Slime City's Michael M on doing it wrong in We Are The Physics

It wasn’t just The Skinny that first stepped on stage 20 years ago – I did too. I say ‘step’ because it was literally that. A dark sticky plinth at the back of the Barfly on Clyde Street in Glasgow, obstructed by a couple of chipped red poles. I was barely in my 20s, playing for 20 screeching minutes to 20 uninterested friends. As I writhed about that 'stage', I had no clue I’d be doing exactly the same for increasing and decreasing numbers of people over the next ten years; 20 if you include all the years nobody turned up.

From 2005-2015 I was the singer and bassist for Glasgow’s premiere mutant science punk-rock band, We Are The Physics. Never heard of us? Don’t worry. We’ve routinely forgotten to be forgotten. We don’t even make those indie landfill lists of the 00s. Like hundreds of bands, our existence has become lodged in the murky toilet of time but, for a brief 14 minutes of fame, we were everywhere, un-flushed.

We were on the cover of NME, the other music and culture magazine, hailed as 'the most perfect new band ever'. We toured the UK and Europe with a Hollywood-adjacent rockstar and had a top 30 single, charting above Adele. We were playing sold out tours in Japan where fans cosplayed as us. And then suddenly we weren’t. Or that’s how it seemed – sudden. Really, it was a slow, grim erosion eked out for years. But it was without bitterness. We trundled through it all with clueless glee. Fame and longevity were never the drivers, but it took me a long time to realise we hadn’t failed.

Some people would rather write a 300-page memoir than go to therapy, and I am some people. Last year, I released You’re Doing It Wrong, a story about my life in a struggling Glaswegian band in the mid-00s. A time just before the smartphone devolution and the persistent documentation of social media. Before YouTube, even! It was just MySpace, and a whole lot of sitting in vans. Not so much sex, drugs and rock’n’roll but budget hotels, imposter syndrome and malnutrition. Imagine Slash’s autobiography if he was a wee specky guy from Dennistoun who never took drugs.

As well as fame, all that stuff just sort of eluded us. Our most enduring ‘hit’ was going on BBC Radio Scotland and covering Katy Perry’s Firework, accidentally changing all the words so it was only about a plastic bag. The station rinsed us for weeks. Our guitarist’s aunt heard it piped into a doctor’s waiting room. Further torture for the unwell. Frankie Boyle tangentially compared my career to America’s clown scene: good, but without an audience. That sort of sums it up.

We Are The Physics in 2006. Image: John Sackey. 

But the more I revisited my memories, the less it felt like failure, just a blip. Something that wasn’t meant to be what it accidentally became. Like most musicians, I made music that excited me with my pals because I felt I had to. Most of us aren’t in it for money, or to ‘graduate’ to the Hydro. We’re doing it because there’s an inexplicable need to create and communicate in that medium. It’s a culture that still flourishes in corners of every city, in repurposed DIY spaces, in bedrooms tapped out on GarageBand. Audience or no, we’ll do it.

But, 20 years on, the industry meant to support it feels unrecognisable, both for better and worse. There’s nothing on that stretch of Clyde Street now. With even the stalwart indie venues closing, less money in the pot and fewer people supporting smaller bands, how do we find and spotlight young artists, especially those from working class and marginalised backgrounds with no inherent capital to propel the long stretches around Britain’s grey motorways?

There’s a lot to love about the internet’s democratisation but we’ve also conjured the notion that artists must develop a gamut of despicable business practices to break through the noise. TikTok industry influencers bleat about posting constant content – 20 new videos a week, strategy decks, KPIs. The power was meant to return to artists, but we’ve accidentally just made our artists business-speaking cunts. The sort of people we got into music to avoid. The horrors of the industry didn’t go away, our artists grotesquely ingested them.

The algorithm has one purpose: to keep you on the platform. It’s not there to surprise you or open your heart to something new, just to keep you sated. And if there’s one thing I learned after 20 years of screaming in dark rooms with barely enough money for chips, it’s that excitement rarely comes from being comfortable. I’m still doing it. My newer band Slime City are, objectively, bigger than my old one in sales and audience size, but you’d never know, because Spotify metrics tell you otherwise. That’s why human input matters, that’s why passionate curation matters, that’s why we need venues, communities and real people talking excitedly about new music. You may not like everything you read in The Skinny, but that’s the point. Except this article – you love this one.

Happy birthday, The Skinny, you’re doing it right!

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You’re Doing It Wrong: My Life As a Failed International Rock Star (In The Best Band You’ve Never Heard) is available now at linktr.ee/michaelmdoingitwrong
Slime City launch their new album National Record of Achievement at The Art School, Glasgow, 29 Nov