Dundee: Dour Fun, Weird Love
(The following is the original version of the script to the STV programme Dour Fun, directed by Valerie Lyon, and presented by that tcheuchter Herbert. It was quite sensibly cut in half for broadcast, but he can't find that version)
I remember the first time I heard that Talking Heads song: you
know, the one that goes "Heaven is a place where nothing
ever happens." I remember thinking, "Actually pal, no:
Dundee is the place where nothing ever happens." And with a
deadening intensity that's practically profound. That would be
about the last time I actually lived in Dundee: late teens, early
twenties. When I wrote the Dundee Doldrums : a set of
poems about our early eighties identity crisis; the collapse of
industries, the absolute absence of culture. Since then I keep
popping back to write equally cheerful things. And yet I don't
dislike the place: quite the opposite, I'm obsessed by Dundee to
an unhealthy degree: I stalk it.
Dundee is the Scottish city no-one seems to visit, or if they do,
they don't stay long. Its inhabitants tend either to stay very
put, or to move very far away. I've had conversations with
Dundonians as far afield as Moscow, in which they claimed it was
the perfect place to live -- if it wasn't for the place itself.
No-one once caught up by Dundee ever seems to really leave. It
seems to inspire a very weird kind of love often
indistinguishable from hate.
In the last fifteen years or so something has changed. Suddenly
the city is full of writers, poets, dramatists, painters --
passing through or learning their trade or have-always-been-here,
always-will. Exiles like myself, Lundonians and Dunwegians, look
at Dundee now and wonder how their jobs and families got them
stuck so far away. All those unwritten books, unpainted pictures,
lost plays and unrecorded music are at last being accomplished.
Why? What's happened to turn things around, and how deep has the
change actually gone?
Do these new Dundonians have any sense of our complex layers of
past? Are they really representing the city or simply inhabiting
it? Will we see a true image of Dundee at last or simply another
quick-fit photo-shoot, a shallow cut and paste, a few new labels
slapped over the old, just as shabby and inadequate? Or is this a
good time, the best of times, to look at the hame toon of
McGonagall?
You can't call Dundee's the city of the 3Js anymore. Jam? A city
built on jam? It was marmalade really, but you'd be forgiven for
imagining us all jiggling away to Bob Marley. Dundonians dance?
Like hell -- except we've got Scotland's only full time
professional dance company, Scottish Dance Theatre , based in the
Rep, and Dundee College runs the only contemporary dance course
in Scotland. Then there's jute -- what exactly is jute again? And
as for journalism, well, that gives an accurate picture. Read us
through our comics and we're all juvenile delinquents in stripy
jumpers and spiky hair, we've all got bunnits and handlebar
moustaches, and we obsessively spy on each other like old pointy
nose herself, Keyhole Kate. Our newspaper magnates, the couthy
auld Thomsons, may have modelled themselves on Hearst, but no-one
set Citizen Kane in Dundee. What about all that anarchic cartoon
energy pouring out of a company that's only just taken the
classified ads off the front page of The Courier: are we a toun
capable of dour fun?
In recent years there have been attempts to label Dundee the city
of Discovery, after the ship that delivered Captain Scott to the
pole for one last icy stroll, but these are almost as daft as
continuing to package the 3Js. Perhaps the problem is that Dundee
doesn't really have an image of itself to sell to Scotland and
the world. Maybe we don't have a strong enough image anyway, or
maybe the truth about Dundee is a little too complex to fit on a
car sticker.
Other cities have writers and artists that chronicle their
histories and their lifestyles, that reflect the city back at
itself. Edinburgh's got Robert Louis Stevenson, Norman MacCaig
and Irvine Welsh; Glasgow's got Rennie Mackintosh and schools of
painters, not to mention Alasdair Gray and Edwin Morgan and James
Kelman and Liz Lochhead and Tom Leonard and (somebody stop me).
Even Oban's got Iain Crichton Smith and Alan Warner. What has
Dundee got? A terrible novel about burning a witch and an even
worse one about the rail bridge faain doon -- and McGonagall. The
Worst Poet in the World. Definitely. The one that enables chumps
and numpties to laugh at the whole idea of poetry and culture at
large. A cartoon icon as Desperate as Dan, a monster as
problematic as Mister Hyde. He's Dundee's very own Don Quixote
and Sancha Panza all rolled into one. We hate him and love him
almost as much as we hate and love the city itself. He's our idol
with the heid of clay and the Tay Whale's his Greyfriars Bobby.
What can be said about this city, this radical toun, that can
crawl out from under the shadow of McGonagall's mediocrity? Look
at it, sitting right on the broad and very silvery Tay, spread
out between three ex-volcanoes: Balgay, the Law, and Reres. The
city looks south under big hopeful skies, it looks to Europe for
its trade and its ideas. What a beautiful location to spoil with
incessant demolitions, moronic constructions and two
heartbreakingly average football teams (except for Billy Dodds).
Dundee has always been a mercantile city: open to the continent
since medieval times, receiving goods from France and Holland and
Germany. Knee deep in claret for centuries and, like any port,
awash in infectious thoughts. This was where Wallace caught a bad
dose of Liberty whilst attending the High School, and stabbed the
Englishman Selby. And this was where that plague Calvinism was
unloaded from ships and packed off to the depths of the Scottish
psyche. In a sixteenth century full of political turbulence and
religious chicanery, this was the Geneva of Scotland. Dundee
tends to stand in for Moscow in BBC dramas, but in the sixteenth
century, there really was a revolution going on here.
When a culture goes into crisis it suddenly starts to think about
its own identity, it starts to need, desperately, some clarity.
That was what happened in Dundee as Timex closed in the early
nineties. And one upshot was cultural: Alan Spence's On the
Line . In the sixteenth century the Reformation was doing
much the same destructive work to our sense of ourselves. The
overthrowing of Catholicism, the destabilising of the Scottish
throne, engaged some of the most brilliant writers Dundee has
produced: the Wedderburn brothers, James, John and Robert -- the
3Ws. In poetry, prose and drama they addressed all sides of this
debate -- and James's agitprop satires were performed at the West
Port, attracting an audience of ordinary Dundonians in exactly
the same way the Rep has done: imagine They Fairly Mak Ye
Work and The Mill Lavvies rewritten by Ben Jonson
and you'll get some idea of the trilogy of Dundonian dramas now
lost to us. And these were times when people got burnt for
writing a play.
In the seventeenth century the various small sackings and
puttings to the sword endured by most Scottish cities coalesced
for Dundee into one big Cromwellian apocalypse called General
Monk. Only in Ireland were worse deeds done. He removed the town
from history for a spell, especially as, when he was massacring
the last defenders holed up in St Mary's Tower, he burnt most of
the town's records as well. Its history, its whole sense of
itself, went up in smoke. When it came to, there was no culture
left: only merchants and guilds, industrialists and workers,
quick profits and radical protests.
Ready obliteration and hasty regeneration became our model. We
grabbed onto new industries as they arrived, gave our all to
them, then watched as they each turned belly up and floated away.
We jumped on the jute bandwagon and made money while the slave
plantations were elsewhere engaged during the American Civil War,
then lost out to cheap labour in Calcutta. Floods of cheap
Catholic labour came in from Ireland, fuelling sectarian
divisions and putting the final shine on our distinctive accent.
And incidentally ensuring Dundee was the city where McGonagall
came to a kind of maturity -- throttling folk art into his
dreadful poetic whine. We jumped in whale boats and harpooned the
blubbery lot to near extinction. Just imagine if Moby Dick had
been written by a Dundonian.
And we made watches with precision and typical dogged
determination till Timex found it cheaper to go to the equivalent
of Calcutta. And all the time our buildings were being thrown up
and torn down with a tasteless relish for the latest monstrosity
or biggest backhander that knocked our sense of civic identity
sideways into that capacious pit: the
working class memory.
Only by remembering everything did our fathers
and mothers and grandparents maintain a sense of the place: all
those things that keep you going when you work in the mills and
the docks and you don't earn enough to feed your children or for
them to get enough of an education to get out -- dance halls and
cinemas and shop names; configurations of streets and closes
where the relatives lived: the smell and the feel of the
buildings being knocked down all round you till only the litany
of the names survived, streets and shop owners and the products
you could afford and the tools you used and the names of friends
and relatives and when and how they died.
What turns a city round from industrial desert to cultural oasis?
Not just a crisis or two or three: we lost whaling, then jute,
then watchmaking, before we seemed to open our eyes and our
mouths. Not just good education as the continuing brain drain to
far-off or exciting or well-paid positions demonstrates. If
Dundee is really going to turn any cultural corners, it has to
waken up to all of its resources, to every art form. Because we
have a unique collision of high and low culture, where the
under-appreciated meets the profitable, and the popular
influences the hard-to-get-a-handle-on. There's nothing simple
about Dundee, nothing you can turn into a slogan. We're not cool
like Britannia, nor miles better like Glasgow. God knows the
first thing you find out is we're not the city of Discovery.
We're deadpan, stare-ye-out, kent-yir-faither but nivir-heard-
o-you. We're difficult and decent, Calvinist and Communist, good
hearts and complex souls. Christ that's it -- we're the real
thing. No wonder naebody wants to know us.
Links
http://www.ukguide.org/uk/dundee.html
http://www.taynet.co.uk/users/mcgon/
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