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If by Magic: The Words and Lore of the Girobabies
Paperback
Publisher Price: $13.95
ISBN13: 9781068233470
Publisher: Salamander Street Ltd.
Published: Dec 2 2025
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.29
Height: 0.28 Width: 5.06 Depth: 7.81
Language: English
If By Magic collects the lyrics and 'baffling ned punk' lore of cult Glasgow band The Girobabies from 2008-2025.
Frontman Mark McGhee takes us on a journey from the banks crashing right up to the spiralling revelations of our times. Here lies the lyrical lovechild of an 8am job centre queue and a Gallowgate jukebox in the 80s. The reader relives the gigs, the friendships and the mystical moments that made things happen over an 18-year evolution from Ayrshire to international notoriety.
A beautiful, chaotic and cathartic collage, The Girobabies are a constant reminder that revolution happens in a gaff at 5am, fuelled by Bucky, good intentions and a pair of banging speakers. Moving through four eras--Social Not Working, Bus Stop Apocalypse, Who Took Utopia? and Dreams Are Mental--these lyrics make you feel everything you've been trying to ignore since Thatcher: McGhee's words detonate truth in working-class Scots.
Part songbook, part memoir, this book is an ode to the strange alchemy that turns life into lyrics.
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