Tavern Bar in Dundee was where we used to play darts as young art students. The Tav was an art school institution and, like Scotland herself, has a long history. The nineteenth-century poet William McGonagall used to frequent it and read his magnificently dreadful poems for a few pennies in the very back room where we honed our darts-playing skills in games with bizarre names such as 301, Mickey Mouse and Round-the-Clock. Bert, the landlord, was an avuncular host who kept good order in the house and administered a series of bans on those who overstepped the mark. Some might be banned for a month (the date of re-entry circled on the calendar in his pocket diary), some for only a few nights, and occasionally Bert, with all the compassion of a hanging judge, would bar someone for life.
My time in Dundee during the early Seventies was that rare part of the twentieth century when there was no unemployment. As art students, with a sartorial elegance that predated but rivalled the Muppets, we quaffed ale next to builders, bakers, prostitutes, merchant seamen, inspectors of meat pies, oil rig workers, microwave oven salesmen, white skinned ex cons re-navigating their lives, and a gang of soft-drug dealers wearing bandannas who looked like they had recently been employed as extras in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. They were in fact town planning students to a man and barely old enough to vote. The legacy of their stoned student days is now cast in concrete in spiralling ring roads that meander around our cities, from Birmingham to Inverness, often leading absolutely nowhere but obviously enjoying travelling hopefully.
The music in our teenage heads was implanted by Radio One, or more exotically Radio Luxembourg, the best-known of the pirate radio stations. I never could find it on the dial and settled for John Peel instead. But his offerings were too gloriously esoteric to define the age – Ivor Cutler, The Third Ear Band, Leonard Cohen (am I the only one who used to think he had a great voice and his songs were actually quite cheerful?), Dave Van Ronk, Edger Broughton, and The Thirteenth-Floor Elevators. No, the music of the streets was pure Radio One via Tony Blackburn, Dave Lee Travis, and Simon Dee – The Kinks, Dusty Springfield, The Monkees and Sonny and Cher. They guided us through the late sixties and through puberty with the pastoral care of a dentist in a sweet shop – not offering us too much of anything that might start any serious rot. The Beatles were always fine, The Stones a bit dangerous, The Doors … well, you had to wait until nightfall, and I think only late on a Wednesday night, for John Peel to appear and The Doors to open. They in turn gave on to a landscape peopled by Grace Slick, The Incredible String Band and The Grateful Dead. Safe and secure in my middle class suburb of Glasgow I would lie beneath the sheets, my homework completed, and listen to Country Joe MacDonald rage against the war in Vietnam, ‘Give me an Eff!’ he would cry, ‘Give me a U! Give me a C! … Give me a K! … What’s that spell?! … What’s that spell?!’ And then he would push out his song, like an angry boat, into the world:
‘Come on all you big strong men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
He’s got himself in a terrible jam,
Way down yonder in Vietnam …’
And so I would drop off to sleep in a purple haze of adolescent plans for the future. THE FUTURE, a mythical and by definition futuristic place which all my life has been just out there, occasionally signposted, but like algebra or German grammar, never quite graspable. Like that destination board on Ken Kesey’s bus that read FUURTHER, never quite within reach …
Everyone had plans in those days and the Tav was where they were most often discussed. They were of course based on a full-employment economy. Don’t try this at home if you were born any time after 1970. Recently qualified teachers could quit their jobs and hitch to India assured that they would pick up another teaching job, possibly with a promotion, as soon as they returned. A sculptor subsidising their art by working in the parks department could, on a whim, leave for Shetland and find work gutting fish or working for the post office. Others played in rock bands or were fiddle-scraping folk musicians in Aran jumpers and flared jeans. Society was deliciously flexible in those days and all things seemed possible. Carefree pretty much sums it up. Stress had not yet been invented and wouldn’t catch on in Scotland until well into the Eighties. But back in the late Sixties and early Seventies you wouldn’t see someone for a few months and then suddenly a postcard from a mate would arrive addressed c/o Bert, The Tavern Bar, Dundee, from Venice Beach in California or the Melkweg Club in Amsterdam. In those days the post office took a rather perverse pride in delivering every single piece of mail no matter how scantily it was addressed. Sometimes simply ‘Bert, the Tav’, would find its destination – very like Banjo Paterson’s famous Australian ballad which features a letter addressed to ‘Clancy of The Overflow’.
A few friends left for London, like Clancy leaving for the Australian tropics. It was the tail end of the Swinging Sixties, a decade which I like to think started with the Beatles first number-one hit Love Me Do in 1962, and ended with the oil crisis in 1974.
Friday night was the big night at the Tav and you had to get there early or else you had to queue, especially if there was to be a band playing in the art school later in the evening. And we got some great bands. Pink Floyd played the art school, as did the legendary Viv Stanshall and The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. The annual Dundee art school Christmas “Revels” were so wild that one passing group called Pete Brown and Piblokta even named their next album in honour of playing there. It was called “Things May Come and Things May Go But the Art School Dance Goes on Forever,” and the following term we all rushed out to spend our grant cheques on it.
I remember one ‘Revels’ that had a Wild West theme and a whole cowboy village was built in the art school hall. I went as a Mexican which befitted my waist length hair and short stature, and I attained a certain verisimilitude by dyeing my skin yellow with textile dye smuggled out of Willie Watt’s textile class that afternoon. It was a strange Christmas the following week in Glasgow, as I remember it, surrounded by close family and maiden aunts, me glowing like a beacon at a zebra crossing and feigning jaundice.
Outside the Tav on a Friday it wasn’t unusual to see upwards of thirty people queuing in the dark rain by eight in the evening. Once inside, mushroom damp, there was a sunburst of light and a symphony of artistic banter as one ran the gauntlet of three hundred elbows towards the bar for two pints of heavy (one to gulp down quickly, the other to enjoy at one’s leisure) and then into the deeply nicotine-stained back room where if you were lucky you could squeeze on to the end of one of the many old school desks with folding chairs that was the sole furniture lining the walls. This was also the nesting place of the serious domino players (or ‘bones’ players as they were known), and it wasn’t unheard of for someone to make as much as ten pounds from a good night in the back room. As often as not, on a Friday, the art school band Mort Wriggle and the Panthers would be playing at the far end of the room, Jonathan ‘Jogg’ Ogilvie thrashing away on drums. Years later I discovered Jogg was working in a museum in Arbroath while his friend Phil, who dropped out of art school after second year, made it big in London as a rock musician in a band called Camel. After that he re-surfaced in the Eighties as Jessie Rae, king of tartan video rock dressed in a kilt and brandishing a two-handed sword.
In the Tav a pound note would buy eight pints of beer at the newly decimalised price of twelve pence a pint, and there would still be enough change for a packet of Rizla cigarette papers and a box of matches. Whole streets close to the Tav were colonised by art students, but none more so than Kincardine Street. During the week many would return there after ten o’clock closing time to begin ‘all-nighters’, working till dawn to get assignments finished (good training for an aspiring lighthouse keeper) with perhaps a break at three in the morning to buy a meat pie or a honey dumpling amongst the taxi drivers and ladies of the night at Cuthbert’s, the all-night bakers. I never met Mr Cuthbert but can vouch that he did make exceedingly good dumplings.
Recharged, we would talk passionately above the sounds of Frank Zappa, Procol Harum and Jefferson Airplane, of Braque and Picasso and the alpine feats of Analytical
