Glasgow – Blood and Porridge

September 17, 2024September 17, 2024

Cultural Alasdair-isation

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

Finally, I’ve managed to catch up with the movie Poor Things (2023). This is Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s adaptation of the novel of the same name, which was written, designed and illustrated by the Scottish polymath Alasdair Gray and published in 1992. Early this year, it got a brief release in Singapore, courtesy of the city-state’s arthouse cinema The Projector. But when I tried to buy tickets for it on a day I wasn’t working, I found it was already sold out. So, I had to wait until it turned up on a streaming service I had access to.

Anyway, nine months later, here are my thoughts on the film and how it compares to Alasdair Gray’s novel. A warning before I proceed – there will be spoilers about both, including about their endings.

I’m a huge fan of Gray, who passed away in 2019, and I consider Poor Things one of the key Scottish novels of the 1990s. It’s a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) set in Victorian Glasgow. The bulk of the book has a narrator, Archibald McCandless, relating how his scientist colleague Godwin Baxter creates a young woman, Bella, out of dead flesh just as Frankenstein did with his creature. What Baxter does is reanimate the body of a drowned woman and replace her brain with that of the baby she’d been pregnant with when she died. Thus, Bella, despite appearing to be an adult, has a lot of learning to do. McCandless falls in love with her despite her initial infantilism (and later childishness and adolescent-ness) and there ensues a highly entertaining mishmash of sci-fi story, horror story, adventure, romance and comedy

I’m less of a fan of Lanthimos, having mixed feelings about his previous films. I thought The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and The Favourite (2018) were all right, but I found his earlier The Lobster (2015) witless and annoying. So, I wasn’t overjoyed to hear that a favourite book of mine was being filmed by someone I was, at best, conflicted about.

The good news is that, for the most part, Lanthimos’s cinematic version is very entertaining too. For me, it’s his most engaging work so far. However, because it’s stuffed to its bulwarks with scenes of sexual shenanigans, those of a prudish disposition would be advised to stay away from it.

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

Firstly, it has many good performances. Willem Dafoe does a decent job of playing Godwin Baxter – ‘God’ as Bella refers to him with unconscious irony – although he wasn’t the actor I imagined when I read the book 30 years ago. I’d envisioned the late Robbie Coltrane as Baxter, whom Gray depicted as hulking and huge-headed, though with a high-pitched voice and small, dainty – practically Trump-like – hands. Visually, Lanthimos and scriptwriter Tony McNamara rework the character. They give him an unsettling habit of burping out bubbles and make his face malformed and stitched-together, so that he resembles a cross between Frankenstein’s creature and the 1930s-40s character actor Rondo Hatton, who in real life suffered from the disfiguring disease acromegaly. But, helped by Dafoe’s understated, softy-spoken portrayal, Baxter retains the endearing blend of kindness and stubbornness he had in the novel.

Ramy Youssef is likeable as Max McCandles – the film’s renamed Archibald McCandless – though, as we’ll see, the excisions and simplifications the film imposes on the book make him a less complex character than the one Gray imagined. Meanwhile, the most memorable male performance comes from Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, the lawyer who encounters Bella while doing legal business with Baxter and McCandles, falls in lust and elopes with her. Or more accurately, since at this point Bella’s mind hasn’t developed much beyond that of a child, abducts her. While Wedderburn takes her on a debauched ‘grand tour’ that extends from Portugal to Egypt and then to France – with the rapidly-evolving Bella gradually turning the tables on him – Ruffalo gloriously channels every cad, rotter and bounder who’s existed in British culture, from Harry Flashman to Terry-Thomas.

Even Ruffalo’s performance, though, is something of a sideshow compared to the one delivered by Emma Stone as Bella. Mentally growing from a floor-pissing infant to a gawky child, from a rebellious (if naïve) teenager to a verbose and sophisticated adult, all the while wreaking havoc with the social, patriarchal and sexual mores of the society around her because she doesn’t have a filter and is fearless in challenging what doesn’t seem fair or sensible to her, Stone never puts a foot wrong with her portrayal. She fully deserved her Best Actress win for this at the 96^th Academy Awards, though I was a little surprised she did win – films as provocative and hard to categorise as Poor Things don’t normally float the boat of the conservative-minded, play-it-safe Academy.

Poor Things also netted an Oscar for its production design by James Price and Shona Heath and set decoration by Zsuzsa Mihalek, which are the film’s other great strength. Price, Heath and Mihalek place Bella and her associates in a world that draws on our popular images and stereotypes of the Victorian era, puts them through a mincing machine and reassembles them as somewhere both familiar and trippily different, one where everything is that much bigger, stranger and more baroque. One where the traditional Hansom cabs mingle on the streets with chugging, steam-powered ones that have ornamental horses’ heads on their fronts, where Lisbon’s tram system has been replaced by an airborne network of cables and capsules, where the Mediterranean is ploughed by absurdly top-heavy and castle-like steamships churning out yellow smoke under psychedelically tumultuous skies. I don’t think I’ve seen a live-action film that comes closer to capturing the vibe of the sci-fi subgenre of steampunk.

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

I think the design team went too far with one detail, though. Populating Baxter’s house and grounds are bizarre hybrid animals – a half-dog, half-goose creature, for instance, and a half-pig, half-chicken one – which are presumably the results of past experiments. Doomed to wander around as house-decorations, with their anatomies horribly messed up, those hybrids can’t have much of an existence. They suggest an uncharacteristic cruelty in Baxter’s nature. Yet as we see from his fatherly concern for Bella, he isn’t Dr Moreau.

A bigger flaw in a generally excellent film is that, at 142 minutes, Poor Things is too long. And its final stretch is a bit dissatisfying because it has a tagged-on feeling, involving a new character, Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), who is Bella’s husband. At least, he’s the husband of the woman whose corpse Godwin salvaged, revived and turned into Bella. He takes her back to his house, proves to be a brute and imprisons her until, once again, she turns the tables on this latest antagonist. Blessington appears near the end of the book too but Gray takes less time to deal with him – a few pages, if I remember correctly.

Unfortunately, as a last-minute villain, Abbott’s Blessington can’t quite match Ruffalo’s splendidly scenery-chewing Wedderburn who preceded him. Also, the film ends with a weak punchline that, again, implies some out-of-character cruelty on Baxter’s part. (Actually, it made me think of the 1944 Universal Studios potboiler House of Frankenstein, wherein Boris Karloff’s villainous Dr Gustav Niemann tried to transplant a man’s brain into the body of a dog).

Its length and final act aside, Lanthimos’s Poor Things gets a definite thumbs-up from me… as a self-contained film. As an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel, I’m less enamoured with it. One issue is that it makes no attempt to replicate what happens at the book’s end. This is when Gray turns everything on its head because he lets Bella take over as storyteller. She denounces Archie McCandless’s version of events and makes him out to be devious and delusional. She claims to be not a Frankenstein-type creation but an ordinary 19th-century woman – though one ahead of her time because she passionately believes in and campaigns for gender equality and social justice. What we’ve read to this point is an insecure man’s gothic fabrication. Thus, the book’s last part serves as a rebuke of male attitudes towards women that combine possessiveness with mad romanticism.

© Bloomsbury Press

This is both more disorientating and more satisfying than in the film. There, yes, Bella becomes an emancipated woman, fiercely intelligent and independent. But she remains a male fantasy creation, something that was made on a man’s laboratory table, reared and tutored in the ways of the world by men and used as a sexual plaything by dastardly men like Wedderburn – Bella, with her brain still trying to make sense of her experiences and her vocabulary still limited, describes those carnal encounters as ‘furious jumping’. However, Gray pulls the rug from under us, making us question men’s treatment of women and their whole interpretation of women, in a way the film doesn’t.

The other thing the book has but the film doesn’t have is Scotland. Gray’s Glasgow setting has disappeared, supplanted by a sprawling, steampunk-styled, Victorian London one. And what was generally a very Scottish book has been turned into a film where the only hints that Scotland exists are Dafoe’s low-key Scottish accent and a few Scottish-sounding character names. This de-Scottification of the story strips from it a layer of symbolism that was obviously important to Gray, an enthusiastic supporter of Scottish independence.

You can read Poor Things-the-book as an analogy for the relationship between Scotland and England. When Archie – falsely – portrays Bella as a creature of gothic fantasy, this parallels how the common image of Scotland was fashioned by 19^th-century English monarchs like King George IV and Queen Victoria (with, admittedly, help from locals like Sir Walter Scott) into a fanciful, ethereal never-never-land of castles, mountains, lochs, heather, tartan, kilts, bagpipes and so on. When Bella finds her voice, refutes Archie’s fantasizing and finds her true identity as a campaigner for feminist and socialist causes, it can be seen as Gray’s wish for Scotland to cut loose from fusty old history-obsessed England / Britain and become a new, egalitarian and forward-looking nation. Mind you, the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s independence referendum, which ended in failure for Gray’s side in 2014, is just a day or two away – so such a thing probably won’t happen for a while yet.

© Estate of Alasdair Gray / From Scottish Poetry Library

I don’t think Gray – a man so idealistic that in 2019, rather than have a funeral, he left his body to science – would have been too annoyed had he lived to see the cinematic Poor Things. I don’t think he’d have indulged in literal ‘furious jumping’. Rather, he’d have understood why Lanthimos, a Greek, probably didn’t feel comfortable with the Scottish aspects of the story and elected to leave them out. (It also wouldn’t have surprised me if Gray had donated his royalties from the film to his nearest foodbank.)

I suspect, though, he’d have been depressed that no Scottish filmmaker had tried to make a celluloid version of Poor Things that was closer to his original, Glasgow-set vision. Or that there seems to be zero funding and infrastructure in Scotland’s modern-day arts world to support a local filmmaker wanting to adapt the book to the screen.

And I don’t agree with certain Scottish commentators – invariably of a ‘Unionist’ hue – who’ve argued that it doesn’t matter that Scotland has been omitted from the movie. Journalist Kenny Farquharson, for instance, has claimed that “Poor Things is a triumph for Scotland,” which makes no sense at all. How can it be a triumph for Scotland if Scotland isn’t in it? It’s like saying The Godfather (1972) is a triumph for Indonesia. Or Blade Runner (1982) is a triumph for Birmingham.

Incidentally, there is one magical moment where Poor Things-the-film achieves an alchemy with Poor Things-the-book. That’s the scene at the end where Bella and Archie snuggle up beside the dying Godwin Baxter – a visual reference to the image Gray created for the novel’s cover.

© Bloomsbury Press

December 9, 2023December 9, 2023

The gallus John Byrne

From National Galleries Scotland / © Estate of John Byrne

According to my well-worn copy of the Collins Pocket Scots Dictionary, the word ‘gallus’ means ‘self-confident, daring and often slightly cheeky or reckless.’ Furthermore: “In Glasgow, the word is often used approvingly to indicate that something is noticeably stylish or impressive… The word was originally derogatory and often meant wild, rascally and deserving to be hanged from a gallows.”

So, self-confident, daring, cheeky, reckless, stylish, impressive, wild and rascally? ‘Gallus’, then, is surely the ideal word to describe the work of John Byrne, the Scottish artist, playwright and screenwriter who died at the end of last month aged 83.

Byrne’s art was bright, bold and always good fun. When depicting human subjects, which it usually did, it wasn’t afraid to tip into the realm of caricature. I suppose he could be accused of being a little narcissistic, seeing as his most common subject for portraiture was himself – a retrospective of his work in 2022 exhibited no fewer than 42 self-portraits – but then again, if you’re an artist with an interest in the human visage, your own visage, the one that stares back at you from every mirror, is the most readily available material to work on. Also, Byrne happily treated his own features to the same caricature he did with other subjects, and didn’t flinch from detailing the ravages of time as he passed from youth into middle and then old age.

I particularly like this grizzled and extravagantly moustached self-portrait, which has a skeleton attempting a Muay Thai-type kick against his forehead, presumably in response to the sizeable cigarette he’s smoking. Incidentally, a nicotine yellowness seems to tinge his white whiskers in places.

From wooarts.com / © Estate of John Byrne

His sense of humour is also apparent in Red and Unread, a portrait of actress Tilda Swinton, who was his partner from 1990 to 2004. At first sight, it looks like Swinton is dancing a hornpipe in a traditional sailor’s outfit. Then you notice the large stack of papers her posterior is resting on and the much smaller stack below her right foot. Byrne meant the big stack to represent the scripts she’d turned down during her career, and the little stack to represent the scripts she’d agreed to do.

From National Galleries Scotland / © Estate of John Byrne

I wonder how differently Byrne’s own career would have gone if a commission he received in the late 1960s had worked out. His early work caught the eye of the Beatles and they asked him to create the cover of their next album, to be called A Doll’s House. Alas, A Doll’s House eventually morphed into 1968’s The White Album and Byrne’s cover was set aside in favour of the famously plain, white one designed by Richard Hamilton and Paul McCartney. At least, a dozen years later, Byrne’s composition was used on the cover of a Fab Four album, the 1980 compilation The Beatles Ballads.

From wooarts.com / © Estate of John Byrne

However, shortly afterwards, plenty of other album-work came Byrne’s way, thanks to the patronage of various Scottish musicians: Gerry Rafferty, both solo and with his band Stealers Wheel; Billy Connolly, who started off as a musician who did a little comedy between songs and ended up as a comedian who did a little music between routines; and Donovan. I particularly like this cover for the eponymous 1969 album by the folk-rock band the Humblebums, a partnership between Rafferty and Connolly. This contains the song Her Father Didn’t Like Me Anyway, which I mentioned in my previous post about Shane MacGowan.

© Transatlantic Records / © Estate of John Byrne

Actually, Billy Connolly was a subject who, over the years, would be depicted several times on Byrne’s canvases. Just three months ago, a mural based on a painting Byrne made of a now bespectacled and white-haired Connolly, and placed on the end of a building in Glasgow’s Osbourne Street in honour of the comedian’s 75^th birthday, made the headlines. Developers want to build a new block of 270 students’ flats on the site and plan to cover up the much-loved mural. Aye, students’ flats. I’m sure they’ll look lovely.

From twitter.com/Lost Glasgow / © Estate of John Byrne

From arthur.io / © Estate of John Byrne

Like the Glaswegian artist and writer Alasdair Gray, Byrne was a man of letters as well as one of images and he wrote for the stage and screen. Perhaps he got a taste for stage-writing while working as a designer for Scotland’s legendary 7:84 theatre company during the early 1970s. His best-known plays were the Slab Boys trilogy, whose instalments were first performed in 1978, 1979 and 1982, based on Byrne’s experiences working in a carpet factory near his hometown of Paisley after he’d left school in the 1950s. In 1979, the original Slab Boys also became an episode of the BBC’s Play for Today (1970-84) drama-anthology series, with Gerald Kelly, Joseph McKenna and Billy McColl as the titular slab boys relentlessly flinging jokes, patter and insults at each other in an effort to prevent their work – having to grind and mix colours in a factory basement – from driving them crazy with boredom.

For television, he penned 1987’s tragi-comedy series Tutti Frutti, which helped make a star of Robbie Coltrane. Coltrane plays Danny McGlone, drafted in to sing for an aging Scottish rock ‘n’ roll band called the Majestics after their original singer, Danny’s older brother, dies in a car accident. The Majestics are truly on their last legs, thanks to their delusional guitarist Vincent Driver (Maurice Roëves), who believes himself to be ‘the iron man of Scottish rock’ but whose personal life is a vicious shambles, and the uselessness of the band’s shifty manager Eddie Clockerty (Richard Wilson).

At least Danny finds solace with another new band-member, guitarist Suzy Kettles (played by an also-up-and-coming talent at the time, Emma Thomson). As Danny gradually falls for Suzy, the Majestics go from bad to worse and to beyond worse, with in-fighting, humiliation, depression, knifings, suicide and dental violence – Danny ends up taking a drill to Suzy’s abusive ex-husband, who’s a dentist. Despite the show’s darkness, Byrne’s witty writing makes it hilarious. Tutti Frutti is surely the best thing BBC Scotland has ever produced. Looking at the channel’s woeful output nowadays, it’s probably the best thing it ever will produce too.

© BBC / Estate of John Byrne

A Byrne-scripted follow-up to Tutti Frutti, 1989’s Your Cheatin’ Heart, wasn’t as well-received as the previous show, though it did acquaint him with its star, Tilda Swinton, who’d be his partner for the next 14 years.

Meanwhile, reading the obituaries for Byrne, I’ve only just discovered that he also wrote scripts for the comedy sketch show Scotch and Wry, which showcased the talents of comedian and actor Rikki Fulton and featured such memorable comic characters as insufferable and incompetent Glasgow traffic policeman Andy Ross, aka ‘Supercop’ (“Okay, Stirling! Oot the car!”), and unremittingly miserable Church of Scotland minister the Reverend I.M. Jolly. Scotch and Wry ran for two full seasons from 1978 to 79, its popularity then spawned a series of specials that were broadcast every New Year’s Eve until 1992, and it became a Scottish institution.

And no doubt this Hogmanay, I’ll be raising a glass to the memory of the creative powerhouse that was the gallus John Byrne.

From wooarts.com / © Estate of John Byrne

November 30, 2023December 2, 2023

Favourite Scots words, P-R

From pixabay.com / © Dimitris Vetsikas

Today, November 30^th, is Saint Andrew’s Day, the national day of Scotland. Also, I’m in the middle of reading Douglas Stuart’s 2022 novel Young Mungo, which is set in Glasgow during the 1990s and is choc-a-bloc with cherishable Scots vocabulary: bevvy, chib, doo, midden, schemie, sook, smirr, tattie–bogle, wean, winchin’… Thus, this seems an opportune time to post the latest instalment of my attempt to catalogue my favourite words from the Scots language.

Patter (n) – A long time ago, I remember Iain Jenkins, my English teacher at Peebles High School, trying to explain to my class why William Shakespeare placed Mercutio’s monologue about Queen Mab in the middle of Act 1, Scene 4 of Romeo and Juliet. After all, the monologue didn’t have any bearing on the plot that came before or after it. It was merely Shakespeare showing off his own verbal flamboyance and inventiveness. Eventually, Jenkins exclaimed, “Patter! It’s just patter! It’s Mercutio indulging in a bit of patter!”

Patter, then, is smooth talk, smart talk or funny talk – often delivered by someone, like a politician or a salesman, who’s trying to sell you something. The word crops in phrases like, “I gave her the auld patter,” or “Enough ay yer patter!” And a person who comes out with it a lot is called a patter–merchant. The city of Glasgow seems full of patter–merchants, surprisingly enough.

Pawkie (adj) – used to describe a person possessed of a dry and quietly mocking sense of humour.

Pech (v) – to gasp or wheeze breathlessly. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s short supernatural story Thrawn Janet, you get the line: “Even the auld folk cuist the covers frae their beds an’ lay pechin’ for their breath.”

© Kypros Press

Peely-wally (adj) – looking pale and sick-looking. That’s why in Solo (2013), the James Bond ‘continuity’ novel written by William Boyd, there’s a bit where an injured Bond is scolded by May, his formidable old Scottish housekeeper, for looking ‘awfy peely-wally’.

I’d assumed this was derived from ‘peeling wall’, something that obviously doesn’t look healthy. But I’ve recently learnt that peely comes from an early 19^th century word peelie, meaning ‘a gaunt, pale person’. And wally is a Scots word meaning ‘made of china’. Even now, people refer to an ornamental china dog as a wally dug and to false teeth (once made of porcelain) as wallies. So peely–wally really means ‘as pale as china’.

Peep (n) – the lowest level at which you can set a gas flame before it goes out. To ‘put someone’s gas at a peep’ is to seriously knock them out of their stride or deprive them of their vigour.

Peewit (n) – a lapwing.

Pieces (n) – sandwiches. Years ago, while I was living with my Dad, I got a job at a local warehouse. I needed to make myself a packed lunch every morning, to eat during the short break I got in the middle of the day. My Dad would always inquire before I left the house if I’d remembered to get my pieces together.

Pisht (adj) – drunk. Just as the Eskimos are said to have a hundred words for snow, there must be at least a hundred words in Scots for being inebriated. See also arsed, bevied, bleezin’, blootered, buckled, fou’, gubbered, hingin’, minced, mingin’, miraculous, miracked, mortal, reekin’, reelin’, steamboats, steamin’, stocious, wellied, etc. This, of course, is a tragic reflection on the state of the Scottish psyche… I wrote, whilst sipping a large whisky.

From pixabay.com / © rebcenter-moscow

Plook (n) – the curse of many a Scottish person’s adolescence, plooks are pus-filled pimples. It was rumoured at my school that every time you ate a Mars Bar, you got a plook. The adjective is plooky and, predictably, this figured in countless playground insults: “Ye plooky bastart, ye!”

Plump (n) – as in ‘a plump ay rain’, i.e., a sudden downpour.

Poke (n) – a small paper bag. I suspect this word is most commonly heard in Scotland’s chippies, where people request ‘a poke ay chips’.

Poultice (n) – an arsehole. For example, “Thon Boris Johnson is a right poultice, so he is.”

Puddock (n) – a frog.

Pure (adv) – popularised by the actress Elaine C. Smith, whose character in the Glasgow-set comedy TV show City Lights (1984-1991) used the catchphrase, “Pure deid brilliant!” Placed before adjectives to amplify their meaning to the nth degree, it crops up in phrases like ‘pure mental’, ‘pure radge’ and ‘pure sleekit’.

Puggled (adj) – exhausted.

Quaich (n) – in the words of the Meriam-Webster dictionary, ‘a small shallow drinking vessel with ears for use as handles.’ These days, ornate quaichs are often used as pint-sized trophies at Scottish sports events.

Quine (n) – a girl or young woman. This is commonly used in Scotland’s North-East, where boys and young men are also described as loons, so you hear a lot about quines an’ loons. In the early 1990s, a group of Scottish feminists, including the journalist Lesley Riddich, started up a magazine called Harpies and Quines – harpy being a word commonly used in Scotland to describe a grumpy, ill-tempered and mean-minded woman. The famous high-society magazine Harpers and Queen failed to see the joke and attempted to sue them.

© Channel Four Films / Polygram Filmed Entertainment

Radge (adj) – violently wild and crazy. Used as a noun, it refers to a mad hooligan. It had humble beginnings in Eastern Scotland, where it may have come from a Romany word with a similar meaning, ‘raj’, but radge was for a while a trendy term used the length and breadth of Britain. This was because of its copious use in Danny Boyle’s hit movie Trainspotting (1996), where it was associated with Robert Carlyle’s ultra-violent character Frank Begbie. I seem to remember the author Irvine Welsh, on whose novel the film was based, remarking disgustedly that he’d heard Hooray Henrys using the word radge in London wine bars. And I also remember Q magazine running an interview with Robert Carlyle under the memorable headline RADGE AGAINST THE MACHINE.

Rammy (n) – a fight or brawl. A stairheid rammy is a brawl that breaks out among the womenfolk in the staircases and on the landings of Scotland’s urban tenement buildings. During the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, a heated television debate between then-SNP deputy leader Nicola Sturgeon and then-Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont was described afterwards by journalist Ruth Wishart as “a right good stairheid rammy” that “made strong men avert their eyes”.

Randan (n) – a drunken knees-up, as in “He’s away oot on the randan!”

Rector (n) – the Scottish term for headmaster.

Redd (v) – to tidy up. I’ve rarely heard this verb used in Scotland, or at least in the parts of it I’ve inhabited. But I frequently heard it during my childhood in Northern Ireland, where a good number of the people are descended from Scots. My Mum would frequently explain, “Get this room redd up!” or “Give that place a wee redd!”

Riddy (n) – an embarrassment. As in: “Liz Truss! What an absolute riddy!”

Right (adj) – uttered with the appropriate intonation, right becomes a contemptuous response, dismissing something that another person has just said. Though for maximum impact, use the phrase Aye, right. “Maggie Thatcher wis the best prime minister since Churchill? Aye, right.” And indeed, Glasgow’s annual book festival is called Aye Write.

© Glasgow Life

Rone (n) – the length of guttering along the edge of a roof for collecting and removing rainwater.

That’s all for now. More Scots words, and more example-sentences that insult famous Conservative Party politicians, will come shortly…

September 11, 2023September 19, 2023

A Dad story

From amazon.co.uk / © Smith, Smith & Swan

Back in 2006, I returned to my family’s home in the town of Peebles, in southeastern Scotland, for a fortnight’s vacation from a job I was doing in a particularly authoritarian, under-developed and hard-to-live-in country. As that country offered little in the way of social life, I had plenty of free time on my hands when I wasn’t at my workplace. And to fill in that free time, I’d spent the past year working on a project initiated by my brother Gareth and his mate Douglas Swan. Basically, Gareth and Douglas wanted to publish a book about the history of a local football team, Peebles Rovers. They conducted the research for it and sent the notes, newspaper cuttings, interview transcripts and so on to me. I’d always fancied myself as a writer, so I took on the job of turning their research into prose.

The research had all been written up and the book was soon to be published when I arrived home that August. As a thank-you for the work I’d put into it, Gareth and Dougie bought me a present: a ticket for the Rolling Stones concert on Friday, August 25^th, at Hampden Stadium in Glasgow, which coincided with my return to Scotland.

This was a little sudden and unexpected. Also, my parents’ house, where I was staying, was offline and I didn’t have a phone – so dictatorial was the country I was working in that private citizens weren’t allowed to carry one. Thus, I was somewhat unprepared that Friday morning when I set off, via bus from Peebles to Edinburgh, and then train from Edinburgh to Glasgow. I hadn’t, for example, been able to search for accommodation that night in Glasgow, after the concert. “Och,” I thought to myself in my haphazard way, “I’m sure something will turn up.”

However, before I left the house in Peebles, my Dad told me: “If you can’t find a place to stay, and have problems getting home, call me from a pay-phone. I’ll come and collect you.”

“Sure,” I said. But as I prided myself on being an independent, ‘low-maintenance’ sort of person, I had no intention of phoning him late at night, and probably getting him out of bed, to lament that I needed help getting home.

Anyway… I got to Glasgow and first of all visited the Tourist Information Centre in George Square to ask if the city had any hotel rooms free that evening. “Not really,” the lady at the desk replied. “There’s a big concert here today, you see…” Well, I knew that, having come to attend it. From what she said, it sounded like the nearest hotel that did have vacancies was halfway between Glasgow and John O’Groats. Oh well, I thought. I’ll just have to head back to Edinburgh afterwards and see if I can get to Peebles from there. Because the Edinburgh Festival was in full swing at the time, all accommodation in the Scottish capital was already booked too. It’d been snapped up months ago.

From mixcloud.com

I enjoyed the Rolling Stones and the Charlatans, their support band, at Hampden that evening. Following the show, I hopped on a late train to Edinburgh. Unfortunately, I arrived in Edinburgh sometime after the final bus of the day had left the city for Peebles. What to do? Well, from previous experience of the Edinburgh Festival, I knew it was virtually impossible to find a taxi at night-time. But there was a very late bus, leaving at around three o’clock in the morning, for the town of Penicuik, which was halfway between Edinburgh and Peebles. From Penicuik, home was another ten miles away. First, you had to traverse the wilds of Leadburn Moor, then you had to make your way along the more sheltered and scenic Eddleston Valley.

Ten miles, I thought to myself in a gung-ho manner, having downed quite a few pints that day and being full of Dutch courage. I could walk that in two-and-a-half hours. And, just in case there are any cars using the road at that late hour – I can always try hitchhiking. Maybe I’ll strike it lucky and get a lift, and get back to Peebles sooner.

Because it was Festival time, many of the pubs in Edinburgh were open very late. And because I felt I could do with just a wee bit more Dutch courage, I spent the run-up to three o’clock sinking more pints in the Scotsman Lounge on Cockburn Street. Finally, it was time to go. I got on the three o’clock bus and a half-hour later got off in the centre of Penicuik, which was utterly still and silent.

From there, I walked down a street towards the southern edge of the town. I didn’t see another soul on the pavements. Neither did a single vehicle pass on the road. The outskirts of town neared and, beyond, the darkness of Leadburn Moor beckoned. I steeled myself. Okay, I thought. This is going to be a hell of a walk. But I can do it…

As I got to the town’s edge, and the beginning of the darkness, a pair of headlights went blazing past on the other side of the road – northwards, into Penicuik, the opposite direction from where I was going. A pity, I thought. But there’s at least one person on the road at this hour. Maybe there’ll be others, heading my way…

And sure enough, a minute later, I heard a car engine approaching behind me – driving southwards, towards Peebles! I turned just before the headlights reached me and stuck out my hitchhiking thumb. The car passed, and slowed, and stopped a few yards ahead. Fortune was smiling on me for sure. I ran to the car, grabbed the passenger’s door, yanked it open, stuck my head in and blurted: “Are you going towards Peebles – ?”

My voice died. For sitting in the driver’s seat was… my Dad.

I spluttered, “What are you doing here?”

“Och,” he said, “I woke up a while ago and thought to myself, that fellah hasn’t come home yet. So I wondered what you would do. I figured you’d be daft enough to get the bus from Penicuik and try walking home from there. So I thought I’d get in the car and take a wee scoot up the road and have a look for you. I spotted you on the pavement there a minute ago, found a place to turn and came back.”

I didn’t know whether I should feel annoyed, insulted, pleased, amused or relieved. I probably ended up feeling a mixture of all five, but the biggest feeling was one of relief.

That wasn’t the only occasion that my auld man, kind and shrewd, came to my rescue. But it was perhaps the most memorable one.

My Dad passed away at the end of last month, aged 88. So I thought I would share this Dad story with you.

Four years after the event described above, I met up with my Dad for a week’s holiday in Malta. Yes, we did end up one day in the pub in Valetta where thirsty movie star Oliver Reed breathed his last whilst filming Ridley Scott’s Gladiator there in 1999.

June 6, 2023June 22, 2023

Live bands behaving badly

I see the rock band Royal Blood have landed themselves in hot water. They took to the stage at Radio 1’s Big Weekend event in Dundee on May 28^th and reacted to what they felt was the crowd’s lack of energy and enthusiasm by impersonating Victor Meldrew in the TV sitcom One Foot in the Grave (1990-2000). They behaved like curmudgeonly old farts. Vocalist and bassist Mike Kerr berated the audience, who mainly consisted of folk come to see the also-on-the-bill popstars Niall Horan and Lewis Capaldi, with such cantankerous remarks as: “Well, I guess I should introduce ourselves seeing as no one actually knows who we are. We’re called Royal Blood and this is rock music. Who likes rock music? Nine people, brilliant…” And: “We’re having to clap ourselves because that was so pathetic…” Plus, he flipped the crowd off while leaving the stage.

Small wonder that the band has been roasted on social media since then. Particularly brutal was a Twitter posting likening them to the long-running British TV glove puppets Sooty and Sweep.

Now I quite like Royal Blood’s music and I have a copy of their eponymous 2014 debut album somewhere in my record collection. Also, not being a pop fan, I would probably find a concert featuring Niall Horan (who was once in One Direction) and Lewis Capaldi (who I admit does have an awesome second cousin once removed) about as pleasurable as poking a sharp stick into my ear and twisting it. But if you’re in a rock band and find yourself lined up to play at an event that’s obviously going to be thronged with pop fans, you should know what to expect, leave your prejudices offstage, get on with the show and make the best of it… Or just cancel your appearance.

Come to think of it, I did once attend Radio 1’s One Big Sunday event in Ipswich in the summer of 2002, while I was working in the area. That was because I wanted to see two bands on the bill, Edinburgh rockers Idlewild and Bristol electronica outfit Kosheen. I didn’t let the fact that the bill also contained Liberty X, Ms Dynamite and Natalie Imbruglia, whom I had zero interest in, interfere with my enjoyment. As I said, at an eclectic do like this, you make the best of things.

Anyway, the recent stushie involving Royal Blood has made me look back over my gig-going career and wonder… What instances of bad behaviour by live bands have I witnessed in my time?

The most memorable onstage meltdowns came while I was living in the city of Sapporo, in Hokkaido, northern Japan, during the 1990s. Visiting Western performers frequently got annoyed at what they saw as the passivity of Japanese audiences, forgetting that there were obvious cultural reasons why a Japanese crowd might seem less extrovert and exuberant than a Western one.

The number-one musical misery-guts during my Japanese years was Ian Brown, frontman of the Stone Roses, who performed at the Sapporo Factory venue in 1995 to promote their recently-released album Second Coming. Brown soon got riled by what he perceived as the audience’s inactivity. “Sapporo,” he snarled, “wake up!” At this point, some New Zealand guys whom I knew yelled from the back of the hall, “Oh, you’ve remembered which city you’re in! Well done!” Brown then commented sourly about “those people at the back with faces like well-skelped arses.” I was standing a few yards from the front of the stage and couldn’t help shouting back at him, “That’s rich coming from you!” My comeback seemed to rattle Brown and I saw him both gesturing towards the side of the stage and pointing furiously down at me. “Oh shit,” I thought, “he’s trying to get the venue’s security staff onto me!” I decided I should make myself less conspicuous. This was difficult because I was rather taller than the average Japanese person and my head and shoulders stuck up prominently above the crowd. I spent the rest of the gig with legs awkwardly bent at the knees, trying to reduce my height, so that Brown and his security goons wouldn’t notice me.

To be fair, Brown had recently been beaten up in a club in Tokyo, supposedly by a trio of Australian bodybuilders, which’d no doubt left him in a foul mood for the rest of his band’s Japanese tour. Still, he behaved like a dickwad that evening and put me off the Stone Roses for a long while afterwards.

Also losing it with their northern Japanese audience were the punk band Fluffy, who in 1996 supported the Sex Pistols (in the middle of their Filthy Lucre reunion tour) at the Hokkaido Koseinenkin Hall. Singer Amanda Rootes sneered at the end, “Thank you, Sapporo, for your boring hospitality!” But it was hardly the crowd’s fault. The Hall seemed designed to strangle any atmosphere at birth – as far as I remember, it was an all-seater venue, which limited one’s ability to get up and bop and jump around to the music, and it was brightly lit. Also, the tickets had said nothing about a support band and people were still filing in to take their seats while Fluffy performed onstage. The band continued to fume about the experience later. A mate of mine who worked in a pub in Susukino, Sapporo’s nightlife district, reported that the band came into his establishment for a drink after the gig and had a moan about how horrible the city was.

On the other hand, I’ve seen a Japanese audience – well, a Japanese audience sprinkled with a number of foreigners – have a go at a band for not being lively themselves. In the mid-1990s the American outfit Sugar played at Penny Lane, Sapporo’s best small venue. Their singer, guitarist and leader Bob Mould was so intense, wrapped-up-in-himself and non-communicative between songs that, eventually, someone with a North American accent roared at him, “Why don’t you speak to us!” I should say that years later I saw Mould again, performing solo at the Oran Mor arts / entertainment centre in Glasgow, and he seemed way more chilled and looked like he was enjoying himself much more.

Penny Lane was also where I witnessed a meltdown by Richey Edwards, the iconic but doomed guitarist – two years later, he’d disappear, never to be seen again – with the Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers. This was in 1993 and the Manics were promoting their new album Gold Against the Soul. The gig was excellent, but Edwards was clearly on edge. At one point he raged against an illuminated fire-exit sign at the auditorium’s far end that he claimed was distracting him. In a typical face-saving Japanese compromise, the venue manager didn’t turn the sign off. He just tied a big strip of cardboard over it so that nobody, including Richey, could see it, but it stayed switched on in accordance with fire regulations.

Away from Japan, I’ve observed some unprofessional behaviour onstage that was the result of physical or emotional dysfunction within the band. In 1995, in New York, I went to a gig by Shane MacGowan and the Popes. The famously raddled MacGowan – who’d already parted company with his earlier and more famous band the Pogues because of his ongoing state of dissolution – lasted all of two songs before sinking onto his haunches, clutching his head between his hands, and then slinking offstage. The rest of the band, the Popes, gamely played a few instrumental tunes for another 25 or 30 minutes. Then they buggered off too. And then there was a riot. Happily, when I saw MacGowan on two later occasions – with the Popes at the 1998 Fleadh Festival in London’s Finsbury Park and together again with the Pogues in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2004 – he was in better physical shape. Well, a bit better.

Meanwhile, by the time I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain in Edinburgh in 1998, the relationship between the band’s founding members, brothers Jim and William Reid, had become toxic. It showed onstage. (Jim Reid once said of the Jesus-and-Mary-Chain experience: “It’s like being locked in a cupboard with somebody for 15 years. If it wasn’t your brother, you could kick him out.”) At one point, in front of the audience, Jim roared, “William, just shut up!” when his sibling started singing a song intro off-key. It was no surprise when, the following year, the news came through that the band had split up.

I’ve also seen folk, full of boisterous, joking bonhomie, fail to read the room and say something they regretted. Most notably, I remember Primal Scream playing on the bill at a one-day event on Glasgow Green in 2000. While they were limbering up to play the song Sick City from their new album XTRMNTR, bass-player Gary ‘Mani’ Mountfield cheerfully barked into the microphone, “This is dedicated to Glasgow because it really is… a sick city!” That went down like a cup of – appropriately enough – cold sick among the multitude of Glaswegians assembled before them. So pissed off were they that, later, Mani felt obliged to announce that he was only jesting and, really, “Glasgow isn’t a sick city at all!” Incidentally, this was in the days before ‘sick’ acquired its modern, slang meaning of ‘amazingly good or impressive’. (I should add that I think Mani, most famous for playing in the Stone Roses alongside Ian Brown, is a decent bloke. His surname even inspired the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, which I use when I write horror stories. That day, he just let his mouth run a little bit ahead of his brain.)

Elsewhere, I recall seeing the Subways in Norwich in 2008. Singer Billy Lunn didn’t endear himself to me or the rest of the audience when, sporting a cheesy grin, he raised a hand and exclaimed at us, “Aha!” in the manner of Alan Partridge – Steve Coogan’s gormless, idiotic TV-presenter character who, of course, is supposed to hail from Norwich. “What a knobhead,” I thought.

Finally, I can think of a few examples of the opposite happening – when the audience behaved badly and the people onstage managed the situation with admirable skill. Back in 1984, I saw the late, legendary Mark E. Smith’s band the Fall at Aberdeen Ritzy, with support provided by abrasive post-punk / noise-rock band the Membranes. The audience was populated with serious Fall fans desperate for the support act to exit the stage as quickly as possible so that their hero Smith could come on. Accordingly, they kept yelling “F*ck off!” at the Membranes between songs. Bassist / vocalist John Robb took it in his stride and started doing funny impersonations of the abusers. “F*****ck off!” he drooled into his microphone.

And in 1997 in Melbourne, I was at a gig by the Henry Rollins Band when a woman at the edge of the stage got a little too vociferous in telling the band which songs she wanted them to perform. The fearsomely muscled Rollins declared, loudly, patiently, contemptuously: “Lady, we decide what songs we play, when we play them, how we play them. Sometimes you get what you want in life. Sometimes you don’t.”

It’s been a long time since I saw a live band behaving badly. This is probably because I spent most of the 2010s living in Sri Lanka, where the only option for seeing live rock music (away from the country’s holiday resorts, where hotel bands played cover versions of the Eagles and Bryan Adams to audiences of sweaty middle-aged Western tourists and local would-be hipsters) was to indulge in the thriving Sri Lankan heavy metal scene. And many of those heavy metal bands had an amusing habit of showing boundless Sri Lankan politeness and gratitude to the audience for turning up to see them. In between songs, they kept saying, “Thank you, thank you very much, thank you for coming, thank you so very much…” Then, a half-minute later, they were emitting blood-curdling, throaty black / death metal gurgles and screaming “F*CK! F*CK! F*CK!”

The pandemic obviously ended my gig-going for a few years. Now that I’ve relocated to Singapore, I’ve been able to see a couple of Western bands again and they’ve been impeccably well-behaved. Even Guns N’ Roses, who had a reputation for being dicks and subjecting audiences to some notoriously poor concerts over the years, were perfect gentlemen when I saw them at Singapore’s National Stadium last year. They even treated the crowd to a three-hour set. Maybe they were simply happy, post-Covid-19, to be on the road again. Actually, considering how expensive concert-tickets are here, the last thing I’d want would be to find myself in a pricy gig with the performers being arseholes onstage.

Mind you, if one of those Korean pop bands like BTS or Blackpink, massively popular in Singapore and elsewhere in East Asia, were to play here and sign up Royal Blood as the support act… I might pay money to see that.