If you are standing in St Andrews Square bus station in Edinburgh after midnight, and you are alone (which is unlikely, because it is August and Festival time), you might hear the faint wail of a saxophone and ghostly voices reciting quaint, subterranean poems. Could that be Michael Horovitz? Pete Brown? Paul Jones (in those pre-Manfred Mann days, Paul Pond, an Oxford undergrad)? And who’s the one with the familiar Liverpool accent? For in 1961, beneath that bus shelter stood a coffee cellar where jazz musicians and poets played, recited, got drunk and slept each and every night of the Festival.
That was my first taste of the Edinburgh Fringe and I had travelled up there with the Liverpool sculptor Arthur Dooley, who had been invited to create a spontaneous sculpture in what was then Binn’s department store on Princes Street. He and I would traipse the streets collecting rubbish, which he proceeded to transform into a piece that covered most of the fourth floor, epitomising the workers’ struggle against consumerism (or, come to think of it, it might have been one of his stark crucifixions). Whatever the symbolism, it was a huge success. (With Arthur and me that is, the staff and shoppers loathed it.)
Before Mike Horovitz invited me to read at his ‘New Departures’ nights in the Cellars Club and we discovered the delights of communal beatnik living, Arthur and I had nowhere to stay, so we slept for three nights on the steps of the Scottish National Gallery. Having been an Irish Guard in a former life, Arthur was an expert in survival skills, and taught me how to stuff newspapers up my trouser legs and cocoon myself in posters for shows at the Lyceum. Although I was a schoolmaster at the time and could have afforded to stay in a B&B, I pretended to be homeless and fiancée-less, and as free as the gulls that swooped over Carlton Hill. ‘This is the life,’ I thought, ‘I’ll come back every year and keep an eye on the castle.’ And being a man of my word, I did, recently celebrating my fortieth consecutive appearance on the Edinburgh Fringe with a show in the large Music Hall of the Assembly Rooms.
And always the Fringe, never the official Festival. In fact, for the first couple of years I thought that the Fringe was the Festival. There was the Tattoo, of course, and there were classical concerts in the Usher Hall and huge theatre companies from Georgia or Nagasaki doing Shakespeare in Polish, but all that was part of the world that belonged to the cultourists who came only once and compared the Festival with Salzburg or Avignon. As a bit player on the Fringe I never felt sidelined, quite the opposite: I always believed I was at the centre of things and it was undoubtedly where I learned my trade. Living in London I’m only an occasional theatregoer, but up there I saw so much that inspired me. The fierce politics of John McGrath’s 7.84 company, the sad whimsy of Lindsay Kemp in Bubbles, God played by Brian Glover with a Barnsley accent and bald as a billiard ball, ascending into heaven on a giant crane in the Mystery Plays on the Mound, ‘Finn McCool’ at the Haymarket Ice Rink, and the wonderful Kosh Dance company with whom I collaborated on three productions.
When the sand had run out on Gazette, the hourglass was not turned back on its head and, although now famous in the streets back home, we were hungry for world domination. To help us achieve our aim Pat Burke, who ran the theatre side of things at the Hope Leresche agency, hired Joan Maitland, a dramaturge, to groom us for success on the West End stage. It was only recently while reading the warm and fulsome obituaries about Pat Burke that I realised what a star she had been, with apparently ‘the best pair of legs on stage for two decades’. When she was looking after the Scaffold she had given up her career as an actress, but she was fiercely determined that we would follow in her footsteps. (‘The Scaffold, the three best pairs of legs …’) While Pat set up auditions with theatre producers like William Albery and booked us into the Little Theatre in Garrick Yard, St Martin’s Lane to showcase our material, Joan Maitland set about turning three mumbling, bumbling promising amateurs into a trio of silken-tongued, balletic thespians.
To help achieve this improbable transformation, she arranged for us to have movement and voice lessons in Liverpool – ‘Ning, nang, nong. All together now. Ning, nang … John, you’re not helping by pulling those silly faces. Ning, nang, nong’ – as well as giving us lessons in stagecraft and sophistication in her large house in North Finchley. At lunchtime her husband, Jack, wearing an apron and monogrammed velvet slippers, would sashay in (they had no children) with a jug of something squashed and a plate of sandwiches: ‘No, Michael, the chicken does not taste fishy, those are tuna sandwiches. Tuna? It’s a fish. Don’t you have tuna up there in the north? Oh dear, we do have a lot to learn, don’t we?’ Like Jack’s manners, her theatrical pedigree was impeccable, although, to be honest, we never recognised any of the names she dropped except for Lionel Bart, with whom she’d co-written the musical Blitz.
In 1964 the Scaffold took a revue called Birds, Marriages and Deaths, that I’d written and she had directed, up to Edinburgh, and we opened in the tiny sixty-seater Traverse Theatre, which was then in St James Terrace on Lawnmarket. Although we were determinedly amateur, and our ‘alternative’ approach challenged the slickly formatted university revues of the time (‘They have succeeded in breaking the mould which Beyond the Fringe had imposed on its successors’ Scotsman), the Traverse audience took us warmly to their hearts, in some cases to their beds, and we were to become a Fringe fixture there for years to come. The theatre boasted a small art gallery run by Ricky Demarco and a very fine restaurant specialising in Scottish dishes. (‘Good evening, boys. Today’s speciality is Herring in oatmeal’ … ‘Wha? I’m not eating porridge with kippers’) as well as a bar that stayed open until midnight.
In those far-off days when pubs closed at ten p.m. and never opened on Sundays, the bar became a magnet to all the performing iron filings in town. Nowadays, performers at the bar in the Gilded Balloon have the haunted look that tells you they’re wondering if the bar at the Pleasance is starrier, or whether they should be up at the Assembly Rooms. But back then there was something very reassuring about watching Peter O’Toole and Bob Hoskins elbowing Larry Adler out of the way in the rush to get served, knowing that you were drinking in the only after-hours show in town.
Accommodation was provided by ‘Friends of the Traverse’ and was always first class, including the run of an apartment with a balcony overlooking the castle, from where we could watch the Tattoo, drink Scotch and shout silly things at the soldiers. Towards the end of our stay mine host, a kilted barrister, invited a few people round for a musical evening, including Room at the Top actor Laurence Harvey and Larry Adler. The former wore monogrammed slippers (without the apron) and crooned, while Larry Adler, still covered in iron filings and bruises from those elbows at the bar, gamely played his mouth organ. You know what it’s like when you’ve drunk six or seven martinis and you’re shouting but you think you are whispering? And you’re taking the piss out of somebody’s monogrammed slippers and you think they haven’t noticed? And you’re accompanying a famous harmonica player on comb and paper, and you think nobody will hear? Oh dear, one less Friend of the Traverse.
Although I loved many of the shows I saw on the Fringe in the early sixties, the main excitement was to be found in the Traverse bar in the afternoons, where Hamish Henderson, poet and professor of all things Scottish, would introduce Hugh MacDiarmid and Robert Garioch to read their poems in Gaelic. A highland shepherd would sing, a piper play a pibroch and every day local poets like Brian McCabe and Alan Jackson would entertain:
I loved the surrealism of Norman MacCaig and Edwin Morgan and, because the link between folk music and poetry was so vital, I felt closer to the Scottish poets than to their English counterparts. When the Traverse moved down the hill to larger premises in the Grassmarket, the afternoon sessions became more organised and attracted large crowds, and many more fine poets including Pete Morgan and a young art student from Glasgow called Liz Lochhead. By the late sixties it was very much Edinburgh-on-Mersey with Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and myself performing, with Andy Roberts accompanying us on guitar. I had met Andy when the Scaffold first played the Traverse and he was a sixth-former working as a musician in Stewed Irish, a clever late-night revue from Trinity College Dublin. He had become so taken with the three of us and with the poetry of Brian and Adrian that he decided then and there to enrol at Liverpool University and study law. Despite graduating, he chose not to become a sharp lawyer in favour of writing music and playing guitar, for which we all remain grateful.
When the Scaffold hit the national charts with ‘Thank U Very Much’ in 1968 our venue during the Festival was a week at the Palladium Theatre. Although a great success, it distanced us from our Traverse audience, and there would be no going back to homely sixty-seaters. There would be a different show every year in a different venue and with different people.
I’m writing this surrounded by press cuttings, diary entries, programmes and letters, both loving and threatening, to do with a short lifetime in Edinburgh. On the wall are framed posters of some of the shows I’ve done there: Wordplay, a revue starring the comparatively unknown Victoria Wood; Lifeswappers, adapted for stage from a play I had written for television; McGough & McCarthy, Pete McCarthy as the hard-nosed comic pitted against the stand-up poet; Words on the Run with Willy Russell; Mouthtrap, a play that Brian Patten and I concocted about a pair of poets trapped in a dressing room and visited by the angel of death, played by Helen Atkinson Wood; and to tell the truth, I’m getting bogged down with detail. However, when you realise that I’ve played the Fringe every year since 1961 for an average of, say, two weeks at a time, that adds up to eighty-eight weeks, which means that I’ve spent over a year and a half of my entire life in Edinburgh. Och, I’m practically Scottish.
And to prove it, here is a spooky but heart-warming story, in a three-generational sort of way. When I was in Edinburgh in 2002, performing at the Book Festival in Charlotte Square, I went to have lunch in Henderson’s, a favourite old haunt on Hanover Street, and was making short work of an alfalfa sprout lasagne when I fell head over heels in love. What happened was that I looked up and saw a girl of about eighteen and my heart, as the poets say, skipped a beat. It was love at first sight and yet it couldn’t be, I’m too old for that sort of thing. Then, to add to my confusion and before the twang of Cupid’s arrow had died away, the girl was joined by an equally beautiful lady who was obviously her mother, and twang! I was in love again. A double dose of delicious déjà vu. I was on the point of forsaking my alfalfa in favour of going over and introducing myself when they were joined by a third lady. I hesitated and looked closely at this attractive sixty-year-old when, bang, it hit me. Not love, but the realisation that it was not Cupid’s arrow that had pierced me but Time’s arrow. The OAP was once the eighteen-year-old I’d fallen for forty Festivals ago and engaged in a brief Highland fling. She recognised me:
‘Och, you’ve not changed at all.’
‘But I’m bald and wrinkly.’
‘Like I said, you’ve not changed at all.’
I joined them for tea, and while we chatted the years fell away until, miraculously, grandmother, mother and daughter all became the same girl.
And what takes me back there year after year? Certainly not the deep-fried pizzas with herring in oatmeal topping, nor the hope that I might be the first poet to win a Perrier award. It’s partly to do with meeting old friends, but it’s mainly to do with the city. We have been having a drawn-out love affair for most of my adult life and my going to perform at the Festival each year provides the excuse to meet up with an old flame. Although I have aged, she hasn’t, and when I try to rekindle the old excitement, that first flush of youthful passion, I can’t, but the good thing is that she doesn’t seem to mind.
One sunny morning I went to the Royal Botanic Gardens and sat on a bench overlooking the city spread out below, with Arthur’s Seat and the Firth of Forth neatly in frame, and I wrote this:
The best show in town
Is the one down there
Edinburgh.
Starring: The Castle,
The sun, and the firth-fresh air.
It’s not a piece of verse I’d normally wish to publish or read in public, because it’s private. A billet-doux for an old and faithful lover.