Retro-graded: The Shop Assistants

Do you know your history? In the first of a series of features on seminal Scottish bands, Gillian Watson remembers The Shop Assistants' all-too-brief spell on the indie-pop shelf...

In a curious twist in post-millennial indie history, one Scottish band who seemed doomed to obscurity are seeing their fuzz-pop formula resurface in the music of New York hipsters. Step forward the Shop Assistants; an Edinburgh-based quartet whose short-lived noise still echoes and whispers through new records like the reverb on guitarist David Keegan's foggy melody lines.

Formed in 1984, the band was lumped in with the NME-coined C86 scene - a new vanguard of acts that redefined indie as jangly guitar pop created by people who prized ideas over tunesmithery, or vice-versa, depending on which they were better at.

Although members of other shambling Scottish bands such as The Pastels were to pass through their ranks, the line-up eventually solidified as the four characters who peer coyly out from the Polaroid snaps on the cover of their only album, Will Anything Happen: Alex Taylor, vox coolly shrouded in mist, Keegan, noisy keening guitar, Sarah Kneale, gurgling bass, Laura MacPhail, Neanderthal drums.

Fading out almost as soon as they faded in, the Shop Assistants split in 1987, reforming two years later only to disintegrate again in 1990. Behind them, they left a slim catalogue that seemed forever shelf-bound until its recent critical resuscitation.

Part of the attraction revivalists find in these old maids of the Scottish indie milieu is the band's easy winning formula: Ronettes drumming plus Ramones strumming equals indie-pop success. Sounds simple, doesn't it?

Not quite.

While other bands of the era swaddled clumsy musicianship and traditional songwriting in layers of cosy fuzz (cough – Vaselines - cough - Jesus and Mary Chain), the Shop Assistants' airy noise was stitched into the fabric of their sound. Much like their adopted home Edinburgh without the constant squall of sea wind, Shopmusic without feedback is unthinkable.

And that's why, although their gauzier moments are gorgeous, it's their 'gazier tunes that are the most powerful. While Taylor mumbles and coos her way through much of the catalogue with expressionless cool, Keegan's knack for dumb, jangly guitar lines, as elemental and enduring as the Scottish landscape itself, provides the real emotional punch.

On 'Caledonian Road', Taylor's unemployed narrator sounds bored, but her escape is found in the craggy mountains of guitar around her, while early classic 'Safety Net' captures how nervous and exciting it feels to be a young adult in the city at night.

So while they've long since passed into legend, there have been no pretenders to the Shop Assistants' throne. Realising it's impossible to replicate music so universal and so simultaneously rooted in its setting, Scottish bands have left well enough alone.

But sometimes an unexpected flicker of that spirit will appear; be it in the occasional chord progression or when a frontwoman gets a particularly deadened look in her eye. And it's then, more than ever, when you need to discover the real thing for yourself.

Where to start: 'Safety Net', 'All That Ever Mattered'

Will like if you like: Vivian Girls, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, No Age

Chances of a reunion: High, if anyone can drag David Keegan away from his bike shop in Aviemore.