Working Class Boy (2 page)

W
here do I start? How about this? This is my story. This is the way I saw things. It might not be completely accurate and it might not be the way others saw it. But this is how I saw it.

Scotland was my first home. Cowcaddens, a suburb close to the centre of Glasgow to be exact. One of the only places in the world you can get your heart broken and your jaw broken at the same time. More than just my birthplace. It holds a place in my heart like nowhere else in the world except for maybe Australia, where I grew up, learned about life. The lucky country. But I was lucky to make it through my childhood in one piece.

I love these places equally and I feel both have helped make me who I am and for that I am grateful. But I have to look at both of these places to really see why I am who I am.

Time and trauma have taken what I was born with and what I have experienced and brewed it all into what you see before you now. Some of what I have done has not been pretty to watch. Imagine what it was like to live through it.

But here I am. Still living and still learning. You've got to love life. You might not always get things right but there is always a chance to make things better if you work hard.

I spent most of my life running from my childhood and now it seems like my time to face it. This is the story of a lifetime spent running away. Running from fear. Running from shame but at the same time running from hope. I am not running anymore. This is the story of an imperfect childhood that has led to me becoming an imperfect adult. But life is not perfect. And it is short so make the best out of it you can, with the tools you are given.

My folks made mistakes – all parents do. Some mistakes were bigger than others but I don't blame them for anything. They came from worse poverty than I did. They had very little education, no help and very little hope in their lives. Life must have been overwhelming for them nearly all the time. I always feel I had luck on my side, someone looking over my shoulder, keeping an eye out for me. My mum had no one looking out for her but us kids, and we were too small to help her, no matter how much we loved her.

Every choice my parents made, every bit of pain or fear I have felt, has brought me to where I am today. I am far from perfect but I am here and I am me. I have a beautiful family and a great life and through writing this all down I feel I can finally let a lot of the past go. I don't need to hold on to it anymore. There is no blame. It's no one's fault.

I want to pass on what I have learned to my children. I know they will have to make their own choices and their own mistakes, but now I will be around to help them deal with them. Meanwhile, I want to thank my parents for bringing me into this world and my brothers and sisters for sharing so much with me. I apologise to all of them for any pain I have caused along the way.

A
h. Nothing. That's better. Nothing at all. No pain.

‘Hey, pass that whisky back over here.'

From the moment I start to drink, I feel absolutely nothing.

When I first started taking drugs and drinking, I found the fear that had filled me since I was small almost disappeared. The fear of not being wanted. The fear of letting my guard down. The fear of letting anyone in. The fear of being found out. The fear of not being worthy. The fear of looking into my own eyes. It was gone. All of it. As long as I stayed smashed.

‘Come on. Don't hang on to it. Give me some.' I'd drink it down and for a minute, I'd stop breathing. ‘Oh yes. I needed that.'

Whoosh. The air rushed back into my lungs. I was still alive. But was this what I wanted? That minute I swallowed the whisky. The minute when the air stopped filling my lungs. That was when I felt peace.

It was like being in a trance. I drank, then I slipped away. Into the void.

The odd times that I did have to be straight I could feel fear racing back over me like a freight train. Then I'd drink, and it was gone.

‘Give me a line.'

All I had to do to not think or feel was get fucked up. I might never have to feel again.

‘Give me everything.'

Maybe this is why, for most of my childhood, my dad was drinking himself slowly to death. Not wanting to feel his own pain and not wanting to see the pain we were feeling. Those nights when he had drunk just enough to want to talk to us but could never really get it out. Or did he try and perhaps I was too young to listen to him? ‘I'm sorry, son. I love ye. You kids deserve better than this. Better than me. I need to let you know why I'm so fucked up.'

‘Don't tell me why. I don't want to hear it. I'm scared, Dad. Why is it all so hard?'

But he never talked to me. He never let me in. He just left.

Did he feel scared, like I do? Did he lie awake, afraid of anything and everything, like I do? Did he drink until he could feel nothing and pass out cold, like I do?

He said he wasn't afraid of anything. ‘Don't be afraid, son. You don't be afraid of anything. You're strong like me.'

Even my big brother John told me, ‘I'm afraid of no man. I'm afraid of nothing that breathes.'

Now I know John was lying. He was lying to me, to himself and to the rest of the world. John was surviving. He was so scared that he was dangerous. Dad was the same. Afraid and dangerous. Especially to those people who were closest to him.

Just like me.

I can see it now.

* * *

The Royalty Bar sits right in the middle of Cowcaddens, a very Protestant part of Glasgow. Around here you could be a Sikh or a Hindu, a Sufi or a Buddhist, a Muslim, even an atheist – so long as you weren't Catholic.

The door of the pub swung open and crashed against the wall. All heads in the bar turned towards the door and looked at the figure blocking out the light. He was big and ugly, sort of like Charles Bronson after a hard night. Maybe it was the way his knuckles dragged on the ground behind him, I'm not sure, but he looked tough. His nose was spread across his face and his teeth were like a row of condemned buildings. It seemed that in every direction in Cowcaddens, something looked condemned.

‘I'm the fuckin' toughest guy in Glasgow. Does anybody here want tae argue wi' me?' he snarled.

I could feel the muscles of the old guy next to me tighten up. He wanted to take him on but decided against it.

I had just arrived in Glasgow for the first time since I'd left nearly twenty years earlier. I came from this place called Cowcaddens, one of the rougher parts of inner-city Glasgow. Now that I think about it, all of Glasgow is tough, but it's home. This is where it all started.

I came to see where I came from, to find my people, and even though I'd grown up twelve thousand miles away, in a place where the sun shines all day and there are beautiful beaches with girls in bikinis baking in the sun, and hardly anyone carries cutthroat razors for protection, something about this scene felt very familiar to me.

I was a long way from the pubs and clubs of Australia where I had got away with murder and made my living singing and chasing girls. Tonight I would not get away with anything, tonight I was out of my depth. I started to get up but my Uncle Jackie, my official guide for this homecoming tour of the bars of Glasgow, grabbed me and sat me down. As I looked at him,
I knew it would be better to say nothing. He told me later that this same guy came into the bar a week earlier and started trouble, and one of my uncle's friends hit him on the head with a hammer a few times. Apparently all it did was make him mad. Maybe.

So we sat quietly and said nothing even though I wanted to stand up and hit him. The gorilla in the door looked around the room, breathed out and spat on the floor. Then turned around and walked out into the cold night. He was going to the next bar to see if he could find someone who would take him on. That's what he did for fun. This was my welcome home.

‘See you next week, Charlie,' my uncle whispered under his breath as the beast left the bar. I think he was hoping to take him down one day, but not tonight.

I knock back a wee dram of whisky while my uncle gets us a refill. He drinks fast; these really are my people. Here in Glasgow they all seem to order the same thing: a whisky with a beer chaser. I drank in this bar every night I was in Glasgow and never saw anybody drink the beer. We would order one beer chaser and have twenty-five straight whiskies. And at the end of the night the beer would still be sitting there, as warm as it was when it was first poured. It was just an excuse to have a whisky.

At this rate I'll be out on the street singing before the pub shuts but so will the rest of the bar so I'll fit right in. I feel happy to be here but I notice that as usual there is a nagging voice in the back of my head screaming, ‘You don't deserve to be happy, you are no good.' I have never really been chasing a dream. I've been running from a nightmare. I still wake up in the middle of the night, short of breath and afraid. Afraid that life will catch up with me, and all the things I've done wrong will swamp me like a tidal wave and drag me down. Drag me back to where I belong.

My next drink arrives.

‘Oh, fuck I needed that,' sighs my uncle, the colour slowly coming back to his cheeks.

The truth is I have felt like this and heard this voice since I was a child, long before I was capable of doing anything wrong. Long before I ran away from home, long before I escaped from life through drinking or taking drugs. Long before I made records, even before I joined a band, and a long, long time before I almost let everything important to me in this world slip through my fingers. Was I born feeling unworthy, afraid, even guilty? What happened to me?

We order another round and we sit and begin to talk, awkwardly avoiding anything too personal even though it might shed some light onto why we are sitting here drinking ourselves into oblivion. We both talk too much and say nothing at the same time. I can feel my head starting to spin but I'm used to the feeling, I've felt it for a long time now.

‘Let's sing a wee song,' shouts my uncle and my first night in Glasgow has begun with a bang.

S
cottish people fall in love very easily, even more so on Saturday night. I think it is because we are all crazy. If I had to go to war, and I had the choice, I would surround myself with Scots. Then again, I would think twice about going to the football or a wedding with them. We can find trouble anywhere. A Glaswegian could start a fight at a funeral, even his own.

I vaguely remember being maybe four years old and looking out of the window on a Saturday night and being amazed at the scene on the street below at closing time. Singing, fighting, kissing and hustling, and that was just one couple. My mum and dad.

Glasgow in 1960 was like a bomb site. As a kid it looked to me like everything was falling down. There was rubble and mess everywhere. Well, there was around Cowcaddens where I lived. I think it was what you'd call an inner-city slum. Years before, they had torn down the old slums and built our slum. It was grey and cold-looking, a lot like the people, and all the buildings were covered in a layer of soot from the coal fires. So were the people, come to think about it. You could smell the coal burning
everywhere. To this day, the smell of a coal fire brings back a lot of memories.

When I went back in 1980 it still looked the same. It was as if the war was still going on and the place had been bombed quite recently. I guess there were trees, art and music and beautiful parts to the city but nowhere near where we lived. The only art was written on the walls of the buildings in chalk and on the sidewalks in blood.

Glasgow was, and still is really, a place that evokes mixed emotions in me. I meet Glaswegians socially and they are warm and friendly and very funny, but then I hear a Glaswegian accent on a dark street and alarm bells immediately start ringing in my head.

But anyway, back in the sixties, most of the town still looked like the Luftwaffe had had a field day there. I always thought one day they'd knock it down and start again, nice and new, but they never did.

In those days I thought my mum and dad were the coolest people alive. Mum was a beautiful girl and Dad was the Scottish boxing champion. They must have looked something when they stepped out on the town. Mum told me later that around that time they were in all sorts of dancing competitions. In fact, they were the jitterbug champions of Western Scotland for a while, a title that they won in a big dance hall near the markets of Glasgow. A place called the Barrowland Ballroom. This same hall became famous in the late sixties for a series of murders that rocked Scotland. Bible John, as he was known, followed young girls from the dance hall and brutally murdered them. He was never caught. The Barrowlands was also one of the first big places I played with my band when I went back to Scotland. I was excited to play in the place where my parents had had so much
fun. I remember it was a great show but I felt uneasy in the hall. Like a lot of Glasgow, this place gave me a sense of belonging but with that there was an underlying feeling of fear.

My dad could sing, fight, drink his weight in whisky and charm the pants off anyone – literally, but I'll get to that later. I used to think that was all I needed to learn to be a man. He was the amateur featherweight boxing champion of Britain, so I guess that made my mum the best sparring partner in Britain. I'm not sure what my dad did in Scotland after he finished boxing; he probably worked with his hands, well his fists anyway. And I'm not sure if Mum worked; she probably had to, but regardless, things were pretty tough for us, as they were for everyone who lived around us. Glasgow was, and still is, a tough town.

Dad won the title in 1956, I think. Apparently he was an amazing boxer, always fought fair and clean. He was offered money to go professional but he always said that pro-boxing was way too corrupt. He always tried to teach us that you had to be fair in sport, know how to lose graciously and win humbly. That was passed on to us as well as how to fight out of the ring. The difference was that out of the ring we learned not to be beaten at all costs. Do whatever we had to do but don't give in or lie down for anybody. These and other lessons have been backhanded down from father to son since time began in Scotland.

Dad used to tell me how he would spend time in training out of Glasgow, in a town called Auchterarder. The air would have been cleaner away from the city so it was a better place to prepare for a fight. Maybe it kept him away from his mates so he didn't drink as much too. I'm not sure, but I did hear his dad used to be his trainer. That would make sense; his dad was a very tough man and I can't imagine my dad taking orders from anybody else.

I never saw Dad without a cigarette in his hand. He started smoking at the age of five or six. His parents, like everyone else at the time, didn't know the damage that smoking would do to you.
There were posters saying how good it was for you. Then again, they did say the same about heroin, cocaine and of course whisky. So they used to send him to school with six Woodbine and a box of matches in his pocket. He never stopped until about sixty years later. That meant for sixty-odd years he smoked plain cigarettes, no filters, so he got the maximum amount of tar and nicotine.

He ran fifteen or twenty miles every day for most of his younger days so I presume the running helped counteract the smoking. My dad was a champion but I think the will to win came more from his heart than his training. Dad never wanted anybody to beat him. In the end the only person who did beat him was himself.

He always had a little cough, dry and ominous. Over the years I heard the cough get slowly worse and worse. He eventually stopped smoking because he was diagnosed with emphysema but by then it was too late. It killed him a few years later. Who knows – maybe that's why I wake up in fright, not being able to breathe.

I loved my dad, everyone did, except my mum after a while. When I was young I never saw any pain or fear in his eyes. I did see it much later as an adult when he could do nothing else but sit and reflect on his life to the sound of death banging at the door. I felt for him then; I think fear was a new thing for him. He could take pain, he was tough, but real fear was different and it only caught up to him when he could no longer outrun it or drown it in booze. I never let him know that I knew he was scared. That alone would have killed him. He died a tough guy.

Mum was different. I did see the longing in my mum's eyes; a look that said, ‘There has to be a better life somewhere for me.' Anywhere had to be better than Cowcaddens. Sometimes that look might have meant, ‘Why did I marry this man?' I'm not sure. There was this sense of emptiness. Looking back, perhaps it was just the need for an even break. I came to recognise that look
and I saw it in her eyes for most of my childhood. Sometimes it seemed to overwhelm her and sometimes she dealt with it. But even at her lowest, I could still see the light in her heart. She was beautiful. I loved her so much, I still do. She could make me feel warm and safe anywhere. I could bury my head in her chest and the problems of the world just slipped away.

Mum was tough, too. Sometimes I think that she thought she was tougher than Dad, which might have been a mistake. When she physically fought with my dad after he came home drunk with no money to feed us, she was the one who wouldn't back down. She would throw herself at him, hitting him with anything she could get her hands on. Night after night she was the one who ended up battered and bruised on the floor, not him. But she just kept getting up.

Dad would just leave so he didn't have to face up to anything. It was strange though – she seemed fearless and yet constantly afraid all the time. Is that possible? Of course it is; all of us kids are a bit the same.

Mum is the person you want around in a catastrophe. She jumps up and says, ‘Get oot ma fuckin' way, I'll sort this,' and then leaps straight into whatever is going on, no matter how dangerous it might be. If someone threatened the kids they had to face my mum, not my dad. He would have been away working or drinking, so I guess she had no other options. My mum wasn't tough by choice, she had to be. She could fight better than most of the men around us. And most of them seemed scared of her.

One time my sister Linda, who was probably five, had a fight with another kid. Linda always had a bad temper and she had bitten a chunk out of the girl's stomach. My sisters were tough even at that young age. Anyway, so justice could be done, one of the other girl's parents had to confront one of my parents. As a result, my mum and the other kid's mum had a fight out on the street, in front of everyone who lived there. Mum gave her
a hiding. That way everyone knew not to mess with our family. That's how we learned to deal with problems.

Mum was the enforcer. She did the dirty work. She was the one who had to be the bad guy and stop us from running wild and being brats. Dad just turned up late and let us do what we wanted. We loved Mum and would run to her if we were hurt or afraid, but if she turned on us, it was really terrifying. Something about her facial expressions could instil fear into all of us kids. She would slowly turn to us with her lips retracting. We were in trouble again. That was the signal to run. It still happens to this day.

But let's go back to the start. My earliest memories are really quite scattered and cloudy. A bit like my later ones when I think about it. There is a room that I now know was the kitchen but there was a bed in there, built into the wall. It was probably there to make use of the heat from the stove. A family could sleep in there when the rest of the house got too cold I guess.

There's nothing colder than a Scottish winter – though the summer comes close, I must say. I have vague memories of snuggling up in that bed with my mum, which is pretty good because I must have been well under two when we lived there. That house was number 169 Duke Street in Dennistoun, one of the poor suburbs of Glasgow.

At the end of Duke Street there had been a slaughterhouse many years before, but that was gone, torn down to make way for pubs and bars that were slaughterhouses in a different way. By the way, there were a lot of poor suburbs in Glasgow. We weren't anything special; there were plenty of slums to go around.

I was born James Dixon Swan at four o'clock in the afternoon on 28 April 1956. My mum was Dorothy, they called her Dot, and
my dad was James and they called him Jim. I was delivered by my grandmother, Elizabeth, they called her Betty. They called me wee Jim, after my dad. He was big Jim. I weighed fourteen pounds when I came into this world. I think if I had been born in a hospital I would have slapped the doctor.

But anyway, I was born in that very kitchen. My granny made my mum scrub the floor with a brush to take her mind off the contractions. It killed two birds with one stone. She didn't notice the pain as much and she had a very clean floor. The Scots are very house proud. I'd say we were all screaming as much as each other. Granny screaming at Mum, Mum screaming at me and me screaming at the world. But luckily for Granny, she was deaf and never heard a word.

Granny was only a little deaf but more importantly she only understood Scottish. She didn't want to hear any accent or speak with any accent that resembled English. Most Scottish people seemed to have an inherent dislike for the English. Everyone spoke about the English with a touch of venom. But the bastards weren't that bad really. Not anymore anyway.

I went back to see my granny many years later. I remember one day in the kitchen of my Aunty Maude's house. Aunty Maude was married to Uncle Jackie and they were my favourite relatives. Anyway, Granny was making tea. I was reading the newspaper when she turned to me and said, ‘Wid ye like a wee cup of tea, son?'

I immediately said, ‘Yes please.'

I could feel daggers flying my way. She looked at me again, and in a slightly more annoyed voice she said, ‘Wid ye like a cup of tea, son?'

‘Yes please, Granny,' I said as politely as I could, wanting to show her the respect any granny deserved.

To my granny this probably sounded like, ‘Oh rather, that would be spiffing Grandmama.' Basically it was like I was waving a red flag in front of her.

This went back and forth for a couple of minutes with Granny getting more and more worked up. I could tell because her voice had changed so much that the paint was peeling off the walls and Aunty Maude's budgie had its wings over its ears.

Finally, she said again, this time through her teeth – she had them in at the time – ‘Wid ye like a cup of tea, son?'

I turned and faced her and said in my broadest Glaswegian accent, ‘Aye, I wid.'

She let out a sigh and went back to the kettle whispering under her breath, ‘Why'd ye no fuckin' say so the first time?'

She proceeded to begrudgingly make the tea. This was her way of showing love, I think. I'm glad she liked me. Otherwise she would have wrapped the teapot around my head.

My mum had the five of us when she was very young. John was the eldest, followed by Dorothy, then Linda, myself and then young Alan. I've made jokes for years that I was the white sheep of the family but as you will read later, that's far from true. There were no white sheep in my family. Even as children we were all a handful to say the least.

My big brother John weighed twelve pounds and my older sisters weighed about eleven and my young brother Alan was a big boy too. I don't know why we were all so big. I've heard people say that Mum must have had gestational diabetes, but I think it was because my granny made my mum drink a pint of Guinness every day of her pregnancies.

I can just hear her saying in a thick Glaswegian accent, ‘Come on hen, it's good fur ye, drink yer Guinness.' Maybe not quite that polite but something like that. Guinness would fatten anybody up.

Dad kept her company and drank a pint of whisky every day. He didn't want to see her drink alone. He never got fat though,
maybe because he sacrificed his Guinness to let her have it. What a gentleman. I think the more whisky you drink the skinnier you get. But that's just a theory. I've seen a lot of really skinny Scotsmen who drank like fish. It might have something to do with the fact that they don't eat.