Foto-© Werner Herpell

Wenn es im Pop Gerechtigkeit gäbe, müsste David Scott viel bekannter sein. Nein, eigentlich weltberühmt. Denn niemand propagiert das Schöne und Gute und Zeitlose in der Musik so virtuos und beharrlich wie der Mastermind des schottischen Bandprojekts The Pearlfishers. Ein brillantes Album voller Bezüge auf die goldenen Sixties und Seventies folgt auf das vorherige seit dem Debüt beim Sophisticated-Pop-Label Marina mit The Strange Underworld Of The Tall Poppies (1997).

Nach Love & Other Hopeless Things (2019) musste man um The Pearlfishers bangen, weil die Plattenfirma von Frank Lähnemann und Stefan Kassel zumindest bei Neuveröffentlichungen dichtzumachen schien. Doch nun sind beide wieder da – Scotts x-tes Pearlfishers-Meisterwerk mit dem herrlich nostalgischen Titel Making Tapes For Girls erscheint bei Marina (VÖ 24. Mai 2024). Wir haben mit dem 59-jährigen Sänger und Multiinstrumentalisten im Glasgower Kult-Recordstore Monorail gesprochen – über das rührige Hamburger Indie-Label, das unverhoffte Comeback seiner Band, Schottlands Indiepop-Metropole, die Karriere als Kritiker-Liebling mit kleinem, aber feinem Fan-Publikum, sein qualitätvolles Songwriting im Stil der ganz Großen. Und den Zauber von Mix-Tapes hat David uns auch gleich noch erklärt.

Hi David, it’s a great pleasure for me to have you here, for an interview in your hometown Glasgow. Because really, you’re one of the Scottish artists I admire most, whose albums I collected from the beginning. You had a career before, I know, but The Pearlfishers debut in 1997, that was my first record of yours. I loved it. And I always loved the Pearlfishers records from then. Now, the new one is an album I didn’t expect – because your label Marina seemed to have closed. I even wrote an obituary for this label – and then we have a new Pearlfishers record out on Marina. So what happened?
Well, Marina said they were going to close. They were gonna do Love & Other Hopeless Things, which was my record in 2019, and then the Marina compilation Goosebumps. Love & Other Hopeless Things wasn’t ready, so they did Goosebumps first, and then Love & Other Hopeless Things. They just carried on making records and concentrated mainly on re-issues. So all of the Pearlfishers records have now been issued on vinyl, most of them on double vinyl with additional tracks. That was a lovely project. Funny enough, but at the time, it was either Shindig! or one of the newspapers, who asked me about Marina closing, and I said: They’ll never close, you know, even if they say they will, because they are vinyl junkies. Both Stefan and Frank are so in love with music. I couldn’t imagine them not wanting to be involved. So I finished a lot of the songs…

The new songs?
…new songs. And I just shared them with Stefan, as I always would do. And he said: Let’s do it. So yeah, I mean, that’s just the way it was.

Marina made “an exception from the rule”, as we say in Germany.
Yes. And I think, that rule, it was like … what was the Mark Twain quote? “Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” (laughs)

So my Marina obituary was too early. And that’s a very good thing.
Yeah.

You know, I wrote a love letter to this label with the Pearlfishers review. And that asked: Where will all those quality pop songs and quality pop records be released? And now we have your new one, and that’s a great thing.
Thank you, Werner. As for me, too, there’s a strong connection with Marina. When I first heard about them, there was a show in Glasgow. I think it would be 1995, something like that. And that was with Cowboy Mouth, and The Bathers, and maybe one other group. I actually thought that my band wouldn’t be cool enough to be a Marina. group. So when they wanted me to be involved, that was a good moment.

Before we talk about your new album, I want to talk with you – because I’m here – about Glasgow as a music city, as a city of great musicians like you. I had some days to stroll around here and to make the Glasgow Music Tour. I recognised once more that Glasgow is the capital of Scottish pop, perhaps one of the capitals of British pop. So what is the magic of this place, of this city, to have such an impact, with lots of great pop musicians?
That’s a question I thought about a lot. I don’t think there’s only one answer…

We’ve got time enough.
… yeah, you can look around and you can see that there is a similarity between here and Hamburg. There are areas of Hamburg that feel very like Glasgow I think. Same with Liverpool, Belfast and Manchester and Dublin. They’re all great music cities I think. It’s partly to do with the feel of the place. There’s a richness in terms of architecture, there’s a richness in terms of the history. Some of that history is problematic.

Is there a special roughness of all these cities?
Maybe, yeah. The other thing that all of these cities have in common: It’s all cities from which people leave and come back. There’s a self-starting thing about those cities. So maybe some of all that feeds into artists being very active and being very DIY. If you look at the history of Glasgow music, most of the really important movements have been independent movements. So whether that is Postcard or other bits of culture that have been started by musicians outside the corporate context. And I think again, it’s maybe one of those things about music towns, which has people gathering together, like minded people to make things happen. If you think about the ways that people collaborate – a good example would be the sort of BMX Bandits/Teenage Fanclub axis, where you’ve got tons of us who have been in these bands and worked together. I’ve been in BMX Bandits on and off for years. There is a community thing there. I’ll be 60 later this year. So all of us have got like 40 years of a warm connection – a personal connection as well as a musical one.

You turn 60, James Grant of Friends Again and Love & Money from Glasgow for example will turn 60 as well. It’s the generation of young musicians from the 80s, and now they’re mature musicians, and they do great music again and again. If you had to recommend three Glasgow records – what would it be?
I would say Songs From Northern Britain by Teenage Fanclub. That’s their best record, it pulls together a lot of Glasgow influences. Then, funny enough, the first Bert Jansch album, even if he was no Glaswegian, but a lot of what he did was forged in Glasgow. And the third? The Friends Again record of 1984, it’s one of my favourite albums, with Chris Thomson.

Is there a special music scene in Glasgow you always can rely on when you do your records? Some names always occur on your albums. That’s your band?
Oh yes. Jamie Gash, who plays drums and sings. Dee Bahl, who plays bass. Gabriel Telerman, whose not on the last record. Stuart Kidd, Becky Wallace. So that’s the core group. The people I use for strings, for horns, are always the same. That’s quite an extended musical familiy.

I think it has to be this way because you won’t have a big budget. You can’t go to London or Manchester and chose musicians over there – you have to rely on friends, this Glasgow musical family.
Oh yes. Yeah.

Your new record sounds as sumptuous and lush as ever. Nobody could imagine that this is not a big studio album from Los Angeles or so, with a big orchestra.
There’s lots of good studios in Glasgow. So for this album, I recorded in a small studio called La Chunky, with great analogue vintage gear. I recorded the strings in a place called Chem 19, to make it sound really big. I recorded some at home, some at the university in Ayr at the west coast of Scotland.

You’re a critics’ favourite, little bit of a cult songwriter. The reviews of your albums are always great. So, aren’t you tired of the fact they are not “hit records”?
No. I stopped thinking about that many years ago. I have an audience for my music, people love it. Yeah, I would like to sell another 50 000 records. It’s not happened in that way to me. But I know my music has an impact on people. Yeah… that means a lot to me, that’s good for me.

Yes, you seem to be quite a happy man… So, let’s talk about the album title now. Maybe not all of the younger people, of the Spotify playlist generation, know about that phenomenon. So, please explain: What is “making tapes for girls”?
It’s about the culture of mix tapes. Something that seems to have transcended to the Spotify generation, by the way. Putting together your favourite music that means something to you, as a compilation. And then giving that as a gift – either just as a way to say: I think you’ll enjoy this, or: This is what I think about you. (laughs) It’s not just a romantic thing. When I got that title, Making Tapes For Girls, I was worried as a nearly 60 years old guy…

I know what you mean. My daughter she would say: “Daddy, you’re too old for that.” On the other hand: Bob Dylan is 83, and he things about love. So why not?
Absolutely. And the other thing is: That song itself is a song about music and young men. So the song is not about “Do you wanna be my girlfriend?”. It’s a song that looks at how you learn to have relationships. To quote from the song’s lyrics: “To share music/is to share meaning”.

There are some idols I always hear in your music, though your songs are absolutely unique and original. There’s Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson and Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout and Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb, maybe some more. Do you agree when someone says: David Scott is a Retro Pop songwriter, or a Sophisticated Pop songwriter?
I don’t disagree with that. I do love all those artists. For example Paddy McAloon had a huge influence on me as a songwriter, the way I construct lyrics. The Word Evangeline is a good example. But that doesn’t naturally mean trying to be McAloon, or McCartney, or Joni Mitchell, or Bobby Gentry. It’s more about learning or thinking about the level and the beauty of that. One of my massive heroes is Green Gartside of Scritti Politti. So The Word Evangeline owes something to The Word Girl, which I loved when it came out (in 1985) simply because it was such a smart pop song and in some ways about pop songs. It was clever but it still had heart and soul.

So, David, who ist this mysterious Sweet Jenny Bluebelle, from your last song of the new album?
It’s my granddaughter. Werner, most of my songs are either autobiographical, or they’ve got some very specific things that bubble up. If I write a song like Sweet Jenny Bluebelle, about my granddaughter – legitimately someone could say: What for, who cares? What You have to do then, as a writer: Okay, that’s where the song comes from, that’s what it’s about – but what do you have to do to make it universal, to make it accessible for other people. That’s a big question for a songwriter: Does it have a purpose beyond?

Would you name some key tracks of the new record, songs that tell most about you and your development.
The title track – we talked about that. Then The Wild Lives, from a production point of view. The other song that came in the very end that I really love ist Yellow & The Lovehearts.

Sounds like a name of a fictional band.
Yes, it’s a fictional band. The song title came from my granddaughter… So there are three. And if I could add one more, that’s Hold Out For A Mystic.

But it’s twelve great songs of course. One should listen to it as a whole.
That’s good.

“Making Tapes For Girls” is, in my ears at least, a deeply moving, a deeply nostalgic record. Does that come from age? Or did you always do it like that?
As a writer I am quite a nostalgic type of person. If you get older you start getting a perspective on your childhood, on your past that becomes clearer to you. Age brings a lot of things, one of them is: We won’t be here forever. And a part oft that is, I think we have to make the most of it. That can or should imbue your songwriting.

Thank you so much for this interview, David!
It was great to meet you, Werner!