BWhen musician and filmmaker Carla Easton was growing up in Lanarkshire, Scotland in the 1990s, her favorite girl bands were Jem and the Holograms – the animated protagonists of a US cartoon. Easton would have liked to have had real musical role models, but didn’t know where to look. Or how close to home she would find them.

She had no posters of the McKinleys on her bedroom wall, even though the Edinburgh sisters had toured with the Beatles and were the first girl group to play at Wembley. She had never heard of them – or the Ettes, Scotland’s first all-female punk band, or Strawberry Switchblade, the Glasgow duo who were the only Scottish girl group to ever reach the UK top 10. Or the Twinsets, Sophisticated Boom Boom or Lungleg.

You may never have heard of these pioneering Scottish musicians, but Easton’s documentary Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands aims to change that. “Decade after decade, there are all these brilliant women. Why are they not remembered?” asks Easton.

Apart from the occasional radio and TV advert, many Scottish girl groups were either ignored or not taken seriously by the London-focused music industry and media, and then forgotten at home. Even the National Museum of Scotland’s exhibition on Scottish pop in 2018 didn’t tell their stories. Easton found that many of these bands had never even heard of each other.

In 2018, she and her colleague Blair Young began interviewing them and asking their fans via social media to dig up memorabilia. While TV and radio performances lay dormant in broadcasters’ archives, the history of these groups was mostly kept by fans in boxes under beds and by the musicians themselves. So the documentation became a digitization project, with Easton and her team determined to protect the 15,000 artifacts they received.

After raising almost £30,000 in crowdfunding to secure the license to these old shows, Since Yesterday premieres at the Edinburgh International Film Festival this week, with the musicians in attendance. The film tells the story of 50 years of music, from the McKinley sisters to 2000s rock band The Hedrons, as they railed against the misogyny of the indie sleaze era and attempted to break into the mainstream.

“God, I wish I had seen her on TV when I was young,” Easton says with a rueful grin. “There was real bands!” She is keen to acknowledge the many great Scottish female-fronted bands – as well as the (non-Scottish) Spice Girls and their pop dominance in the late 90s – but she had to form her own band TeenCanteen to see a stage full of Scottish women and their instruments. “I hope a lot of women and non-binary artists watch this film and think, ‘I can do that too.’ Each performer came through on their own terms; no one compromised.”

That’s certainly true of Strawberry Switchblade, whose 1984 hit Since Yesterday – which spent 21 weeks in the UK singles charts – gives the film its title. With its twinkling synths and sugary la-la-las, it’s often been mistaken for a bittersweet love song, but Rose McDowall, who formed the group with Jill Bryson, laughs at the thought. “It’s about nuclear war! I was terrified of war because I had a baby. But that’s just how our brains work; you can love beautiful things and be gloomy at the same time.”

Just as their song was misunderstood, the duo’s vibrant aesthetic – polka dots, hairbands, makeup so dramatic it made Robert Smith blush – led to criticism from the media and their record label. From headlines like “Strawberry Tarts” to meetings with Warner about “taming us,” as McDowall puts it, they felt hemmed in and pressured. “We were thrown into a place where everything was alien,” says McDowall, describing the experience of leaving a turbulent Glasgow suburb to ride to Top of the Pops in a limousine. “It just didn’t feel real.”

McDowell says Warner wanted to force her into a mold shaped by the Bangles and Bananarama – “but I wanted to be Patti Smith.” Ryuichi Sakamoto was interested in producing her second LP. But label pressure combined with mental health issues led to Switchblade breaking up just a year after the release of their debut album.

Their story fits a familiar pattern of Scottish girl groups who, in order to succeed, had to move to London and become cut off from the local scene. Many others “were dropped, unmanaged or unpaid,” says Easton, pointing out that the McKinleys claimed they could barely afford chips at the height of their fame. “Other bands had to change their sound or their look. They got pregnant or labels were afraid they would lose them. could get pregnant.”

Such was the fate of ’80s post-punk group Sophisticated Boom Boom, who opened for Simple Minds and landed John Peel sessions with their witty, stylish songs. Before they signed a contract, singer Libby McArthur found out she was pregnant. In the film’s saddest moment, she told the group and later learned her bandmates had replaced her. “The loss was devastating,” she says, “but I walked out with my head held high. The only thing I decided was not to use that name. Sophisticated Boom Boom – you owe me that.”

In the ’90s, Scotland’s girl bands rejected the promises of London labels and the fickle music press. Inspired by US grunge and riot grrrl feminism, a scene of DIY labels, zines and all-female charity gigs emerged in Edinburgh and Glasgow, featuring bands such as Lungleg, Hello Skinny and Pink Kross. Many musicians credit Saskia Holling, who also played with Sally Skull, with holding the scene together, although she protests: “I would never have called myself a promoter.” Her first concert, Twisted Girl Pop Dream, took place in 1993 and presented a wild range of genres and styles; rooted in community. “We thought, ‘We can do this our own way and support each other,'” says Holling.

The bands that tried to go the traditional label route found that women were still pitted against each other. Lesley “Soup” McLaren, drummer for the Hedrons, recalls in disbelief how their manager couldn’t get them a record deal because they were afraid they would get pregnant – a paranoia that was still very common in the mid-2000s. “It was seen as a risk to go with four girls. Those A&R guys were all bloody sans character!”

The Hedrons played over 150 shows in 2007, a relentless schedule designed to hone their craft and wow audiences. Their exciting stage performances secured them a catwalk appearance at New York Fashion Week (“It was Tartan Week,” she sighs) and a support gig for the Sex Pistols (“We met Johnny but he had his minder with him – I don’t know if he thought four girls from Glasgow were going to ambush him”). At the Isle of Wight Festival, when the band knew Channel 4 was filming, they encouraged singer Tippi Hedron to “steal” the catwalk reserved for Mick Jagger on the main stage. “She turned to me and said, ‘Should I go?’” laughs McLaren. “Yes! Go on!”

Their attitude attracted industry trendsetters like Seymour Stein to their gigs, but even the man who signed Madonna wouldn’t offer them a record deal. Eventually the Hedrons shelved their second album and quit. “We wanted to be taken seriously,” says McLaren. “I thought, ‘It’s going to be another 10 years before this band breaks through and I’m earning £10 a day.'”

The documentary doesn’t feature contemporary bands like Honeyblood (amazingly the first Scottish girl band to ever release a second album) or Sacred Paws, the only female and non-binary group to win Scottish Album of the Year. Instead, Easton uses the film to highlight grassroots organisations like songwriting collective Hen Hoose and concert series Amplifi, and to highlight the recurring gender imbalances and exploitative working conditions that were reported on this year by the UK government’s depressing report on misogyny in music. “Top-down isn’t going to work,” says Easton, referring to the traditional music industry. “So we need to support these grassroots organisations and show that there is a demand – and that there needs to be financial support.”

Since 2014, she estimates that more than 50 new girl groups have been formed in Scotland. “What happened? The first rock school for girls opened,” she says. Both Easton and McLaren are mentors at RIG Arts’ Rock School project in Greenock, one of Scotland’s poorest areas. They give free music lessons and help young people with songwriting and promotion. Teenage sisters Eva and Grace Tedeschi, also known as The Cords, have already appeared on BBC radio and will support the Vaselines on their tour. “They do all the things I’ve been promoting,” beams McLaren. “Get out there! Be part of a band!”

It’s still not an easy road, but the Cords have generations of Scottish girl bands proudly behind them. Since Yesterday is the rare documentary that has created a historical archive, but also created an active community that could birth Scotland’s next girl band. As McDowall says, “We’re not going to admit defeat, are we?”