SEPTEMBER 14TH, 2007 | ARCHIVE

Stevie in the graveyard

Got to go pick up the Cooke. Got to take his picture. That’s my project this week. Taking pictures of the band in some of their favourite spots in Glasgow. That’s the theme of the calender this year. Marisa’s doing most of the pictures, but she’s off to sunny Spain, so I’m running about doing some of the outdoor ones.

I took pics of Stevie in the graveyard yesterday. There’s a big heaped mausoleum called ‘The Necropolis’ next to our ancient cathedral. It’s a good place, where goths and neds collide. It’s usually pretty quiet. A guy comes up to us though.

“Are you artists? Photographers?”
“Not really”
“Want to take a picture of a scar?”

Immediately the first episode of Father Ted comes to mind when the man from the TV comes to Craggy Island and meets madman Tom with the ‘I shot JR’ t-shirt on.

“It’s a cracker…look at that.”

The man looks as if at one stage his head had practically been severed at the neck.

“I got that in Notting Hill, in the Carnival.”
“Are you feeling better now.”
“Och, I still get headaches. They had to go into my brain. Keyhole surgery. Because they cut me here..”

..points to neck..

“…it stopped the blood going here..."

..points to brain..

“Ah.”
“I just came up here for a few tins. You sure you don’t want a picture?”
“No, I’m just doing landscapes. I’m working for him.”
And I point to Stevie.

He goes off.
“Did you see he had one hand behind his back the whole time? I thought he was going to pull a knife,” says Stevie.

It never occurred to me that the guy might mean any trouble. As we proceed I play over in my mind what would have happened if the guy had pulled a knife. I would have thrown him over the parapet of the graveyard, and he would have broken his neck or something. And I would have gone to prison for 5 years for killing someone. And that wouldn’t have been good.

Wouldn’t have been too good for the guy either. You can’t go throwing people over parapets, even when they’re trying to chib you. One must exercise caution even when a fellow’s trying to open you up like a side of veal. That’s the rule.

Better go get the Cooke now, and I’ll catch up with you later on. I’ve got to tell you about the the Throwing Muses and the bath. And the cheesemonger who was threatened by saffron.

Later

Yeah, so it’s been an ok sort of a week. Wednesday I was out taking pictures of Sarah up the canal. We walked for quite some distance, me with my big lens, her with her bicycle, looking for an interesting perspective. The funny thing was that there was plenty other girls out walking the canal, looking for some sort of perspective.

My guess is that they just came back to Glasgow from their summer jaunts, and they thought they’d try to connect/reconnect with the city by getting down and dirty, up the old canal path; breathing in some industrial grime before retiring to their books and lectures for the rest of the year. Rest of the year is right as well! Listen boys, if you want to see a good looking girl on the street of this beloved city, then get out and look now, because come the first of October they bury themselves under books and blankets, and that’s IT until May…

So it’s Friday night and I’m staying into listen to Abba because I’m gay. Last night after football, I got into the tub and put on my big noise cancelling headphones and a few candles, and started downloading Throwing Muses stuff, or at least trying to. It’s a good feeling to go shopping for music in the bath. A very good feeling.

So there I was listening to the Muses, and loving it. I never really listened to them since the Eighties. Then, I used to LOVE them. I mean, they were my number one for a year or so, and that year was a very long and formative one.

The Fat Skier

That year, that summer, I moved into this house, my first room in a house. I didn’t know the neighbours, but I wanted to know them.

I had The Fat Skier by Throwing Muses and it was just blowing my mind on an hourly basis. I had other records, but that was the one I remember. My bed was old and springy. The wardrobe was in front of the window, one of my flatmates I suspected of being a bit of an NF goth, but friendly with it. (That’s the thing about the NF, they are friendly if they like the look of you.)

I dunno, I didn’t stay in that flat too long. I think there was a schoolteacher lady who didn’t like where I left my cereal box in the kitchen. So I left the wardrobe where it was, took my copy of The Fat Skier (those girls had cast a spell on me by that time) and moved back closer to the exact geometric centre of the Old West, down off that hill, back to Oakfield Avenue.

I got a place of my own, a small bed-sit. It was next to the mosque. In fact the dudes in the mosque were my landlords, and everyone else that lived there was in the mosque, apart from Peter, who moved in downstairs.

I liked it there. I even didn’t mind it too much when someone scraped

“WHITEY GO HOME”

into the door of my crappy Peugeot 104. I was home already! Where did they want me to go!

(I bumped into John from the 1990s a while back and he asked me

“Still living in the West End?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Southside too black for you?”

No. No. I LIVE here. That’s it. Leave me alone..)

What’s that got to do with the rest of my week? Not too much. I'll tell you the rest tomorrow. For the minute I'm going to listen to Samson by Regina Spector. She actually made a tear well up when she played it at in concert a few weeks back, but I promptly squeezed it back in.

Archive