Glasgow

by Alan Taylor

  TOM JONES IN GLASGOW, 1983

  Billy Sloan

  For unfathomable reasons women attending performances by the Welsh singer Tom Jones like to throw their underwear at him. Glaswegians, it seems, were no less afflicted.

  Welsh superstar Tom Jones embarked on his first British concert tour in over ten years. I caught his show at Glasgow Apollo, and was impressed by his still powerful tonsils and explosive, sex-charged stage show.

  Most of the audience were tipsy women – quarter bottles neatly concealed in handbags – who were determined to have a rerr terr and a good ogle. As Jones whipped off his jacket, exposing his he-man hairy chest and thrust his hips provocatively towards them, the excitement level reached fever pitch. His tight clothes left nothing to their imaginations. Then with 3,000 females simultaneously bursting a blood vessel, one of them rushed up to me and, in a mixture of ecstasy and obvious distress, screamed into my ear.

  ‘Wid ye just look at that boady. He’s the only singer in the world I’d haud in a pee fur . . .’

  Only in this fair city could twenty years of gold discs, Las Vegas sellouts, phenomenal riches and international acclaim be summed up by the self-discipline of a wee Glesga wummin’s bladder movements.

  MILES BETTER – THAN WHERE? 1983

  Harry Diamond

  If New York could have its image changed by a slogan, why not Glasgow? That was the thinking in the 1980s when the city was in need of a surge of energy and a dose of the feelgood factor. But where to start? As Harry Diamond (1930–99), who ran the City Council’s PR operation recounts, it was actually a teenager who helped set the ball rolling, ably abetted by his father, who was in advertising. Thus was ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ born. Diamond was the son of a Russian alien called Chatzkind who took the name Diamond because it was the first one an immigration officer saw on the board over a shopfront.

  John Struthers, a Glasgow advertising man, and his 14-year-old son Mark were doodling, John’s own word, on sheets of paper on a flight to London trying to devise a campaign slogan for their native city.

  Page after page was discarded as they wrote things like ‘GLASGOW TOPS FOR YOU, GET TO KNOW GLASGOW, GROW WITH GLASGOW, THE GLASGOW SMILE’. They still hadn’t quite got it when they arrived in London. Then on a train from the airport to the centre of the city John wrote ‘GLASGOW’S MILES BETTER’. When they got home that night they substituted a smiling face for the letter ‘O’. And so was born the slogan that swept the world.

  Struthers took his idea to Lord Provost Michael Kelly, who had the wit and foresight to see its possibilities. He persuaded the City Council to put up £150,000 towards a full-scale promotional campaign for the city. The business community put up £200,000. Kelly persuaded business leaders that what was good for Glasgow was good for them and businesses too. After all, if a lot of people were attracted to the city because of the things they read they would obviously spend money there.

  The Glasgow’s Miles Better campaign, which started in 1983, was one of the best promotions ever mounted by a British city. It won the International Film and Television Festival of New York award in 1983, 1984, 1985 and 1987. ‘The only reason we didn’t win in 1986 is because we didn’t enter the festival,’ says Struthers.

  Struthers devised a series of advertisements based on the things we had been publicising over the years: the city’s international hotels, museums, parks, restaurants, sporting facilities. Then came badges, car stickers, umbrellas, tee-shirts, and plastic carrier bags, all carrying the miles better slogan.

  No opportunity to spread the word was overlooked. Holiday-makers flying out of Glasgow had the miles better stickers on their luggage in a variety of languages. People like Jimmy Savile and Lulu were recruited by council departments. Even the Queen was pictured with Michael Kelly under a miles better umbrella.

  At one point John Struthers devised a miles better advertisement to put on Edinburgh buses during the Edinburgh Festival but we were refused permission by the city’s transport authority. We planned to spend about £2,000 on this exercise but the transport authority’s refusal was reported worldwide and we received millions of pounds worth of publicity for nothing. I was even quoted on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

  In March 1984 Michael Kelly launched the campaign nationally with a breakfast at the Savoy Hotel in London hosted by Britoil. The list of guests from every walk of life was enormous. One of them was Billy Connolly. Mr Connolly was being what he considered amusing for the benefit of the crowd in a reception area when I approached him quietly at Michael Kelly’s request and stopped a few feet away. I waited until he acknowledged my existence by looking in my direction and said, ‘Would you mind taking your place at the top table Mr Connolly so that we can get started.’

  Mr Connolly looked me up and down and said in a voice that carried to Carlisle. ‘Whooo are yoooo? Fuck off.’ A few self-conscious titters broke out at this brilliant riposte. Mr Connolly had obviously been misled by my immaculate appearance.

  I put my hand under his armpit, assisted him to a nearby wall, and whispered in his ear in the idiom which he apparently understood best, ‘Listen pal, Ah’m a Glasgow man an’ all and if you talk to me like that again I’ll rip yer scruffy fucking heid aff and fling it to all yer admirers out there. Get the message, son?’ Mr Connolly was taken aback, abashed and nonplussed. He went in for breakfast.

  PURE MINCE, 1984

  James Kelman

  For many Glaswegians – not to mention many Scots – a plate of mince is as memory-laden as Proust’s petite madeleine. Extraordinarily, Alexander Fenton’s otherwise comprehensive, The Food of the Scots (2007) makes no mention of mince or, for that matter, minced beef, but it does contain a couple of references to mince pies, which of course have nothing to do with real mince. Nor, indeed, is there any mention of mince in Annette Hope’s A Caledonian Feast (2002), though there is a recipe for a dish called minced collops, an essential ingredient of which is a handful of toasted oatmeal. Is this any way to treat a meal that made the lips of generations smack in anticipation? Thankfully, Booker Prize-winning novelist James Kelman (1946–), who was born and brought up in Glasgow, knows how to make the perfect plate of mince and tatties. Follow the instructions the Busconductor Hines delivers to his son, published in Kelman’s novel of the same name. Follow them to the letter and you cannot go wrong. Be warned but, Hines is only just avoiding a nervous breakdown.

  ¾lb beef links, 1lb of potatoes, 2 onions medium sized and 1 tin beans baked. And that’s you with the sausage, chips and beans plus the juicy onions – and they’re good for your blood whether you like it or no. This big pot with the grill type container is for the chips, it lets them drip so the fat goes back into the pot. Simple economics. And even if your mummy’s sick to death of chips, what should be said is this: she isn’t the fucking cook the day so enough said, let her go to a bastarn cafe. 2 nights on the trot is okay as long as it’s not regularly the case. Fine: the items should get dished no more than 4 times per week but attempt to space it so that 1 day can pass without. 7 days in a week. What is that by christ is there an extra day floating about somewhere? Best to ignore fixed things like weeks and months and days. The minimum to cover all of the things i.e. breakfast, dinner, tea. Right: chips number 1 day, 3 day, 5 day, 7 day; missing 0 day, 2 day, 4 day and 6 day. Alright 8 times a fortnight. But 7 every 14 days. So there you are you can maybe get left having them twice on the trot but being a chip lover you just ignore it. Let’s go then: right; Monday is fish day – rubbish. Monday is mince and potatoes. Simple, get your pot. Item: 1 pot. Item: ¾lb mince. Item: 2 onions medium sized, then a ½lb carrots, a tin of peas and also a no – not at all, don’t use a frying pan to brown the mince; what you do is fry it lightly in the same pot you’re doing the actual cooking in. Saves a utensil for the cleaning up carry on. So: stick mince into pot with drop cooking oil, lard or whatever the fuck – margarine maybe. Have onions peeled and chopped. Break up mince with wooden spoon. Put pot on at slow
heat so that it doesn’t sizzle too much. While breaking up mince all the time in order that it may not become too fucking lumpy. Toss in onions. The pepper and salt have been sprinkled while doing the breaking up. Next: have your water boiled. Pour a ½ pint measure in which you’ve already dumped gravy cube viz crumbled into the smallest bits possible. Stir. When mince brownish add mixture. Stir. Place lid on pot. Having already brought to boil. Then get simmering i.e. once boiling you turn gas so’s it just bubbles and no more. Pardon. Once you’ve got ½ pint gravy water poured in you’ll probably need extra. Lid on. Handle turned to inside lest accidents to person. Then sit on arse for following hour apart from occasional checks and stirring. 30 minutes before completion you get the spuds peeled and cut into appropriate sections and fill the other pot with boiling water, having already dumped said spuds in to pot while empty for fuck sake otherwise you’ll splash yourself. Stick on at hot heat. Sit on arse for 15 to 20 minutes. Open tin peas of course. The bastarn fucking carrots. At the frying mince and onion stage you’ve got them peeled and chopped and you add to same. The peas get placed in wee saucepan and can cook in matter of moments. When time’s up you’ve got mince, potatoes and peas set to serve from a trio of pots.

  ALASDAIR GRAY’S LANARK, 1984

  Anthony Burgess

  First published in 1981, Alastair Gray’s debut novel, Lanark, was immediately recognised as a significant contribution to Scottish literature. Many years in the writing, it combines realism, surrealism and science fiction, introducing a hero called Duncan Thaw, who may or may not be based on the author, and a city called Unthank, which doubtless owes a lot to Glasgow. The most quoted passage in the novel is that in which one of the characters asks: ‘What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That’s all. No, I’m wrong, there’s also the cinema and library. And when our imagination needs exercise we use these to visit London, Paris, Rome under the Caesars, the American West at the turn of the century, anywhere but here and now. Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music-hall song and a few bad novels. That’s all we’ve given to the world outside. It’s all we’ve given to ourselves.’ One of Lanark’s many fans was the English novelist, Anthony Burgess, who cited it in his book, Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939.

  A big and original novel has at last come out of Scotland. Gray is a fantastic writer (and his own fantastic illustrator) who owes something to Kafka but not much. He has created a mythical city called Unthank, a kind of lightless Limbo where people succumb to strange diseases and then are transformed into crabs, leeches, dragons before disappearing without trace. This nonplace has a vague resemblance to contemporary Glasgow. Lanark, one of its citizens, indeed eventually its Provost, suspects that he is a metamorphosis of an earlier life-form, consults the Oracle in a strange place called the Institute and is granted a vision of the life of a young man named Duncan Thaw, growing up in a real Glasgow, preoccupied with the problem of reconciling his artistic ambitions with the maintaining of ordinary human relationships. All this is good traditional naturalism. Thaw dies, and it is not clear whether his death is accidental or suicidal. He finds himself in Unthank, which nightmarishly reproduces aspects of his past life. His identification with Lanark is vague. Lanark sets out now on a mad journey ‘through the mist and time chaos of the Intercalendrical Zone’, visits a city called Provan, where the citizens drink rainbows and are oppressed by security robots. Gray attempts no linguistic innovations, though his footnotes and marginal glosses recall Finnegans Wake. Whether his intention is satirical is not clear. It is best to take this novel as the emanation of the fancy of a Celt with a strong visual imagination and great verbal power. Scotland produced, in Hugh MacDiarmid, the greatest poet of the century (or so some believe); it was time Scotland produced a shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom. This is it.

  COME AND SEE MA BLUE HOOSE, 1984

  Ian Jack

  Glasgow is not by any means unique in being a city of contrasts. Like Paris, or for that matter New York or London, rich and poor have always lived within its precincts. Perhaps, though, the two are more obviously demarcated in Glasgow. Taking his lead from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, journalist Ian Jack imagined what a day in the life of a Glaswegian might be in the not-too-distant future.

  It is the best of times, it is the worst of times, and there are two Glasgows. Perhaps the Burrell Collection exemplifies the city at its best; a fine and genuinely popular modern building, set among woods and parkland, which attracted a million visitors within the first ten months of its opening. It cost £20 million to build but entrance is absolutely free. Here the people worship art, or merely gawp at the results of one man’s gobbling hunger for rare and precious artefacts. Sir William Burrell made his fortune by the simple expedient of ordering ships cheap during slumps and selling them dear during booms. The profits went into salerooms. A great man for a bargain, Sir William would buy almost anything, from any period, from any culture, if the price was right. Glaswegians are celebrating a belated monument to the city’s old wealth and self-confidence.

  Glasgow at its worst can be found in the housing estates, the famous ‘peripheral estates’ which have changed in twenty years from a solution to a problem to a problem without any solution in sight. Unemployment rates in the estates can rise as high as fifty or sixty per cent. Many of the houses are damp; Glasgow Council received more than 17,000 complaints of dampness last year and spent more than £8 million trying to dry out its tenants’ homes. According to a recent medical report, children who grow up there are more likely to be hospitalised for diseases such as whooping cough and gastroenteritis than children born in the more privileged parts of the city. Heroin-taking increases by the week. Large numbers of people want to get out.

  I took a taxi to Possilpark, a pre-war estate built on a hill above the derelict wharves of the Forth and Clyde canal and only a mile or so from the city centre. Here, quite coincidentally, Sir William Burrell owned the boatbuilding yard which laid the foundations of the Burrell fortune in the middle of the last century.

  ‘Possilpark,’ said the driver, ‘that’s a helluva place to get into. It’s a maze, no joke. They’ve built all these barriers across the roads to stop the boys pinching cars. Not, mind you, that it stops them.’

  We passed abandoned factories and then began to rumble up and down streets full of wild dogs and wild children. Many houses had hardboard nailed over the windows.

  ‘Christ knows what the folk do in a place like this,’ said the driver. ‘I think they must stay in doors and just screw the arse off one another.’

  I got out and walked through the children (‘Hey look, there’s a funny man in a taxi’) and called on Mrs Betty Collins to ask her if Glasgow had improved. ‘Oh aye,’ she said, ‘miles better if you don’t have to live in this damned place.’ The Burrell Collection, the Citizens’ Theatre, Scottish Opera; to Mrs Collins they seemed hopeless fripperies, possibly located on Mars. She helps run a local tenants’ group. The majority of tenants, she said, were ‘decent people trying to do their best’ in the face of formidable problems which people who don’t live in a place like Possilpark could never hope to understand. Take the woman who lived across the street. She was a ‘wee bit simple’, not quite right in the head poor girl, and frequently taken advantage of. She’s been raped once. Then children had broken into her house and painted it blue – with hands not brushes, blue paint daubed on every wall. The woman came home and was delighted. ‘Come and see ma blue hoose,’ she’d told Mrs Collins, who didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  Housing estates, as a Glasgow councillor remarked, live in a ‘peculiar psychological isolation’. Mrs Collins defined it as frustration bred from lack of hope and solved, temporarily, by alcohol, vandalism, theft and heroin. Kids, she said, were beginning to take junk (heroin spliced with Vim or sugar) at the age of twelve. Dirty needles had given the boy next door three separate doses of he
patitis. You could recognise heroin-users by the fact that they went into pubs and sat there clueless, without a drink. Mrs Collins remembered that as a teenager in the Fifties she’d had a choice of dancehalls, cafés, cinemas. Now there was nothing but pubs and bookies’ shops. Nearly every local factory had closed and gangs of teenagers wandered aimlessly about the streets.

  Within ten minutes of leaving Mrs Collins I was sitting in a restaurant and inspecting a menu which advertised not only food but also the manner of its recent capture. Oban-landed monkfish, creel-caught langoustines. All around happy diners talked about interesting personal developments.

  ‘I hear Andrew’s bought a wee weekend place on Loch Fyne.’

  ‘I hear he’s off the drink.’

  ‘Heard that one before though.’

  Here is an interesting change. Glasgow restaurants, unlike their London counterparts, were once filled with whispering customers who deferred both to the waiters and the food; an abnormal treat, eating expensive food, and an experience clearly devised for the luxury races to the south. But now people eat, drink and talk with unabashed enjoyment, as though, indeed, their custom made the owner’s profits.

  We ordered food. The Wild East Coast Salmon was especially recommended. My friends, none of them rich but all of them doing all right, discussed the peripheral estates. They had heard – heard perhaps too often – about the unemployment, the damp and the heroin. But what was going to be done? ‘I mean, let’s face it, the Clyde is never going to build Cunarders again . . . and it’s difficult to see how the bears will ever work again.’ (‘Bears’ is a Glasgow word for yobs or lumpens.)