Review of the Tenementals debut album, Glasgow: A History. 

The Tenementals are a Glasgow band led by Professor David Archibald from University of Glasgow exploring the rich history of Glasgow from a radical perspective. 

---

What is a city and who makes it? That’s the question asked by The Tenementals in their debut album, ‘Glasgow: A History’. Is it the Red Clydesiders or human exploiters, Irish immigrants or empire builders, Buddhists and Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and Hindus or imperial merchants?

Of course, it’s all of them. A city is not only streets and precincts but a repository of the dreams, disappointments and drama of the lives of its people.   It’s a city of contrasts embracing the outstretched bronze arms of a Spanish revolutionary and the global expansionists of the British Empire.   

It’s clear what side The Tenementals are on. Their Glasgow is one that’s caught in the rapids of revolution. A city where its toilers, strikers and demonstrators are its beating heart and gives it its soul.  Their hard won wisdom forged in the furnace of breakneck industrialization and its equally rapid decline.    

The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings across each part of the city; the working-class schemes on the periphery of all its four corners and its leafy parks and boulevards to the West.

Using a variety of voices and musical styles embracing Spanish guitars, Brechtian vaudeville and Iggy’s Stooges it is a bold attempt to embrace the history, struggles and contradictions of a city that saw it all; from Vikings to Covenantors to the working class heroes martyred in a cemetery in Sighthill.

Glasgow is one of many working-class cities of the world and perhaps in The Tenementals it has found a worthy chronicler of its past, present and future.

---