It is 7.15 p.m. on a Thursday night in January 2001. I am over-stretched, trying to write a patient report, prepare a lecture, clean up the dog pee and check on a child’s homework before Billy and I leave for a charity event in Beverly Hills. We are due there at eight. Billy pops his head in to remind me that I have just fifteen minutes to get dressed for what will be a very flashy, public event. Twenty minutes later, I climb into the car, breathing heavily. I am now wearing a new outfit that seemed like a good idea a few minutes ago.
‘Jesus, Pamsy,’ he exclaims, ‘you look like you glued your body and dived into the wardrobe.’
I shoot him a look, which causes him to revise his comment.
‘No, I mean, you look great … er, did you try that on in the shop?’
In the folk scene, Billy discovered that when he made his highly original observations about humanity, people found him very funny. It was a revelation to him that not only were his singing and playing appreciated, he was masterful at engaging people with his words and body movements alone. He was lucky to have the kind of freedom to experiment that was afforded by the folk clubs. There was no intrinsic expectation that he would do any more than sing a song or two, so he had the glorious luxury of being able to improvise without any pressure. In the process, he made all kinds of discoveries about what audiences found comical. If he spoke explicitly about sex rather than just hinting at it, it could be mind-bendingly funny. When the audience reacted by screaming, he knew they’d never heard anybody saying anything like that before. He was developing an ability to anticipate laughter from an audience but, best of all, when he was unintentionally funny he did not try to prevent or analyse that process.
He began to write humorous, often satirical songs. One was about the familiar Glasgow tenement problem of having an outside toilet.
‘Oh dear, what can the matter be
I’m scared to go to the lavatory
I haven’t been since two weeks last Saturday
I know who’s hiding in there.’
People just exploded and that thrilled Billy. It was lovely for his audiences, too, to see a performer from their own cultural background with whom they resonated. Eventually, Billy began to feel more confident in his ability to slay the audience on any given night.
Billy’s most remarkable surge ever in the development of his comedy occurred in 1970, after the Humblebums split up. Gerry was desperate to be known as the great songwriter he was. Near the end of their final tour together, they were avoiding each other’s gaze, shuffling their feet in Glasgow’s Queen Street Station. Both of them knew it was time to call it quits. ‘This is daft,’ said Billy.
Gerry went back to London to get his own band together, and build a better platform for his extraordinary songs. His first album, Stealer’s Wheel was a beauty. Billy was very nervous at the prospect of working on his own, which astonished Gerry, who had no doubt that Billy would go on from strength to strength … although he would never have predicted Billy’s international success. ‘It didn’t surprise me that he went on to achieve great solo success,’ says Gerry today, ‘but I was surprised by the scale of it. He was so much rooted in the west of Scotland, I imagined he might not travel very far. I was fundamentally wrong.’
The folk-singing artist Ralph McTell had been signed to Transatlantic Records around the same time as the Humblebums. When he first met them in London, Ralph thought Billy was ‘not cool’, beneath London standards, an ‘exotic hippie person, completely over-the-top in green velvet flares’. Ralph was a denim kid at the time, locked into a Woody Guthrie reverie. He thought Gerry sounded a bit ‘Paul McCartneyish’ but he loved Billy’s banjo playing.
In Ralph’s opinion, the relationship between Billy and Gerry became destructive to Billy in some ways. ‘Billy’s a fine musician,’ Ralph says. ‘He has a deep, pure love for the banjo and loves mountain music and primitive styles of playing: working-people’s music. Gerry, on the other hand, wrote sophisticated, rather urbane songs. Billy is rooted in a different place from Gerry and, during the course of their association, he ended up being punished for it, relegated to doing comic interludes and a bit of accompaniment.’
From Gerry’s perspective. Billy was just developing more as a comedian. ‘The jokes were getting longer and the musical content shorter and I was frustrated towards the end. At the outset it was just banjo and guitar, but the London recording company formed a band and provided backing groups for my songs. That was difficult for Billy.’ Billy simply shrugs his shoulders. ‘It was Big Yang and Big Yin.’ he says today.
In the last months with Gerry, Billy felt he had become a passenger, and truthfully he didn’t like it one bit. To make matters worse, once Billy became a solo act, nobody would employ him: Gerry was marked to become a huge star and Billy to disappear. But necessity turned out to be the mother of comic invention for Billy, for once he was on his own, he had an invigorating surge of energy and began to write prolifically. Not having Gerry, or his songs, to rely on meant he was challenged to create a great deal of new stage material and change the way he played his instruments. Fortunately, he had a wealth of ideas floating around in his head and was turning new influences from his immediate environment into songs, and funny monologues.
He had seen an article in a magazine about the mystery of a grossly injured body that had been found just outside Edinburgh. Investigators had concluded that the victim was an illegal immigrant who had tried to enter Britain by crawling inside the undercarriage of an aeroplane, with tragic results. Billy wrote a song about it called ‘Please Help Me I’m Falling’, based on a song by Hank Locklin.
The Humblebums had been the opening act for Hank Locklin when he toured Scotland. Hank always had great boots. He used to invite Billy up to play banjo with him in his dressing room because he was dreadfully homesick.
‘Boy they’re beauties,’ Billy coveted his grey hide cowboy boots. ‘What are they made of?’
‘Elephant’s ear,’ replied Hank. ‘I might forget you, but my boots won’t!’
Billy’s first solo gig was in Musselburgh. It was shaky, but it worked and gradually, towards the end of 1970, people began to employ him on his own, leading to a rapid rise in his popularity. He was different: no one else had his mixture of a very eclectic repertoire of songs as well as hilarious monologues. He needed help with his career, and for some curious reason agreed to allow Doug Mitchell, a stocky, medieval-looking entrepreneur with a past history as a taxidermist, to manage him. Soon, he was flying in the clubs, just ripping everyone to bits and really making a name for himself. One gig that did not go so well took place at Glasgow University.
‘No, Doug,’ Billy had protested beforehand. ‘There’s no way I’m going to play that crowd of bastards. Not any more. Students just heckle you to death and vomit in your banjo case.’
‘It’s worth a hundred pounds,’ goaded Doug. ‘If they heckle, just leave the stage. All I’m asking is that you try. See how it goes.’
‘All right then,’ replied our skint hero.
Billy walked on stage the following night, carrying his banjo. He placed the case at the side of the stage, took out his instrument and strolled to the centre of the stage. He didn’t even make it to the microphone.
‘Get aaaff!’ someone shouted.
‘Certainly,’ replied Billy good-naturedly and left immediately. He still comes across people who whisper in awe, ‘I was actually there the night you did that!’
Once the word got out that Billy on his own was a sensation, audiences began to turn up in vast numbers. Television people heard about him, and before long Billy was engaged to sing topical parodies every week or so on a popular Scottish daytime talk show called Dateline hosted by Bill Tennant. A month or two after his first appearance, Billy had a panic call from the producers. An antiques expert had agreed to be interviewed on the show, but she had contracted a bad case of stage fright and suddenly withdrawn, so Billy was asked to extend his role by filling in as the featured talking guest that day. It was a riot: everyone in the studio was screaming, cameramen, make-up people, everyone. Billy never looked back in Scotland.
Out of the blue, Billy was engaged to play seven weeks in a couple of Irish bars, the Harp and Bard in Massachusetts, USA, and the Windsor House in Toronto, Canada. For quite a while now, Billy had had a real bee in his bonnet that he could be well received in North America. He subsequently proved that to be true, although his real success there took many years.
News of Billy’s outrageousness had travelled across the Atlantic Ocean, and the small audiences in Massachusetts and Toronto loved him. He sang ‘What Does a Scotsman Wear under his Kilt?’ to the tune of ‘Blowing in the Wind’, which was the punch line. When Billy returned home he brought Jamie a Mickey Mouse bendy toy and a pair of tiny red, white and black cowboy boots. The boots were far too uncomfortable for a one-year-old and Jamie kicked them off in protest. It was the beginning of his admirable, and persistent, refusal to step into his father’s shoes.
Although Billy still had a hankering to till the shoes of one of the savagely satirical performers, like Matt McGinn, he was happy about the way his comedy was developing. Maybe Matt was more of a mover and shaker politically, but Billy was just making people roar and that’s what he wanted. He had no desire to educate or change anybody politically, and he still hasn’t. His attitude has always been that if people are changed, moved or educated by anything he does then that’s brilliant, but that is not the aim. The aim is to make them laugh. The majority of folk singers he knew were trying to educate people, which Billy thought was a desperate arrogance. He had changed his political stance several times on the way to his present one, so he felt he had no business telling anybody what the right way was. He himself hadn’t a clue.
Billy just improvised the shape of his show and varied it from night to night. Sometimes he would sing more because he hadn’t much to say. He was not averse to telling an immensely long story with a puny wee punch line, for he realized that punch lines aren’t everything. It was fun to tell jokes every now and then. The audiences liked them because they felt safe. Everybody knew when to laugh because there’s a pattern to standard jokes, but Billy was attracted to the more esoteric story, where the punch line isn’t necessarily at the end. Occasionally it was right at the beginning but he had to tell the whole story to make sense of it. Billy was becoming more of a patter merchant like the ones he’d known in the shipyards. Sometimes he even borrowed old music hall lines: ‘I was just walking home last night, when some bastard stood on my fingers.’
By the end of 1971, Billy was really making his way as a solo artist. In January the following year, he received an invitation to perform on television in Ireland, in conjunction with a folk concert there. Just as he was about to leave, he had a phone call from Florence.
‘Mona’s very, very ill,’ she informed him.
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘Phlebitis.’ she answered, ‘and there’s something horribly wrong with her pancreas. Michael’s with her.’
Billy considered ignoring the information, but relented and turned up at Stobhill Hospital to see her.
‘Billy’s here.’ whispered Michael.
‘Oh?… That’s nice,’ she sighed.
Billy went over and spoke to her. She seemed bewildered, just as she had for many years. He was struck by how small and vulnerable she seemed … a disoriented little old grey-haired lady, without a trace of monster about her. She died that same night.
‘Billy cried buckets at her funeral,’ says Michael. Mona’s passing created an emotional quagmire for Billy, a mixture of relief and guilt, fury and loss. It seemed as though the first act of his life story had ended, and glad he was to have made it to the intermission.
Billy’s concept of his world as a series of theatrical events had formed during his experience with Clydeside. He had come to love musical plays. In 1972, in collaboration with a poet called Tom Buchan, Billy created a stage event called The Great Northern Welly Boot Show, directed by Tony Palmer. It was performed in Glasgow with mediocre success during an arts festival called Mayfest, but the following year, the director Robin LeFevre reconstructed it for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This time it was a roaring success.
The show was a combination of songs and sketches that told a story about workers taking over a factory that made rubber boots. A talented painter called John Byrne designed the sets and costumes. John looked exactly like Frank Zappa and Billy liked him immensely from the minute he met him. John, who signs his paintings ‘Patrick’, is thought to be an exceedingly eccentric person, but I think it is his giftedness and intensity that shocks people. Billy’s friend Sandy Goudie, another marvellous Glaswegian painter, called on John once in his mother’s house in Ferguslie Park. He was shown into a back room where he found John dressed in a starched, white French sailor’s uniform. On his head was a white beret topped with a red pom-pom and he was utterly focused on painting a self-portrait. The thing that rocked Sandy was that it was only 8.30 a.m.
John designed some stunningly inventive wellies for the show. There was the ‘Jack Buchanan Evening Welly’, which had silk lapels, a white shirt and a bow tie. The ‘Dixie Flyer’ was a cowboy welly with a wheel for a heel and Billy dreamed up the ‘Rustic Wishing Welly’ that was like a dead tree. The one that stopped Billy in his tracks, however, was a banana boot called the ‘Reggae Welly’. It just was the most beautiful, silly thing imaginable.
One night during the run of the Welly Boot Show in Edinburgh, there was a delay in set-changing, so Billy ran on stage to appease the audience by performing a piece he had been working on lately. It went down a storm. Billy had been drinking in the infamous Scotia Bar when his pal Tam Quinn wandered in. Tam was a guitarist who played with his brother Mick in a band called The Lagan. He told Billy a joke he’d heard earlier that night, the best Billy’d heard in a while. ‘Jesus came into the bar where all the apostles were hanging out and saw them eating a Chinese take-away. “Where did you get that?” he asked. One of them replied, “Oh, Judas bought it. He seems to have come into some money.’”
Billy told it to the audience the next time he was on stage. As always, he embellished and protracted the original to a considerable degree, setting it locally. When the audience just exploded, Billy was encouraged to develop it further and further, until eventually it became a set piece called ‘The Last Supper and Crucifixion’. The idea was that there had been a misprint in the Bible so Galilee was actually Gallowgate, a street near Glasgow Cross that originally led up to the old gallows. ‘Of course,’ Billy would say, ‘Gallowgate is near the Cross.’
Billy eventually used a picture of the Sarrie Heid as a backdrop when he performed this piece on stage: ‘All the Apostles are there, tearing lumps off the Mother’s Pride. The atmosphere is getting a wee bit tense: “See you. Judas, you’re getting on my tits!”’ Billy didn’t know it at the time, but the Sarrie was a particularly appropriate choice, since it’s believed that in the eighteenth century condemned prisoners once spent their last night there on their way to be hanged.
The piece was wonderfully satirical but it caused Billy a good deal of trouble. He was forced to defend it, as a number of people found it offensive. Some brave clergymen insisted that religion could only gain from it, but others just went crazy and screamed at Billy in stores and bookshops. He always took that as proof that he had hit the target.
Some people physically attacked Billy, notably Pastor Glass, an evangelist who still demonstrates outside various places in Scotland when Billy is appearing. Glass and his followers resembled the cast of Village of the Damned and took to hitting Billy with heavy bags of change representing thirty pieces of silver. ‘Those people don’t blink much,’ thought Billy. Billy vowed Glass had a satanic look and was certain that always irritated the pastor. He was a man of the cloth, yet he looked like the devil: Billy was supposed to be the devil but some said he looked messianic.
Predictably, Billy’s father hated ‘The Last Supper and Crucifixion’. He thought it was blasphemous and often complained about it. He criticized Billy for ‘going in the wrong direction’ and alienating people. ‘When it comes to being funny, everyone’s an expert,’ thought Billy. His father would listen to Billy’s conversation and wait until he heard something he thought he could attack. The thing that most got Billy down was the way William sided with the hecklers. He would say:
‘You lost them tonight. They beat you.’
‘No they didn’t. I won.’
‘No you didn’t. It went on too long.’
‘Fuck, what is it, some kind of football match?’