They could be contenders (from left, clockwise): Rachel Sermanni, Hudson Mohawke, The Revenge SAY AWARD
‘Who seriously
thinks Chaosmosis is one of the best albums of the year?’
Music writers David Pollock and Stewart Smith talk about the Scottish Album of the Year Award, in a wide-ranging conversation that takes in the priorities of
public funding, the need for more diversity, the function of the awards, the future of the Scottish music industry and a bit of gratuitous Primal Scream-bashing
David OK, so I suggested we do this because I saw your post on Facebook about the SAY Award; you made lots of interesting points, not all of which I agreed with. Maybe you should start by saying what your thoughts are on the longlist?
Stewart I was a little underwhelmed. There are some good records in there, of course, but too many usual suspects and B-list indie acts. Does the world really need another Django Django album? Who can get excited by this vaguely dancey indie fodder? Like many a thirtysomething, I remain very fond of the Beta Band, but the latest Steve Mason solo album is hardly earth-shattering. I can’t get mad about such acts making the longlist, but it’s a shame it’s at the expense of emerging acts. And Primal Scream can do one: Chaosmosis is such a lazy, piss-poor effort, running on the fumes of Bobby Gillespie’s tired
hipster reference points. Who seriously thinks this is one of the best albums of the year?
On the positive side, it’s cool to see electronic music doing quite well, especially HudMo and Auntie Flo. It’s a shame Golden Teacher’s EPs were ineligible though. There’s tons of indie pifl e like Admiral Fallow, but no metal, jazz, experimental etc. Perhaps there could be a change to the voting system so that more niche genres stand a chance? A friend raised the point about what the award is for: is it to support grassroots music, or promote the Scottish music industry? It feels more like the latter. As a result, you’ve got quite a bland, corporate list that doesn’t really rel ect the diversity and energy of the Scottish music scene. I support the principle of the award, but I can’t help but feel it’s a bit of a missed opportunity.
So, what do you reckon to the longlist and the
question of what the award is for?
David It was pretty much as I’d expected, although that doesn’t mean I expected to see exactly every album end up on there. But it has a decent mix of styles: HudMo, Auntie Flo and Young Fathers are real innovators; C Duncan, FFS and Miaoux Miaoux have all made really distinctive and engaging pop records; I guess some of the others maybe suffer from overfamiliarity, if anything. But I think we’re on very different pages about what the award is for. I remember writing about this in The Independent back in 2013: I wrote that the SAY Award ‘is symptomatic of the resurgent cultural coni dence in a Scotland poised on the brink of . . . an independence referendum.’ For me the SAY Award is wrapped up in the whole feeling of possibility and national self-analysis from that time; let’s call it a celebration of localism rather than nationalism. ‘Here’s who we are and what we do’, it says, whether that’s
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2 Jun–1 Sep 2016 THE LIST 29
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