News

December 10, 2009

Remembering Ivor Cutler

Filed under: General News — Charlie @ 1:25 am

Today I noticed that my friend Ian had signed up for the Facebook fan page of Ivor Cutler. I hadn’t thought about Ivor Cutler for a long time, yet he was a big part of my youth. So, this being the twenty-first century, I signed up too.

I was a bit rubbish at being a rebel. Hence when I was fifteen, while most of my school contemporaries were listening to Madonna and Alexander O’Neal I was spinning Ivor Cutler’s ‘Gruts’ LP. And it was an LP. I can still hear the crackling between Ivor’s hesitant, carefully enunicated Glasgow voice as he imparted another faintly surreal tale of a stall selling old cups of tea (the colder and more sour the tea, the cheaper the price), or visiting the Hoorgi House where a man with wheels for feet ladelled soup into Ivor’s lap from an enormous vat strapped to his back despite repeated entreaties to stop.

I think I first heard Ivor Cutler on John Peel’s late night Radio One show - when I really would listen to a small whiny radio beneath my pillow and be introduced to all sorts of life-changing bands like the Shop Assistants, Laibach and The Fall - and I was immediately drawn in to his surreal parallel world where everything normal was different and everything different was normal.

In fact, Ivor Cutler really did change my life. And here’s how. It was the night before my geography O level and I wasn’t confident. I had never actually passed a geography exam in my life and had scored a mighty 26% in my mock. It didn’t matter though, as that night I had a ticket to see Ivor Cutler at the Greenwich Theatre. I was unfeasibly excited. So much so that, having got home early from school and changed into my best studenty jumper, I was ready to go far too early.

My mum was due to give me a lift. She was standing in the front garden talking to someone and I decided to join them. Being excited by the prospect of seeing Ivor Cutler that evening, I jumped out of the front door. We’d lived there for fourteen years, but I chose that afternoon to forget that we had a porch. The top of my head hit the crossbar of the porch at peak velocity. A loud bang went off inside my head. I was knocked flat on my back, and as I looked up at the clouds I remember thinking to myself that it was a really, really stupid thing to do.

I stood up and saw my mother’s horrified face. Are you all right, she enquired. Yes, I said, fine, and started to walk towards her. This course of action proved difficult however as I couldn’t see her for the blood that was now running into my eyes. I’d split my head wide open right across the top.

At Greenwich Hospital I lay on a bed in casualty while a doctor examined my exposed skull. “The good news is that you’ll be going to the theatre tonight,” he said, knowing of my anxiety to make it to see Ivor. “The bad news is, it’s an operating theatre.”

Like what I needed right at that moment was a wise guy.

I was stitched extensively and sent on my way with instructions not to wash my hair - matted with blood - for a week, with a bald patch shaved into the top and the stitches sticking up like the laces on an ancient football.

I missed Ivor Cutler. I still have the unused ticket.

The hospital gave me a note to staple to my geography O level paper, explaining my mishap. When the results arrived in an envelope among the cards on my sixteenth birthday, I’d got a B. I’d passed a geography exam for the first - and last - time ever.

Eighteen years later I gave a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society. The previous week it had been Michael Palin, the following week it was Ranulph Fiennes. The audience was 750 highly qualified geographers.

As I stood at the lectern ready to begin, entirely unqualified to be there beyond my O level, I felt the top of my head and thought of Ivor Cutler.

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December 10, 2009

Remembering Ivor Cutler

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