The Big Yin, 1975
George Rosie
Billy Connolly, the raucous comedian from the Clydeside shipyards, both epitomised and subverted the perceptions of working-class Scotland. Here, journalist George Rosie predicts the imminent superstardom of The Big Yin, in an article published in The Sunday Times on February 25, 1975
There is a man in Glasgow called Billy Connolly who has been putting forwards a new representation of Christ – head man of a squad of Glasgow tearaways. It goes something like this; the scene is a wellknown hostelry in the Gallowgate. “The door opens ...crash! And in he comes. The Big Yin... With the long dress and the casual sandals...” It is, of course, the King of Kings, the Messiah, the Man himself, but with a terrible thirst on. “Oot a’ morning’ daein the miracles. I’m knackered! Gie’s a glass o’ that wine. Nae kiddin’ son, I’m knackered...Take a look oot that door. There’s nuthin’ but deid punters walkin’ up and doon, wi’ their beds under their airms...”
As the Last Supper gets under way, the Big Yin makes a prophecy. “Wan o’ you is goin’ tae shop me... and two big Roman polis is goin’ to wheech me right oo’ o’ here, and into the jail. And ah’m goin’ tae dae a wan-night lie-in, me with the good dress on tae. And I’m going to get up in the mornin’ and say, first offence, ah’m on to probation nae bother. But a big Roman is going to come into my cell and say ‘Probationum my a**ium’...”
It is a tour de force, a stunning and relentless piece of near-blasphemy which can, and regularly does, reduce every variety of Christian – from the fiercest of Protestants to the most devout of Catholics – to helpless, hysterical mirth. And the whole piece is delivered in harsh, uncompromising Glasgow dialect, a racy, demotic and brutal argot which bears no resemblance to music-hall “Scotch”!
Connolly’s version of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion goes some way to explaining his amazing, runaway success. Because over the last year, Billy Connolly has become the man in Scotland, the only one with the ability to pack every theatre in the country five times over, and with a following that includes old-age pensioners from Gorbals and Drumchapel, to the Edinburgh intelligentsia. And the word is getting out to the enormous Scottish diaspora; in January he sold every seat at the London Palladium, and the sales of his latest LP record are expected to top 200,000 copies.
In most ways Connolly is the antithesis of the Scots comic, a species usually composed of dapper little men in neat suits, with patent leather hair or a penchant for sporrans, kilts and bow ties. Connolly is big, glamorous, wears his auburn curls down to his shoulders, sports a long wizard’s beard, and likes to trick himself out in gaily-coloured silks and brocades. He has all the stage arrogance of, say, the lead guitarist in a good rock-and-roll band.
But he works hard at his stagecraft; he moves well, is an excellent banjo player, a decent guitarist, possesses a fair if unspectacular singing voice, pens a nice song, and has developed a neat way with his hecklers. “You should get an agent, pal. Why sit there in the dark handlin’ yersel’...”
But it is his stories that the punters pay to hear, long, rambling, crude, blasphemous and raw, packed with incident and character, full of the clang of the shipyards and the echoes of the back close. A running commentary on the intricate, hot-tempered culture of the Scottish working class. Reports from a world peopled by meandering musical drunks, street-fighting heavies, slatternly mothers and snotty kids, inept teachers, no-hope scholars, whores, shipyard gaffers and wily apprentices.
At its root, Connolly’s work is kindly and deeply nostalgic. But it is laced with a sly wit, a caustic intelligence, a sense of menace, and a cunning eye for just the right details. It is a rich and heady mixture.
Connolly was born 31 years ago into a respectable, working-class Catholic family. Although his father was a time-served engineer and never without a job, home was two rooms in a “right bummer” of a close in Anderston. When young, Connolly moved in with two of his father’s sisters in the dockside area of Partick. School was the local RC primary. “I hated every minute,” he says. “I used to stand outside the door greetin’ until I was pulled in by the teacher , or shoved in by my father.”
Secondary school was better. St Gerard’s RC, across the Clyde in Govan. But even then he was the joker in the pack. “There was always one and I was it. I was the funny guy, the patter merchant.”
It was a talent that gave him a vague ambition to be a comedian. He was a regular attender at the famous Five Past Eight shows that flourished in Glasgow, and used to feature almost every variety of Scots funny man. He recalls watching Jimmy Logan dressed up as a coal-man singing “what do you want if you don’t want briquettes”, and thinking, “I’d love to do something like that”.
In the event, young Connolly’s career got off to an inauspicious start; messenger boy in a bookshop to be promptly sacked for stealing books. “Thing wis...I didnae dae it.”
That was followed by a spell as a van boy for Bilslands bread, a job he loved, and then, at the age of 16, into Stevens shipyard at Lindhouse as an apprentice welder.
Connolly talks about his years in the Clyde shipyards in the way that some literati conjure up their golden days at Eton or Oxford or Cambridge. “I was
so happy there,” he says. “I fell right into it. Loved it. As soon as that gate shuts, a shipyard becomes a complete wee town. You could buy shoes, cigarettes, transistor radios, cheap booze. It was an amazing place.”
For reasons that he is still not too clear about, Connolly joined the Parachute Regiment, Territorial Army. “It just sounded great,” he says. “And I liked the red beret and that. I thought, Christ, I’m guaranteed a woman in this gear. But not this joker.”
Surprisingly, perhaps, Connolly was a fairly enthusiastic paratrooper, with 23 jumps to his credit, and spent three or four years travelling about, firing off his rifle, and generally enjoying himself. But the radical traditions of the Clyde were seeping through, and the pointlessness of the whole business came to him in the Kyrenia Mountains in Cyprus. “We were supposed to be chasing the Green Howards,” he says. “After about a fortnight we captured one. It turned out he worked in the same shipyard as me. So I said to myself, Christ, I could have got him any day in the canteen. What the hell am I doin’ in the Kyrenia Mountains wi’ nae a*** in my trousers.”
At that stage Connolly’s musical tastes were simple enough. “I liked country and western, and I liked traditional jazz, but nothing out of the ordinary.” A few years previously he had bought a banjo for fun. “I just wanted to make that picking noise.”
But he found that his interest was sharpening, so he bought a guitar as well. Because someone had told him about it, he turned up at a folk club in Clydebank, and was immediately converted.
“I thought, Oh-ho... This is it. All the women looked like Joan Baez, and the guys were all hairy. All I’d known was suits, ties and Perry Como haircuts.”
Before long he was getting to sing, and enjoyed it all so much that he gave up his job at Stevens, and started to eke out a very small living singing in the folk clubs and pubs. “They were places where you could go and learn in front of an audience.”
He was a natural, and gradually began to pick up something of a reputation. He ventured into England with a little group called The Skillet-lickers, then got together with an ex-rock guitarist called Tam Harvey and started the Humblebums.
Later Connolly met, and was enormously impressed by, Gerry Rafferty, and the Humblebums duo became a trio. After a short time (and some acrimony) Tam Harvey left, leaving Connolly and Rafferty to make a couple of reasonably successful LPs and become, probably, the most popular folk duo in Scotland.
But it fell apart. “Gerry was a better musician than me, but I was better at stage craft,” he explains. “It couldn’t work any more. I just had to get funny.”
So Connolly packed it in, put together a solo act, and flopped miserably when he tried it out in Musselburgh. He then took off on a short tour of the clubs in the North of England where, he says, I grew up, entertainment-wise.”
Then came a show at Cumbernauld called Connolly’s Glasgow Flourish, which he took to The Close theatre in Glasgow, where he teamed up with Tom Buchan the poet. Together they scripted The Great Northern Welly Boot Show, a UCS [Upper Clyde Shipyards] – inspired political rockmusical which did great business at the 1972 Edinburgh Festival, and turned out nicely when transferred to the Young Vic in London.
After that, a series of increasingly successful tours (including the US), a fast-growing word-of-mouth reputation, and then early in 1974 a watershed show at the Glasgow Pavilion, after which everything fell into place for Connolly, and he proceeded to pack out every theatre in every city in Scotland. The whole thing culminated (perhaps) in January this year when Connolly hit the London Palladium, generated a thriving black market in tickets, and was given a five-minute standing ovation at the end of the show.
But it is the eerie psychopaths and murderers of the “Nutcracker Suite”, Barlinnie’s famous Special Wing, with whom he finds most rapport. “Look. These guys are condemned. They’re in there for an awfully long time, if not forever. They’ve come through bad times – maybe the worst there is – and they’re standing upright. They know exactly who they are and what they are. Which is a great thing. Giving a guy like that a laugh is a big thing to be doing with yourself.”
And Connolly is prepared to speak the unspeakable. His Crucifixion piece is the most obvious example, but there are others. He will, for instance, register the constituents of a pool of vomit and conclude, “It’s no’ the 18 Guinnesses that does it, it’s the diced carrots.” And Connolly’s drunks do not just walk funny and have problems articulating; they also have vomit down their jackets and their trouser legs are soaked in urine.
But if that is the way that the Scots choose to get drunk – and large numbers of them do – then that is the way Billy Connolly will represent them. As he says: “The basic charm of my stuff is its honesty. That’s all.”