August 2009

Back in the early seventies I was on tour in the UK with the one and only Man Band, and for one show in Glasgow we were all staying in a modern hotel out at Glasgow airport. The morning after the show, before getting in the tour bus to wherever, I took a walk over to the airport to have a look around – the way you do. It was just another airport, but its atmosphere was momentarily diverting. And also there was a great bar there full of all kinds of Glaswegians making sure that they were going to come round on a flight to somewhere feeling completely terrible – it’s a tradition.

I bought a newspaper and looked at the Departures board before heading back to the hotel. Names of destinations in the inner and outer Hebrides were on the board, and these names gave me an unexpected thrill which was to form part of a profound yearning which I was to nurse for a long time. Tiree, Coll, Stornoway, Barra, Benbecula, Balamory,Islay – these beautiful names – names I already knew, but which had not really meant anything to me until this moment. I was transfixed by the idea of flying to any of these places, and later in life, made a point of going to them all – I particularly recommend the flight to Barra in the outer Hebrides: the plane lands on a pure white beach when the tide is out and the airport is a small cabin with sensational views to Eriskay, South Uist, faraway inner Hebrides islands, plus lots of smaller islands upon which nobody has lived for a lamentably long time.

In time I also wanted to go to the west coast port of Oban from which many ferries leave for these islands. For a few years I did go to Oban a lot with friends, often at Christmas, but my life, like everyone else’s, changed, and suddenly I found that I was going to Oban alone, in summer, in winter, whenever it was realistic to depart, and apart from the suffering which I was carrying at that time, I liked going there on my own. It’s a cliché that it is better to journey than to arrive, but in this journeying, both modes were lovely. I was living in London, so first I had to fly to Glasgow and thrill again at the Departures board of flights to the islands. Then I had to get into Glasgow and stay there for the night before getting the early morning train up the coast. At this time there was nobody in Glasgow that I wanted to visit – I’d gone off drugs and violence for a while, so invitations to hard-bitten pubs in dangerous locations held no appeal whatsoever. Instead I’d check into my hotel, go over the road and have a mutton pie supper, then start drinking large whiskies with lager in a variety of tremendous boozers like The Riggs (best pub in UK), The Vale Of Leven (a coincidence), The Virginian, The Stocious Bampot, Rogano’s, The Chib Off The Old Block, The Ramberlin Rose and Sweeny’s One Eyed Doghouse. I didn’t even get talking to people in these joints, apart from transient pleasantries – I was in them to get steamboats (not mortal), then go back to my hotel room to lie there drooling until morning when I awoke feeling like a dead badger wrapped in polythene to the sound of BBC news blaring out of the TV and the Guardian newspaper shoved under my door.

Then I’d go over to Queen Street Station where the trains left for Oban. My elation at being on the train to Oban was a mad one – I was hardly able to contain my excitement – it felt like a thoroughbred achievement, as if somehow the world was mine for a while, and no matter how badly I fucked myself up, nobody could take this away from me. It’s about a three hour journey, and at first the train heads west down the north side of the Clyde through some of the most sobering urban landscapes on the planet, stopping at towns like Helensburgh and Dumbarton. The train slowly turns north west and starts to glide along the sides of lochs like Loch Lomond until suddenly it’s in real Highland territory, flashing past remnants of the great Caledonian pine forests, pausing in towns such as Dalmally and Tyndrum, then on past Loch Awe, through the Pass Of Brander before finally sweeping with a melodramatic flourish into Oban itself where it stops right on the harbour’s edge.

Getting off the train in rain, hail or blazing sun and walking round the harbour to my hotel (usually The Rowantree) felt like an absolute victory: sometimes people, like George The Post, or Allan Morrison would hail me from over the street, saying it was good to see me back, and I knew I’d be yahooing in one or other of the bars later on that night with these invincibly wonderful geezers.

The Rowantree Hotel is a small modern hotel right in the centre of town, with glimpse-style views over the bay to the island of Kerrera, a long brooding island which dominates the scene, with the island of Mull lowering in the background. It’s a simple functional hotel in many ways but very cheery and with a great bar. In this bar I once had an encounter with one of the two bishops of Oban. We got into a desultory talk about the weather over whisky, and then he came over a bit religious. I heard myself saying ‘Of course, you’re probably aware of what the American comedian Lenny Bruce said about religion?’

The bishop gave me a weary and pained look, and said ‘No, but I’ve a feeling I’m about to find out’.

‘Lenny Bruce said ‘More and more people are leaving the church and returning to god’.

He nodded and drained his glass of Old Obama’s Highland Curse: ‘Nice talking to ye’ he said as he left the building without a backwards glance.

During these sojourns, my nights were spent in the many fine pubs – The Oban Inn, The Woodside, Davy’s Gay Locker, The Chieftan O’ The Puddin Race, making new friends and catching up with old ones, drinking a hideous overstrength German beer called Furstenberg and a frightening whisky which claimed on the bottle that the manufacturer (McCallan) had no way of knowing the true strength of the product, hence its name ‘As We Get It’. I was never aware of anybody drinking this except me, and afterwards I wasn’t aware of much at all. But nothing was finer than to wake up the next day feeling like a dog shit on the Marie Celeste, crawl out of bed, buy a newspaper and go to the Rowantree dining room for a big plate of black pudding and scrambled eggs. After this I would go for a long walk, either north or south, along one of the coastal roads – south headed along the water’s edge with the island of Kerrera constantly in view. At one point there was a small ferry stop where you could change the colour on a board to alert the ferryman on the other side to your desire to cross over to the island. The ferryman appears in my song Gylen Gylen – this being the castle on Kerrera.

The other direction takes you round on a beautiful winding road to the small beach at Ganavan, where in Summer there is a restaurant and bar and stunning views of Mull, Lismore and the faraway purple headlands of Morvern. In the afternoons I would go back to the hotel and sleep for a couple of hours, then get up and start writing songs. At this point in my life I hadn’t written any songs since the days of my old band Doll By Doll, and I couldn’t tell if the songs were any good or not, nor did I play them to anyone. I can remember one cold rainy winter’s day when I wrote the songs The Crazy Song, Gylen Gylen and Heartsick Land all in an afternoon.

‘Are these any good?’ I would say out loud to myself before putting the guitar back in its case and going for a curry. At this stage I was a fair ways off from having the confidence to start recording again, but what I was doing was establishing a new discipline of writing which has stayed with me right through to the present – a kind of killer instinct which says – ‘no matter what else is happening in your life, be assured that this writing must be done and you will do it well’. You’ve got to have principle and process – as an old compadre of mine used to say, to disarm opponents in committee meetings at my charity The Core Trust – yes, that’s the principle, but what’s the process?’.....