Ballboy

Outside there is snow,

but inside this room there is only you and me

I have a photo album that tells the story of when we fell in love with Scotland. Not the postcard Scotland of castles perched on the water's edge, kilts and bagpipes, the grainy outlines of Nessie or the epic blue-and-white of "Braveheart". Not the Scotland of dramatic high cliffs, but rather the Scotland of export-ready bedrooms, coloured pastels inside and perpetual gloom beyond the windows.

Every now and then I still flip through it, and I wonder what would have become of us had we chosen the Edinburgh of Ballboy instead of diving headfirst, all for one, into the Glasgow of Belle & Sebastian and Camera Obscura. If only we'd devoted ourselves to the surprising after-hours pursuits of primary school teachers and nurses instead of the overblown literary pretensions of those swooning teenage posers.

Without knowing it, we would have opted for the roughest and most romantic act around. For the sharpest, most direct handwriting. For the pale outlines left on the walls by Sarah cherry posters, by Smiths or Wedding Present or Cathal Coughlan's Microdisney posters, silent witnesses to an adolescence now gone. No more stereotypes in their rooms. No Nouvelle Vague and no Tom Courtenay. No colourful portraits of intellectual girls immortalised in heartache. In their place, the seamless modulation of a long, unrelenting mockery, the bloody nonsense inventions of the white-hot genius David Shrigley, and an unavoidable dousing in water and irony for every human ugliness, starting, whenever possible, with one's own.

Tenderness within nihilism, that's what Ballboy were. Amateur musicians, and not just for dramatic effect. Improbable poetasters. Beautiful losers in their dignity as the defeated, especially in love, with a weathered disillusionment permanently stamped on their faces. Anyone wanting to get an idea of how Gordon McIntyre and his band actually sounded will have to dig through a bit of indie undergrowth and go back to the group's first two records, as buried now as they were then. Revisit the invective aimed at the snobbish record shop clerk in "Avant Garde Music", with its priceless aftertaste of smug vindication; the ferocity disguised as intimate delicacy in "They'll Hang Flags From Cranes On My Wedding Day"; or the scathing manifesto of "Sex Is Boring", complete with a private rosary of debunked myths tested on their own skin. That's because - as "I Lost You, But I Found Country Music" teaches us - their songs often pushed self-deprecation well past the danger threshold, in terms of sheer sadism. Music as a balm that can only work up to a point, then, and only as long as the smile never fades. They barely had a couple of songs, but both were excellent. The stripped-down, tranchant rock one, with prominent rhythms and essential new wave guitar, allowing itself just a modest amount of grazes. And then the airborne rides, Gordon's speciality: luminous atmospheric pieces lovingly lifted from Galaxie 500, a theatre of impossible dreams purpose-built to shelter the singer's elusive spoken word passages. Evocative, impassive, as if kissed by the sun in the wonder of a journey taken on angel's wings, far above the ordinary miseries of everyday life.

The "ball boys" of Scottish indie-pop, on the fringes of the biggest playing fields as if to honour the aptness of yet another nomen omen, could have kept hammering away at their own formulas ad nauseam. Only occasionally landing - as on "One Sailor Was Waving", among their happiest moments - on the paroxysmal coincidence of both traits, that sublime self-deprecation and those ecstatic rarefactions, forced to cohabit within the same sonic segment with simply stunning results. Yet it was the band's leader himself who resisted the comfortable inertia of this artistic drifting. He let his bandmates go without doing the same to the band's name, vindicating the few who, from the very start, had described Ballboy as a group made in his own image. Setting aside the brutal humour, shelving those spectacular song titles, on the third chapter of the McIntyre story he chose to push his music to an apparent point of no return, both aesthetically and emotionally. A concept record of rare candour on the theme of relationships, played out entirely on the thin thread of memory and his own flair for embroidering it as needed. He'd already written plenty of unusual lovesongs before, poisoned darts disguised as caresses, but "The Sash My Father Wore And Other Stories" pushed his poetics of raw storytelling well beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Spartan structures you'd call monotone, plain guitar and restrained vocals, a few timid string interventions underlining the nostalgic streak, without ever tipping into sentimentality. Clarity, a sense of measure bordering on the miraculous, powerful and sincere feeling.

Just a few simple ingredients to craft a winter record that is nonetheless warm, as luminous as the peripheral Sweden evoked in its incipit, as peaceful as its author, suspended in a bubble far removed from material worries and the anxieties of time. The Gordon of these pale snapshots was a marathon runner with a hobby for spellcasting. Skilled at drawing out and, with stubborn discipline, reprising almost transparent melodies, slow-paced yet insistent, playing on the tiniest nuances of his singing to draw in his small audience.

Fragile gems like "Dutch Trance" or "Past Lovers" thus reached the heart via unexpected paths. Not remotely showy. Left out of the usual cholesterol-laden routes of a cynical pen that here allows itself just a single merciless dip into the inkwell, disguised moreover as a folk nursery rhyme, on the track that lent the collection its title. The detours from the main road are unusual too: a slight tear ("You Should Fall In Love With Me"), which is merely the electric variant of the preceding acoustic musings; and then a livelier but still essential interlude ("Kiss Me, Hold Me and Eat Me"), telling the story of a cannibalistic love that veers from dark fairy tale towards symbolist poetry, in the manner of Jonathan Richman's eccentric oddities.

For the rest, the real cannibal was Gordon, capable of tuning other people's sensibilities to his own wavelength. Far from a stretch when it came to the Dean Wareham of "Tell Me", but truly astonishing in his impossible reworking of "Born In The Usa", stripped of its pride and all rhetorical trappings to become a ballad of working-class dignity à-la Woody Guthrie: relaxed, with its own humble epic quality, unassuming and beautiful.

Hot on its heels, there would have been room for a new band. The reborn Ballboy would go on to write, with the following "The Royal Theatre", their own personal "Distortion", seemingly indulging the unlikely parallel between the Edinburgh songwriter and his Yankee counterpart named Stephin Merritt. The sound would become more varied and pop-leaning, the fluorescent highlighter of the keyboards jostling with a bit of guitar feedback, for a gently noisy approach. "I Worked on the Ships" would then reshuffle the deck once again, between domestic peace, impeccable flashes of light and pure celebrations of autumn's magic. Great albums after, great albums before. In between, this full-frontal nakedness, loved by very few. "Overlooked" perhaps captures the idea, if not the scale, of a culpable general indifference.

And to think that a single unassuming photograph, caught by the right eyes, would have been enough to make so many others fall in love just like us.

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25/10/2015