Scottish Camp

Watching Caledonia Dreamin, BBC4’s documentary charting the development of Scottish pop, I was introduced to the wonderful sight of young Alan Horne, svengali behind the hugely influential Postcard record label. Seeing him, camp and cutting, ready to shake up Scottish popular culture from his bedroom wardrobe powerbase, was like glimpsing a parallel universe in which Andy Warhol had been born and raised in Pollockshields, the Barrowlands transformed into Studio 54. My reaction to this all-too-brief trip round the Horne was similar to that of Alex Kapranos who, on discovering a couple of Orange Juice records in a Glasgow street wondered ‘Why had no one told me about this stuff?’.
To explore why such strange, exotic and supposedly typically un-Scottish beasts as Alan Horne or, say, Billy MacKenzie (what if Jeff Buckley had been born on the banks of the Tay?) have to be rediscovered afresh by each subsequent generation requires an understanding of Scotland’s uneasy relationship with the aesthetic of camp and it’s bastard offspring, kitsch. Camp is notoriously difficult to define, as anyone who has read Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp will realise - less an essay than a dance of the seven veils around a topic - but we certainly know it when we see it and hear it and Scottish culture provides a rich Dundee cake full of examples. Camp also provides a useful tool (briefly arched eyebrow) to explore Scottish gender issues. While, as Sontag suggests, camp should not be considered synonymous with homosexuality one of its edgier pleasures is the way it allows the performer to skip along the boundaries of gender, to delight in the androgynous. Surely a nation who’s greatest exports involve big, bearded men in skirts, little drummer girls in plastic tubes or indeed wee Jimmy Krankie would know a thing or two about that?
The aesthetic ethos of Postcard offered an excitingly modern identity for young Scottish men seeking more urbane alternatives to the city – and the nation’s - Hard Man image. With heavy industry in decline Horne, Edwyn Collins and other members of the Postcard stable risked a beating by walking the streets with delicately flicked hair wearing clothes better suited to 1920s Berlin than 1980s Sauchiehall Street. The company’s motto ‘The Sound of Young Scotland’, along with its emblem of a kitten playing a drum further promoted a flirtation with camp as offering a means of attaining a softer, ironically aware, smarter Scotland.
One of the commentators in the documentary noted how radical this was as Glasgow had never seen the likes of these effete, ironic rebels before. The implicit suggestion was that to be a fey, to flirt with the gay, is to be un-Scottish, that the only camping done up here is the sort involving tents and midges. But analyse Scottish culture, high and low, and the more ridiculous this assumption becomes. A streak of high quality camp runs right through our culture like the letters in a stick of Saltcoats rock. One of the most loved Scottish comedy double acts, capable of filling Glasgow theatres for weeks on end, was Jack Milroy and Rikki Fulton’s Francie and Josie. Anyone coming to the act cold would expect at least one woman involved but instead they have the joyful Jack Milroy. Watch a clip on Youtube and marvel at the large Glaswegian audiences laughing in obvious affection at the sight of two men who live together and whose most famous routine involves one asking the other ‘Are you dancin’?’ to be met with the coy response ‘Are y’askin’?’
What’s generating the laughter is the knowledge that there’s something risqué, something taboo going on here and it’s striking the comparison Fulton’s wonderfully inventive mangling of the Queen’s English – ‘Hullawrerr!’, ‘taking this opperchancity’ - makes with the Polari used by Barry Took and Marty Feldman for ‘Julian and Sandy’ of the Round the Horne radio series. Camp can be regarded as a means of one oppressed group seizing and gaining control over language, twisting it to their own ends and thereby creating a form of code beyond the understanding of their oppressors. In a nation so sensitive to the uses and abuses of language, Fulton’s corruption of standard English, mashing it up with Glaswegian working class argot becomes as gleefully subversive as any Kelman short story.
It would appear inevitable to ‘drag up’ Stanley Baxter as another obvious example of Scottish camp but I would argue camp succeeds best when there’s an undercurrent of aggression to it, charged by the danger of going too far. Although Jack Milroy seems gentle enough there’s a trickster-like thrill in his delight at pushing Fulton into corpsing, the way he will break off from the routine to see how far he can continue the laugh, prodding the audience to the point of hysteria. Baxter seems to enjoy dressing as a woman that bit too much, too demure and feminine to be convincing as the real Queen. In drag he lacks the vulgarity of Dick Emery (whose catchphrase ‘Ooh, you are awful…but I like you’ so closely echoes Sontag’s final word on Camp, ‘The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful’, it raises the intriguing possibility one was a fan of the other) and so charms us rather than cracking us up.
If Baxter is too much like a woman to shock us into laughing a more successful demonstration of the latent capacity of the Scottish male to camp it up extravagantly comes at Christmas, a time when a certain breed of Scottish character actor can scarcely walk past a theatre without diving in and throwing on a frock. The impressive tradition of the Great Scottish Dame succeeds because Johnnie Beattie, Jimmy Logan, Gerard Kelly et al understood that they were not attempting to be a drag act but, as one of the prime exponents Dean Park states, simply ‘a man in a dress’. The best Dames know the power, the freedom inherent in looking like the biggest numpty in the room but their added strength lies in them being a Scottish numpty, a nation that’s turned failure into an art form. This enables them to access to an extra level of outsider-status, of the champion as underdog unavailable to their English counter-parts.
The paradoxical fact that for all its subversive intent the camp tradition can at times only reflect, even reify, a repressive social climate is clear from the gender-bias of the names above; nae wimmin. This becomes even more striking if we compare Scottish camp to the variety to be found emanating from the North of England, one ruled by the three great Queens of Coronation Street, Victoria Wood and Alan Bennett, all of whom focus on strong female central characters. However, the prime exponent of Scottish camp was also the woman who happened to be the greatest Scottish writer of the 20th century.
Google ‘Scottish camp’ and the fourth link, below those for Highland tent and caravan sites, is to Jenny Turner’s obituary of Muriel Spark in which she refers to Spark’s ‘special narrative voice, it’s curiously posh-Scottish camp’. Camp was integral to Spark’s style and she pushed it to such an arch extent that she succeeded in drawing attention both to the truly artificial nature of fiction but also the vibrant, excessive possibilities of language. This is Camp as late modernism, following in the perfume-scented wake of Compton-Burnett and Firbank but with the advantage of being funnier than either of them.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has become so subsumed within the tourist board image of the city it’s easy to forget just how strange and fantastic a book it is. Anyone who stumbles across a clip of Maggie Smith playing the film version of Brodie might think she’s overly mannered but read the novel and you realise it would be impossible to play Miss Brodie in a ‘straight’ realist fashion. How else could an actor do justice to such lines as ‘Whoever has opened the window has opened it too wide. Six inches is perfectly adequate. More is vulgar’? (Just try and read those lines without doing so in Smith’s Morningside tones - although why would you want to deprive yourself of the pleasure?)
Smith appears as the embodiment of Sontag’s reference to camp’s delight in the androgynous, that ‘what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine’ a point that also relates to the radical nature of Miss Jean Brodie herself, a woman whose downfall lay in her naïve belief she could live life as freely as a man. Smith was a good friend of Kenneth Williams and certain of her mannerisms have a definite ‘Sandyesque’ quality to them, the character Williams played in Round the Horne. We have the uncanny sensation of Smith’s Brodie as a female drag act, a woman impersonating a woman, and what’s striking is how attractive and entertaining a performance it is. That this was appreciated by millions is evident in it being a certainty the producers of the Harry Potter films had a short-list of one for the character of Professor McGonagall, especially with J.K. Rowling living a stone-throw away from Brodie’s old stomping ground, thereby granting the world another opportunity to hear that ‘posh-Scottish camp’ with added Spark.
Walter the Softy, Victor and Barry, The High Life, Fisher and Donaldson Kelvinside/Morningside, Belle and Sebastian, the Scots Porage Oats Man, Gregory’s Girl, Molly Weir, Mr Anderson’s Fine Tunes, the word ‘wee’, comedian Craig Hill doing a ‘Maria’ on his posters, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Florizel stories…the list of topics this article could have covered is as broad as a pantomime dame’s bahooky. To return to that Postcard kitten banging a drum, it’s time we stopped fretting over pointless questions of authenticity, stopped cringing and started celebrating the ‘so awful, they’re good’ aspects of our culture. Because if we don’t people like Matthew Bourne and his fantastic Highland Fling will do it for us. Now…who’s all back to mine for a wee cup of tea and a wee toattie of shortie?