Alex speaks to Gord Matheson of The Strangers Almanac about the Dundee music scene, reviews causing hurt feelings, and playing gigs in living rooms.
Compiling a Spotify playlist featuring unknown yet excellent Dundee bands left me in a quandary. Including The Strangers Almanac meant having to pick a song from the only record they had on there which was ‘Car Boat Sail’. Knowing that their recent release ‘Those Tremendous Mountains‘ was only on Bandcamp thereby scuppered my plans.
I say scuppered, what I should divulge at this point is the fact that I added a song to the playlist only to remove it after about two days because it didn’t fit in. From this I can draw two conclusions. Firstly, I need to listen to The Strangers Almanac a lot more. Secondly, I wouldn’t have this issue if I’d actually seen them play live more than never. At least I think I’ve never seen them play live. Which is pretty much as good as.
As I’ve said on many occasions, there’s a reason why the music scene in Dundee is healthy. At least in terms of artistic merit it is.
The lack of music industry infrastructure or wide variety of nightly shows that you would get in say, Glasgow, means that there is very little oxygen for bullshit to survive. To play music in Dundee you have to really want to do it because there’s so few opportunities for exposure and the chance to build an audience. Let’s face it, out of term time when the two Universities empty, so does Dundee. During those student-free weeks it’s almost like a ghost town. That’s what makes the recent surge of interest in art and culture exciting.
Enjoy the podcast.
Download Episode #25 – The Strangers Almanac
Hello! Thanks for stopping by. My name is Andy and you've found my blog. Once in a halley's comet I'll help a noisy band release a record like 
