Reviews are normally of completed works: books, recordings, and databases. However, The Tenementals’ project is not simply a studio album; it represents an ongoing conversation about the nature of community and a performance practice that aims to sustain and build that community both in the group’s home city, Glasgow, and more widely wherever like-minded listeners are found who share radical social-political values (see Supplementary Material). It is academic in concept, but also functions as political advocacy and sociological intervention. Reviewing it, therefore, sets some challenges: by what criteria do we assess this?

David Archibald, Professor of Political Cinemas at the University of Glasgow, the Tenementals’ frontman and, along with guitarist Simon Whittle, its main song composer, described the aims of this collective of academics/musicians in a podcast interview following the album launch as follows: ‘If the history of the city was told not by historians in books and in academic articles, but … by artists and musicians, through music, then what would it sound like, what would it feel like’? In the same interview, he suggested that the eruption of ‘ephemera around the band, all that, creates an unfinished messy kind of history … a work in progress’ (Brett Reference Brett2024). If this is ‘I of VI’, then the process is far from over.

The album (the first of hopefully more) contains passionate, compelling music, composed using an eclectic mix of post-punk, rock, and folk styles. The songs, meditating on historical processes and stories that have formed the modern city, contribute powerfully to cultural debates about the relationship between Glasgow’s radical past, post-industrial present, and potentially radical future, expressing a commitment to educate and indeed empower its citizens. If this review were an ‘impact’ assessment associated with academic research processes, it would also highlight that the project’s aims and outputs align with social impact agendas associated with UN Sustainable Development Goals 10 (reducing inequality) and 11 (making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable).Footnote ¹ As an act of cultural curation in the interests of the local population, the funding for the album’s production came from the Glasgow City Heritage Trust, which should be congratulating itself on its decision.

However, this is not ‘academic’ music. Like any popular music, it entertains and moves its listeners, and, as such (showing its evidence trail), was greeted in the first month of the album’s release with coverage by national media (the BBC and major newspapers), local music media, and lastly but significantly, social media – the modern equivalent of the fanzines of the first punk movement. The songs, and their reception, are both part of the narrative.

The first track, ‘The Owl of Minerva’ is an absolute banger delivered with the verve of the best of the first-wave protest-punk bands of the 1980s. The lyrics reference Hegel’s notion that history can only be understood with hindsight. This temporal concept is translated into synchronous time (the point of departure for all imagined communities, according to Benedict Anderson), seen through the eyes of the eponymous owl as it takes flight from the Finnieston Crane (a huge and now disused relic from Glasgow’s shipbuilding past) over the night city. The river Clyde becomes a metaphor for historical processes that have reproduced patterns of inequality, scarcity and want. David Archibald’s distinctive Glasgow rasp delivers a musical history lecture transformed into a call for action, compelled towards a future that breaks the patterns of the past by the driven drum rhythm and with the descending guitar ostinato that uses and subverts the message of The Stooges’s classic ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ (1969).

Other tracks focus more closely on individual stories, academic case studies transformed by thoughtfully crafted music into powerfully affective encounters. Track 2, ‘A Passion Flower’s Lament’, switches to a modern folk style, with cello, harp, and Spanish guitar accompanying the story of those who left Glasgow to fight with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, sung this time by female vocalist Jen Cunnion, whose delicate (folk) voice presents a striking contrast with Archibald’s earlier delivery. The medium is the message: there is strength in fragility, and there are many different voices to be heard.

Continuing on, track 3, ‘Pentimento’ (Archibald and Cunnion in dialogue) takes a look at Archibald McLauchlin’s painting of John Glassford and his family (c.1767), which originally included a Black enslaved boy whose image was once thought to have been painted over. Cleaning has recently revealed that he was there all along, obscured by dirt, unnoticed. The larger point remains, that history reflects the perspectives of social elites, whose share of past wealth was often ill-gotten, and challenges listeners to consider how to respond to the restored memory. Those lost from memory are also resurrected in the following song, ‘Peter Pike or Pink’, which commemorates a man deported to Australia for his involvement in the Scottish radical war of 1820, whose name on the Sighthill Martyrs Memorial (erected in 1847, during a second period of radical unrest) was ambiguous.

The order of the tracks has an approximate chronological order, as would be true of any more conventional historical account. Side two of the vinyl version of the album takes us into the 20th century, starting with ‘Universal Alienation (‘We’re Not Rats’), which samples a recording of the 1972 address of shipyard trade-unionist Jimmy Reid to the assembled academics of Glasgow University on the occasion of his inauguration as Rector (the elected students’ representative in Scottish university governance). ‘Machines for Living’, sung in a style reminiscent of the Scottish ‘jangle pop’ of the 1970s, discusses the failed modernist estates that circle the city. ‘Post Production’ is a complex meditation on the politics of representation in a post-industrial city that has become, for contemporary film-makers, the set for dystopian cities like Gotham.

The end of the album pans out to a wider-angle view of historical processes. The penultimate track, ‘Fossil Grove’, walks amongst the fossilised trees found in Glasgow’s Victoria Park, stylistically sounding more like folk than rock; all human history, high and low, suddenly appears fragile in this geological timeframe. The final track, ‘People Make Glasgow’, is again an energetic rock number, taking its inspiration from the slogan of the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Its lyrics list the many people, from the Romans through empire builders and shipbuilders, high and low, good and bad, who have made the modern city. By implication, you, Glaswegians, currently listening to this, are asked: what kind of a mark will you make? There is an echo here of the Battlefield Band’s single ‘I am the common man’ (1988), which similarly lists various kinds of people contributing to the collective narrative and calls on its listeners to take an active stance.

However, the music is far from the end of the story. The reception in the media (of all kinds) is a critical part of the message: the evaluation of commentators, mostly non-academic but nevertheless culturally and musically expert, has been remarkable. Glaswegians seem to be recognising and embracing this project. The formal album launch was at the West End Glasgow venue Òran Mór on 27 November 2024; however, individual tracks had been performed for some time before that date. Archibald remarks in the interview cited earlier (Brett Reference Brett2024) that the audience on that occasion sang along with many songs, punching the air to ‘We’re Not Rats’. This kind of crowd participation overlaps with folk music and modern rock concerts, suggesting that there is a common collective social function.

In the first 6 weeks of the formal release, the album was reviewed by national and local media. The BBC (radio, BBC Scotland’s The Nine, and BBC News) all carried segments on 9 December 2024; newspapers like The Herald (29 December 2024) and The National Scot (6 January 2025) remarked on it; local radio (e.g. Sunny Govan Community Radio on 4 January, 2025) endorsed it; and Scottish popular music bloggers and podcasters such as The Ginger Quiff, is this music (Brett Reference Brett2024), Serious Feather Arts (Gregory Reference Gregory2024) and The Drouth (Wilson Reference Wilson2024) heaped praise upon it. There was even a mention in the Australian newsletter Green Left Weekly (a tick for international impact) (Ward Reference Ward2024). The album fed into local narratives of radical identity: the shopfront of the radical Barralands bookshop, Calton Books, filled its pre-Christmas window with Tenementals merchandise, helped by the eye-catching black, white, and red print of the album cover designed by Whittle using a photograph taken by Archibald. None of these are academic ‘peer-reviewed’ responses, but collectively, they constitute primary evidence of the target audience’s enthusiasm for the music and its radical energies. In the words of one online journalist, Gus Ironside (Reference Ironside2024), ‘At a time when many of us feel increasingly disempowered and isolated, this remarkable collective of musicians and academics are a beacon in the darkness’.

The Tenementals’ music wears its considerable learning lightly, but nevertheless, there is great intelligence at work. Jacques Attali’s concept of ‘music as prophecy’, aiming to change the world’s reality, is a relevant idea (Attali Reference Attali and Massumi1985). Marshall McLuhan’s formula ‘The medium is the message’ may also be relevant (McLuhan Reference McLuhan1964). Glasgow’s record of spawning rock bands is second to none (even Liverpool might want to look to its laurels): the social history of its rock bands might be argued to constitute a kind of historical disruption. Recent academic books that have discussed the place of popular music in Scottish contemporary culture have not fully grappled with the social politics at work here, and in this respect, The Tenementals are making a new contribution to the debate. Macintyre et al.’s (Reference Macintyre, McPhee and Cooper2022) Hungry Beat documented the post-punk scene of the Thatcher years but was more interested in musical biographies and infrastructure than the politics of the period. McKerrell and West’s (Reference McKerrell and West2018) edited collection Understanding Scotland Musically looked at the intersection of popular music with traditional music in ways that to some extent reflected an attempt to update the high/low cultural battlegrounds of the folk revival years, but in which the editors argued for the priority of ‘traditional’ music, whatever that is (to be fair, they allowed their contributors to interrogate this concept). Most recently, Frith et al.’s (Reference Frith, Cloonan and Williamson2024) edited volume Made in Scotland: Essays on Scottish Popular Music in the 20th and 21st Centuries has allowed readers to understand the rich diversity of the contemporary music scene. Uniquely, the Tenementals have given us a project that is both academic and popular, text-based, and performative, and which makes in its making an argument for why popular music is an essential part of Glasgow – and Scotland’s – musical identity.

These songs are part of a larger vision: helping listeners to connect with the river of collective history that joins those who have lived, who do live, and who will live, in the extraordinarily musical city that is Glasgow. If it is research – and I would argue that it is – it is the kind of active ethnomusicology advocacy that has emerged in association with the work of people such as Jeff Todd Titon in the context of environmentalism. It is also, simply, an ongoing performance that shapes as it plays. Bring on the next instalment.