so quick buck compilations that probably ensured the label's survival in the early days - in 1988. The little heard She Always Cries... only ever appeared on the aforementioned album. The inauspicious 25 Unfinished Plays would later morph into one of their finest songs, Truck Train Tractor.
25 Unfinished Plays
Baby Honey

Sittin Pretty Band

Finally, for your delectation, we have four rough quality demos recorded at an unknown studio in 1985. Couldn't Care Less comes almost fully formed to its counterpart on their third and final Creation single later that year. I'm Alright With You receives a more laid back acoustic treatment with an alternate intro and slightly different lyrics. Blind Faith is another lost original that never made it to the pressing plant, while the set ends with a wistful take on Suicide's Cheree, complete with stylophone organ and what sounds like a struggling-to-stay-awake vocal.

The Pastels Sittin Pretty Zippered Lyrics

Couldn't Care Less
Cheree

The Pastels long ago became a kind of shorthand for a wan, wonky and distinctly unambitious strain of guitar music that’s as niche as they come. That – the result of a reductive association with the NME’s C86 cassette – has rendered them one of the most misrepresented cult groups of their era. There’s a much more compelling story to be told about a band integral to the birth of the Glasgow independent music scene, who continue to make wonderful and surprising music (albeit very slowly: they average an album every seven years).

Without the instincts, inspiration and energies of the Pastels’ softly-spoken founding singer-guitarist Stephen McRobbie, AKA Stephen Pastel – who runs the Domino Records imprint Geographic and co-founded one of the UK’s best independent record stores, Monorail – the Glasgow scene would probably be bound together by significantly less camaraderie and common purpose than it does today.

The Pastels formed in 1981 – another indie group on the fringe of the Postcard Records scene – just as Orange Juice were setting about their post-punk mission to rip it up and start again. It was Brian “Superstar” Taylor, a slightly older friend of Postcard svengali Alan Horne, who first took seriously the cocksure aspirations of the duffle-coat sporting Bearsden boy with a DIY haircut. Taylor helped McRobbie advance his rudimentary guitar skills, and became the first recruit to his fledgling band, influenced by the untamed mayhem of the Velvet Underground and naive charm of the Television Personalities. They recruited bassist Martin Hayward and drummer Bernice Simpson, and were playing shows and recording music with indecent haste. McRobbie booked their first gig at Bearsden Burgh Hall because he’d seen Crass play the same venue.

Such was McRobbie’s certainty about his new group’s worth that he wasted no time in impressing on Rough Trade Records in London the necessity of snapping up the next big thing out of Scotland. Geoff Travis was sufficiently convinced to release the Pastels’ 1983 single I Wonder Why (their second single following chaotic debut Songs for Children, which had been released on Television Personalities singer Dan Treacy’s label Whaam!). Multi-tracked and divested of the raw, almost childlike energy of their live playing, it was a false dawn, and the band’s relationship with Rough Trade ended as the label became preoccupied with shinier new signings Scritti Politti and the Smiths. But, at their own, geological pace, the Pastels were on a path to releasing a minor masterpiece of a debut album.

Before that came several more singles, a John Peel session and lots of cassette sharing and fanzine scribbling. (The Pastels’ fanzines Juniper Beri-Beri and Pastelism long predated the self-publishing culture that grew up around the C86 bands.) All that and some principled staying put. Having watched Orange Juice, among others, move to London and become swallowed up by the industry machine, there was a determination to do what no significant Glasgow guitar group had done before. When their debut album Up for a Bit With the Pastels finally arrived in 1987 via Glass Records, it was staunchly promoted with one foot firmly planted at home, in part because McRobbie was studying for a master’s degree in librarianship at Glasgow University.

The Pastels’ ageless debut saw them cited as a favourite by everyone from the Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream to Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo and Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. It never set the world alight, despite the gothic swirl of Ride, the motorik drone rock of Baby Honey and the anthemic Crawl Babies (the decaying spires of the Glasgow skyline are romantically invoked in the gorgeous lines, “I want to build her up / up as tall as a church / just to watch her / just to watch her falling down”). However, it did help to inspire confidence in the Glasgow scene and showed that bands didn’t have to move south but could let the record industry come to them. In its wake came such Scottish classics and quintessentially Glaswegian debuts as Belle and Sebastian’s Tigermilk and Mogwai’s Young Team through to Franz Ferdinand’s self-titled arrival and arguably even Chvrches world-beating synthpop.

The first lineup of the Pastels disintegrated with the departure of Taylor, Hayward and Simpson following their long-lost second album, 1989’s Sittin’ Pretty (which is well overdue a reissue). The band could have called it a day, but a new incarnation instead assembled around McRobbie, keys player and vocalist Annabel “Aggi” Wright (a long-standing member of the group recruited from the Shop Assistants, who was also responsible for a lot of the Pastels’ artwork) and drummer Katrina Mitchell. It didn’t seem to bother anyone that Mitchell, who would become McRobbie’s long-term girlfriend (the pair still live together), couldn’t play the drums when she joined and spent years learning to do so. Which says it all about the Pastels’ excruciatingly patient approach to music-making.

With Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake and Gerard Love among others fleshing out the lineup, the Pastels returned in 1995 with the release of Mobile Safari on Domino Records, at last a sympathetic and stable home for a band who had worked with no fewer than seven labels (including three spells on Alan McGee’s Creation Records). The uncharacteristically prompt follow-up Illumination arrived in 1997, as the Pastels’ sound mellowed and evolved into a form of gently psychedelic off-kilter pop, adorned with orchestral instrumentation.

Around this time, through their association with Japanese musician Cornelius, the band became incongruously wrapped up in the hype surrounding Britpop in Japan, jostling for position in magazines with the likes of Blur and Manic Street Preachers. On one trip to Tokyo they were mobbed by screaming fans outside hotels and venues. For a bunch of unassuming Scots who could barely get arrested back home, it must have felt like stepping into an alternative universe.

In 2000, McRobbie started up his Domino imprint Geographic, releasing gems from, among others, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Bill Wells Trio, Future Pilot AKA, The Royal We and Lightships. In 2003, he became one of the founders of Monorail Music, a vinyl-centric record shop based in a railway arch next to music venue Mono. One of the hubs of the Glasgow scene, it’s a bright, open and inviting space where you can browse the latest releases by local labels as well as rare imports. Any of which might be sold to you by McRobbie himself, who is often to be found working behind the counter.

A collaboration with Japanese lo-fi duo Tenniscoats in 2009 gave rise to the soft-hued Two Sunsets, a playful, spontaneous and spellbinding must-hear. In 2013, the Pastels released their 16-years-in-the-making album Slow Summits. It is perhaps their most complete set since Up for a Bit, with its 10 summery, groovy flute and french-horn-licked songs, trippy in the sense of the kind of trip that lands in a pile of freshly mown grass.

PastelsPastel

Every so often the Pastels get their just deserts. In 2013, Slow Summits was shortlisted for the Scottish album of the year award; a year later, they opened for Mogwai at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh; and last year Copenhagen micro-brewery Mikkeller made a beer in the band’s honour, appropriately titled Pastelism.

Cheers to that, and to the enduring health of a band who have been integral to Glasgow’s music scene for about as long as anyone can remember there being such a thing.