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Evening News, 20.7.07
Tom MaxwellNorthern Alliance stays firm
YOU don't exactly need a degree in nuclear physics to form a band, but it helps. "It's actually a PhD," laughs Doug Johnstone, lead singer and guitarist in Edinburgh three-piece Northern Alliance. "I got a job at Marconi before it was taken over by BAE Systems, writing computer simulation programmes for aircraft. "It was pretty boring really. I was a bit of a desk monkey, so after four years I made the big leap into freelance journalism. It probably seemed fairly insane at the time, but it's worked out a treat." But the 36-year-old's first love is music and his group, whose music he describes as "lo-fi, indie, bluesy, a bit of electronica and a bit folksy", are getting ready to do something they don't do very often - play live. "We put out our first record before we played any gigs," says Johnstone. "We formed as a kind of reaction to what we did first in our other bands - slogging our guts out playing gigs. "We released a mini-album, Hope In The Little Things, in 2003. It got loads of great reviews, including four Ks in [music magazine] Kerrang. So we thought we'd better go out and play live." They followed up Hope with a second well-received mini- album, Disaster For Scotland in 2004. In their handful of live performances so far, Craig Smith (bass), Vivien Strachan (guitar/keyboards) and Johnstone have performed as a three-piece. However, following the release of their first full-length album, For The Grains Of Sand, in November, the band decided they needed to "kick out the jams on the songs that deserve it". And so for this weekend's gig at Cabaret Voltaire they have enlisted the help of some fellow members of the Fence Collective, the term used to describe artists signed to Fife label Fence Records. "We were doing a few gigs when the For The Grains Of Sand came out but it didn't really represent what the album was like and The Red Well said they would be our backing band," says Johnstone. "We're going to be turning up the amps and rocking out." Originally a drummer in Ballboy at university, Johnstone got to know his current bandmates through moving in the same Edinburgh circles. "We were all into the same kind of music and went to the same gigs," he says. "Craig was originally in Joyriders and I was sharing a flat with their singer - this was about 12 years ago. "Then I was in Little Hopetown Giants with Craig. I was drumming and he was on bass. They became Hobotalk who got signed not long after I left." It wasn't until 2002 that the current alliance came into existence. "We formed at a Hogmanay party," says Johnstone. "I originally wanted to call ourselves The Taliban but I was shouted down." The name of Northern Alliance, then, was something of a compromise. But there are certain opinions on which the singer-songwriter refuses to budge. "I'm a massive fan of Diego Maradona," he says. "I've always rated him better than Pele, which gets me into a lot of arguments in pubs." In fact, Johnstone holds the pint-sized Argentinian genius in such high regard that Northern Alliance's next mini-album, scheduled for an autumn release, is called The Hand of God - a reference to the infamous goal against England during the 1986 World Cup quarter-final in Mexico. But when he's not making music, worshipping controversial footballers or interviewing the stars (he says both KT Tunstall and Ian Rankin are Northern Alliance fans), Johnstone has also been gaining a reputation as an author. His first novel, Tombstoning, was released last year. Set in his home town of Arbroath, it tells a story of fear, reunions and death. His follow-up book, which draws on his musical experiences, is due to be released in March. "It's called The Ossians," he says. "It's about an indie band on the verge of being signed. They are going on a tour to the Highlands but it all goes pear-shaped." And Johnstone could be adding something else to his already impressive CV. "There's an outside chance of the band doing a film soundtrack, but it's a long way away," he says. "It would be for a fairly famous director - not Steven Spielberg or anything, but not a little indie project either. Negotiations are at a very early stage, but I would love to do something like that." However, Northern Alliance's Renaissance man is determined to keep his feet on the ground. "Like a lot of people in the Fence Collective, we are not really ambitious for a major record deal or to become famous," he says. "We just enjoy making music. We just want to sell a few records and make a few people happy - that'll do us."
The Metro, 18.07.07
Nadine McBayLast year, Northern Alliance lynchpin Doug Johnstone made his fiction debut with Tombstoning, a thriller where both love and danger lurked along the windy clifftops and spray-smattered shorelines of small-town Scotland.
Similar images are evoked by his band’s music, and not simply because of the Edinburgh trio’s favoured artwork of deserted beaches and vast, engulfing skies.
Originally called, erm, The Taliban, Northern Alliance don’t make music so much as conjure the feeling of rain on your cheeks and a chilling breeze through your hair. Johnstone, bassist/guitarist Craig Smith and vocalist Vivien Strachan will be joined by members of similarly atmospheric Edinburgh glumsters The Red Well (who will play their own set, as will fellow Fence Collectee Candythief) making these performances their first with a full band in their three-album career.
Though forthcoming mini LP The Hand Of God hints at a relatively peppier, electronica-tinged future, their mesh of arpeggiating guitar, somnambulant beats and boy/girl harmonies recalls early 1990s US slow-corers Codeine, while being as evocative of Scotland’s lush murk and wistful resignation as Young Team-era Mogwai.
Though not without a lathering of mordant wit, this is a band that turn even Andy Cameron’s footie chant-along, Ally’s Tartan Army, into a stinging, red-eyed heartbreaker. It’s going to be a beautifully sad few nights.
The List, 16.07.07
Malcolm JackThey’ve released just three albums in five years (two of them mini ones), and as yet never played a full band live show. What’s been the hold up for Edinburgh lo-fi indie slowcoaches Northern Alliance?
Kids, careers and studies, for starters. In fact, considering that singer/guitarist/songwriter Doug Johnstone has written his first novel during that time, while busily plying his trade as a music journalist for - among others - your favourite fortnightly Glasgow and Edinburgh events guide, it’s a wonder they’ve found time for the rock at all.
‘The music stuff I find is a bit of a release actually,’ says Johnstone. ‘That’s how it got going in the first place. For a long time we just did it in our basement, bashing out tunes for a laugh. Then we put out a mini album and people started buying it. Then we had to take things a bit more seriously.’
Much to everyone’s gain, the three piece finally released their rather brilliant first full-length longplayer For the Grains of Sand last year on 45B/Fence Records.
Another album is slated to drop this autumn, after they’ve broken their full band duck with a pair of live dates this month featuring members of grungey fellow Fence signees The Red Well.
‘It’s going to be absolutely rocktastic,’ says Johnstone of the gigs. ‘Like Dinosaur Jr meets Pavement. Big and loud.’
Incidentally, how would a Doug Johnstone Northern Alliance review read, were he given the convenient chance to write one himself? He thinks for a minute, before replying, ‘Shambolic, but their heart’s in the right place.’ It seems appropriate.
The List, 01.10.06
Some bands can turn doing nowt into an art form. While their pal and (sorta) label mate King Creosote churns albums out like a Nike sweat shop spews forth Air Jordans, this Edinburgh trio have been decidedly snail-like in their work rate. Good things do come to those who stand about long enough and this kind of heavy-lidded, beatific magic is worth waiting for. A little bit country, a little bit rock ‘n’ roll, and even a bit trippy-Boards-of-Canada-electrics in there too, maybe if Arab Strap had swapped the Buckie, Es and break ups for doobies, wine and beaches they might have sounded like this.
Scotland on Sunday: The Sound of Scotland, June 2004
Paul WhitelawA right bunch of Edinburgh romantics. Northern Alliance merge the dissolute melancholy of Arab Strap with the smudged alt folk of Sparklehorse, and have already released two sadder than Lassie mini-albums, the latest of which, Disaster for Scotland, is out through Fence. Although their own material is superb, their masterstroke is a slo-mo cover of 1978 World Cup squad anthem ‘Ally’s Tartan Army’, which encapsulates decades of Scottish disappointment with understated class. What a result.
The List: Best New Scottish Bands, Autumn 2004
Dave PollockCertainly owners of the most entertaining band website in Scotland (displaying one member's knack for journalism), Northern Alliance live up to the hype. Distilling the textured melancholia of Will Oldham, Low and Sparklehorse with a distinctly Scots flavour - blub over the national football team, anyone? - the trio are a thing of real texture and beauty. Having released on Fence and SL, they only need Chemikal Underground to collect the set of Scotland's best labels.
Is This Music, issue 6, summer 2003
Mark Robertson talks to Northern AllianceFriends in the North
Every action has a reaction, I might be wrong but this is a vague recollection from my days dozing during standard grade physics class. Northern Alliance are a musical reaction to a musical action. Doug Johnstone, one third of Edinburgh Northern Alliance takes up the point with this uncanny alignment of physics and music.
"The normal thing to do in a band is to get together in a room, rehearse like fuck until the guts are hanging out what embryonic songs you have and then play anywhere anyone will let you. That's just fucking stupid."
Mild-mannered Johnstone, alongside Craig Smith and Viv Strachan have been through the gamut of R'N'R emotions as components in too many local indie rock combos to even bother picking out on your fingers and toes and while they've enjoyed mixed success (read: two good bands and plenty of shit ones) in the past, they remain sufficiently in love with music, just not the traditional process with which to create it. Instead of careering down the aforementioned path of music generation, the tortoise-like Northern Alliance have taken a slower and arguably more fruitful route of distilling and shaping their music fully before foisting it on an unsuspecting public.
"Maybe it's because we're all a little older but we don't have the desperation to get out there as soon as we get the ideas out of our heads. We have patience and feel comfortable refining things. All the songs we eventually recorded went through a really long gestation period. The guitary ones were all keys and samples before, and vice versa."
The band's sound belies their ferocious attitudinous streak, melodies are just that, kitten soft and loveable, the songs not tortured tear ups but resonant strolls that discuss geometry, shifting tectonic plates and light pollution intertwined with affairs of the head and, inevitably, the heart. Stealthily, steadily, 'Buildings of the Future' unfurls in slo-mo before rumbling to an abrupt, uneasy climax, while 'Festivity in the arms of the people' is a languid drawl that utilises twin male and female vocals wrapped in swirling Wurlitzer organs. For the feckless cross-referencers out there, there are glimpses (and never more than glimpses, mind) of Sparklehorse, early Grandaddy, the harmonics of Belle and Sebastian, the pacing and unfussy arrangements of the Palace Brothers' first album, all things that should make a heart leap with joy. The musical equivalent of an arched eyebrow, a raised pint and a pair of open arms, Northern Alliance won't change your life, but will make it seem way better than the shallow, directionless dirge you always wished it wasn't for half an hour.
All of this is gathered together in a tastefully presented seven-track mini-album 'Hope in Little Things', a shining first product of this cottage industry. Gigs shall ultimately follow, Johnstone admits, but might require the recruiting of several more players to do them justice. We live in quiet hope. Proof again that science doesn't have all the answers.
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