Glasgow

by Alan Taylor

  Now this may surprise you, while the English businessman abroad is still too often identified by a certain seedy fatigue about the waistline, the Scotsman, or more specifically the Glaswegian, emerges, in any pinstripe throng, as elegant and taut, the owner of twenty shirts in fashionable working order, the possessor of a fine gold chain around his neck and on his wrist, most probably, a Rolex denoting upward mobility in in circles highly serious about time. These are not the ramblings of a deranged fashion writer but the findings of various solid market research studies carried out over recent years on behalf of the British menswear industry. At its most detailed such data reveals not just the Glaswegian’s superiority in the matter of shirt tails – the average man here owns more than his equivalent brother anywhere else in Britain – but also the sparkling role ornamentation plays in his life. No matter how discreet, his cuff-links are meant to be observed.

  Glasgow, of course, has always dealt brazenly in superlatives, sending shivers of disapproval down Edinburgh’s prim spine. Yet one leading jeweller with outlets in both cities once disclosed that he lost more items through theft in the capital than he did forty miles away in the west. In general he suffered one break-in a month in Glasgow while in Edinburgh some costly bauble was lifted almost every week by professional gangs up from the South whose ultimate refinement was the elderly fur-coated lady acting as a decoy. In Glasgow the raw ebullience of smash-’n’-grab prevailed. But while Edinburgh men disguise what they spend on clothes by sheltering in the safe tradition of tweeds and sober suits, Glasgow men listen to the language of fashion, its code of status signals, and rapidly respond. Does all this prancing around, this looking sharp in the definitive leather blouson or the draped Numero Uno jacket suggest that effetism is now sweetening Glasgow’s macho armpit? Who can be sure? But much has changed utterly and much has to do with a new attitude of mind which doesn’t ask men to become dandies but requires that they be less repressed about sensuality and self-expression.

  Among Glasgow’s daughters, of course, visual panache has always been the thing. Long before the city’s remarkable revival, Recession Chic cohabited here quite naturally with multiple deprivation. By cultivating a strong, personal style, Glasgow women defied their turf’s ugly reputation. Keeping up appearances welded body and soul together and thus the city of the hard shoulder became the city of the fast turnover, one of the first centres in Britain to sustain two mobbed Marks and Spencers, two bustling C & A’s. So this battered old place became the rag trade’s lingering amour, meticulously coiffed and enamelled, ready to strut through the dark with all the beckoning relish of sin. The other night a raven-haired girl in a silk romper suit and black stockings was seen running for a Springburn bus. Scoffing chips from a poke, she appeared like some wild alliance between Theda Bara and a kindergarten. Where had she been, this self-regarding ingénue? Fury Murry’s . . . the Sub Club . . . shaping with her pals in all that pagan House music, practising her panda-eyed gaze and desire to look silently profound?

  Today new money seeks the pedigree of international labels from The Warehouse, Ichi Ni San and Princes Square. Mappin and Webb in Glasgow sell a Rolex at around £2,000 practically every day of the week. Sax is the only shop in Scotland to stock Romeo Gigli and through the adventurous buying spirit of David Mullane at The Warehouse, Jean-Paul Gaultier, the most anarchic designer in Paris, can claim to have a Scottish chapter in the Merchant City.

  Much tested in resilience, Glasgow’s earthiness is never likely to allow poseurs to gain the upper hand. Even so one already detects certain little arriviste snobberies, a sniffy suspicion that in fashion (as in the general arts) the only good things are those that are imported. This is the reverse of that tedious London myopia about anything north of NW1 and equally as ill-founded. In fact it does nothing except mark out the truly provincial, but more seriously it also puts at risk the very creative possibilities of those indigenous designers whose talent requires sustained investment rather than the smug tokenism of ineffectual start-up grants.

  GLASGOW’S MILES DAVIS, 1989

  David Belcher

  Is – was? – Glasgow, music-wise, the new Liverpool? Or Manchester? There is surely a case to be made. The city’s musical heritage is, of course, illustrious. Did not Chopin play here? Indeed, he did, in the Merchant City in 1848, a year before he expired. Alas, few turned out to witness his performance and one ungenerous report noted that he was ‘a man of weak constitution and seems labouring under physical debility and ill-health’. More recently, in 1990, Frank Sinatra wowed the crowd even though he too, then in his seventies, was unable to perform at the highest level. As music journalist David Belcher points out in this extract from The Glasgow Herald Book of Glasgow, as the Year of Culture approached, Glasgow was in the grip of a ‘rockbiz’ resurgence which, a quarter of a century on, shows no sign of abating.

  Beware, children, of those who would adopt the authentic, multi-hued mantle of cred and try to tell you where to go in pursuit of the hippest, hip-hoppiest pleasures after sundown. Shun those who would claim to know what’s ah, shakin’ out there on the street and on the dancefloor, who would insist that they are in tune with ‘The Kids’. Anyone who claims to be able to tell you all about the clubs has not been enjoying himself in any of them sufficiently enough to know whether or not they are worth attending. Me? I’m just going to give you a few gnomic pointers: like most of the rest of ‘The Kids’, I spend the bulk of my time re-inventing myself at home in private, not paying £5 admission to try and do it in public, in the dark, over someone else’s choice of pounding beat. Bomp-bomp, bompitty-bomp, excuse me, I feel my head spinning . . . spinning . . .

  Glasgow’s Miles Davis: there isn’t one, we’d have told him to learn how to play in tune. Glasgow’s Miles Kington: nope, there isn’t one of those either, far too consciously-absurd and clever-clever. Glasgow’s Miles better . . . ah, yes, my head is clearing and I remember that line from somewhere . . . what does it mean again? While the city of Glasgow is in many and varied ways miles better than it was (rather than actually being better than anywhere else), in what might be termed youth culture (whatever that is), Glasgow is simply miles better than most places in the rest of Britain, outside London.

  If youth culture is how young people address one another, dress, enjoy themselves, measure one another, chart their aspirations, articulate their desires, and pretend to be more youthful than they are, then Glasgow has got a lot of it. Not the most inventive, innovative, or original brands of youth culture, but lots of it, lots definitely and derivatively if not definitively, most of it music-related. Glasgow presently likes to think of itself, with some justification, as Rock City, UK. To employ rockbiz parlance, Glasgow-based bands such as Wet Wet Wet, the Blue Nile, Deacon Blue, Hue and Cry, the Silencers, the River Detectives, and Texas, have all, along with émigrés like Simple Minds, done mega-business in the charts.

  Quite why there are so many bands from Glasgow, more bands than from any other UK city of comparable size, is one question (as is their quality): what is indisputable is that rock music, live or recorded, plays a vital practical role in the city’s perception of itself and in its cultural identity. We rock, therefore we do not have to seek unavailable joinery apprenticeships which we did not want in any case. We rock because we might as well, because in the post-industrial first city of Europe we stand more chance of getting a number one hit single than we do of securing gainful long-term employment as a warehouseman or invoice clerk.

  DIARY OF A SHOP ASSISTANT, 1989

  Ajay Close

  Shopping is something Glaswegians approach with the utmost seriousness and for which they prepare appropriately. It is an event, like the storming of the Bastille. Over the decades, the epicentre of bargain hunters and fashion victims has changed. Time was when Argyle Street was where those who had money to burn flocked. Later, Sauchiehall Street was retail heaven, and to some extent it still is. More recently, however, Buchanan Street has become the prime location. As you stand
at its top, on the steps of the Concert Hall, you look down on a sea of adrenalin-fuelled humanity which belies any notion of recession or retrenchment. For while Edinburghers may put their money into property – preferring to inherit clothes, even undergarments, rather than purchase new items – Glaswegians display their wealth on their backs. Christmas, of course, is when the shops hope to do their best business. In 1989, journalist and novelist Ajay Close spent four days at John Lewis experiencing what it feels like to be on the other side of the counter. What follows is her account of day three.

  9 a.m.

  Christmas is high season for crime, so I am assigned to Store Security (sensitive to police teasing, they avoid the term detective). As security manager, David Macklin (known among Glasgow’s shoplifting fraternity as ‘Carrot’) is responsible for everything from ejecting mischief-making children to arresting light-fingered drug addicts. None of this compares with the trauma of having to shut out customers at 5 p.m. on Christmas Eve. ‘Suddenly you’re the most unpopular man in Glasgow.’

  He encounters every type of criminal, from Dippers (pickpockets) to professional shoplifters who make a handsome living out of store theft. ‘They steal anything of value: from top of the range £300 to £400 suits, down to a £20 bottle of perfume. You can pick the good ones, they’ll come in clean-shaven, with a smart suit – perhaps Christian Dior – but you look at their shoes and you know,’ he says. ‘Their heels are worn down.’ ??? ‘Have you ever tried to steal a pair of shoes?’ Then there are the regulars: Shorty, Gumsy – who takes his false teeth out in a vain attempt at disguise – and the Salmon Man, bane of the Food Hall, who only steals tinned fish. In an average day the team spots 30–35 of them on the video monitors, fed by overhead cameras which a surprising number of thieves assume to be dummies. Drug addicts, known as desperadoes, are a major problem, accounting for 75 out of the 180 prosecutions this year. Every store detective dreads having a needle pulled on him.

  Not everyone is prosecuted. ‘We’ve got nothing to achieve by putting 60 and 70-year-olds into court. You could kill a person of that age,’ he says. ‘It can cause a lot of bad publicity for the store: “Granny shoplifting takes a stroke and dies – security man last seen heading for the Costa del Sol” . . .’

  12.30 p.m.

  I grab my coat and take a tour round the store with Aileen, a former sales assistant who moved sideways into security. Dressed in jeans and an outdoor jacket, she mingles convincingly with the customers, although the regulars aren’t fooled. On the streets of Glasgow it is not unknown for them to say hello and offer to buy her a drink.

  Since Lewis’s insists on three months’ training before security staff are unleashed on the shop floor, mine is strictly a watching brief. I listen for unfamiliar accents and keep my eyes peeled for prams (which can have false bottoms), duvet anoraks (perfect for poacher’s pockets), big carrier bags and sports holdalls. Amazingly, given this list, they insist they have never stopped a genuine customer. A common trick is for men to take two suits into the changing room and come out with one (embarrassing if you’re caught in the cubicle next door, peeking under the partition to see if the suspect is tucking a pair of trousers into his socks). Hiding booty up a jumper is another favourite. (‘You get women coming in and the next time you see them they’re nine months pregnant.’) ‘Watch their eyes and their hands,’ Aileen advises. ‘Everything else about them is normal.’

  Unfortunately, I find it difficult enough to negotiate the crystalware displays and avoid toppling shelvesful of stuffed hippos in wedding dresses without having to spot shoplifters as well. After countless top-to-bottom tours of the store, all I have to show for my efforts is a mysterious ache in my kidneys.

  3 p.m.

  Christmas Stationery. Underneath a speaker blaring out jazzed-up carols, I am instructed to tidy the card racks. I soon know just how Sisyphus felt. For some reason, no slot contains an equal number of cards and envelopes. In the time it takes me to straighten one row, another three are messed-up. Periodically I am asked if we have a card specifically for a boss/nephew and wife/cousin and husband. I rifle through cards for mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, in-laws – every permutation of human bonding except the one the customer wants.

  If by some miracle I find the right relation, the rhyme inside is unsuitable. One woman looking for a card ‘to a special brother and his wife’ isn’t keen on: Here’s a Xmas wish for you/With more love than before/ To bring you happiness on this day/And throughout the year in store. I take her point. Still, it’s preferable to It’s Xmas, so let’s make music together: you shake your maracas and I’ll play with my organ.

  I go home to a nightmare about mismatched envelopes and wake with a stabbing pain between my shoulder blades.

  À LA MODE, 1990

  Roy Jenkins

  One of the ‘Gang of Four’ who left the Labour Party in 1981 for the newly-formed Social Democratic Party – the others were Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rodgers – Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) won Hillhead from the Conservatives in a by-election the following year. Though he subsequently lost the seat, he retained his affection for Glasgow and when he entered the House of Lords took the title Baron Jenkins of Hillhead. He gave this paean to the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow to mark the city’s year as European City of Culture.

  There is only one word of warning that I must give to Glasgow. Glasgow has ridden high on a mounting wave of fashion in the 1980s. It amuses me to look back over the change in the outside perception of Glasgow during the period that I have been closely associated with the city. When I became Member of Parliament for Hillhead in 1982 I derived a lot of pleasure from surprising people all over the world with the wholly accurate information that my Glasgow constituency was, according to the census, the most highly educated in the whole of the United Kingdom. And I added for good measure that, while it was geographically only one-eleventh of the City of Glasgow, it contained at least fifteen institutions or monuments of major cultural, intellectual or architectural fame. That was all in the days before the Burrell Collection was open. The Burrell (not in Hillhead but three miles away on the South Side), while it is a fine heterogeneous collection, housed in perhaps the best building for a gallery created anywhere in the past quarter-century, adds to what was previously in the Kelvinside Gallery and other Glasgow collections before but does not qualitatively change it. 1982 was also the beginning of the ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ slogan, and before there was much thought of Glasgow being either an important centre of aesthetic tourism or the European City of Culture.

  What has changed since then has been that for three or four years everybody has come to accept these earlier facts without the previous surprise, while for me the sad fact amongst them is that Hillhead has ceased to be my constituency. My warning is that fashion is a fickle jade. Glasgow has been tremendously à la mode for the past five years. But la mode, by its very nature, cannot remain constant. Last week, for the first time in my experience, someone said to me that he thought Glasgow had achieved an exaggerated reputation, and went on to add that he thought Edinburgh – admittedly he lived these – was the cultural as well as the political capital of Scotland. I rocked on my heels in amazement. No one had said such a thing to me for years.

  I do not happen to believe that it is true. Edinburgh has of course great cultural assets, the Festival, the National Gallery of Scotland, the Portrait Gallery, and the copyright library, but they are none of them strictly indigenous. They come from outside or by virtue of capital status rather than arise out of the life of and work of the inhabitants of the city itself, as is the case here. None the less, I think Glasgow must be prepared for the going to be a little harder in future. Having caught and mounted the horse of fashion in the early eighties and dashingly ridden it for seven years or so, Glasgow must be ready for its vagaries soon to take the horse veering off in another direction . . .

  When in 1982 I first came to know Glasgow well, and in particular its West
End, what most struck me was not so much the warmth as the quiet self-confidence. It was not a complacent or narrow or inward-looking self-confidence. It was not based on a desire to keep strangers out, or I would not have been made nearly so welcome. What it was based on was a consciousness of the contribution which this strip of river and hills had made to the advancement of civilisation throughout and beyond Britain, and on a feeling that while it was desirable to go outside the West End from time to time it was as good a place to live as anywhere in the world. It was based neither on complacency nor on any sense of compensating for inferiority, but, as true self-confidence always is, on a desire to learn of outside things accompanied by a contentment within one’s own skin. That is the dominant impression that I retain of Hillhead and of Glasgow as a whole.

  A PINT OF TENNENT’S, 1993

  Bill Bryson

  Ever wondered what it must feel like to be an alien in Glasgow? Or an American? That’s the impression one has of Bill Bryson, who arrived in Glasgow towards the end of a tour of Britain in 1993. Not only did it feel foreign, it sounded it. This was not his first visit. He had been two decades earlier, when no one beat a path to its door. In the intervening years, however, it had been transformed, or so it appeared. Grimy buildings had been sandblasted, Princes Square had been built and the Burrell Collection had been opened. Moreover, ‘In 1990, Glasgow was named European City of Culture, and no one laughed.’ What hadn’t changed was the argot. Apologising to a taxi driver for not speaking Glaswegian, Bryson was told: ‘D’ye dack ma fanny?’ Later he got lost in the Gorbals and decided to seek refuge in a pub. There have been worse ideas, but not many . . .