Tilda Swinton – Blood and Porridge

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 28, 2022

A peripheral vision

© Penguin Books

For someone who’d normally describe himself as a ‘voracious’ reader, I’ve read a shockingly small number of books in 2022. I’d like to think this was due to the stress and disruption I’ve suffered this year while moving from Sri Lanka (which had been my home for the previous eight years) to Singapore. However, back in January 2022, I contracted Covid-19. Although it was a very mild dose, and seemed to have minimal effects on me, I’ve worried since then that it impacted on my powers of concentration, made me less able to process information, and slowed down the mental faculties I use when reading.

This worried me particularly a few weeks ago when I started reading The Peripheral, the 2014 novel by cyberpunk maestro William Gibson – which, coincidentally, has lately been made into a TV series starring Chloë Grace Moretz. During The Peripheral’s first 100 pages or so, I struggled to follow what was going on, found everything bewildering and came close to giving up on it. Was Covid-19 brain-fog stopping me from getting to grips with the book?

In fact, beforehand, I could have just read the blurb on The Peripheral’s back cover, where the book’s central gimmick that caused me so much initial confusion is plainly explained. But I didn’t read it, wanting to avoid ‘spoilers’.

All of William Gibson’s fiction – of which I’ve read two-thirds of the Sprawl trilogy (1984-1988), all of the Bridge trilogy (1993-1999) and two-thirds of the Blue Ant trilogy (2003-2010) – is disorientating at first. Gibson is not one for exposition. He drops you straight into the action, which invariably unfurls in some near-future scenario with characters peppering their speech with unfamiliar techno-talk, jargon and cultural references. All of which your reading-brain simply has to get acclimatised to. So, I knew what to expect, but with The Peripheral I was alarmed at how long the process of acclimatisation took. For a large, early section of it, I felt I was sinking.

But finally, after the 100-page-mark, I began to swim. That’s when the book became really enjoyable, as enjoyable as anything else that Gibson’s done. And before I proceed any further, I should warn you that there’ll be spoilers here too.

Once you grasp the novel’s basic premise, following it becomes much easier. For events aren’t happening in one future scenario but in two. There’s a setting not too far into the future, featuring a rural American town where life isn’t much different from that in 2022 – just a bit cruddier. The environment has been even more degraded, it sounds like warfare has become more high-tech but no less brutal, there are possibly even more chain stores and fast-food joints, and much of the local economy seems based on drug production. Meanwhile, the characters make extensive use of 3-D printing and drone technology, and we hear of a recent fad where kids played with cute little Transformers-like robots that had iPads instead of heads.

In this setting, the novel’s heroine, Flynne, fills in for her brother Burton for a few days while he’s out of town. Burton, a former soldier, gets paid for playing a role in a strange new virtual reality / video game – presumably testing it out – by an ask-no-questions company that’s supposedly based in South America. Flynne takes over his role in the game and, while playing, witnesses a murder in a cityscape that looks weirdly similar to London but at the same time isn’t London.

This strange version of London provides the book’s other setting. It’s a real place, only seven decades further into the future. The murder that Flynne believed she witnessed in a game has happened in reality, and a publicist called Wilf Netherton and his wealthy pal Lev Zubov, scion of a family of London-based Russian oligarchs, are informally investigating the disappearance of the person Flynne saw killed. Lev has been using a form of time travel – well, time-travelling communication via a mysterious ‘server’ created in China – to hire people in the past to carry out operations for him. Those hirelings believe they’re working in computer simulations in their own time. It becomes obvious they need to get in closer contact with Flynne, who’s the only witness to what happened. However, whoever engineered the murder has access to the server too and is soon hiring assassins in Flynne’s time to take out her and her brother.

Gibson explores the book’s two-different-futures-in-communication gimmick to the full. The protagonists living in the further-away future have full knowledge of the earlier one, including its economy. Thus, using the server and their knowledge, they can manipulate that economy to finance interventions in it. While Wilf and Lev tamper with the world around Flynne and Burton, making them exponentially richer, able to create their own corporation and pay for their own protection, the villains of further-future London intervene too – not only staging assassination attempts, but also recruiting to their cause the unsavoury corrupt politician / drug manufacturer who controls Flynne and Burton’s hometown, and sending against them a cult of demented Christian fanatics (whom Gibson has evidently modelled on the real-life, loathsome Westboro Baptist Church).

Things step up a further gear when Wilf and Lev manage to send back in time some advanced technology, via a 3-D printing company run by Flynne and Burton’s friends. This allows Flynne, Burton and others to transfer their minds to the future London, where they’re embedded inside ‘peripherals’ – artificial, semi-cyborg bodies that can be humans, animals or homunculi – which the people of the era hire out and inhabit for special occasions in the way that people of past eras hired out and wore fancy dress. And Wilf amusingly gets to make a trip in the other direction, where he’s psychically installed inside one of the iPad-robot toys of Flynne’s time.

One thing that I’ve noticed about Gibson is the importance he attaches to communities. This was especially noticeable in his Bridge trilogy, where he had San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge taken over by a band of outsiders, misfits and radicals and turned into a township where they live their lives according to their non-corporate, eco-friendly ideals; or a ‘cardboard city’ of homeless people at a major Japanese railway station that’s actually a refuge for computer hackers, otaku and general ‘cyber-gypsies’. In The Peripheral, much is made of the rundown, hard-pressed and exploited community that’s home to Flynne, Burton and their family and friends – many of those friends being military veterans like Burton. They don’t have it easy, but they stand by one another, even when threatened by murderous thugs employed by dark forces from the future. This includes looking out for an ex-soldier called Conner, who’s returned from the battlefield both mentally and (severely) physically damaged. Indeed, one highlight is when Conner’s mind get transferred to future London and, to his joy, he finds himself inhabiting a full-bodied peripheral. A full body is something he hasn’t had for a long time.

Meanwhile, Gibson’s description of London in that further-off future is ripe with satire. Russian oligarchs are so established there they’ve practically become the aristocracy, while advanced technology has allowed areas of it to be turned into tourist-orientated recreations of the Victorian past – as if parts of London aren’t that way now. He also gently takes the piss with the character of Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer, a police detective investigating the murder who seems to know more about what’s happening than she lets on. Lowbeer embodies every imperturbable, raffish crime-fighter in a long tradition of non-realistic British crime stories. I wondered at first if Lowbeer was conceived as a female version of John Steed from the TV show The Avengers (1961-69), but recently on social media I saw Gibson state that he’d imagined her as ‘Tilda Swinton channelling Quentin Crisp.’

Faults? Well, occasionally, Gibson’s description of the action – the full-on action scenes, with danger and violence – can be frustratingly sparse, to the point where you have to reread his descriptions a couple of times to figure out what’s just happened. He’s a writer who’s interested in fast-moving narratives but not so much in action itself. Also, while the peripherals are a logical plot-component, the concept of them seems slightly old-hat after James Cameron made extensive use of the same concept five years earlier in his movie Avatar (2009). Not that that’s Gibson fault, of course.

And connoisseurs of time-travel stories might find it a cop-out that Wilf and Lev can interfere in their past as much as they like without suffering any effects in their present. This is because, Gibson explains, the moment they start interfering they create a ‘stub’ – an alternative timeline where the reality containing Flynne, Burton and the others begins to branch off from the established, ‘official’ timeline, developing in its own way towards its own, unknown future. The idea makes sense, but some may miss the complexity of a traditional time-travel story where interference in the past has unexpected and unwelcome consequences in the interferers’ present. See Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder for the classic example.

The Peripheral is very entertaining, then, but there’s a grimness at its heart that’s rather like finding a dollop of ultra-sour cream within an ice-cream sundae. The grimness is something called the Jackpot. This isn’t a single cataclysmic event but a protracted series of smaller ones – “droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves” – that represent humanity reaping what it sowed with its onslaught against the natural environment. The Jackpot occurs between the novel’s two time-settings and accounts for something Flynne notices when, in peripheral form, she arrives in future London. There seem to be very few people around.

Late on in The Peripheral there are suggestions that, as their timeline diverges from the established one, Flynne, Burton and her friends, empowered by future technology and investment, can do something to avert or at least alleviate the Jackpot and create a better future for themselves. Meanwhile, away from the pages of Gibson’s novel and looking at the dismal, real-life events of the early 21^st century, I fear we’ll be hitting our own Jackpot all too soon.