Finally, after a very long time, the debut National Park album, ‘outside’ is out there. We played in Mono on 22nd August, with support from The Gabys and sterling DJ sets from Stephen and Sushil. Thank you to everyone that showed up for the gig and everyone that bought an album – think most of them are gone now.
There’s a lot of work gone into every track: not just recording and mixing but the time to restore and master. Most of the tracks were recorded on cassette and the tape had stretched on quite a few. We spent a lot of time making the album look good too – do you usually get a colour eight page booklet too? Small things like designing and making two different sets of labels took more time and energy than you’d think. So it’s brilliant that folk seem to be enjoying it.
Thank you to everyone that helped. Thank you to those heroes that show up at gigs, buy the record, take photos and then post about it. It’s not been 29 years in the making but it took a long time to get everything in place. Some photos from the launch night:
We have an album coming out, ‘outside’, released by Errol’s Hot Wax on August 21st (this year! 2026). It comes with an eight page 12 x 12 booklet and there’s a monorail music Glasgow School edition with National Park plectrums and a different centre label.
There’s a gig for it in mono on 22nd August with The Gabys and DJs Stephen Pastel and Future Pilot AKA. Pre-order the limited vinyl and get gig tickets.
From monorail:
“We’re very excited to welcome National Park to our coveted Glasgow School Series with their debut album, outside. National Park is a gently heroic collective centred around John Hogarty, a legendary presence on the Glasgow music scene since the 1990s, and always regarded as one of the best guitar slingers in town.
outside is their belated debut album – epic in places, intimate, gentle, wild. It’s geographic with a small ‘g’ – all about details – that exact point on Great Western Road where everything opens up VU style – ride into the sun, have a glorious moment. Like a previous Glasgow School, Tacoma Radar’s No One Waved Goodbye, it shines a light on a beautiful corner of one of the best community-based music scenes in the world.”
Playing live in the Glad Cafe for the Launch of ‘Collapsing the Wave Function’ by wor_kspace. Fresh from a short tour with Radhika and Gerard Love, wor_space launch their second album for the legendary Glass Modern Label. National Park will be playing a full set and Gerard Love will be DJing between the bands.
wor_kspace is Finlay Macdonald, currently also playing guitar for National Park, so he will be pulling a double-shift.
The Solo Demos EP is available now on Cassette and download/streaming from Bandcamp and generally on most places where folk play music nowadays. The first run of cassettes has sold out – there’s about twenty left of the second run. It’s the first release on our own label, Greatest Hiss.
I started making these recordings to get ready for a solo show (that didn’t happen in the end) and then to give the band something to learn songs from when we started playing again. Then decided it was more fun doing things with a band. Then that I still liked these solo demos. There’s another fifteen or so, but these tracks all felt like they belonged together.
The songs are all set in Autumn, sliding into Winter, with a theme of letting go running through them. I recently had a conversation with Douglas MacIntyre where he was talking about the notion, when we were younger, of thinking there was going to be the perfect rendition of a track. So one of the things I’m letting go of here is that! Most of this is made up of first takes and the versions are pretty different from how the band would play them.
Website of National Park, band, from Glasgow. We’ve finally got round to updating the website. Should now have up-to-date News, Releases with link to buy or stream, Gigs and links to National Park elsewhere. It’ll probably be a few weeks before everything is updated.
