Life in a Scotch Sitting Room
Ivor Cutler’s original harmonium, image by Andrea Blackie
One August Saturday afternoon, as the 20th century spluttered to a close, I saw Ivor Cutler perform at the Queens Hall. Of the event I can now recall little, other than Cutler expressing incredulity on learning (he straight up asked someone in the front row) that tickets for his show were priced at £11. That anyone would pay that much to see a 76 year old poet and singer from Govan, was beyond him.
Last night in the Spiegeltent at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, tickets were £21 to see Edinburgh indie pop songwriter Hamish Hawk present his tribute to Cutler: Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, Vol. 0. That’s a quarter of a century of inflation for you, but it was worth every single penny.
In their own ways, both Cutler (who died in 2006) and Hawk (born 1991) are Scottish enigmas hiding in plain sight. We all like to think we have "discovered" an artist, that we are the only ones to have heard their music. In a post-show discussion with Nicola Meighan, Hawk touched on this in relation to him listening to Cutler for the first time as a teenager. Similarly, I thought I was the only person to have heard Hamish Hawk’s records but, by the time I got into him, he was on to his 4th album, Laziest River. Ivor Cutler was certainly no secret, collaborating with Robert Wyatt, and lauded by Paul McCartney, Billy Connolly, and Radio 1 DJ John Peel. It was all or nothing with Ivor Cutler.
Hamish Hawk, image © Edinburgh International Book Festival
It would have been easy enough for someone as talented as Hamish Hawk simply to replicate a selection of Cutler’s songs, poems and autobiographical Life in a Scotch Sitting Room stories. And with an uncanny nod to Cutler’s cadence, he does this very well. A bonus for the devotees (everyone in the audience): the music is played on Cutler’s original harmonium.
But the evening is stitched together with Hawk’s own Life in a Scotch Sitting Room stories, fragments of his childhood, the cul-de-sac, patterns on the mug mats, decorating the Christmas tree, the visiting mobile fish van. All told in wistful, spartan words. In Ivor Cutler, Hamish Hawk has found a voice to let us into his beautiful cosmos.
Hands down, the most moving show I’ve seen this August.
Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, Vol. O, run ended but a tour hinted at
Ivor Cutler, Jammy Smears album cover, 1976