WITH its free music courses for young musicians and (often directly resultant) fostering of great Glasgow bands such as Golden Teacher, Whilst, Happy Meals and countless others, the tiny, analogue-focused Green Door Studio in Finnieston has long been a very powerful force for good. Its Youth Stand Up! project, however, is surely its most amazing trick yet. The story of how this extraordinary, cross-cultural link-up between young musicians from three continents originally came to be was told in more than one corner of the music press last autumn, when the project’s album was released on the Autonomous Africa label. The tale bears recapping for those at the back, though, before – with a remix EP of tracks from the album out now and a host of other YSU! activities on the horizon – we find out what’s been happening in the interim.

As the Green Door’s Emily MacLaren explains over cups of tea in the Glasgow flat she shares with collaborator and partner Stuart Evans, Youth Stand Up! began in unusual circumstances – with a visit to a monkey sanctuary in a remote area of Ghana. “We were in the country to visit a drumming school with Laurie and Ollie Pitt from Golden Teacher, and while we were there we visited the monkey sanctuary, which is in a little village in the Volta Basin called Tafi Atome. The sanctuary had a youth music group, and you could make a donation to them and they would perform for you. We made the donation and that evening the young people from the village all came out and were playing drums and singing, and me and Stu just found it totally mesmerising. It was one of the best musical performances I’ve ever seen, and at the time we joked that we should come back to this remote rural village in Ghana and record them.”

The following year the pair made a similar trip to the Lebeha drumming school in Hopkins, Belize, and were similarly blown away by the skills of the kids (in both places many of them were as young as 10 or 11) they encountered. Again the idea of working with them was mooted, but logistics and funding seemed like insurmountable hurdles. The solution arrived in the shape of the Celebrate fund, which was set up for the 2014 Commonwealth Games as a means to provide funding for projects that engaged artists from anywhere in the Commonwealth, of which Belize and Ghana are both part.

Funding duly secured, the pair sketched out a plan for a recording project and began setting up groups of young musicians from Glasgow, ranging in ages from 10 (Turner Prize nominee Cathy Wilkes’ young son Hans drums on one of the Youth Stand Up! LP’s finished tracks) to 22, many of whom had received their own introductions to the world of music production at the Green Door’s previous youth courses. “The way we decided to make the record was to get the young groups we’d assembled in Glasgow to record rhythm tracks with live drums and electronic instruments,” Emily explains. “Then we sent the tracks to the group in Belize and then we went back there to have them add parts of their own to the tracks. Then we did the same with the group in Ghana, and then it all came back to Glasgow to be finished up. The idea was that all the songs would have everyone’s stamp on them rather than having some songs be from Ghana, some from Belize and some from Glasgow. Every song was a collaboration between the musicians from all three places.”

As the groundwork for all this was being done, fundraiser gigs (which continue to happen now – the latest is tomorrow night at Glasgow’s Flying Duck) were raising money to buy equipment for the future workshops in Belize and Ghana, and an array of Glasgow producers came forward and donated bits of kit from their own studios.

With each group having added their ideas to the tracks, the album was finally released, under the collective name of The Green Door Allstars, in October last year. Emily admits they had “absolutely no idea” if it would be a success.

“The first run sold out and then they repressed it, and we got some great mentions – Monorail Music made it number four in the best albums of the year and the Vinyl Factory made it their number 30 album of 2015. Andrew Weatherall was playing tracks from it a lot and mentioning it in interviews, it was all really exciting.” Aside from the collective satisfaction of a job well done, further benefits from the album’s success began spreading back to Ghana and Belize immediately.

“So many wonderful things have come out of it that we didn’t expect,” Emily continues. “One of the best stories concerns one of the singers on the album from Belize, Leandra Ramos, who was 11 at the time and who sings on two of the songs (Come With Me and Lagueda). She’s an incredibly talented singer and songwriter and Come With Me in particular got a lot of radio play, so in the end a substantial amount of money came in from just that song. So we worked with Leandra’s mother and eventually were able to take that money and pay for her secondary school fees for next year, and all her books and uniforms. That’s been really good because she is just coming to an age (13) where free education stops in Belize, and a lot of girls especially drop out because carrying on just costs too much. So it’s wonderful that just this one song she’s written has benefited her in such a tangible way.”

Along with personal stories like this, the project is now well on the way to providing potentially life-changing opportunities to a whole generation of young people in the region around Tafi Atome. “All proceeds from everything we do on this go to the communities in Belize and Ghana,” says MacLaren, “and the two groups have used the money in different ways. The group in Belize already had some recording equipment, so they have spent their money on new drums and lighting for night-time performances, among other things. In Ghana, however, they had no recording facilities, and so the money from the album and from sending a couple of study groups of young musicians from Glasgow to collaborate and learn from the musicians in Ghana has enabled them to start construction on a recording studio in the village.”

Work on the recording studio there is nearly complete, and the next phase of Youth Stand Up! is focused on raising funds to properly equip it. Plans for that next phase include another study group of 36 musicians from Glasgow visiting Ghana in the winter, as well as the remix EP, which comes out tomorrow and features contributions from Optimo, Midland, Auntie Flo and General Ludd. “When that’s done and the equipment bought, Stu and I are planning to go over and volunteer for a few weeks to offer sound engineering training and workshops. Hopefully we’ll end up with a sustainable, community-owned recording studio in the village. There’s so much great music made in the Volta Region, but there aren’t really any recording studios outside of [Ghana’s capital] Accra, and those are usually prohibitively expensive. And because Tafi Atome already has an eco-tourism site with its monkey sanctuary, the recordings made there could be sold through the facilities they already have. It’s been amazing to watch the project grow, and we have to say a huge thanks to Keith (McIvor, of Optimo and co-owner of the Autonomous Africa label along with Midland and Auntie Flo) for agreeing to release whatever came out of the project when we first came up with the idea.”

“Well,” McIvor chuckles when I talk to him later, “I did say to them that if it was a musical disaster I wouldn’t put it out, but knowing them I was almost certain they would deliver something great, which, of course, they did. The project has been a total success on many levels. Close personal and musical ties have been forged between Glasgow and the communities in Belize and Ghana, and the album release and a few fundraising nights have paid for the community studio at Tafi Atome and funded the Lebeha Drum Centre in Belize too. Hopefully more music and more releases will come out of the project in the future.”

“That’s the really wonderful thing,” Emily concludes. “Although the record came out a while ago and the first phase of the project is over, this still really feels like just the start of something rather than the end.”

The Youth Stand Up! Remixes EP is out inow on Autonomous Africa. The Flying Duck’s ninth birthday party tomorrow is doubling as a fundraiser for the Tafi Atome project, see bit.ly/29CwLSJ