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Thoughts on Homecoming
To celebrate the start of the Year of Homecoming, The List magazine ran a funny feature this week called 79 Great Things About Scotland. Number two, right after Robert Burns, was Tunnock’s Tea Cakes. The joke, obviously, was that lists like this are ridiculous (a point rammed home by the completely random number - why 79, for heaven’s sake?). Other choices included ‘hot toddies’ and ‘having the Gay Gordons hardwired into you as part of your physical education’. It was, some might say, a very Scottish way of celebrating the Year of Homecoming - somehow turning ‘we’re great’ into a joke at our own expense.
The List knew exactly what it was doing, I’m guessing - it was having its Tea Cake and eating it. No Scottish publication wants to risk alienating its readers by mocking the Year of Homecoming, just in case they’re feeling more patriotic than it is. On the other hand, I don’t imagine any of them want to be an uninhibited cheerleader for it either. The YOH, after all, has an inescapable smell of naffness about it (as embodied by the advert above). Even Alex Salmond, smart operator that he is, knows this. But he also knows that, if cynicism and self-deprecation appear to be hardwired into the Scottish psyche like the Gay Gordon’s, then misty-eyed nostalgia, sentimentality and patriotism is too, especially among ex-pats. And this will, in theory, make the Scottish tourism industry lots of money this year - and who wants to sound like they’re trying to undermine that?
Like many people living and working here, I’m ambivalent about the Year of Homecoming. The version of Scotland its marketing team is trying to sell to the world—tartan, misty glens, Sean Connery, Rabbie Burns - means very little to me. Culturally, the Scotland that excites me is the Scotland I see all around me right now - of Franz Ferdinand and Twilight Sad, of David Mackenzie and Lynne Ramsay, of Alasdair Gray and Janice Galloway, of Instal and Kill Your Timid Notion, of the National Theatre of Scotland and the National Review of Live Art, of David Greig and David Leddy, of Glasgow International and Glasgay, of T in the Park and Connect, of the Arches and the Bongo Club and the Traverse. These people - or the people who made these things - have little in common with each other. A lot of them weren’t even born in Scotland, but made a home here (like I did), bringing a fresh outsider’s perspective with them. Partly for this reason, they represent a Scotland that’s hard to pin down or package for tourists. They’re products of a constantly changing, constantly evolving country.
The first piece of Scottish theatre I got really excited about was Mainstream by David Greig. I saw it, I think, at the Arches, which has always been an exciting place to see theatre because it doesn’t feel anything like a theatre (it’s a big cave, basically, in a network of railway tunnels), so you go in immediately expecting the unconventional. Partly because of this, and partly because the venue also runs gigs and club nights and there’s a lot of audience crossover, the crowd tends to be young and excitable. I was young and excitable too, which probably influenced my opinion quite a bit, but one thing I remember about the play was that it was recognisably Scottish (Scottish accents, Scottish reference points) but that its Scottishness was incidental. It was set in a hotel that could be anywhere. It had four actors playing two characters, replaying one hotel lobby encounter over and over again with minor variations, the recurring motif being that there is no such thing as a ‘mainstream’ person, that everyone has their own unique quirks. To define someone as ‘mainstream’ is to dehumanise them.
This was exciting to me, because it was what I instinctively felt people are like. I’ve always felt that all stereotypes - national, cultural, racial, class-based, whatever - are mostly useless, an idea hardwired into me from an early age for all kinds of reasons - at school, I was seen as the ‘posh’ kid in a northern English town, simply because of the way I spoke (I grew up in a home where Radio 4 was on most of the time, but we weren’t posh by any stretch) and rapidly rejected class stereotypes. For a lot of my teenage years I was assumed to be gay, which taught me that sexual stereotypes are often useless too. I then moved to Scotland, brandishing an English accent. I have spent much of my life being mildly irritated at people’s attempts to define me as something that I’m not. I love being half Scottish, half English, at home in two countries but belonging to neither. No nation has a claim on me.
That said, I can’t help feeling excited when Scots do well. Franz Ferdinand were one of my favourite bands for a long time (although I’ve had a crisis of faith recently, after their way too cautious and very overrated third album). I was excited by them partly because they were hugely successful ambassadors for a very contemporary Scotland that I recognised - they dressed like people I know (and, in fact, knew a lot of the people I knew) and had the same reference points and favourite hangouts as me. That was useful to me, as much as anything else - every record they sold punctured idiotic, stereotypical assumptions about what kind of music Scots should be making. They, like Chemikal Underground but more so because of their level of success, inspired a lot of bands - including us - to realise that they would have just as much chance of getting their music heard by staying exactly where they were and doing things on their own terms as they would by meekly attempting to get people in London to pay attention (an idea that seems ridiculously obvious now, but wasn’t at the time).
It was an odd thing. I was proud to be from the same country as Franz, for all kinds of reasons, but at the same time one of the things I liked most about them was that, like David Greig’s plays, their Scottishness was incidental. Their songs had references to places like the Transmission gallery, but musically they could just as easily have come from New York as from Glasgow. Half of them aren’t even Scottish. But somehow they fit in here perfectly, and they know it. They recognise that the place where they formed is somehow part of what makes them work as a unit - which is, I’m guessing, why they recorded their new album in Govan Town Hall. But at the same time they are not tied to any particular idea of Scotland - to watch a band like that operate is to see Scotland evolving before your eyes.
Hamish and I have always made a point of saying that we are not a Scottish band but a band who happen to be based in Scotland. Our reference points - like everybody’s, in this age of mass global communication - come from everywhere. It always amuses me when reviewers suggest that we’re influenced by the Blue Nile, the Associates and Belle and Sebastian - three bands that have nothing in common with each other musically but are all Scottish. As if we spent our youths exclusively listening to Scottish music. The title of our first album, The Regional Variations, was a kind of defiant response to this (and, I have realised over time, a bit of a homage to all the things I liked about Mainstream). Everyone is a regional variation, the ‘centre’ is an imaginary place. We feel very at home in Scotland, while keeping a cautious distance from it.
There’s nothing wrong with a nation exploring its own identity, asking itself who and what it is. It’s to be enthusiastically encouraged, in fact. But I haven’t seen a lot of that yet from the Year of Homecoming. All I see, for the most part, is lots of pictures of Robert Burns. Nothing against Burns either, just a long-held suspicion of the idea of any single artist representing a nation. Artists should represent no one but themselves, or they are not artists at all - they are politicians, or diplomats, or PR people. Artists, if they take what they do seriously, should constantly resist any attempt to define them or pigeonhole them - and that includes defining them as representatives of a nation, however flattering that might be to their egos. You let other people tell you who you are, and what you represent, and you undermine any claim you have to be an artist. When I read about Sandi Thom marketing her latest tour as her ‘Homecoming tour’, I cringe. It feels like the same careerist bandwagon-jumping as her PR company’s attempt to sell her as an internet sensation. Did she learn nothing from that whole fiasco?
But then the Year of Homecoming is not about art, for the most part. It’s about politics (Alex Salmond grooming us all for nationalism once again - which is fine with me if we can actually afford it) and tourism (fine, we need the money to pay for the nationalism). It’s about a nation taking pride in its achievements (again, fine with me, as long as it’s not done dishonestly, mawkishly, stupidly, or exploitatively). At a stretch, it’s about encouraging its ex-pats to think about who they are and where they come from (I have no problem with that either, as long as it doesn’t descend into racism).
But artistically, so far at least, it means no more to me, or most people I know, than that list of 79 Great Things About Scotland. Turn the page and it disappears, forgotten. I doubt I’ll miss it much. I’m more excited about the new Twilight Sad album, and about this year’s Instal. That’s my Scotland.
Andrew
