Each month, I’m posting something about a different song from Virtual Virgins. For April I’m going to introduce Bouley Bashers, the penultimate song on the album. This song’s already been getting a bit of radio play (especially from Jim Gellatly on Amazing Radio) so it seems like a good one to write about.
Bouley Bashers was one of a clutch of songs written in January 2023 which all made use of stringing my acoustic guitar in Nashville tuning. If you play guitar and haven’t heard of this way of stringing your guitar, there’s loads of info online.
The lyrics are a homage to the Bouley Bashers of Aberdeen, who are/were famous for parading their souped-up cars up and down the city’s Beach Boulevard. When I was growing up in Aberdeen in the 1990s, everyone knew of the Bouley Bashers, who were largely demonized as anti-social scourge of Aberdeen’s beach front.
The song pieces together a lot of different memories into one story. So even if it’s not based on a true event, it feels like it could be. It’s really about the kind of banter that goes on in every city at night. I suppose it’s also about me being an outsider looking in, and wondering what I might be missing out on. Probably not much, but that’s not how it felt, and writing the song was a bit of a nostalgia trip on a number of levels.
The accompanying painting is by my talented cousin Megan MacKay. If I was releasing this as a single this, or one of her other paintings, would have made a great cover!
