01: Glasgow
The city of my birth, and even though I no longer live there I still look on it lovingly from a distance as the greatest city on earth. Admittedly, I haven't been to them all. It wouldn’t matter. The others couldn’t compete. The city is a part of my soul and its restless, grounded creativity has hugely influenced the type of person I am today.
The city was going through a period of substantial change in the early 1970s, when The Heady Heights is set. Local Authority policies and indeed, the organisational structures of the Police and the Judiciary were forging new – but not entirely positive – identitities. The East End communities were still suffering from the dislocation caused by the urban clearances of the tenement blocks. Traditional industries such as the Beardmore Steel works which employed thousands of local men were under imminent threat of closure and social deprivation levels were increasing.
This context of apparent socio-economic hopelessness in the light of perpetual change drives the principal Glaswegian characters in ‘The Heady Heights’ to try to achieve better lives for themselves. As is perhaps often the case in such circumstances, the grass is rarely as green and attractive as it appears from the other side of a broken-glass-topped brick wall.
02: 1976
1976 was arguably the best single year in the history of civilisation. Pallid, pasty-faced Glaswegians basked in over forty days of relentless sunshine and ludicrously high temperatures. It was a prolonged ‘taps aff’ vibe that made citizens look up and see parts of the Victorian architecture that they rarely saw when bent over, cowering against the brutal driving rain of a ‘normal’ Scottish summer. Billy Connolly joked that there were only two seasons in Scotland: Winter, and June. Accordingly, our total ignorance of global warming and malignant melanomas made if feel that (a) God was finally smiling on us, so we rejoiced, and our normally blue Scottish skins flaked like never before.
In an era before mobile phones and the internet, people like Archie Blunt had a handful of very close mates. They would never let each other get ideas above their station in life. They would call a pal out to his face when he was being an arsehole. Everyone knew where they stood and who they could rely on. Nowadays, people have thousands of ‘virtual’ friends, all air-kissing and ‘gif-ing’ each other like drugged hippies in a worldwide commune … until one makes a too quickly written mis-step, or ‘likes’ a controversial statement, and then its locked in the stocks of a public shaming from which they might never recover. No wonder there is widespread paranoia and mental illness.
And then just when we had had enough of middle-of-the-road, self-indulgent prog-rock bollocks (Yes, Freddie Mercury etc…I’m talking about you!), Punk Rock came along and saved us all.
Which brings me to…
03: The Sex Pistols
The Sex Pistols last-minute appearance on Bill Grundy’s Today show caused the biggest stink in British TV history. It brought punk to the nation and with delicious irony, it was indirectly Freddie Mercury’s fault.
Queen had been booked to appear on the live 6pm show, but Mercury developed toothache. It was so bad that Queen’s appearance was cancelled. A desperate EMI offered up their new signings, The Sex Pistols as a last-minute replacement to Today’s producers. What happened next changed everything. When Steve Jones responded to Bill Grundy’s dare that he say “something outrageous” with the words “What a fucking rotter”, he fundamentally altered British broadcasting and took punk into the mainstream. In 1976 you just didn’t hear the word ‘fuck’ on the telly. It had in fact only happened twice before in the history of British TV, and questions were raised in Parliament as a result.
In ‘The Heady Heights’, this is a pivotal moment in the story of The High Five.
04: Jim Rockford
Archie’s relationship with his father is changing due to his dad’s accelerating dementia. They find a strong connection through favourite TV programmes, and of these, The Rockford Files is the one that provides an anchor for both through the easy assimilation of the two principal characters; Jim Rockford, and his dad, Rocky.
My own dad and I also loved The Rockford Files. I suspect my dad looked at James Garner (Jim Rockford) as someone he’d like to be mates with; who’d fit in well in the pubs and the bookies around Shettleston. He was one of his favourite actors.
James Garner’s confident affability, his laidback optimism … his gallusness in the face of all threats made him seem more Glaswegian than Californian. His sarcastic wisecracks and crumpled appearance only added to that mystique, and he shuffled through the show like he might realize there were cameras just beyond the fourth wall at any given moment.
Incidentally, one of the award-winning writers for The Rockford Files was a young David Chase, who got his big break on the programme and would later go on to create The Sopranos. Even in the mid-70s, The Rockford Files always seemed a cut above the rest.
05: Mid-70s light entertainment TV
The Heady Heights is an amalgamation of several shows I grew up watching, involving real people with a (sometimes very well hidden) talent desperately aiming to impress the watching public or a panel of judges sufficiently to be awarded a life-changing opportunity at fame. The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?
When I was younger, we lived across the hall from an actor. He appeared on a Scottish serial drama programme called ‘High Living’. He was the barman; a peripheral and generally non-speaking role. When I saw him on the tenement stairs, if felt like encountering an alien. Nowadays, everyone really ison TV, and sadly for longer than their allocated fifteen minutes.
When Archie stumbles inadvertently into a chance opportunity to appear on the national, prime-time Saturday night TV programme, The Heady Heights, it truly does seem unbelievable. But, as he slowly realises that all is not what it might seem with Hank Hendricks and his acolytes, he still can’t reconcile their depravity with the personas of apparently clean-living light entertainment stars. This ‘hiding in plain sight’ now regularly acknowledged about those engaged in such abusive activities remains hard to believe today.
06: Laurel & Hardy
All my books (this is now the fourth) have a Laurel & Hardy reference in there somewhere. Although their comedy was born in a different era, it remains timeless to me. It was another thing that connected my dad and I, and since this story is partly a tribute to him and the generation of Glaswegian men that he was part of, a shared love of Stan & Ollie is one of the first things that Archie thinks about when pondering a life without his father in it.
If you haven’t yet seen it, Jon S. Baird’s brilliant ‘Stan & Ollie’ movie starring Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly captures their enduring appeal far more eloquently than I ever could. I’d urge you to watch it.
07: The Music
My books are full of musical references and the culture of the period that they are a central thread of. This is not merely indulgent retro-nostalgia on my part; the attempt is to create an immersive experience for the reader that they can completely lose themselves. The contrasts between humour and pathos, authenticity and absurdity are often finely balanced ones, but the music plays an important part in creating that grounded context of cultural believability.
As with my other books, The Heady Heights contains a playlist with the records that appear in the story, or that influenced the vibe*
*Perhaps unfairly, this does not include the 7 minutes of absolute shite more commonly known as Bohemian Rhapsody, despite several mentions of it within the text. Then again, it’s mybook!
08: The Central Hotel, Glasgow
The Hotel opened in 1883 and briefly became internationally significant as the destination for the world’s first long distance transmitted television pictures by John Logie Baird in 1927. Sir Winston Churchill and John F Kennedy have been amongst the more recognisable names that have stayed there over the years. Roy Rogers and Trigger are also listed as ‘guests’ although the horse actually stayed at local stables despite the Evening Times reporting otherwise.
For most of his adult life, my dad worked in the vast network of tunnels that ran under the railway station. My mum worked in a secretarial office at the back of the hotel overlooking the concourse. They met at a Railwayman’s Dance in the Hotel’s function room on Hogmanay 1960. He was 25; she was 20. They got engaged a year later. Before she died in 1972, I visited her at work on a few occasions and I still recall the labyrinthine nature of the corridors and routes in the building that led to her office and that expansive view of all those Lowry-like people moving purposefully around the station’s famous concourse.
In 1973, my dad got trapped in one of the hotel’s antiquated lifts with Ken Dodd. The comedian was staying at the hotel while playing a few nights at the Pavilion. For 38 minutes, Robert Ross was a captive, one-man audience.
09: Billy Connolly
‘Glasgow’s a bit like Nashville; it doesn’t care much for the living, but it really looks after the dead.’
‘When I was a boy I was a Catholic. I paid the fine and got out.’
These two brilliant Billy Connolly quotes book-end ‘The Heady Heights’, acknowledging the debt owed to his influence in creating the story and the characters. In the mid-70s, and especially after his first appearance on Parkinson in 1975 – an event he says changed his life completely – Billy Connolly was Glasgow.
Billy Connolly is a genius. The greatest comic storyteller I’ve ever heard. I remember listening to records like Cop Yer Whack For This that my dad and his mates loved. Forty years later, thinking about a book that was composed like an elaborate, long-form Connolly story, full of absurd but realistic Glaswegian characters and billowing, achingly funny digressions.
In the unlikely event that Sir Billy ever reads ‘The Heady Heights’, I hope he’d recognise some of the descriptions of character and places as authentic to the Glasgow he talked (and still talks) about so warmly.
10: My dad
This book is for my dad. He died in 2010, years before my first book was published. He wouldn’t even have been aware that having a novel published was something I’d have been capable of achieving since I never discussed it with him when he was alive.
He was born, grew up, and worked in Glasgow his entire life. He was a man symbiotically linked to the city and the close community of friends and workmates he knew. When circumstances intervened and changed the direction of his - and my – life, he always appeared dislocated by it. A fish (that couldnae swim…) out of water. It was perhaps no great surprise that in later life he moved back to the context that he understood so well.
Archie’s brief dalliance with fame, and the promise of a different life where he might be able to move on from grief and heartache is the central thread of the book, and perhaps me acknowledging – sadly, too late to tell him – that I finally understand the depth and pain of his personal loss.
I hope he would have been pleased with the book, and proud of me for having written it.
