Plain Or Pan

Sunday morning coming down. I was thinking about War Memorials; how every town and city the length and breadth of the country has one and that each name on every monument has a story to tell. The greatest thing I’ve ever done in my day job was enabling a class of young learners to research the local war memorial as a way of uncovering the stories behind the names chiselled into the sandstone and marble. The kids cracked open a wide seam of local social and historical significance. Underage conscripts, entire families of infantrymen who failed to return from France and Belgium, a soldier that had – incredibly! – once lived in the same house as one of the pupils, entire streets and streets and streets in the town named after its fallen sons… At the project’s conclusion I was invited to chat to various community and church groups to talk about what we’d uncovered. I’d always end my talk with the line that this was just one wee war memorial in one wee town – lest we forget that every town in the county had their own war memorials, no doubt containing similar as yet undiscovered stories just below the surface of brass and stone, waiting for the nosy and curious of the town to scratch beneath the surface one day to expose them.

I’d used the war memorials story as an analogy to a pal on Saturday night. We were out in Irvine, my hometown, to hear local boy made good, the writer Andrew O’Hagan chat to local girl made good, former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon about Mayflies, the novel that has propelled Andrew from the relative margins to the slap-bang-in-the-middle mainstream, with TV adaptations and translations into over 30 languages cementing just how good, just how essential the novel is. Modern classic? I’d say so. There won’t be many here who haven’t read it. Those who as yet haven’t will want to rectify that. 

Andrew O’Hagan is a great speaker; educated, philosophical, funny, self-deprecating and eloquent. “Eloquent as fuck!” as I quipped later on. He’s been all around the globe at all manner of high fallutin’ literary events, but back in Irvine he slips easily into the Ayrshire dialect of his youth, talking about how we in the west of Scotland use the ‘f’ word as punctuation and how some of the actors casting for the TV adaptation didn’t quite get the proper handle on the emphasis of the book’s incidental swearing.

Nicola Sturgeon has spent a lifetime in politics and as such can talk on any given subject. Indeed, she too is funny, self-deprecating and eloquent. Back in her hometown, she also slips back into a local dialect that has never really abandoned her, aligning her teenage years to that of Andrew’s through shared experiences at political meetings in the Volunteer Rooms (different parties, different rooms, but a shared loathing for the Conservative government) and in the Magnum, the oasis of the Irvine teenager in those awkward pre-pub days. She has real presence and charisma and when the talk inevitably turns political (the book’s background is political, after all), she speaks not in political soundbites but in plain and common, non-patronising terms. I liked her already, but I like her even more after this. As a duo, O’Hagan and Sturgeon would brighten the sofas of any chat show looking for fresh ideas.  

Mayflies, as the clued-in amongst you know, centres around the friendship between a group of politically-charged, music-obsessed teenagers in 1980s Irvine, growing up against a backdrop of mass local unemployment, the Thatcher government’s relentless decimation of dignity in the working class and their determination to break free of the pre-determined mould that their lives seem cast in. The pages zing with brilliantly chosen words, viciously delicious conversational patter and multiple references to The Smiths and New Order and The Fall and The Shop Assistants, until the real crux of the story is revealed; one of the group, Tully, is terminally ill and wants his best pal Noodles to help him in his final months and weeks.

Mayflies is purely autobiographical. O’Hagan is Noodles. Tully is Keith Martin. And Keith, like Tully in the book, had cancer. In his dying days he asked Andrew to write about him, write about them; their strong friendship, the stuff and nonsense they got up to with their gang of like-minded, socially-conscious music nuts. The gigs, the girls, the gang mentality of a group still tight-knit to this day.

Everyone in Irvine knew Martian. Everyone. He was funny, kind, inquisitive, interested in you and what you had to offer, yet with a ferocious rapier wit that you didn’t want to be on the wrong end of.

At the bar in the snug of The Turf one night, Keith made a beeline for where the 17-year old me was standing. I pretended not to see him while he mentally sized up the double denim I’d dared to dress myself in. “Shift up, Shaky, and let me in,” he said as he elbowed his way into the bar. Hardly harsh by Martian’s standards, but a first-hand experience of his pop culture-referencing sense of humour. For the next few months, an unfortunate but accurate nickname came my way. Keith would never pass without an, “Awright, Shaky?”

I watched from a safe periphery as O’Hagan and Martian and their gang held court, a rabble of loud opinions, leather jackets and, to use a line that I believe Andrew appropriated from a previous post on these very pages, a riot of considered hair. Sculpted, Brylcreemed Simonon quiffs, elegant and pop starrish and effortlessly just right. I didn’t yet know anyone that might play in a band, but these guys exuded exactly that. 

The Big Gun – Heard About Love

Keith and co did indeed constitute a band, the Peel-spun Big Gun. The handsome Keith was the group’s guitar-playing, lead singing focal point. This being the ’80s, O’Hagan was the band’s crucial tambourine player. Effervescent in a Buzzcocks meets Orange Juice fashion, The Big Gun promised much in an era when guitar bands were where it was at. The fantastic Heard About Love single would prove to be their lasting legacy though, a fizzing, climbing chord progression with a neat, nagging hook line – exactly the sort of track that should have seen the band become more well known beyond late night radio and the jukebox in The Turf.

That noisy group of agitators in The Turf contained not only apprentice popstars from multiple original and exciting bands. There were painters and artists and textile students and designers too. Real creative sorts that would go on to carve out interesting lines of paid employment. Andrew O’Hagan would soon swap the rattle of the tambourine for the rattle of the typewriter, decamped outside Fred and Rose West’s house to report on every gruesome going on, prolific and punchy with his prose, alternating easily between fact and fiction for each subsequent essay or article or novel. The acerbic John Niven, himself no stranger to the business end of an electric guitar, would weave his way through the music business of the early 90s before he too picked up a pen to put his outlandish and hedonistic experiences down on paper. If you’ve read Mayflies and you’re looking for a companion piece, John’s latest novel, ‘O Brother‘ and its memory triggers for life growing up in Irvine can’t come recommended highly enough.

Something was in the air of that pub. Or maybe it was in the beer. But for a small town, Irvine had a high proportion of creative minds, eager to make their mark by producing great work from straight outta the thin and clear seaside air. 

History shows that this is nothing new. The political novelist John Galt was born in Irvine in 1779, his words ringing the wrongs of the Industrial Revolution. Two years after Galt’s birth, Robert Burns found himself a job in (and setting fire to) the town’s heckling shop. It was his friendship with local sea captain Richard Brown that stopped Burns from giving up a career in writing. Brown encouraged Burns to keep at it, and a National Bard was born. That particular story is told in song in I Hung My Harp Upon The Willows by, yes, the Irvine band Trashcan Sinatras. Even Edgar Allan Poe’s 19th century gothic horror has roots in the town, his The Pit And The Pendulum inspired, they say, by the grand old clock that kept time in Irvine Royal Academy’s main hall. Irvine, it seems, has always been – and always will be – a hotbed of unique creativity. 

I like to think that the scene that unfolded every Friday and Saturday night in that 1980s Turf was every bit as fertile as the Beat scene in New York, with Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs holding court in the bars around Columbia University, or  ‘20s Paris, with Dali, Matisse and Picasso the universe around which all Parisienne creativity orbited. But I also wonder if every wee provincial town, close to the city, but not so close as to be consumed by it, had the same creative noise as Irvine. Was there a pub in Elgin that was the equivalent? Or Hamilton? Or Stranraer, Kirkcaldy or Denny? Is it just that no-one has thought to join the dots of the goings-on in these places? Am I making too much of the Irvine scene, or is it that I’m the only person who’s chosen to shout about it? We Scots aren’t known for bullishness and self-promotion after all. Just as every town has a war memorial, does every town also have a Keith and Andrew, a Tully and Noodles, and a whirlwind of artistic possibility ricocheting around them like a jittery Alex Higgins break? I’m not so sure. Irvine, as it turns out, seems to have been quite the remarkable wee town in this respect.