Scotland 1980s overview

In the 1970s several Scottish performers, including the Average White Band and Rod Stewart (who was born in London to a Scottish family), had to relocate to the United States to experience wide-reaching success. At the turn of the 1980s, however, a small but significant music scene developed in both Scotland’s official capital, Edinburgh, and its commercial and industrial capital, Glasgow, as a number of Scots celebrated one of the most revered tenets of postpunk music making, the founding of an independent label in a regional city.

In Edinburgh, Lennie Love’s Sensible label was home to the wacky punk music of local art students, the Rezillos, until both label owner and band decamped for London. Fast Products, a clutch of labels and notions masterminded by Bob Last, was also the regional distributor for other independent labels. The Gang of Four (from Leeds), Joy Division (from Manchester), and electronic experimenters the Human League (from Sheffield) all debuted via the visionary Fast.

Meanwhile, in Glasgow, Postcard Records made precarious progress with such unexpected talents as the Fire Engines, Aztec Camera, Josef K, and Orange Juice (whose Edwyn Collins made the big time in the 1990s, utilizing British punk’s archetypal drummer, the Sex Pistols’ Paul Cook). Glasgow also maintained Scotland’s flow of exported talent, as a number of performers found success with “foreign” labels. Most notable were the Skids, confessional songwriter Lloyd Cole, and the only Scottish band of this era to achieve international stardom, Simple Minds, whose debut single, under the parodic punk name of Johnny and the Self Abusers, was on London’s Chiswick label. Their second single was on Edinburgh’s Zoom label, but the group soon signed with Arista and finally achieved success on Virgin. Scotland was destined to remain a good place to start: a country large enough to develop its own artists but too small to sustain its own record labels.