Christmas lights wink from window shops at passers-by; people rush and run along the streets, their hands full of bags with the logos of local shops or of exotic designers; toddlers are dragged along, no matter how much they cry, with a stuffed toy in their hands, possibly a reindeer or a bear dressed like Santa; there are queues a bit everywhere, department stores, shops and cafés; getting a bus at rush hour implies fighting for a seat with nasty shoppers. This is Christmas in Glasgow, Scotland, where in this period you have more chances to be killed by an aggressive lady with a human-sized bag emblazoned with Winnie the Pooh trampling over you than by a car. This is Christmas in Glasgow's city centre, but this morning we are a few miles away from it, sheltering in the quiet normality of Shawlands, in Glasgow's Southside.It's mid-morning, light rain is falling and everything seems ordinarily calm. The only things we can hear in the café are the drone of the coffee machine and pop music, coming from speakers set somewhere above our heads. There's not much here to remind us that Christmas is coming, except for the fact that I'm sitting with The Pearlfishers' David Scott, having a chat about the just released mini-album "A Sunflower at Christmas". I have many prejudices on Christmas records, yet "Sunflower." strikes for being very cute and sweet, a breath of fresh air among the oppressive, cheap range of Christmas releases which are presently in the shops. So, how was this Christmas album conceived? "There was no big plan about doing that record," David says, smiling, "what happened actually was that Stefan Kassel at Marina called me one day and said 'I had a dream last night: we were doing a Christmas record. But of course this will never happen since we'd only lose money'. After he phoned, I said to myself, 'He's going to be back on the phone in a couple of days saying that we should do the record' and that's exactly what happened. He called again two or three days later and simply told me 'We need to make this album!' I've always - and this is one of the reasons why I've never done well on major labels although I've had lots of major deals - worked on purely artistic records. The idea to do something for a market is very alien to me, so I found the idea of doing a Christmas record a sort of interesting challenge. I decided that for this release I wanted to try and do something really sweet, something about Christmas that came from the heart. I know that talking about Christmas trees just doesn't seem to be right in this day and age when people are getting bombed in Iraq. Yet, there is a connection with that as well in the album and that connection is the theme of childhood.""A Sunflower at Christmas" is released by Hamburg-based label Marina which also released most of The Pearfishers' records and the Brian Wilson tribute compilation "Caroline Now!" (2000) which featured many Scottish bands covering Wilson's tracks, "Marina's Stefan Kassel and Frank Lähnemann don't just love Glasgow bands," David states, "in fact the only Scottish group they work with is The Pearlfishers. They put out records by other great artists, by American bands such as The Aluminum Group or Ashby, the latter are funnily enough based in Boston, but are originally Scottish. Stefan and Frank were both great fans of Postcard Records and of the sensibility that burst out of post-punk Glasgow, that burst of expression that came out of Glasgow, between 1979 and 1983-84. That sensibility is embodied by the spirit of people like James Kirk, Edwyn Collins and Roddy Frame as well, though Roddy is more mainstream. Aside from that, I think Stefan and Frank's main interests were Burt Bacharach and Brian Wilson, but I think Postcard was their first exposure to contemporary pop music. Stefan and Frank take good care of all the Marina releases, here's a good example about how crazy they are about the packaging: I told them that we should have done a really thick booklet for 'Caroline Now!' and that I would have written notes for it with Douglas T. Stewart. We did and Stefan thought that they needed something special to go with the notes and with the interview also contained in the booklet. So, he and Frank hunted down Brian Wilson photographs which had never been published before. That's what I love about Marina: it's just a small label and there are just two guys behind it, but they always go the extra mile when they have to do something and I think that's great.

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