Glasgow (45 page)

ooyah
An exclamation of pain: ‘Ooyah! Get aff ma fit!'

plootered
Drunk.

quoted Well-quoted
means highly-regarded, well-esteemed: ‘I hear the challenger's well-quoted.'
Not quoted
means given no chance, unimportant or useless: ‘Never mind what that balloon thinks – he's no quoted.'

run-out
To
do a run-out
is to eat a meal in a restaurant and then abscond without paying; a most unsavoury practice.

scratcher
One's bed: ‘Ach, Ah'll away tae ma scratcher.'

Teddy Bears
Nickname for Rangers FC. The fact that this is rhyming slang becomes clear when you know that Bears is pronounced Berrs and thus rhymes with Gers.

urny
Local version of aren't, as in ‘Youse urny gaun', ‘We urny comin', ‘They urny here'.

vicky
A local term for a rude V-sign: ‘We gied them the vicky an got aff wur mark.'

wee man
A friendly title for a small person: ‘Look who it is – how's it gaun wee man?' Someone wishing to register disgust, amazement, exasperation, etc. without resorting to profanity may say: ‘Aw in the name a the wee man!' Perhaps this is a euphemism for the Devil.

yin
A local form of one: ‘That yin's mines.' It can be applied to a person (‘She'll come to no good, that yin') and is often used in nicknames or terms of address, as in
big yin
,
wee yin
,
auld yin
,
young yin
. The fact that Billy Connolly is known as The Big Yin has occasioned some confusion down south and I remember hearing him introduced by an English TV announcer as the big
Yin
. No doubt millions assumed this was some kind of derogatory term for a Scotsman.

THE MATTER OF SHIRT-TAILS, 1989
Anne Simpson

For a city that has long had a reputation for dreariness, Glasgow is surprisingly fashion conscious. The phrase ‘dressed to kill' may be
ambiguous but it is one Glasgow men and women embrace in a manner that makes the rest of Scotland look like scruffs. For men, a sharp suit, a loud tie and a Borsalino fedora are just the ticket, even if it makes them look like one of Al Capone's gunslingers. Women are even more apt to put on the style. Come the weekend, they are to be seen wandering around the designer boutiques of the Merchant City trying desperately to stay aloft in heels so high they turn midgets instantly into giraffes. Moreover, when the thermometer plunges, they would rather discard clothes than add layers. Necklines plunge, hems rise and the bling is blinding. This is not a new phenomenon but, as Anne Simpson notes in this piece from
The Glasgow Herald Book of Glasgow,
it became more noticeable towards the end of the 1980s, when there was influx of French and Italian labels. Until then, no one surely would have dared to call Glasgow effete. Theda Bara, by the way, was a star of the silent screen and one of cinema's earliest sex symbols
.

Now this may surprise you, while the English businessman abroad is still too often identified by a certain seedy fatigue about the waistline, the Scotsman, or more specifically the Glaswegian, emerges, in any pinstripe throng, as elegant and taut, the owner of twenty shirts in fashionable working order, the possessor of a fine gold chain around his neck and on his wrist, most probably, a Rolex denoting upward mobility in in circles highly serious about time. These are not the ramblings of a deranged fashion writer but the findings of various solid market research studies carried out over recent years on behalf of the British menswear industry. At its most detailed such data reveals not just the Glaswegian's superiority in the matter of shirt tails – the average man here owns more than his equivalent brother anywhere else in Britain – but also the sparkling role ornamentation plays in his life. No matter how discreet, his cuff-links are meant to be observed.

Glasgow, of course, has always dealt brazenly in superlatives, sending shivers of disapproval down Edinburgh's prim spine. Yet one leading jeweller with outlets in both cities once disclosed that he lost more items through theft in the capital than he did forty miles away in the west. In general he suffered one break-in a month in Glasgow while in Edinburgh some costly bauble was lifted almost every week by professional gangs up from the South whose ultimate refinement was the elderly fur-coated lady acting as a decoy. In Glasgow the raw ebullience of smash-'n'-grab prevailed. But while Edinburgh men disguise what they spend on clothes by sheltering in the safe tradition of tweeds and sober suits, Glasgow men listen to the language of fashion, its code of status signals, and rapidly respond. Does all this prancing around, this
looking sharp in the definitive leather blouson or the draped Numero Uno jacket suggest that effetism is now sweetening Glasgow's macho armpit? Who can be sure? But much has changed utterly and much has to do with a new attitude of mind which doesn't ask men to become dandies but requires that they be less repressed about sensuality and self-expression.

Among Glasgow's daughters, of course, visual panache has always been the thing. Long before the city's remarkable revival, Recession Chic cohabited here quite naturally with multiple deprivation. By cultivating a strong, personal style, Glasgow women defied their turf's ugly reputation. Keeping up appearances welded body and soul together and thus the city of the hard shoulder became the city of the fast turnover, one of the first centres in Britain to sustain two mobbed Marks and Spencers, two bustling C & A's. So this battered old place became the rag trade's lingering
amour
, meticulously coiffed and enamelled, ready to strut through the dark with all the beckoning relish of sin. The other night a raven-haired girl in a silk romper suit and black stockings was seen running for a Springburn bus. Scoffing chips from a poke, she appeared like some wild alliance between Theda Bara and a kindergarten. Where had she been, this self-regarding
ingénue
? Fury Murry's . . . the Sub Club . . . shaping with her pals in all that pagan House music, practising her panda-eyed gaze and desire to look silently profound?

Today new money seeks the pedigree of international labels from The Warehouse, Ichi Ni San and Princes Square. Mappin and Webb in Glasgow sell a Rolex at around £2,000 practically every day of the week. Sax is the only shop in Scotland to stock Romeo Gigli and through the adventurous buying spirit of David Mullane at The Warehouse, Jean-Paul Gaultier, the most anarchic designer in Paris, can claim to have a Scottish chapter in the Merchant City.

Much tested in resilience, Glasgow's earthiness is never likely to allow
poseurs
to gain the upper hand. Even so one already detects certain little
arriviste
snobberies, a sniffy suspicion that in fashion (as in the general arts) the only good things are those that are imported. This is the reverse of that tedious London myopia about anything north of NW1 and equally as ill-founded. In fact it does nothing except mark out the truly provincial, but more seriously it also puts at risk the very creative possibilities of those indigenous designers whose talent requires sustained investment rather than the smug tokenism of ineffectual start-up grants.

GLASGOW'S MILES DAVIS, 1989
David Belcher

Is – was? – Glasgow, music-wise, the new Liverpool? Or Manchester? There is surely a case to be made. The city's musical heritage is, of course, illustrious. Did not Chopin play here? Indeed, he did, in the Merchant City in 1848, a year before he expired. Alas, few turned out to witness his performance and one ungenerous report noted that he was ‘a man of weak constitution and seems labouring under physical debility and ill-health'. More recently, in 1990, Frank Sinatra wowed the crowd even though he too, then in his seventies, was unable to perform at the highest level. As music journalist David Belcher points out in this extract from
The Glasgow Herald Book of Glasgow,
as the Year of Culture approached, Glasgow was in the grip of a ‘rockbiz' resurgence which, a quarter of a century on, shows no sign of abating
.

Beware, children, of those who would adopt the authentic, multi-hued mantle of cred and try to tell you where to go in pursuit of the hippest, hip-hoppiest pleasures after sundown. Shun those who would claim to know what's ah, shakin' out there on the street and on the dancefloor, who would insist that they are in tune with ‘The Kids'. Anyone who claims to be able to tell you all about the clubs has not been enjoying himself in any of them sufficiently enough to know whether or not they are worth attending. Me? I'm just going to give you a few gnomic pointers: like most of the rest of ‘The Kids', I spend the bulk of my time re-inventing myself at home in private, not paying £5 admission to try and do it in public, in the dark, over someone else's choice of pounding beat. Bomp-bomp, bompitty-bomp, excuse me, I feel my head spinning . . . spinning . . .

Glasgow's Miles Davis: there isn't one, we'd have told him to learn how to play in tune. Glasgow's Miles Kington: nope, there isn't one of those either, far too consciously-absurd and clever-clever. Glasgow's Miles better . . . ah, yes, my head is clearing and I remember that line from somewhere . . . what does it mean again? While the city of Glasgow is in many and varied ways miles better than it was (rather than actually being better than anywhere else), in what might be termed youth culture (whatever that is), Glasgow is simply miles better than most places in the rest of Britain, outside London.

If youth culture is how young people address one another, dress, enjoy themselves, measure one another, chart their aspirations, articulate their desires, and pretend to be more youthful than they are, then Glasgow has got a lot of it. Not the most inventive, innovative, or
original brands of youth culture, but lots of it, lots definitely and derivatively if not definitively, most of it music-related. Glasgow presently likes to think of itself, with some justification, as Rock City, UK. To employ rockbiz parlance, Glasgow-based bands such as Wet Wet Wet, the Blue Nile, Deacon Blue, Hue and Cry, the Silencers, the River Detectives, and Texas, have all, along with émigrés like Simple Minds, done mega-business in the charts.

Quite why there are so many bands from Glasgow, more bands than from any other UK city of comparable size, is one question (as is their quality): what is indisputable is that rock music, live or recorded, plays a vital practical role in the city's perception of itself and in its cultural identity. We rock, therefore we do not have to seek unavailable joinery apprenticeships which we did not want in any case. We rock because we might as well, because in the post-industrial first city of Europe we stand more chance of getting a number one hit single than we do of securing gainful long-term employment as a warehouseman or invoice clerk.

DIARY OF A SHOP ASSISTANT, 1989
Ajay Close

Shopping is something Glaswegians approach with the utmost seriousness and for which they prepare appropriately. It is an event, like the storming of the Bastille. Over the decades, the epicentre of bargain hunters and fashion victims has changed. Time was when Argyle Street was where those who had money to burn flocked. Later, Sauchiehall Street was retail heaven, and to some extent it still is. More recently, however, Buchanan Street has become the prime location. As you stand at its top, on the steps of the Concert Hall, you look down on a sea of adrenalin-fuelled humanity which belies any notion of recession or retrenchment. For while Edinburghers may put their money into property – preferring to inherit clothes, even undergarments, rather than purchase new items – Glaswegians display their wealth on their backs. Christmas, of course, is when the shops hope to do their best business. In 1989, journalist and novelist Ajay Close spent four days at John Lewis experiencing what it feels like to be on the other side of the counter. What follows is her account of day three
.