THE PASTELS
Photos courtesy of Domino Records
Glasgow indies- the wrong note's right sometimes
by Giitanjali Chiya
(December 2025)
This was the time of monsters. The cultural moment of the UK in the early '80s reveled in muck, conceived from an unique set of circumstances- society was extinguished and the riff-raff ordered back into the inert and neutered world of the family. The long downturn of the '60s reached its narrative denouement in the spectre of Thatcher, with whom any commitments to full employment were blown off the furnace. Scotland, with its sundry industries of shipbuilding, steel, coals, cars, was textiles, was left to rot and soon became historical marginalia. This was the house that Maggie made.
The Pastels, whose story doesn't exactly lend itself to this world-historic legend, could arrive only as alien vectors in this new domesticated ethos despite their (fairly domesticated!) image otherwise. The jagged edge of their city's blood and guts bleakness wouldn't find home in the band's world, and they were dubbed, for better or for worse, the quiescent others to punk and synth's kinetic charge. Forming in 1981, they appeared in sonic lockstep with Postcard Record bands like Orange Juice, but their sound pushed fidelities sparser still. Lead singer Stephen Robbie, whose own continued commitment to the band and its image demanded he usurp his own last name, became Stephen Pastel.
A Pastels record isn't exactly an imprint of the city's storied dramatis persoannae - you wouldn't easily index the post-industrial junkie, rake, suburban lout or tenement lubber whose galvanic screech had become a trademark to punk. The Pastels instead created a relatively anaesthetised world to return and retreat to (American listeners who were sick of "power" and "intensity" gravitated towards this and the sound of the Glasgow scene more readily). 1982's Songs For Children honed this image; the melodies are simple, the bass-guitar-lox alchemy shambolic. They sound fun and carefree and the earliest conceits of a Pastels record seem to be coming together. The rhythmic force of "Heavens Above" (to me, the standout in the vinyl pressing) is chaotic and amateurish. Stephen crooning "this song is pure popcorn" is both a declaration of their '60s bubblegum harmonic influences and tongue-in-cheek prod at their artistic intentions. 1984's Baby Honey casts the net wider across the pond, dissolving into sounds of 1970s kraut bands like Faust. The length of the song allows them to fan out their experimental impulses; the horn-guitar-bass creating a jangly vortex and wall of sound that is "uncharacteristically" erratic, angry and flighty for a Pastels record. 1995's Mobile Safari is surfeited with the same nod-and-nudge gestures at their process ("Yoga"), romance of the tenement and sunshine over Glasgow ("Classic Line-up") with a clangy guitar and a disarmingly green charge to the drum tones It's the same evocative charm of those late Television Personalities records like Mummy You're Not Watching Me who were "colleagues" on Whaam Records which released the band's first EP. Instrumental pieces like "Mobile Deli" percuss and drone evincing the glum and sardonic lilt of this record. This record like all the others seems to follow the principles of liquid thermodynamics, there is an unpredictable ebb and flow, disorderliness that is never ham-fisted but genuinely amateurish and defiant of overarching structure. Their music has anchors that shift, but never strive towards perfectibility. Despite the plasticity of their sound over the years this central conceit remains unchanged.
There's a prelapsarian idyll to the music that seems by itself an unique sound signature unattributable to a time and place. It takes music to its aleph - an atomic stage where everything must be built up from the most elementary. They are aGlasgow band, but it is a rather hackneyed provincial notion that every good band must carry within in its city's DNA. As if an urban ethos can be sublimated in a sound that is some unadorned espirit de Glasgow - these banalities are even harder to sit through when they claim some sibylline force of palpable positivity that runs through the entire indigent populace, wonder what city in the world this isn't true of. Stephen himself didn't see the band in the "Glasgow" scene; where the "scene" was more "wooden and uptight"- they had become their own thing. The daisy chain of influence is even more inscrutable with a band like The Pastels where it seems to begin somewhere in '60s America, touches en-route power-pop a la Big Star, jangle, '70s Germany to smaller labels in the UK peopled by bands little known a stone's throw over their city limits. In the '80s, they were releasing covers of the New York Dolls (proving their punk bona fides) and former Monkee Mike Nesmith's country originals. Stephen's own record company, 53rd and 3rd, had a cross record releasing deal with K Records in Washington which put them on the American ether (this is when Kurt Cobain, an Olympia native, first heard the band and became a fan) while they brought local Olympia bands to a Scottish audience. Geography's imprint is ineffable but not determining.
This also made them a sorting problem at a time where music criticism's most urgent task seemed to be taxonomy. Everything had to be ordered and filed in genres and vectors and tabulations. Being a serious Pastels fan is bristling against these conventions and also being utterly confused by them. Are they punk? Must they be twee? Are they twee? What is twee? And what the fuck is cutie? These tendencies were always redolent more of the Magellan ethnographer in a hurry to sort and hence pacify the first unknown tribe he chances upon than any real intellectual interest in the sociality of music making. It wants to affix music to a time and reduce it to geography. Historical and temporal contingencies seem to dissipate. Music is all being and never becoming. The band's inclusion in the now infamous C86 tape, itself an attempt to provide some cultural stopgap for guitar-pop against the westerly winds bringing hip-hop to the UK, condemned them to the "cutie" moniker that has hardly washed off since. Much to be said about the politics of "cute" as an aesthetic category, but it has managed to make the group and their politics trivial and render them into lightweights. These genre categories and agglutinated adjectives trafficking music magazines are but nets cast to "catch" sound, if one were to badly paraphrase Karl Popper. Objects are always more than the concepts used to describe them. More on this later.
They bracketed themselves with off-kilter punk acts like Swell Maps and Television Personalities but drove a wedge against the sound that buoyed mainstream perceptions of punk: think of Anti-pasti's violent thrash, epidermal anger and bombast. If The Pastels had angst, it slipped through the cracks, for groups like the Exploited however, it was the muscle of the sound, the gestalt of their musical identity. Zines of the time couldn't have anticipated the latter day taxonomy of these groups in the hallowed chambers of post-punk. The acts themselves couldn't have known either, but when critics and obsessive music mavens who ran the DIY scene chirp on the Pastel's ability to ripple through the '80s rock firmament, you sense a boredom with the over-saturation of prevailing styles. The Pastels are the "pointed edge in innocence" "blue sky through the clouds" - but what is it that audiences are so sick of?
The Sex Pistols had become shibboleths, "Anarchy in the UK" had substituted itself for a bloodless commercialism. It was hard for anyone that still gasped for the red thread between art and revolution to be taken seriously. It was a quaint naïveté. Punk's story "choked on its own cliches," the finance buccaneers of the post-industrial new world punk leered at broke it down to parts and sold it for scraps. A T-shirt, here a pair of shoes there... it was a violent defanging that became a cruel reminder of art's march towards entropy in a social and economic system built to stifle it. Punk didn't have any politics to offer beyond conspiracy- it stood in awe of its enemy and its goals were unattainable simply by dint of being undefinable. An "objet petit a" (object-cause of desire) if in this one instance Marxist philosopher Slavoj Ži žek is to be believed.
Post-punk's petard too went off with Thatcher - the roiling apocalypse of its sound and novelty were out of place in the world of the London's burgeoning elite, now freed from heavy postwar taxation and at ease to buy yachts or whatever it is that rich people do. By the early '80s, even Scritti Politti, Marxist mavericks and oddities who seemed firm on their left-field bona fides, had traded in their skittery experimental sound for soapy synths. The wheels of pop machine turned and bludgeoned all in the way. A purge and bowdlerization effected in favour of a synth-pop soundscape more sanguine with the rise of Thatcherism and its musical ethos. Even if these groups didn't align themselves with the politics, the du jour visual conceit had trapped them: materialist excess, fervid consumerism and ultra-individuality- it was alienation writ in reverb.
To the winners, this looked like a futuristic and triumphalist impulse had rekindled in mainstream music - but to the losers, the majority of whom were in the peripheries and internal colonies of the UK, these victories appeared pyrrhic at best. The Thatcherite boom came at the cost of Scottish plenty, who lost any hopes in keeping a rightful share of their oilfields away from Maggie's noose-hold. Their own oil revenues from the North Sea were darted off to rescue the freefalling British economy and line the pockets of London financiers. Synth practitioners may recoil from the association but noise has always been a document of power - the cybernetic sonic forms the instrument engendered were copacetic to the Thatcherite consciousness. The Pastels, with their hand-me-down anoraks and languid guitars, must've looked on in horror.
Synth's mechanisation also made the artist a passive element, giving it an anemic and utilitarian sound that strove towards order. It is easy to see why The Pastels appeared as gnostics to these de rigeur tendencies. Their music evinced a Luddism uncharacteristic of the time, even among their guitar-pop peers. Their languid earnestness and mistakability that couldn't be encompassed by the harmless gadfly allegations of "twee" and "cutie" - their music communicated in deficit as it did in presence; it defies a reifying order. The Pastels take us back into particularity against totalisation. One of my favourite comments on a Pastels song is under the YouTube video for "Leaving This Island"(written by Katarina Mitchell for Illuminations): "if it is in tune you don't mean it." Indeed. 1989's Baby You're Just You has guitar solos that again eschew any drive towards perfection, and yet the message is communicated. "Technically" perfect guitar solos couldn't vehicle the tenderness which needed the slippery vulnerability of a relatively "unskilled" guitarist. The cri de Coeur feedback on the guitar rounds out the emotional gravitas of what to me is the best heartbreak anthem in the band's catalogue. If there is sloppiness to a Pastels record, it is the beating heart of their humanist project (even if it seems to put id in the driver's seat).
It's a sordid habit to stamp art we love with an unearned radicalism, and I anticipate the exasperated eye-rolls this might get, but the fallibility in their sound is a part of revolt. The haphazard harmonic relationships gainsay perfect reproduction, each performance is novel, their music carries love for the game and the romance of open experimentation. If punk was about musical dissonance with the status quo and peculiarity, The Pastels are its ur-practioners. They carry within them the idea that drives art forward, that there is something within the human experience that can't find an objective correlate in perfect harmonies and marketable song structures or "hit" formulas. Life is in excess of this grammar of music production, but our most vulnerable moments find redoubt in the band's sonic arrhythmia (watch this, this and this).
It is this spirit and also their commitment towards Glasgow that has ensured their longevity. Where their more mammon-weary peers either hung up their hats or made their way to London for chart success, they stayed in the city. They fostered the "scene," would help new bands (The Shop Assistants, Talulah Gosh, The Vaselines, BMX Bandit to name a few) find their ground, assist them with recording, gear and infrastructure with the aforementioned label Stephen set up. Stephen also headed Domino's subsidiary Geographic which gave space and latitudes to acts in his taste. Artists would shuffle across the city and membership of groups under his aegis would remain fluid - a real musical community had started taking shape. It is not all them, of course, but without this dogged persistence, half of Glasgow's musical eccentrics would have a snowball's chance in hell.
Sovereign control over their music and process has allowed for more notches on their sonic belt; the band was never managed, most members have day jobs and they come together only when inspiration strikes. They have resisted the lull of marketing at every turn, choosing instead to ensconce themselves in the zine and punk DIY culture that championed their style before the music press came knocking.
The aperture to Pastel's world opened further with their 2006 remix album Illuminati (taking their 1997 album Illuminations as template) featuring My Bloody Valentine, Stereolab and a motley crew of others which pushes limits of what a "remix" album must do. MBV's Kevin Shields's Promethean chaos to Magic Nights, Jim O'Rourke's brilliant piano arrangement, slinky guitar and strings to Leaving This Island, Kid Loco's acidy drums and galoshes to Viaduct create something unlike anything in their discography. The resulting album is a churning temple to sound.
Their later embrace of the melodic with 2013's Slow Summits (Arthur Russell particularly ghosts over this record) isn't unusual but a welcome step forward, with Mitchell's gossamer vocals taking lead and becoming the centrifugal force of their new direction without compromising on the community spirit their work embodies. Stephen speaks repeatedly of this process: "negotiated sound and mistakes of people playing at different levels of ability" (via a Quietus interview, February 2013). There's no bog standard, no crank prophet whose genius overlooks and shepherds the process; just a room of curious artists prodding sound to its limit to see what they might find. In this, the joy abides.
