Sign of the times…

Lewis band SIGN RED have been grabbing the headlines for their enduring popularity with the listeners of Radio 1’s Vic and Gill show, and are heading into a third week at the top of that show’s Battle of the Demo Bands. PETER URPETH catches up with them in Stornoway and finds a band determined to enjoy and build on their recent success from their home shores.

DEDICATED FOLLOWERS of Radio 1’s Vic and Gill Show (Thursday PM) have voted with their feet in recent weeks, and for two shows in a row have kept Sign Red in pole position in the influential weekly Battle of the Demo Bands. The band’s recent airwave adulation comes on the back of a hectic first year of life that has taken in the cutting and selling of a CD, a full-programme of local gigs, and two hectic smash and grab raids on the stages of the land’s alt-music venues.
 

Sign Red © Peter Urpeth

For those listening to their music while labouring under the influence of diverse negative stereotypes, the band’s success comes as no surprise until it becomes known that Sign Red hail from the Isle of Lewis. It is now two-thirds of a decade since Astrid blazed across the musical sky from their island base, and if a successor to that band has been sometime coming, then in the fledging Sign Red, one may now be emerging.
 

It cannot be doubted that coming from the outer islands does pose very significant added difficulties to a band trying to make it in the wider musical world and the commitment of this band and its shrewd and dedicated manager, Jori Kim, to remain living and working on the islands is a credit to the sincerity with which they cite the influence on their music of their island upbringing.
 

As all who have witnessed their gigs recently will confirm, the band’s energetic, eclectic, and highly committed music draws on elements from almost the entire pantheon of guitar music in the last twenty years, with hardcore, metal, DIY punk, thrash, pop, glam crackle and good ol’ rock and roll mixing it with their own evident originality.
 

While it is perhaps unfair to single out any of the members of this band, the frontline nexus of vocalist and songwriter Colin MacLeod and lead guitarist Derek Healey is ripe with awesome potential.
 

In Colin Macleod the band have a prime wedge of physical frontmanship at their disposal, a performer who can hit the audience’s on-button even in a golf club lounge bar gig on a wet Wednesday night in Stornoway. Respect most certainly due on that account, as it is for the emotional impact of his vocals that fly with ease between mic-snogging introspection and punk-screech anger.
 

In Derek Healey they have a player who can cut and paste his way through thrash-fisted rhythms and then switch to fleet-fingered metal soloing. He probably hasn’t himself quite worked-out where his heart lies in all of this but the scope he brings to the project is immense and ensures that the band’s music doesn’t settle too easily into a familiar grove.
 

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