From the Edinburgh duo who toured with the Beatles to the ribbon-festooned Strawberry Switchblade, Scotland produced thrilling girl bands. So why couldn’t they sustain their success? A new film tells their stories
When musician and film-maker Carla Easton was growing up in Lanarkshire, Scotland, in the 1990s, her favourite girl band were Jem and the Holograms – the animated protagonists of a US cartoon. Easton would have liked real musical role models to look up to but didn’t know where to look. Nor how close to home she might have found them.
She didn’t have posters of the McKinleys on her bedroom wall, even though the Edinburgh sisters toured with the Beatles and were the first girl band to play Wembley. She had never heard of them – nor the Ettes, Scotland’s first all-female punk band, nor Strawberry Switchblade, the Glaswegian duo who remain the only Scottish girl band ever to crack the UK Top 10. Nor the Twinsets, nor Sophisticated Boom Boom, nor Lungleg.
