On the 28th November 2013, it was announced that Leith-born author Irvine Welsh’s cult ‘vernacular spectacular’Trainspotting (1993) had been voted the best Scottish book of the last fifty years, garnering ten per cent of the 8,800 votes cast. One of the most quoted passages in Welsh’s book, and one previously used for party political purposes by the SNP, is the one in which the central protagonist, Renton complains of Scotland being a ‘a country ay failures’, but is at pains to point out ‘it’s nae good blaming it oan the English fur colonizing us.’ This sentiment had been prefigured in the work of the author who came in second on the list, Alasdair Gray (with Lanark (1981)). In his book 1982 Janine (1984) Gray had written, ‘Scotland has been fucked and I am one of the fuckers who fucked her.’ These two books reflect the way in which the political backdrop of Scotland in the 80s and 90s shaped and defined and ultimately, was defined by, the arts and culture that emerged in that period. The generation that has grown up in the intervening twenty-five years since the failed 1979 referendum on Scottish devolution now looks ahead, to the referendum on Scottish independence that will take place in September 2014. It is also a good moment to look back.
Peter Kravitz was the editor of The Edinburgh Review (1984-1990) and editor of Edinburgh-based publisher Polygon (1980-1990), during which time he brought the work of Scottish writers including James Kelman and Janice Galloway to wider attention. He recalled the sense of missed opportunity in the decade that followed the unsuccessful 1979 referendum: ‘In some circles it was known as the ‘deferendum’ due to the lack of nerve exhibited by the electorate.’ Although the Conservatives only won 31% of the vote in Scotland at the 1979 general election that followed the referendum, Britain’s “first past the post” system meant that Scotland was forced to accept the electoral choice of the rest of the UK (Conservative), a situation that would be replicated in every election for the next seventeen years.
The night after Irvine Welsh’s win was announced, on 29th November, I was up late reading around on the internet about the work of Alasdair Gray and James Kelman. I came across an essay called “As it Never Was” (2001) that had been written by Peter Kravitz for the pages of Glasgow-based independent magazine Variant, in which he described how in 1995 The New Yorker had ‘sent Richard Avedon to Glasgow to capture Scotland’s best in a single posed team shot at the [East End pub] the Clutha Vaults.’ An image appeared in my mind of the Clutha Vaults, one of Glasgow’s oldest public houses, which along with the nearby Victoria Bar and the Scotia Bar formed ‘The Stockwell Triangle’ within which folk music and radical activism thrived during the 1980s and 90s, with input from, among others, Billy Connolly and the activist collective Worker’s City. Although I now had a clear image of the photograph and at least some of the people in it, I couldn’t find it online. I idly clicked on Twitter. I read, with complete incredulity, a tweet that had just been posted by Jean Cameron, Glasgow-based art producer: “ apparently helicopter has crashed thru roof of pub full of people.” Cameron’s tweet was the first of thousands that unscrolled through that night and all the next day, as details unfolded of how a police helicopter had fallen “like a stone” out of the sky, straight into the small, busy pub, killing ten and injuring dozens.
Amongst the dead was local poet John McGarrigle. One of his best-known poems, A Refuge, described how even in a litter-strewn Glasgow park, ‘there’s something, that defies this desecration / a sunset unsurpassed.’ His poem was first published in 1988, in a book called Workers City: The Real Glasgow Stands Up, one of a plethora of books and pamphlets published in Scotland in the late 80’s and early 90’s by leftwing independent presses like Clydeside Press, Clocktower Press and Rebel Inc. in Edinburgh. Clutha Vaults, it struck me, as I read the tributes to the people who had formed a human chain to evacuate the injured, was a good example of the tendencies I believe to be characteristic of the Scottish arts scene of the last generation, offering as it did, both what Michael Gardiner called, in his 2006 book From Trocchi to Trainspotting: Scottish Critical Theory Since 1960, ‘a return to an older geopolitics, an attempt to capture folk song in a living form’ and a refuge from official culture and Westminster politics.
In the 1979 election that followed the failed referendum, the Conservatives only won 31% of the vote in Scotland, however owing to Britain’s “first past the post” system, Scotland was forced to accept the electoral choice of the rest of the UK (Conservative): a situation that would continue for the next seventeen years. However, several of the grassroots initiatives that formed in the 1980’s, specifically in Glasgow, such as artist-run gallery Transmission (est. 1983), Variant magazine (est. 1984), Women in Profile (est. 1987, in 1991 evolved into Glasgow Women’s Library), The Free University (est. 1987), Tower Studios (est. 1987) and Worker’s City (est. 1988), were galvanized into action by their opposition to the Thatcher government, and the desire for an arena in which political participation could be enacted through the medium of talk, which was conceptually distinct from the state. Artists began to consider self-organised public meetings as a necessity, and worked to establish places where some of the divisions and contradictions of communal, lived politics could be expressed.
The predominantly self-organised arts infrastructure that emerged during the long years of unwanted Conservative rule was an actualization of community organizer Saul Alinsky’s dictum from Rules for Radicals (1971): “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Following the 1997 General Election, when Tony Blair won with the party’s highest ever number of Parliamentary seats, Labour initiated parliamentary reform in Scotland and Wales, which led a few months later to a referendum on devolution for Scotland and Wales, which demonstrated public support for devolved parliaments in both countries, which met in 1999. Increased public subsidy of the arts in Scotland from the late 90s onwards has helped to build upon the momentum of the 1980s and early 90s, not only in Glasgow, but throughout Scotland. In the decade that followed the introduction of the National Lottery in 1994, the Scottish Arts Council distributed over £219 million to the arts in Scotland. Since that second successful referendum, and under first Labour and then SNP governments, funding for the arts in Scotland has been protected. Since the late 90s, the art scene in Glasgow in particular has expanded and diversified in many ways, from galleries like The Modern Institute (1998-), Sorcha Dallas (2004-2011), Mary Mary (est. 2006), SWG3 (est. 2005, with addition of The Poetry Club in 2012), The Common Guild (est. 2006), The Duchy (est. 2009), David Dale Gallery (est. 2009) and Kendall Koppe (est. 2011), to record labels like Chemikal Underground (est. 1994), Rock Action (est.1996) and Optimo Music (est. 2009) and advocates of literature such as Aye Aye Books (est. 2006) and Good Press (est. 2011) and publishing imprints such as Freight (est. 2004) and Cargo (est. 2009).
Discussions around the approaching referendum on Scottish independence have become increasingly divisive in recent months, as the rival ‘Yes’ and ‘Better Together’ groups have attempted to muster support. Richard Sennett observed in his recent book Together (2012) that ‘Today, the crossed effect of desire for reassuring solidarity and economic insecurity is to render social life brutally simple: us-against-them coupled with you-are-on-your-own. But I’d insist we dwell in the condition of ‘not yet.’’ The arts scene in Scotland remains distinctive owing to the foundations that were laid during the Thatcher years, and at its core the scene is not motivated by profit, but instead rooted in a desired social experience: one that rests upon people investing time in supporting one another. That legacy will continue to benefit Scottish artists of all stripes, for as long as we are able to maintain our predilection towards social co-operation, collectivism and conviviality.
This essay was commissioned for Issue 1 of The Poetry Club’s Paraphernalia Magazine, Spring 2014 issuu.com
