Shambolics are no soft touch, many of the songs seeing life through the eyes of those whose life is much more gutter than stars.
There’s not a lot to do in Kirkcaldy.
Like many other places in Scotland, post-Industrialisation has punched hard, leaving a High Street that’s full of identikit shops. As the shifts end in the mid-afternoon sometimes a few lads will walk past in hi-vis clutching bottles of Buckie; there’s the ice hockey up the road, or the perennially mediocre Raith Rovers, but even the decent comic shop has closed down, plagued by shoplifting and threats to staff.
Forming a band there seems like the longest of shots. Being courageous enough to stay on the dole whilst trying to make it – 20th century style – riskier still. But having grown up on Fife’s schemes Darren Forbes decided he would do just that, together with Lewis McDonald whom he met whilst getting up to the kinds of shenanigans you might find in a Graeme Armstrong book.
Discovered by Alan McGee – yes, that Alan McGee – whilst gigging in nearby Dunfermline, even with that kind of endorsement it’s been a tortuous uphill journey for Shambolics so far. Forbes and McDonald remained the group’s core as folk have came and went; the economics of being a musician now mean that with them as exceptions, those who played on Dreams, Schemes And Young Teams have retreated back to the realer world.
One place you can get to easily from Kirkcaldy is Dundee, a city over whom the influence of The View still hangs, their transformation overnight from gig audiences to being headliners now almost 20 years on acquiring mythic status. Their avatar, Kyle Falconer, even appears here on Attention, a glistening slice of cherubic indie pop which manages to stack up plenty of familiar devices in just over 180 seconds.
Shambolics are no soft touch however, many of the songs seeing life through the eyes of those whose life is much more gutter than stars. Here, the dead-end jobber of Everything You Should’ve Done is stuck on weekend warrior repeat, I know you’re getting sick and tired of your nine to five/’cos you sniff away your troubles just to feel alive’, whilst on the ballad Filth & Scum for the subject, ‘It’s like I’ve fallen into a nightmare/And there’s nowhere left to run’.
Other nightmares are not quite as real as they have to be however, Influencer’s turbocharged guitars rain down on the only-here-for-the-socials crowd and their total absence of use or value, whilst the melodic sweetness of Fooling You masks a story about the negative obsessions we develop for those who care for us the least.
Do we come here to be reminded about our lives or lose ourselves though? Sometimes only the latter will do, as the job of meeting people halfway towards another drink and turning it up are served on the punky Coming For You, whilst If You Want It is all swagger and balls, the kind of material which underlines a songwriting desire to not die wondering.
Such a level of being all in means that Forbes is content to pursue his dream as a job in itself – and equally happy to send up the real-life events of having his benefits withdrawn because of it on the skitty Universal Credit.
There’s not much to do in Kirkcaldy, and the last thing some will expect is you taking a crowbar to its chains. Darren Forbes and Lewis McDonald formed Shambolics and Dreams, Schemes And Young Teams is about all those things, songs about the past which they’re using to grab themselves a future.
