Since the music video format became popular with the advent of MTV in the early 1980s, Glasgow has frequently provided a backdrop to musicians either performing or honing their acting ambitions with varying degrees of success. Here are ten Glasgow-centric music videos from across the subsequent decades, in no particular order:
1. Simple Minds / Waterfront [1984]
Simple Minds returned to their home city and used the industrial backdrop of the River Clyde in the 1980s and a live performance in the recently reopened Barrowland to film the video for what was to be their biggest hit single to that point.
2. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy / ‘I See a Darkness’ [2012]
It is not just musicians from the city who have used it for filming videos. Shot around Aston Lane, Byres Road and the Necropolis this was the video accompaniment to one of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s occasional reworkings of his back catalogue for the ‘Now Here’s My Plan’ EP in 2012.
3. Sophie Ellis-Bextor x @Wuh Oh/ ‘Hypnotised’ [2022]
Barrowland is again the location for this all-singing, all-dancing hit from last year.
4. Franz Ferdinand / ‘L.Wells’ [2006]
This great 2006 single by Franz Ferdinand probably takes in more city locations than any of the others here, among them Govan, Queens Park, Victoria Road and Great Western Road.
5. The Delgados / ‘No Danger’ [2000]
From their 2000 album, ‘The Great Eastern’ (named after a hotel in the east end of the city), the grainy black and whiteness of the video harks back to an even earlier part of the city’s past. Contains kids’ choirs and dancing nuns.
6. Amy Macdonald / ‘Dream On’ [2017]
A minature Amy Macdonald on location around the city centre (including busking on Buchanan Street] in this single from the album, ‘Under Stars’.
7. The Pastels / ‘Check My Heart’ [2013]
Something of a west-end tenement trail, this clip accompanied the single from the Pastels’ last album, ‘Slow Summits’.
8. The High Fidelity / ‘Scream If You Want to Go Faster’ [2000]
For this video, the band hired a fairground ride, put on some waste ground in the East End of the city and offered free rides all day to local children, capturing them on camera.
9. The Snuts / ‘Glasgow’ (2022)
Well, the video for this one was hardly going to be shot anywhere else . . .
10. Belle and Sebastian / ‘I’m a Cuckoo’ (2004)
All points of the city feature here as B&S singer, Stuart Murdoch, undertakes a rigorous training programme under the tutelage of Olympic gold medalist, Allan Wells.