She’s Got A Brassiere!

Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl is the greatest film to come out of Scotland no, the UK  no, the world bar none. Any one random, washed-out coloured still from the film will instantly stir more emotion, more melancholy, more longing for simpler times than any other memorial device in existence. It will also have the uncanny knack of pulling the entire script verbatim from some well-accessed cerebral filing cabinet from under my greying (but definitely not thinning) hair, the film’s never-ending treasure trove of rich one liners and cultural reference points shared and appreciated by whoever I’m with at the time. 

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a new town (in my case, Irvine) which was the architectural mirror image of Cumbernauld’s jutting white symmetry and undulating green spaces. Maybe it’s because I too played terrible football on an unforgiving orange blaize pitch with a merciless Mitre 5 that stung like six of Fowler’s belt if it caught you on the back of the thigh on a February morning.

Maybe it’s because every modern school in the New Town area looked exactly like Gregory’s (the real-life Abronhill High School in Cumbernauld) and everyone I knew at my school looked like an exact clone of Gregory or any of his hapless pals; flares, skinny school blazers that were either too short or too long in the arm, shapeless grey jumpers, shirt collars as long as the nose on Concorde, gap-toothed, awkward boys with haircuts that fell somewhere between Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks abomination and your mum’s rapid-fire Sunday night handiwork, attempted with one eye on That’s Life and the other on the smouldering inch and a half of ash teetering from the Benson & Hedges wedged in her mouth.

If you’re of a certain age, I daresay Gregory’s Girl will have had the same effect on you.

From first minute to last I could identify with just about everything in it. The mazy pathways that led around exotic corners of the bright, white housing estates. The chip shop wrapping their 15p wares in brown paper and newspaper. The head teacher wafting stealthily through the corridors, his bat-winged cloak following him like dark trouble itself. The P.E. teacher’s caterpillar moustache and whistle. That row of hopefuls he has lined up at the trial where Dorothy arrives? We’ve all stood in that row, willing someone to pick us not last. “You all know what I’m looking for,” he says with a serious face, “A goalscorer. And that requires two basic skills: ball control, shooting accuracy and the ability to read the game.” 

The entirety of Gregorys’ Girl was like my life on film. Everything, that is, except the true subject matter at its core. Aged 11 when Gregory’s Girl first made it to the big screen – the supporting feature, believe it or not, to the far-less interesting but far more decorated Chariots Of Fire –  I was a good four or five years younger than the characters in the film and nowhere near as interested in the fairer sex as Gregory and his hormonally-rampant friends. It wouldn’t be long, but for now, girls were mainly just insignificant. Strange and alien. Not really annoying, just gang-like and giggling. Certainly not to be talked to. Not to be looked at, even. We had Subbuteo and bikes and Madness and Adam and The Ants. That was more than enough. 

The music of Gregory’s Girl collected – Colin Tully

Arguably, the most iconic thing about Gregory’s Girl is its soundtrack. Composed by Scotsman Colin Tully, who was given a VHS of the soundtrack-free film by Forsyth and asked to come up with something suitable, its meandering jazz-funk and light soprano saxophone stylings are so out of step for the times it was made, yet heard nowadays they provide an instant passport back to 1981 far more than Grey Day or Stand And Deliver might.

All it takes is a crack of compressed snare, or a tinkle of Fender Rhodes, or the slap of bubbling bass, or one of Tully’s own freewheeling sax solos and I’m right back on that blaize pitch, or in that dinner hall, or in that boring class – Gregory and his pals had the welcome distraction of early leaver Steve cleaning the classroom windows one day, I had an excitable, long-tongued dog running wildly around the playground during a particularly tedious slot of double French with which to while away the long minutes.

Bella, and indeed bella. Or should that be joli, joli, Mme McGlone? 

• * The music embedded above comes from a digitised tape made available by its composer to a friend and subsequently shared when Tully passed away from cancer. For a soundtrack that has never been commercially available, 45 years on, this might be as good as it gets. Enjoy listening to it!