If Burns were alive today...A
poser's a poser for a' that
By DAVID BELCHER
Through the revolving
door of history Rabbie turns up in Glasgow, looking not a day over 37. In an exclusive
interview with David Belcher he explains how he is coping with the twentieth century.
I CANNOT help but watch
the flailing figure in the cheap, too-tight leather jacket as he struggles with
the waiter who is trying to huckle him out through the revolving doors of Glasgow's
Cafe Gandolfi. ''Effin' an blindin', it's ma gemme . . . ya wee sleekit, timrous,
cowerin' basssterrt!''
His pinched grey shoes
and matching facial pallor seem oddly familiar and strangely disturbing. My assignation,
which had seemed unlikely enough at the outset, is evidently getting off to a
start so bizarre as to be wholly unimaginable.
I mentally re-run the
late-night phone call which had brought me here: your Ayrshire Bard is alive yet
. . . Robert Burns wants a meeting set. How? Rabbie Burns? Undead for 199 years?
Further loud scufflings ended my reverie.
''Y'effin' sonsie-faced
puddin' shite . . . a'm a famous writer, me -- a can pey yur hirelin' traitors'
wages!'' Chilling words. Burns alive in '95 . . . but in such a debased form?
''A've a cheque in the post! An if a get ma boot to ye, ye'll have a red, red
erse!''
Such is my horrified absorption
in this spectacle that I entirely fail to clock the materialisation at my table
of an urbane figure in a stylish four-button tweed suit. When he speaks, his voice
is three-parts Denis Law, two-parts Scottie in Star Trek, one-part Willie McIlvanney.
''Have nib, will travel,'' he drones with quavery gravitas.
I study my new companion's
trendy Roman emperor-style haircut and neatly-trimmed mutton-chop sidewhiskers,
his air of no-nonsense dandification. He doesn't look a day over 37. Yet he had
been born 236 years previously -- the heaven-taught ploughman-poet; the drawing-room
dilettante and farmer; the satirical sentimentalist, Robert Burns.
''Immortality's easy when
you've tholed half an hour at Rugby Park,'' is Burns' gnomic reply to my obvious
first question.
About his life post-death,
as it were, Burns is similarly vague. ''I was away for a long time. Then I went
away-away. To the States. I relocated there, to LA, in 1960-odd. I joined a friend
in hopping aboard a US military transport plane when it called into Prestwick.
I'm over there six months of the year; over here the other six, living somewhere
between Heaven and Kilwinning, let's say.
''I didn't write for literally
ages. It was the sixties that got me going again at the word-face.''
Ah, the era of free love,
dissent, and self-expression. ''No, the era of knocking out small amounts of words
for big buckets of wonga, writing TV ad jingles. Let not women e'er complain;
Surf banishes wash-day pain. Lines Written on an Amex Credit Card -- far safer
than a Bank Note, pard'ner! Then I got back into songs again.
Mostly for my own groups.
Folk. Folk-rock. Acid-rock. Right the way through to industrial grindcore and
ambient trance. There was the Houghmagandie Band; Extemporaneous Effusions; Auld
Mahoun and the Muckle Black Deils; Thripplin Thrissle.
''Then it was film music,
and ultimately film-writing. Stuff like The Cotter's Saturday Night Fever; Twa
Reservoir Dogs; Halloween. Halloween is still my favourite: the spell-binding
tension, the blood and guts, the senseless violence, the flash of the stalker's
blade . . . the horror. Aye, and all of it based on a Ayrshire Cup tie between
Kilbirnie Ladeside and Cumnock.''
Ah yes, football. Shake
my hand in a scrimpet fashion under this table and tell me you're not a Rangers
man.
''I can honestly say Robert
Burns has had no interest in football since the retirement of his great-great-great
grandson, Kenny. Kenny once told me that he psyched himself up for the on-field
fray by nutting the dressing-room wall . . . he said he could only give of his
best in a game if he had the taste of blood in his mouth. Aye, in his own gritty,
workaday kind of way, Kenny was as much a poet as me.
''As for freemasonry,
let me say that when I joined 170 years ago, it wasn't for bond-holding bourgeois
bummles in the Copland Road stand.''
So do you seek weekend
entertainment on the dancefloor?
''I visit the Love Boutique
at the Arches every month. It's refreshing to dress up in thigh boots, chamois
breeches and lacey ruffles. Otherwise, I'm not a man for clubs that would have
me as a member. As I've already said, look what happened to the masons.''
How do you get about these
days?
''A Mitsubishi Shogun
V6 3.5 litre four-by-four with a personalised number plate, K17 AFF. It's meant
to look like 'Kit Aff,' as in 'Haw, darlin, get yer . . .' An all-terrain vehicle
covers much more galloping-ground in the Ayrshire Tirlie-Whirlie Stakes.''
Ah-ha! Love action! With
whom? ''No comment, but it's not John Cairney.''
There are many Burnsian
contradictions, leading to contradictory interpretations of your role and worth.
How do you cope with being all things to all men?
''Easy. The friend with
whom I went Stateside has been through it all, too, exactly the same. We share
the burden. And much else besides, actually . . . not least eternal life.''
What? ''Robert Burns .
. . and Elvis Presley. Rabbie still burns and Elvis lives. Ponder the karmic connections.
We both checked in in the same month, January. We both checked out -- apparently
-- after a visit to the dentist. He signed off -- ostensibly -- by singing Auld
Lang Syne at the end of 1976. And where was the one place he touched down in Britain?
''I've been writing songs
for him. Country and western. Aye, when you're talking about country and western,
simple couplets, sentimentality, deathless love, and cheatin' hearts . . . well,
songwriters don't come any more country and western than me.'' Our conversation
winds to an end. We bid each other adieu, exiting Cafe Gandolfi together, carefully
avoiding the ejected trouble-maker whose rage continues in the street.
''For auld lang's effin
syne, it's Francie an' effin' Josie,'' the leather-jacketed cries upon seeing
us.
Burns stops. Considers.
''Return to sender, pal. I did bawdy demotic 150 years ago. Get a new act. Get
contemporary. Like me.''
Wed 25-Jan-1995
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