Why Edinburgh Ending Film Festival with an Ode to Scotland’s Lost Girl Bands is Just

“I would like it to become an irrelevant documentary in five years’ time,” says Blair Young, whose film with Carla J. Easton will close the Edinburgh International Film Festival Wednesday night.

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Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands was chosen as the fest’s closing night feature. It is a love letter to music made by Scottish women. From the ’60s until now, the doc follows visionary artists, many whose tales are lost to history, who emerged through Scotland’s music scene and attempted to break the glass ceiling.

The doc is vibrant and celebratory but often also a bleak look at how men have continued to dominate the industry and the blasé nature in which they harassed women for much of the 20th century.

Young hopes the film will one day serve as a reminder of how things used to be. “I would like people to take away an incredible playlist, but I would also like it to look back and go, ‘That’s nuts that they had to make that documentary back then.’ And it can just be the norm that there’d be as many women forming bands as men because if you look at the charts, who gets to release records, it’s clearly a bit lopsided.”

The documentary started as a bit of a “DIY project,” Easton tells The Hollywood Reporter. The pair linked up in 2016 and started haphazardly interviewing female musicians who once were making a name for themselves.

Easton, who has a background in art but has been releasing music for almost 20 years now, said, “We started a conversation about how girl bands are depicted in music videos and then, ‘Well there’s not been that many girl bands in Scotland,’ and then, a real ‘Hold my beer!’ moment for both of us. It was like, someone should make a film about this.”

From The McKinleys in the ’60s to The Ettes, Strawberry Switchblade, and Sophisticated Boom Boom (who later became His Latest Flame), Young and Easton cover extensive ground. They speak to the women who fronted Scottish bands like The Twinsets, Sunset Gun, Hello Skinny, Lung Leg, Melody Dog, Sally Skull, and The Hedrons, all who have never before told their stories in such detail.

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Eventually, after a kickstarter contributed to by fans, the filmmakers were able to secure more funding and retrieve archived footage of the young women, some of whom were forced to abandon their careers when music labels feared they would get pregnant and “mess up” a record deal. The theme of becoming a mother and its subsequent disruption to one’s music career is integral to the documentary.

“I don’t even know where to begin unpacking it,” Easton said. “You’re just assuming that anyone with the ability to carry a child wants to do that.” She continued, citing her wish to empower female musicians with Since Yesterday: “Unfortunately, I think our film demonstrates that success is limited to you, just because of who you are, and nothing to do with the music. We could have done from 2010 to 2020 on girl bands that have emerged today, but I really wanted to demonstrate that any change that is happening is DIY, and it’s grassroots. It’s bottom up. It’s not top down.”

One of the songs by ’80s pop duo Strawberry Switchblade, made up of Jill Bryson and Rose McDowall, has had a resurgence on TikTok. The single “Trees & Flowers” has been used on nearly 200,000 videos. “I told them that last week!” Easton says. “It’s got millions of views. We had a private screening and I was like, ‘You guys have blown up on TikTok!’ and they’re both like, ‘Really?’ And I’m like, ‘Hey, you might want to cash in on that.’”

But the question remains — how did the two react when they found out they’d be closing the EIFF? “We’re a bit lost for words,” Young says. Easton adds: “To get the prestige of it being the closing film for the Edinburgh International Film Festival, one of the oldest film festivals in the world, it’s a bit like, ‘Right, something’s gonna go wrong at some point’… The takeaway you get from it is, ‘Fuck, people really either love these bands or they really want to know about them.’ And that’s so hopeful, because, let me tell you, it’s really fucking hard being a woman in music at the moment.”

Poetically put, it’s a sort of “homecoming” that Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands closes the EIFF. Young noted: “There was definitely some other festivals that could have been options. And when thinking them through, whether we got accepted or not, just never felt right. Whereas the homecoming as a home launch felt like the most appropriate. Plus, Scotland loves music, and this is a chance to watch film and listen to some more music.”

Since Yesterday: The Untold History of Scotland’s Girl Bands releases in U.K. theaters on Oct. 18. It is produced by Forest of Black and financed by Kickstarter Crowdfunder, Screen Scotland, and BBC Scotland.

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