Post Coal Prom Queen describe themselves as ‘just a couple of science geeks who also make big dramatic music’. The duo may have bonded over their shared love of science fiction but they both have proper STEM skills. By day, Edinburgh-based Gordon Johnstone organises international science conferences, while Lily Higham, the Glasgow contingent, builds websites for the BBC World Service ‘in 41 languages’.

However, their first meeting, when they both worked for the Young Scot charity, was decidedly lo-fi. ‘One day I was trying to find a quiet spot to glue my shoes back together because I had no money,’ says Johnstone, ‘and I found Lily doing exactly the same thing in this little nook of the office.’ From such modest yet weirdly coincidental seeds, their first band L-Space was born.

^{Hidden Door performance / Picture: Chris Scott}

‘Between us, we have no musical theory and we didn’t know what end of a guitar to plug in,’ says Higham. And yet in 2020 they were still able to produce Music For Megastructures, an instrumental concept album about a cyberpunk city. ‘We’re both passionate about technology, science, the future,’ says Johnstone. ‘It’s always been a fascination and it just naturally led to the music we make. We were never gonna write introspective songs about love and relationships when we could be writing songs about giant isopods or any of the other myriad nonsense things we’ve written about over the years.’

Entertaining conceptualisation has followed them into their latest post-lockdown incarnation as Post Coal Prom Queen, the evocative name taken from a photo essay on (of course) post-industrial Transylvania. In 2021, they released Music For Hypercapitalists, collaborating with local hip-hop artists such as Empress and Conscious Route.

^{Picture: John Farrell}

With hip-hop licked in imaginative style, it was time to move on to another musical genre they had no obvious connection to. Music For First Contact is a space opera inspired by the writings of Chinese sci-fi author Liu Cixin which they first performed as an interactive referendum on alien contact at last year’s Hidden Door in Edinburgh’s Old Royal High School. ‘We were already thinking about first contact when we saw the Central Chamber where we would be performing,’ says Higham. ‘It’s a debating chamber that looks like the control room of a spaceship. Music For First Contact is set on a space station 1000 years in the future, with Scottish pioneers going off into space, and the vote was based on Scottish referendum references.’

Their resulting album may not have the playful theatre of that Hidden Door show but it does have the soaring vocals of soprano Stephanie Lamprea among other musical collaborators: May The 4th be with them at next month’s album-launch show at Glasgow’s Old Hairdresser’s. Meanwhile, Higham and Johnstone are already planning their next Music For . . . odyssey. ‘It’s going to be a hymnal exploration of nuclear semiotics with a Lovecraftian feel,’ says Johnstone. ‘Until somebody stops us, we’re going to keep doing these slightly ridiculous, off-kilter things.’ 

Post Coal Prom Queen: Music For First Contact is released through bandcamp.com on Friday 28 April; the album is launched at The Old Hairdresser’s, Glasgow, Thursday 4 May.