Fringe by the Sea: Alistair Harkness on the festival's new music film strand, Wavelength
The inaugural Wavelength programme at Fringe by the Sea brings together a range of music documentaries with talks, DJ sets, live performances and more, writes Alistair Harkness
Serving up a welcome exploration of the intersection between music and film, the inaugural Wavelength strand of North Berwick’s Fringe By the Sea festival brings together a slew of new and recent music docs with a series of live performances, DJ sets, and talks with luminaries of the arts scene, starting with Irvine Welsh, who’ll be interviewed on stage by Wavelength’s co-curator, BBC Radio Scotland and Radio 6 Music regular Vic Galloway.
In many ways Welsh is the ideal subject to open this kind of festival. Now an unlikely elder statesman of the literary scene, the Trainspotting author’s transgressive writing has always drawn on music and film for inspiration. That’s hardly surprising. He came of age in the anything’s possible heyday of punk and later embraced rave music, sometimes DJing in Edinburgh basements at club nights for Rebel Inc, the cult Scottish literary magazine that first platformed his writing.
With the publication of Trainspotting and Danny Boyle’s subsequent film adaptation he quickly became the pre-eminent literary voice of the emerging rave and Britpop scenes, but over the course of his subsequent mercurial career he’s also run record labels, continued DJing, directed music videos and written the screenplay for the biopic of Creation Records founder Alan McGee. And that’s on top of writing four short story collections and 15 novels, including the newly published Men in Love, a direct sequel to Trainspotting that follows the characters through the ecstasy-fuelled acid house explosion of the Second Summer of Love.
There are plenty of other fascinating-sounding talks from the likes of music video pioneer Tim Pope (a frequent collaborator of The Cure, Neil Young, David Bowie and many more) and Blur drummer Dave Rowntree (promoting No One You Know, his new book of photography capturing the band during its early years). But one of the most intriguing things Wavelength seems to be trying to do is provide an audio-visual snapshot of Scotland’s vibrant music scene, both its history and where it is right now.
Regarding the former, two feature length documentaries from last year provide contrasting views of creativity: Mogwai doc If the Stars Had a Sound examines the Glaswegian post-rock noisemongers’ incredible 25-year career through the prism of their tenth studio album’s unexpected chart success; and Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands provides a blinkers-off exploration of the many all-female pop, rock and punk bands in Scotland who either never broke through or weren’t able to sustain careers because of the sexist machinations of the industry.
Bringing things up to the present, the short documentaries Hello Universe and Dinny Greet respectively tell another contrasting story: that of Miracle Glass Company and Redolent, two Edinburgh bands that have been plugging away for a decade or so, but with different outcomes — the former plagued by tragedy and bad timing, the latter the recipients of a record company feeding frenzy and last year’s Scottish Album of the Year award. Bolstered by Q&As and supplementary live performances, Wavelength is a good way to fully immerse yourself in it all.
For more information and tickets visit www.fringebythesea.com/wavelength
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