The sold out Closing Night film at the 2024 Edinburgh International Film Festival was the Carla J. Easton film Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands.
Now the film is to be released in cinemas, and there is a special screening at The Cameo on 18 October with a live introduction and Q&A from 1980s Edinburgh girl band The Twinsets, aka sisters Gayle and Rachel Bell.
Written and narrated by Easton who is the award-nominated solo artist and member of TeenCanteen, and co-directed by prolific music promo director Blair Young (collaborator with Belle & Sebastian, Biffy Clyro, Teenage Fanclub and many more), Since Yesterday unearths the rich history of Scottish girl bands from the 1960s onwards.
The film blends personal anecdotes from bands including Jeanette Gallacher from The McKinleys (the first Scottish girl band to break into the charts in 1964 and the first girl band to ever play Wembley Arena), The Ettes, Strawberry Switchblade, The Hedrons, Sophisticated Boom Boom, Sunset Gun, His Latest Flame, The Twinsets, Lung Leg and Hello Skinny. With a scrapbook-style audio-visual aesthetic, the film takes us on a decade-by-decade adventure, crafting the ultimate visual mixtape. Discover unheard demos, lost archives, and rare performances that celebrate the women who never compromised, and subsequently got lost in time.
In Since Yesterday, Easton tells a powerful global story through a local lens, asking how we can inspire young women to make music, if those who do so are continuously erased from our cultural history?
Carla said: “Since I first suggested to Blair the idea of a documentary about the history of women who had formed bands in Scotland way back in 2016, we’ve been excited about letting an audience hear all the great music we knew about already, and then all the music we subsequently discovered. But more than that, it became about letting people hear the experiences of the women who made the music tell their stories, something they had never really gotten the opportunity to do before.”
Tickets and dates for the UK cinema release at sinceyesterdayfilm.com The film will be shown at The Cameo from 18 to 24 October.
Since Yesterday: The Untold History of Scotland’s Girl Bands is produced by Forest of Black and financed by Kickstarter Crowdfunder, Screen Scotland and BBC Scotland.
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
