Emma Dunlop – Somebody Call The Alliance: Bellshill and Being Nice to Yourself

The outside world might label it Glasgow but, for those in the know, Bellshill feels like the centre of Scottish music at times. Teenage Fanclub, The Soup Dragons, Sheena Easton, Superstar and more. Not to put pressure on Emma Dunlop, but you can’t argue with geography. She’ll be hoping her second album, Somebody Call The Alliance, sees people add her to the list of music-makers from this part of Lanarkshire. 

SNACK caught up with Emma to talk about council tax, phones, track lists and thinking about your younger self.

When I pay council tax, it’s mainly about getting my bins picked up. You got an album. How did the North Lanarkshire Council sponsorship come about?

I’m born and bred in Bellshill, still live here. I’ve known Craig Smart [Creative Resources & Assets Manager, North Lanarkshire Council] for a long, long time. He just phoned me one day to say, ‘We want to essentially sponsor a North Lanarkshire artist to do an album in Beetroot Studio. We would love to have you as our first North Lanarkshire artist to come and record an album in this space. Are you interested?’ And of course I was like, ‘I’m absolutely interested.’

I went to meet Craig and Stuart MacLeod, who is manager of the studio and an engineer there. I went into the studio a few months later and I think Stuart was expecting voice notes with just me humming tunes. I was like, ‘Oh no, there’s full production happening. We’re already sort of cooking with gas.’

You write your songs on your phone. How does the phone version of a song compare to the finished track? Take the title track.

Typically what I’ll do is I’ll record just a guide track on my phone and then just start to build the layers on top of it. That song actually stayed, I think, unchanged. The strings are sampled from actual violins and actual stringed instruments as opposed to the more artificial ones that I’ve got.

What does Stuart pull out of you to add to the record?

A lot of confidence. Stuart and I co-produced this together and at no point did he sort of go, ‘Well, I’m producing this.’ He said, ‘You know what you want out of this more than I do. I will give you my input if you want it, and you take it or you don’t take it, but this is your thing.’ I’m sure lots of people don’t get that experience. And as a female artist, to be listened to and to be respected by a male producer…

I’ve now started saying, ‘Oh, I produce my work’ or ‘I’m a producer’, because I was kind of like, ‘Is this production that I’m doing?’ And I’m like, ‘it is production.’

Can you tell me a bit more about the track listing and how you got there?

‘Say Something’, which is the big synthy banger, I wanted that to be somewhere in the middle because it also worked out that when you flip the vinyl, that’s the first track on side two, which signifies a bit of a shift in mood.

The opener, ‘Somebody Call The Alliance’, is a new song. ‘I Can Still Hear You’ is an old song, so I wanted to bring that in right away to say we’re flipping between these two time points.

Some of the songs on the record date back 20 years. What’s the oldest song on the album?

‘I Can Still Hear You’ is the oldest track. I wrote that when I was 16.

You say you’ve found more empathy for the girl who wrote those songs. So what do you understand about young Emma now?

I understand now that I did absolutely know myself back then. When you have lots of doubts as you’re growing up about who you are and what you’re about, I always did feel as if I had a real strong sense of who I was.

The core of who I am as a person but also as an artist was there at the start, and I can see it.

It would’ve been nice to just be a bit nicer to myself back then. But hindsight’s a wonderful thing.

Somebody Call The Alliance is released 30th October

Emma Dunlop plays Big Blue, Glasgow on 2nd November

Main photo credit: YesZebra