Scotland | Freshlyworded

By strange coincidence, the day I picked up a copy of Billy Connolly’s autobiography “Windswept & Interesting” I saw on social media that the “Big Yin” had just turned 80.

It was quite a milestone for one of Britain’s most famous comics, actors and travel show hosts, and it seemed even more fitting that I should now be reading about his life.

I’ve long been a fan of his, enjoying his his hilarious storytelling stand-up comedy, entertaining travel documentaries as well as his more serious acting in movies like ‘What we did on our Holiday’.

He’s certainly a very talented individual, and from reading his book, comes across as warm-hearted and lovable person in his private life. This is in spite of many difficulties experienced in childhood including physical and sexual abuse and a later problem with drinking (no doubt caused by this trauma).

The title of his autobiography, which he wrote during lockdown, refers to the way his flamboyant appearance was described to him by a friend early on in his entertainment career.

It’s a moniker Connolly revels in and believes is an accurate description of a type of person he identifies with: someone with their own individual style and who doesn’t give a fuck (excuse my language, but I am paraphrasing Billy) what anyone else thinks.

“Being windswept and interesting is not just about what your wear,” writes Billy.

“It’s about your behaviour, speech, your environment and an attitude of mind. It’s perpetually classy – but it’s not of a particular class. It transcends class.”

Later, he says: “Once I’d realised that I was windswept and interesting, it became my new religion. It was such a delightful contrast to the dour and disapproving attitudes I’d grown up with. Instead of cowering under the yoke of ‘Thou shalt NOT!’ , I found a new mantra: ‘Fuck the begrudgers!'”

It’s an attitude of mind that runs throughout the book, fueling his success first as a musician (a career I knew nothing about) and then as often outrageous and daring stand-up comic. Without this psychic armour, Billy might never have made it out of the gloomy Glasgow tenement flat he’d grown up in and which he describes so well in the early chapters of the book.

As with many people of a certain age, the pandemic provided the opportunity for reflection and the time to sit down and think about their lives. He does so in a self-deprecating, warm way, that only sometimes veers off course into somewhat uninteresting (for me anyway) banalities and trivia, such as his favourite TV programs.

To this I am sure Connolly would say: I don’t give a fuck, it’s my story and I’ll choose what I write about. Fair enough, I would not want to be the “fucker that begrudges him”.

Billy Connolly’s story begins in a tenement flat in Anderston on the unloved south western outskirts of Glasgow, where he is raised by his aunts, one of whom is the sadistic Mona, a nasty woman who takes particular delight in physically and verbally assaulting her wee nephew.

Connolly finds himself in this unhealthy domestic situation after his mother runs off with another man, and his father is posted overseas during the war. Later, when his father returns, Connolly is forced to share a bed with him, and his horrifically and inexplicably abused.

It’s a shocking thing to be abused by our own father, but Connolly devotes only a few paragraphs to this incident (one of the surprising aspects of the book), leaving this dark chapter to be dissected by his second wife, the actress turned psychologist Pamela Stephenson, who wrote in more detail about it in her biography, Billy.

Connolly only mentions it again fleetingly, though other memories of his father surface such as family holidays. He only return to the very painful and confusing topic when his father dies.

It is of course a sign of Connolly’s strength of character, his tenacity and warm-heartedness that he does not allow such awful events to dominate his life, though those dark memories do fuel his excessive drinking.

In many respects the book is a chronicle of the people he met along his journey to self-acceptance, those individuals that impacted his life and his career in a positive and creative sense.

Among them were the welders he met while working as an apprentice on the Glasgow shipbuilding docks,

“The shipyards were full of patter merchants. That’s where I first really understood you could be incredibly funny without telling jokes,” recalls Billy.

Billy Connolly with Gerry Rafferty in their days as “The Humblebums”.

He discovers he has a gift for making people laugh through his storytelling, a skill he gets to practice on stage before and in between gigs as a banjo and guitar player.

Of this musical career, I was blissfully unaware and so had no idea that Connolly teemed up with famed pop star Gerry Rafferty of “Baker Street” song fame to write music and tour as the folk band the Humblebums, to a fair degree of success.

While Connolly is keen to point out Gerry Rafferty’s far superior musical talents, there is certainly no doubt that Billy became by far the more famous and successful of the duo.

I also learnt to my surprise and astonishment that Billy does not prepare material for his stand-up shows, but pretty much just gets up on stage and starts talking.

It’s quite a gift, but no doubt gave his stand-up shows a daring, unexpected quality, as well as their freshness and spontaneity.

He writes of his first time of being onstage without Gerry as giving him a “lovely sense of freedom, just talking, singing and being myself”.

It’s the pleasure and enjoyment of storytelling, of being himself, which makes his autobiography so enjoyable for the reader, and especially the fan. There are also plenty of laugh-out-loud moments such as the hilarious “murdered my wife” joke he told on an appearance on the Michael Parkinson show in the 1970s (You can find it on YouTube).

Now an octogenarian living with Parkinson’s Disease and half his hearing gone, it’s good to know that Billy Connolly has turned into less of a grumpy old bastard and more of a opinionated cuddly bear, fond of swearing at the TV, but always eager to learn and discover new things, even in his sunset years.

Throughout it all, he’s remained true to his calling: windswept and interesting.

I went to hear legendary Scottish author Irvine Welsh speak last week.

My friend Jonny, who has read all his books, invited me along to a talk hosted by the Wheeler Centre.

I have read just one of Welsh’s books, “Trainspotting”, but it was enough for me to say “yes” immediately.

Trainspotting – a brilliant, excruciating, haunting and often hilarious story about a group of doomed Scottish junkies set in the impoverished council estates of Edinburgh in the late 1980s/early 1990s – was published in 1993 and has sold more than 1 million copies in the UK alone.

It’s listed in my literary reference bible: “1001 Books You Should Read before Die” alongside contemporary literary masterpieces by Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Donna Tartt and J.M. Coetzee.

Irvine Welsh with a fan in Melbourne

Welsh, a bald, tallish man sat down on stage at the Athenaeum Theatre on Collins Street dressed casually in a black t-shirt, jeans and leather jacket looking like the kind of guy you’d strike up a conversation with about football at the pub. The only sign of possible eccentricity: bright red socks.

He was there ostensibly to promote his latest book which has the intriguing title of ‘The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins’. It’s his first novel set entirely in the US – Welsh lives in Chicago and wrote and set the novel amongst Miami’s gym, fitness and dieting culture.

(“If people want to lose weight, they should just eat less. Instead, in America, they consume diets.” he says.)

It’s his first novel without a Scottish character with only the vaguest references to Scotland.

Putting on a bad American accent, Welsh recalled a line in the book spoken by one of the aggressive female characters to Wheeler Centre director Michael Williams:

“I don’t wanna go to a fillum set in Scotland or Bosnia speaking a language no one can understand.”

Williams reminded Welsh that he is had pronounced “film” in the Scottish dialect of “fillum”.

Welsh throws back his head and roars with laughter.

Miami agree with Welsh. He goes to gym, eats well, walks around in shorts and t-shirts taking in the good weather.

But his heart – thankfully – remains firmly rooted in Scotland, where he created his most iconic characters – Renton, Begbie, Sickboy and Spud.

It’s not just his heavy Scottish brogue that makes it hard to imagine he’s become an American in any way, he still clearly loves his homeland, telling the audience that he has enjoyed “discovering Scotland from the US”.

Moving to somewhere “exotic” like Miami, he says, made him realise that Scotland is “one of the f-cking weirdest places I have ever been to in my life.”

And he’s also kept up with local politics, noting that the country is “re-inventing itself from the inside out” and that it is an “exciting time” with the Scottish independence referendum vote on September 18 – a remark which draws a large cheer from fellow countrymen in the packed audience of devoted fans.

Welsh has also maintained that famous, sardonic, playful Scottish sense of humour, that made Trainspotting such a huge success.

He quips: “Scottish people are always wonderful to outsiders – they like people coming to visit, but they f-cking hate each other.”

He then jokes that the last time he visited Edinburgh everyone was so nice to each other, which meant he had nothing to write about.

This is thankfully an exaggeration with Welsh telling the audience that his next book – coming out next year – will be about a taxi driver in Edinburgh.

More than likely it will be about one of those failed characters, who he writes so well about – whether its Renton, Spud or Begbie in Trainspotting or the vicious Detective Seargeant Bruce Robertson in the recently filmed “Filfth” (a novel I’ve already picked up from the library).

Failure, is something which inspires Welsh and the characters he creates on the page: Trainspotting is not just about failed characters whose lives have been blown off course by heroin addiction but is set within a landscape of failure created by Margaret Thatcher and her Tory cronies, and one experienced by Welsh himself.

“Failure is much more interesting to me than success,” he says. “I write about people who are going through a bad time, when things are falling apart.

“I try to show these characters grasping for the light switch,” a beautiful phrase, which encapsulates the sadness behind doomed characters like Tommy Laurence, a football-mad childhood friend of Renton in Trainspotting who turns to heroin after his girlfriend dumps him and ends up contracting AIDS.

“These are people who were not always like what they are now,” Welsh says.

Welsh himself knows a lot about failure. He couldn’t play football or cut it as a musician (his two other passions) – but he was good at storytelling.

“Most writers are serial failures,” he says.

Speaking about his own success – he notes humbly that many celebrated Scottish writers blazed a path for him but did not achieve the international recognition he did.

He says he is inspired by bad fiction, rather than by what other great authors have written (one of his favourite books is Ulysses by Irishman James Joyce):

“When I read a shite book, I tell myself, I am going to take that c-nt down.”

Renton, couldn’t have said it better.