Why It’s Right That Edinburgh Closes Film Festival With an Ode to Scotland’s Lost Girl Bands

“I would like it to become an irrelevant documentary in five years’ time,” says Blair Young, whose film with fellow Scot Carla J. Easton will close the Edinburgh International Film Festival Wednesday night. 
 
Since Yesterday: The other striking feature of the fest’s programme was the screening of the documentary The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands as the closing night film. It is quite literally a valentine to the music produced by Scottish women. Spanning from the ’60s right up to the present day, the doc is with visionary artists — some of whom no one would be aware of today — who came through Scotland’s music scene and tried to crack the glass ceiling. 
 
The doc is and lively and hopeful, but is alternately a depressing view of how men have remained in charge of trades, and of the dismissiveness with which many men harassed women throughout most of the twentieth century. 
 
Young only wants the film to be remembered in the future as how it was to be in the present. “I would like people to leave with an exciting playlist, but I would also like it to look back at the door and go, bloody hell, they had to make that documentary back then! And as we just think that it can be normal to have as many women forming bands as men because who gets to release records?” 
 
’The documentary began as kind of ‘do it yourself’ thing, says Easton to The Hollywood Reporter. They began sporadically dueting together in 2016 and set out to clumsily conduct interviews with women who were once on the verge of musical success. 
 
Easton, who has a background in art but has been releasing music for almost 20 years now, said: “They said, ‘Talking about girl bands from your youth, how come there are not many girl bands in Scotland?’ And then, I think, one of us was just like, ‘Well, there should be a film about that. ’ ” 
 
But this is as far back as they go: starting with the ’60s duo The McKinleys, crawling through The Ettes, and moving up to Strawberry Switchblade and Sophisticated Boom Boom which changed their name to His Latest Flame. The women interview bands like The Twinsets, Sunset Gun, Hello Skinny, Lung Leg, Melody Dog, Sally Skull and The Hedrons and hitherto have not shared these stories. 
 
The filmmakers were later able to fundraise more and get back raw footage of the young women, some of whom were forced to stop performing once record labels feared they might get pregnant, and damage, a record deal. It is about the theme of becoming a mother and the impact which made her have no more time for music. 
 
“I can’t even for a start,” Easton replied. “You’re just assuming that anyone with 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 shows that for you success is only going to come to you because you are you and not because of the music We could have made a film like from 2010 to 2020 on girl bands that have emerged today but I really wanted to show that change that is happening is amateur, bottom up, not top down. ” 
 
There was one track, performed by the 1980s’s pop duo Strawberry Switchblade that consisted of two women Jill Bryson and Rose McDowall. The track “Trees & Flowers” is the most utilized in the videos namely at 190595 videos. “I said that to them last week,” Easton spits out. ‘It has millions of views, you know?’ ‘The other night we watched it,’ said I ‘and you two have gone viral on Tik Tok!’ ‘Oh, really?’ ‘Yes’ said I ‘lighting up a fag ‘You know, you should think about monetizing this, maybe?’ 
 
The two, seemingly still confusing who is who, were asked how each of them felt when told that they had to close the EIFF. “We’re a bit lost for words,” Young says. Easton adds: “To have the prestige of it being the closing film of the Edinburgh International Film Festival – one of the oldest film festivals in the world – as something is going to go wrong at some point … The feeling that you get from it is, ‘Alright, people are either going to love these bands or find them out. ’ But that is so hopeful; because I will tell you, darling, it is hard being a woman in music now. ” 
 
Poetically put, it’s a sort of “homecoming” that Since Yesterday: The EIFF is closed by The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands. Young noted: “That there must have been some other festivals that could have been an options. And when considering them through whether we got accepted or not just did not feel right. While home coming as the home launch felt perfectly right as a possibility. And Scotland we all know love 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 comes out on October 18 in theatres of the United Kingdom. It is produced by Forest of Black and was funded by Kickstarter Crowdfunder, Screen Scotland, and BBC Scotland.