Tickets and information about ACTION TIME VISION at the Glasgow Book Festival (Aye Write) in the Mitchell Library are on this link: https://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/event/1/action-time-vision-grant-mcphee-katy-lironi-douglas-macintyre-with-nicola-meighan
Here’s a review by Russell Leadbetter in The Herald of Creeping Bent: A Leap Into The Void:
THE HERALD – CREEPING BENT: A LEAP INTO THE VOID
SOME thirty years ago, a young Scottish musician found himself in Los Angeles, contemplating the next stages of his career.
Douglas MacIntyre had in his late teens been in a short-lived, Lanarkshire-based post-punk group, Article 58. He’d gone on to sign various deals and take part in session recording or touring work with such artists as Subway Sect’s Vic Godard, Lloyd Cole and Future Pilot AKA. He had written songs, and roadied for other bands. But he’d grown bored with his life and realised that new direction was needed.
“I had determined that setting up a label as an outlet for music, art, design and literature that piqued my inquisitive nature was the way forward”, MacIntyre writes in a newly-published book. “I had no responsibilities in my life other than to myself and had no desire to make lots of money; I’d always been happy with just making enough to get by”.
The result, when it came, was Creeping Bent, which has turned out to be one of the pivotal forces in Scottish indie music over the last three decades. Launching in December 1994 with A Leap Into the Void, an ambitious multi-media event at Glasgow’s Tramway, it went on to release singles and albums by such acclaimed acts as Nectarine No.9, Adventures in Stereo, Vic Godard, Gareth Sager, Future Pilot AKA and Bill Wells & Isobel Campbell.
Now, however, the Creeping Bent Organisation will halt operations at the end of the year, bringing the curtain down on a 30-year project that issued no fewer than 100 art products – music, performance, literature and film.
To mark the “end of definition” for the label, MacIntyre has written Creeping Bent: A Leap into the Void, in which he reflects, year by year, on the pleasures and challenges of running what he terms an “outré underground independent label”.
The organisation’s final actions will take place on Friday, December 12 in Mono, Glasgow, and the following night at Edinburgh College of Art.
The End of Definition will feature a plethora of “15 minutes of fame sets” by Creeping Bent-adjunct artists, each performing four songs. This will be followed by dancing and action at Mono into the wee hours to tunes supplied by DJs Bobby Bluebell, Divine, Gerry Love and Stephen Pastel. Port Sulphur (MacIntyre’s own band) and Paul Research, The Leopards, The Bluebells, The Secret Goldfish, Gareth Sager, Mackenzies, QUAD90, The Nectarine No.9, The Sexual Objects will all be performing live over two days in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Before then – on November 13, in fact – MacIntyre will be taking part in an Aye Write event at the Mitchell Library. Joining him will be his wife, Katy Lironi, and award-winning filmmaker Grant McPhee.
It should be an interesting evening. Hosted by Nicola Meighan, all three will discuss their new books and the development of the DIY aesthetic in the Scottish music scene. Lironi’s book is her memoir Matilda in the Middle: Family, Music and Mayhem. She has been involved in Creeping Bent since the outset. McPhee’s latest work, on top of his previous works – the excellent oral histories Hungry Beat and Postcards from Scotland – is Caledonia Screaming, in which he explores punk’s seminal effect on Scotland in 1976/77. The book features interviews with over 100 Scottish punk musicians and London contemporaries, as well as promoters, label owners, music journalists and fanzine writers.
Creeping Bent itself was influenced at the beginning by the example of the groundbreaking Edinburgh label, Fast Product, established in the late 70s by Bob Last and Hilary Morrison, and its subsequent imprint pop:aural.
Creeping Bent’s launch in 1994 came at an markedly creative time on Glasgow’s music scene, as MacIntyre writes in his book. There were lots of “groups and labels emerging in Glasgow who had become absorbed in the DIY ethos of the post-punk era”; gigs were being staged in the 13th Note on Glassford Street and Sauchiehall Street’s Nice’n’Sleazy.
Creeping Bent’s launch event at the Tramway attracted a fair degree of media attention. Few could have foreseen at the time just how successful the new label would become, even when MacIntyre was running it from his one-bedroom flat in Mount Florida. Its first singles and EPs, by Spacehopper, The Leopards, The Secret Goldfish and others, all drew glowing reviews from the then-influential music weeklies. John Peel, as he so often was, proved to be an early champion of the Creeping Bent aesthetic, playing the songs on his late-night Radio 1 programme and inviting several of the acts to record sessions.
A key figure in the new label’s existence was Katy’s brother, Stephen Lironi, an in-demand producer who had formerly played with Altered Images. MacIntyre took him on as house producer for Creeping Bent’s early output. Lironi worked with Alan Vega, of the cult New York band Suicide, for several singles released on Creeping Bent, as well as an album, Righteous Lite.
Numerous highlights are recorded in MacIntyre’s book: the steady growth, the critical acclaim, the Peel sessions, the association with Alan Vega. At one point Peel even asks Creeping Bent to programme a label night at the 1998 Meltdown Festival he was curating at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The invitation helped bring Creeping Bent to the attention of the media and major record labels.
The night was a great success. “After the show”, MacIntyre notes in his book, “it was lovely speaking to John Peel and getting the chance to thank him for his support personally. It’s hard to imagine how Creeping Bent groups would have built their audience without the support of Peel and BBC Radio 1”.
Later, there was a “mind-blowing” moment when Peel broadcast a live show from the Beeb’s Maida Vale studios to mark Creeping Bent’s fifth anniversary.
Much more recently in the Creeping Bent story, there was a manufacturing and distribution deal with the Last Night from Glasgow (LNFG) label; and MacIntyre notes with pleasure how his band Port Sulphur entered the Official Scottish Charts at number one in 2022 with their album, Speed of Life.
He’s had an interesting life, has Douglas MacIntyre; he also established the FRETS concerts in Strathaven Hotel, which has so far attracted such bands as The Bluebells and Butler, Blake & Grant. If you want to know what it’s like to run an underground label, though, his book, published by LNFG, is an engrossing primer.
Creeping Bent: A Leap Into The Void is available to purchase at this link: https://shop.lastnightfromglasgow.com/products/creeping-bent-a-leap-into-the-void-douglas-mcintyre?srsltid=AfmBOoq4JM9P-C4O0Stt3BS9DLzIKQmJ0M2kkcaId6tkj_wuIR9psRF3
Fretsconcerts.com 