Sign of the times…

Lewis band SIGN RED have been grabbing the headlines for their enduring popularity with the listeners of Radio 1’s Vic and Gill show, and are heading into a third week at the top of that show’s Battle of the Demo Bands. PETER URPETH catches up with them in Stornoway and finds a band determined to enjoy and build on their recent success from their home shores.

DEDICATED FOLLOWERS of Radio 1’s Vic and Gill Show (Thursday PM) have voted with their feet in recent weeks, and for two shows in a row have kept Sign Red in pole position in the influential weekly Battle of the Demo Bands. The band’s recent airwave adulation comes on the back of a hectic first year of life that has taken in the cutting and selling of a CD, a full-programme of local gigs, and two hectic smash and grab raids on the stages of the land’s alt-music venues.

For those listening to their music while labouring under the influence of diverse negative stereotypes, the band’s success comes as no surprise until it becomes known that Sign Red hail from the Isle of Lewis. It is now two-thirds of a decade since Astrid blazed across the musical sky from their island base, and if a successor to that band has been sometime coming, then in the fledging Sign Red, one may now be emerging.

It cannot be doubted that coming from the outer islands does pose very significant added difficulties to a band trying to make it in the wider musical world and the commitment of this band and its shrewd and dedicated manager, Jori Kim, to remain living and working on the islands is a credit to the sincerity with which they cite the influence on their music of their island upbringing.

As all who have witnessed their gigs recently will confirm, the band’s energetic, eclectic, and highly committed music draws on elements from almost the entire pantheon of guitar music in the last twenty years, with hardcore, metal, DIY punk, thrash, pop, glam crackle and good ol’ rock and roll mixing it with their own evident originality.

While it is perhaps unfair to single out any of the members of this band, the frontline nexus of vocalist and songwriter Colin MacLeod and lead guitarist Derek Healey is ripe with awesome potential.

In Colin Macleod the band have a prime wedge of physical frontmanship at their disposal, a performer who can hit the audience’s on-button even in a golf club lounge bar gig on a wet Wednesday night in Stornoway. Respect most certainly due on that account, as it is for the emotional impact of his vocals that fly with ease between mic-snogging introspection and punk-screech anger.

In Derek Healey they have a player who can cut and paste his way through thrash-fisted rhythms and then switch to fleet-fingered metal soloing. He probably hasn’t himself quite worked-out where his heart lies in all of this but the scope he brings to the project is immense and ensures that the band’s music doesn’t settle too easily into a familiar grove.

Elsewhere, and openly, the band have commented on the influence on their music of 80s Washington hardcore icons, Fugazi. It is striking that while the soul inherent – and vital – in the making of many post-punk musics is over-looked, the embryonic Sign Red have already grasped the need for that note in their music.

On their eponymously entitled CD on Honcho Records, there is no better example of this than on the track “Oh dear my dear”, and the same track is a fine example of the depth of Macleod’s lyric ideas – if it was in German they’d call some of this stuff lieder, and the while the edges are raw at times and in need of defining, refining and polishing the potential is massive. 

But the band work as a unit and their collective ideas and influences, myriad as they are, all have common origins, and they readily acknowledge that their island upbringing is a vital element in their music and the songs they write, as bassist Donald Eadie comments: “Its easy to sit down and write a song and then when you come back to it you realise that there’s elements in there of what you see around you and you didn’t notice at first, and you see meanings that you didn’t realise were there and which have come from the things around you, but then, you can only write from what you know and what you’ve experienced and it has to be like that.”

For manager Jori Kim, one of the elements of the band’s music that most struck him was its dramatic range: “I always found that lightness and darkness of their music was reflective of the geography of the islands, where you get the moors and the mountains and I see that in their music while for them it is probably an unconscious thing that just comes in to what they do.”

Colin Macleod adds: “I don’t like the kind of clichéd thing of a band in an area kicking out saying we hate where we live and we’re better than all this. We want to stay here, Astrid moved away to Glasgow but we want to stay here if that is at all possible. We love where we are, it makes it awkward but we love where we are.”

It remains a sad fact in fulfilling these aspirations that talent such as Sign Red have to make do and mend when it comes to such necessities as dedicated local venues, versatile dedicated rehearsal space, and all the other facilities needed to nurture latent raw talent, adding to the process unhelpful clutter that has to be overcome. For Jori, a vital element in the whole process is that of focussing attention on the islands and their new music. Sign Red are a glowing example of just what there is on offer.
 
The band’s CD Sign Red is on the Honcho Records label, c/o PO Box 333, isle of Lewis, HS1 2PU.

© Peter Urpeth, 2004