Makes me nostalgic for an era when music was more than a click away: Teenage Superstars reviewed

In Teenage Superstars, a long and slightly exhausting documentary about the Scottish indie scene of the 1980s and ’90s, there was a moment when a man revelling in the name of Stephen Pastel — his real name is Stephen McRobbie, and he must be pushing 60 now — was described as ‘the mayor of the Scottish underground’.

Such a position — even one, as this, necessarily unelected — would be all but impossible to occupy today. With the internet and democratisation of music — its creation, its distribution, its consumption — has come the fallowing of what were once its most fertile fields: the local scenes created and inhabited by small numbers of interconnected people and encouraged by confident tastemakers — such as Pastel.

For the bands featured in Teenage Superstars, it wasn’t about being heard. Though there were ambitious people in Glasgow and its suburbs, and in Edinburgh, their music was more about a shared endeavour, a bond between friends.