Brett Gregory interviews Professor David Archibald (University of Glasgow), from The Tenementals

BG: Hi, I'm Brett Gregory, and this is Professor David Archibald from the University of Glasgow, founder of the Scottish protest group, The Tenementals.

DA: Brett, it's good to be back in touch. It's been quite a year for The Tenementals; last year we released our first single, Die Moorsoldaten or Peat Bog Soldiers; and, out of the blue, we were contacted by the people who oversee the archives of the concentration camp in which the song was first performed on the 27th of August 1933. The reason the archivists were in touch was because they wanted the song to be placed in the archive that they have about the camp, and they've got an archive about that song because it's been covered by a number of various artists previously. They also said some very moving words about the two versions that we had made –one English, one German. To receive this news was overwhelming

Then we produced another cover, a song by Victor Jara, the Chilean poet and singer, who was murdered during Pinochet’s coup against the elected government in Chile in 1973. We were doing an event at St. Luke's which is a beautiful venue in the East End of Glasgow on the 15th of September last year, almost 50 years to the day when Victor Jara's body was found dumped in a street. He'd been arrested during the coup, he was held in a makeshift prison, and in the prison the guards broke his fingers to stop him playing the guitar. They shot him dead, and they dumped his body. And because we were doing an event which was 50 years and one day after the death or the finding of Victor Jara's body, we wanted to do something which kept his memory alive so we sang ‘Te recuerdo Amanda’. It's a song which is about remembering really, and it's also about people involved in the struggle to build a better world, and sometimes the sacrifices that are involved in that.

Monica Queen is an extraordinary, beautiful, beautiful singer who's maybe known quite well in Glasgow and Scotland. I'm not so sure how well she's known out of Scotland, but her voice is extraordinary, and we asked her if she would sing it, and she was up for it. Our drummer Bob Anderson drums with Monica and her partner, Johnny Smiley, is the mixing maestro on our recordings, so it seemed like a good idea. So that night I said a few words about Victor Jara, and why we were going to sing that song, and then introduced Monica and our guitarist, Simon. She sang it in Spanish, and there were 500 people in the room, and time seemed to stop it.

We wanted to recreate something of that moment. We did that in the spring, but we're very slow and our rhythm is pretty irregular, so we're just bringing out a video now. We went down to the River Clyde, and we shot it. And the original song is about someone remembering, someone goes to a factory, so we went to Glasgow's industrial landscape, and we filmed a little video. We don't want to be overly romantic, but when we listen to the songs of Victor Jara, we think that in some ways he walks with us. Every time Victor HJara's songs are sung it's a blow against the people that would kill the writers, the poets, the dreamers, the people who try and imagine a different world.

The album's called ‘Glasgow: A History (Vol. I of VI)’: it's coming out with Strength in Numbers records in November.

The first track we brought out was ‘A Passion Flower’s Lament’, and it's about the men from Glasgow who travelled to Spain, and who died in the Spanish Revolution or the Spanish Civil War. It's written from the perspective of a statue that sits on the banks of the River Clyde which commemorates the members of ‘The International Brigades’. The statue is named after a very famous Spanish communist politician commonly known as ‘La Pasionaria’. It was erected in the 70s and it's become an important part of Glasgow’s cityscape. The Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Revolution, is a contested historical period.

There was a period in that war called ‘The Civil War within the Civil War’ where different leftist groups were, you know, fighting each other, but they weren't just arguing with each other about the contents of their paper, they were shooting each other, and one of the people that was caught up in that was a University of Glasgow student, Bob Smillie, who had fought alongside George Orwell in the Aragon front, and he died in a prison cell in Valencia. He was arrested by the forces on the Republican left. He was in the process of leaving Spain and he was beaten up and died. It's murky, you can't be exact but it's possible, perhaps probable, that he died at the hand of the people who were on the same bloody side as him.

The song asks whether we should be worrying about the difficult aspects of the conflict when, as the song says, ‘Once more the jackboot seeks to recruit’. What do we do about the troubling aspects of anti-fascist history at the moment when the fascists are coming back? The song leaves that open. Perhaps art poses questions rather than answers them, but also what the song seeks to do is to resurrect the revolutionary spirit of Spain, to focus on a moment of revolutionary possibility. If it happened once it can happen again. The Spanish ruling class are fearful of the memory of the Spanish Revolution, precisely because they know that better than anybody else.

Peter Pike or Pink with Sarah Martin

The song is sung beautifully by Jen Cunnion who sings most of the songs on the album, but Jen is not always available so we've worked with other fantastic singers as guest vocalists: Belle and Sebastian’s Sarah Martin has sang live with us a few times, but she also recorded one of the tracks on the album called ‘Peter Pike or Pink’, about the events in Scotland known variously as the 1820 ‘Radical War’, the ‘Radical Rising’ or the ‘Scottish Insurrection’. Therese Martin also sings on the song so there's two Martins on that song. No relation other than they're both great singers. 1820 witnessed a period in Scotland of sustained civil unrest, a general strike, and aborted armed uprising; and it culminated with its leaders sentenced to death while others were deported.

During the lockdown I took a trek up to Sighthill Cemetery where there's a monument dedicated to the men who were executed for their part in the rising. The memorial lists those who were executed but also those who were deported to Australia, and one man's name is listed as Thomas Pike or Pink. I thought, now we don't even know his name, and that that was interesting in the sense that 1820 sits somewhat uncomfortably in the Scottish national consciousness. For some it's too radical, for some it's too nationalist, for some it's a bit murky because the British state was involved. There's a poetic connection with the uncertainty around one of the participants’ names as much as there is around the uncertainty of what that the event is, and what it means. We added our own artistic license to the mix when we tweaked the title a little.

It's the second track in the album, and the album will be released in November. It contains nine tracks. There's two other singles that are likely to come out: ‘The Owl of Minerva’ imagines what the owl associated with Hegel's aphorism, ‘The Owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk’.  What would it be like if The Owl of Minerva was living in the Finnieston Crane, one of the magnificent titan cranes that sits on the Clyde? In that song she flies over the city, commenting on what she encounters and reflecting on the historical process. And we're also bringing out a single called ‘Universal Alienation: We’re not Rats’ which riffs off a celebrated speech by Jimmy Reid, who was a major trade union figure in Glasgow in the 70s.

Thanks to Glasgow City Heritage Trust who gave us some money which subsidised some of the production costs of the album, we're able to put on a free to enter album launch, so we're going to be having that on the 27th of November in Oran Mor.

And we've started working on Volume II. We've written a few songs, there's a song about hope, there's a song about the city's connections with the anti-apartheid struggle, and other material which is quite close to our hearts which will come out in good time.

We don't have time to focus much on political party leaders; we focus on what we can do, where we are. We need to pressurise them of course in Britain and Scotland and then elsewhere, and perhaps there's no more pressing subject on which to pressurise the leaders of the British State at the minute than on the question of their participation in the genocide in Palestine. We've participated in many of the marches in Glasgow as we could have. We're absolutely alive to the fact that while that event takes place in Palestine, Britain is actively supporting that event, and I think the scale of that event hasn't not really been made clear yet. There was an article recently by Professor Sridhar who's the chair of global Public Health at the University Edinburgh which built on the report in the Lancet which had estimated that the death count in Gaza could be as high as 186,000 people, and she extrapolated that methodology, and argued that if the conflict continued until the end of 2024 then the total deaths could be in the region of 335,000, a third of a million people, the killing of one third of 1 million from a population of 2 million. I mean what is the word for that?

So what can we do? Little, we march, we put pressure on our leaders, we bear witness to their participation in genocidal war crimes, and we call them out at every opportunity.

The Tenementals is what I've called a wild research project and some of the band members are academics. It's got one foot in the university but for a project like The Tenementals to have a life, to breathe, it has to move to its own beat. The Tenementals has to run on the logics of a rock band rather than the metricised logics of the neoliberal university. Art has to be accountable to itself rather than the control mechanisms that come with working in higher education, so that's really the only way that The Tenementals can be alive. And I've been working on developing this thinking around the concept of Wild Research. We’re having a symposium on Wild Research, at Stephen Skrynka’s amazing Revelator Wall of Death in September where different artists and academics, filmmakers, writers will come together and discuss the whole the idea of Wild Research.

So my work with The Tenementals since astride my work as an academic. I'll be heading back to Cuba later in the year with my Catalan comrade and colleague Núria Araüna Baro to work on the feminist filmmaking project which we've started -  it's been a busy, busy time.

Thank you, Brett, for taking some of your time out. I know that you, as I said earlier, you've been working on your filmmaking projects, the Kafka short, and working on your own writing, and your blog and so on, and all power to you. We need as many radical voices out there as we can. We all make a modest contribution, but combined those modest contributions hopefully add up to something more, so let countless radical voices bloom.

You can find 'The Tenementals' on Spotify here, and on social media here: @tenementals