[click on a name to jump to the full memory]
“… For the denouement - Armageddon for the believers - we had the audience in almost total darkness in the centre nave, lights and sounds, not all of a comfortable nature, and best trick of all, a flaming serpent descending from the vault above. … I’m still not sure what we were really trying to say to the world, but it was most effective theatre….”
“ … It was almost like being asked to join a cult after the most important festival in the calendar has just taken place… teams of post Golden City acolytes telling us how we’d just missed being part of this AMAZING production that had won awards at the Edinburgh festival and had been such an unmissable experience…
“ … at a two day development simulation at the University of Witwatersrand Business School I suddenly realised that I could use all the improvisation experiences that Hugo had left us with…. I could use the skills Hugo had shown us during the Directing course that he led in the early 1970s and from our two years working on improvisations for the Golden City….”
“ … During the lead up to the GC I spent some time in Iona with acoustic guitar, and constructed sequences in St Martins Chapel, adjacent to the Abbey. The acoustics were wonderful … It was a joy and I felt confident that the music would work in the large cathedral environments of Glasgow and Edinburgh….”
… But Hugo really was ‘The Boss’ in the end, and he, incidentally, cast himself at John of Leyden; he was the leader of this crew in the story, this gang of Anabaptists and at the same time he was the director and leader of us as well, so it was quite profitable in terms of our relationship to John of Leyden when he became megalomaniac and so on - and so did Hugo in his own way (laughs) …”
“ … Hugo opened my eyes to what was possible. STG & the whole enterprise seemed full of incredibly glamorous, talented , creative people. After the rather dry academic approach at Glasgow Uni, where I was doing my degree, it felt intoxicating & dangerous & incredibly ambitious….”
… Of the production, I remember being immersed in feelings of joy and terror. The musicians were incredible, as were the crew…. Particularly memorable scenes were the religious hate screamed at each other over the length of the vast spaces, the starvation scene and the Pavane, which I might even still be able to perform with the right partner! …”
“ … I was tasked willy nilly with dealing with the financial side of what was essentially a pyrrhic victory: the production exhausted the financial goodwill of the university as well as the energies of the cast and crew and we were left to negotiate out of our way out of the impasse with as much energy as we could devote to it…. “
“… The Edinburgh rig was similar but different to Glasgow. The lighting rig had to be suspended from the quadriforium above the nave arches. Access was “external”, ie up a scaffolding tower; 50 years ago I could go up the outside corner of one of those in 2 ft strides. The rigging was a mixture of heavy and skill….”
“ … Bertie Scott and Hugo Gifford … thought I might be able to help the show with some electronic sounds evoking the end of the world. It sounded unlikely subject matter for a theatrical show and it was with some trepidation that I agreed to take part. It turned out to be a momentous decision …”
‘The Golden City’ was a show created by Hugo Gifford and the company of Strathclyde Theatre Group, and told the history of the radical Anabaptist sect in Munster, who after a campaign of baptising, and charismatic preaching, in 1534 proclaimed a communal government for the city. Hugo played the leader, Jan of Leyden, whose visions and fervour stirred up the population to mass hysteria and a belief in the 'end times', giving this sect a moment of glory, before the uprising was ruthlessly crushed by the overlord Prince Bishop. One of those cages I had seen hanging on Munster cathedral had been for Jan.
We were back working in Glasgow Cathedral as we had been for Everyman some years before -– again stripped of chairs - great vaulted spaces preponderant with mystery and emotion. With the lighting designer Vic Lockwood I toured all friendly theatres to borrow spare lanterns for a colossal rig mostly on scaffolding running along the triforium level of the nave. This time there was a large high stage at each end, and another stage central to the nave. The great west stage on its scaffold base had to be shifted for Sunday service. This was neatly done with about twenty-five or so cast and crew underneath, all lifting on scaffold crossbars, and shuffling sideways together into the transept. Then to replace again the couple of hundred chairs. When the audience entered to the empty paved space they milled around the nave to follow the action, and there were at times many ‘plants’ in the audience, sometimes in costume, to uphold involvement and emotion within the crowd. Quite soon the centre stage split into four separate cubes, each on wheels and moved out, and lo and behold out of the middle pops Thom, dressed only in loin cloth, as a John the Baptist type figure announcing the coming Kingdom.
As the fever of the new commune gets intense, and polygamy is the practice, and starvation is rife in the besieged city, there is an inner court of people close to Jan, their mad prophet leader. At one point this is presented as a dance – a Pavanne, which was contemporary to the period. For this, the genius of Stuart Hopps, the choreographer, created a set piece courtly dance.
The Anabaptist Pavanne was on the main west stage, with live musicians, and about a dozen dancers. The tec. crew were up under a north side arch on a platform with the lighting controls. I was cueing operators on three borrowed dimmer boards. It was from here I first remember seeing Steve, although I must have seen him in the preceding rehearsals, and in the earlier part of the show, but this is the bright memory of my really noticing him, a dancing, slender, curly haired, silver clad lad. I may have missed a cue. I fell in love in the theatre of the cathedral, but fell into his arms only at the end of run party.
The Messiah figure was preaching Armageddon as the Prince Bishops armies close in. For the denouement - Armageddon for the believers - we had the audience in almost total darkness in the centre nave, lights and sounds, not all of a comfortable nature, and best trick of all, a flaming serpent descending from the vault above. It concertinaed down on hidden ropes and pulleys with glaring eyes, shrieking over the people’s heads, was lit wildly but not too visible, accompanied by battle sounds, and many groaning crying Munster folk among the knees of the audience.
I’m still not sure what we were really trying to say to the world, but it was most effective theatre.
Bulge, chief technician of this enterprise, sharp witted, wild living and ever planning more adventure, found himself with such an able and lively crew that he tried to hire out our services calling us the ‘Panama Red Trucking Company’ with its motto : ‘We humph anything’. Indeed. The Panama Red was a slight exaggeration, most of the hashish came from Morocco or the middle East, the home growing of the herb was not a habit among us itinerant students of northern climes – yet. After University Bulge disappeared into obscure technical work for the Government. I remember saying to him at one point ‘if you are doing the work I think you are, you should probably not be seen talking to a socialist like me’. I didn’t see him again for many years.
The enterprise was a great success and united a total of about 40 people to create the spectacle, and caught critical admiration for its innovative styles. We had a single week to prepare the transfer to St Mary’s Cathedral Edinburgh. The last night party of the Glasgow run, was at Diana and Robin’s house, outside the city and with gardens. Someone sat on the leaf of the antique dining table which then collapsed. I danced with the willowy boy from the pavanne dance with his shy air of innocence. He was delightful, and we stuck together in the following days. But not for long. In the late summer busy schedule of new rehearsals in Glasgow, in parallel with a scaffolding fit up in Edinburgh, involving many movements of cast, who were also doubling as crew, there came a crushing accident.
Steve was driving a mini-bus, running on a schedule I’d mostly drawn up, with some heavy dimmer equipment and 6 people, heading east to Edinburgh late night on the motorway, when they all went to sleep, him last, one assumes. The mini-bus ran up the side bank of an exit ramp and somersaulted back onto the road. All walked away except Steve who was for six days in a close-by intensive care unit, in a coma. Looking at him I realised he would need help in rehabilitation, and that I was going to be staying around to be with this guy. He came slowly back to us – his mother rushed up from Gloucestershire (and thereby started a long, polite, but forceful battle for his attention). Steve was fragile for a while, needing support to find his feet, not always sure of himself, but the university was most understanding and lenient with him, and I had fallen in love.
And at the same time, after the Edinburgh production which had caught the imagination of the festival theatre world, I got a job offer from 7:84 Scotland. The job on offer was as lighting man and general stage hand and this latest experience with STG had well prepared me for it.
As a student in Theatre Film and TV studies at Glasgow university in the early 1970s I had become increasingly frustrated with the lack of opportunities to participate hands on in performance within that institution.
One of my best mates in the course, Carol Ann Crawford, who was directing a piece by South African playwright Athol Fugard called Hello and Goodbye (in which I played the home coming sister) had become involved with an exciting theatre group at the University of Strathclyde. She told us she was using some of the methodology learned at Strathclyde in her directorial techniques in our Fugard play.
On the opening night of Hello and Goodbye, Carol Ann invited the Strathclyde Thestre group director, Hugo Gifford to view the performance. Hugo was so impressed, he immediately invited us to bring the production to the Drama centre in Ingram Street… which we did in the September of 1975 … It was generally a good experience, although the whole run was dominated by teams of post Golden City acolytes telling us how we’d just missed being part of this AMAZING production that had won awards at the Edinburgh festival and had been such an unmissable experience… even Carol Ann Crawford herself was transformed into a dreamy eyed apologist for the mundanity of post Golden City life.
It was almost like being asked to join a cult after the most important festival in the calendar has just taken place, there won’t be another one along for another century and if you weren’t there you can’t possibly know what they all know..
I determined I would see out the run of Hello and Goodbye and then I’d be offskie.
Of course… that didn’t happen… the charisma and professionalism of Hugo Gifford. .. the innovative participatory techniques and improvisatory processes that brought out the best in every individual who put themselves forward to play a part either on or offstage had me spellbound. I was in awe of the man as a teacher, an artist, a director, a facilitator and (eventually) mentor and friend.
The Golden City wasn’t the end after all… rather, it was the launch… the beginning of an extraordinary period of experimentation and innovation in Scottish theatre that touched the lives of every one of us involved in either Golden City itself or the decades following.
I acknowledge Hugo Gifford and STG as the major influence on my practice with Fablevision. Everything I have done in the 5 decades of working in Scotland can be traced back to the learning from STG, Hugo and all the many fellow travellers who were also students of the master Gifford.
Hugo left us too soon but the legacy of Golden City and everything that followed reverberates….
After we sadly left Glasgow and involvement with STG at the end of 1976 it was to be many years before we worked in theatre again. In the early 1980s we worked backstage and helped revive the Ruiru Amateur Theatre Society (RATS) at our local sports club in Kenya. By 1990 we were working in South Africa and it was at a two day development simulation at the University of Witwatersrand Business School that I suddenly realised that I could use all the improvisation experiences that Hugo had left us with. I was one of two delegates from Rhodes University who travelled up to Johannesburg to participate in two 30 player role playing games developed by inspirational academic Graham Chapman - The Green Revolution Game and Exaction. We were shown how to play the games and then how to manage them. I quickly realised that I could use the skills Hugo had shown us during the Directing course that he led in the early 1970s and from our two years working on improvisations for the Golden City. Being game manager in Exaction was like being a cross between a Stage Manager and Director - participating in and shaping the direction that the simulation was taking.
For the next 25 years Kate and I would run the games with students and colleagues at Rhodes University and on programmes in South Africa, Botswana, Sweden, Finland and France. They became an integral part in a number of our international exchanges where we tested and developed our own simulations - the African Catchment Game, African Development Game and Swampfire (a chillingly simple simulation of the spread of HIV-AIDS). I can safely say that we would never have never embarked on such adventurous academic pedagogical innovations if it weren’t for Hugo and the Golden City and I am sure that I wouldn’t have gone on to get the Rhodes University Distinguished Teaching Award in 2004 without his inspiration.
During the lead up to the GC I spent some time in Iona with acoustic guitar, and constructed sequences in St Martins Chapel, adjacent to the Abbey. The acoustics were wonderful and I spent a few days working on the material. I also got the privilege of playing the sequences in Iona Abbey.
It was a joy and I felt confident that the music would work in the large cathedral environments of Glasgow and Edinburgh. So much of the GC music was born on Iona.
The Townspeople song was constructed from lyrics created by the cast. I found out later that the cast had used the Toreador song as the basis!
There are many other stories such as playing the Fringe Club and at the Elie house party.
In August 1973, Hugo encouraged me to go down to Ingram St because he was starting to invent a whole huge project to make a play which eventually became The Golden City - so I decided that I would join up with the theatre group because I’d always been keen on the idea of acting, almost since primary school, and had never had the nerve to go do it. And I was encouraged in this by Hugo’s acting-training method - his version of the Stanislavsky Method - which was very enabling to people like me who hadn’t prevkusly done serious acting. And I’d always felt that I would be nervous - and sometimes I was nervous - I’d also always been afraid that I’d get the giggles when I went on -, but Hugo’s method of finding one’s way into the part you were playing, very slowly, through improvisations and through physical training and preparation and so on were very enabling to me - I learnt the basis of that from him and gained the confidence to go in plays. And for this huge production, The Golden City, there was nine months, or nearly a year’s, run-up to it,
It was Andrew Cruickshank, an earlySTG patron,who suggested to Hugo that the theatre group should find itself a big project, inventing a show of some sort. Hugo and Bertie Scott got interested in the Anabaptists in Munster in the 16th Century and decided that the theatre group should mount a devised play, in a church - in a cathedral space - which we eventually called ‘An Epic Extravaganza’ - done on a promenade basis, meaning that the audience largely stands and the performance goes on around and amongst them. Hugo got some money to go to Munster to research the place and of course there were a few books about the Anabaptists - sort of fundamentalist Protestants, trying to set up a holy city on earth in Munster, against the wishes of the Holy Roman Empire. So Hugo recruited a lot of the people who’d been in his plays before, in August of 1973, and he had a sort of scenario narrative of the events of the attempt by Jan of Leyden to set up a Holy City in Munster and the success of this for a while and the besieging of the city by the Holy Roman Emperor’s troops and the destruction of the Holy City and of Jan of Leyden by the troops at the end.
People were cast in the various roles for historical people, but some of us had a number of roles - different roles in different scenes - but the leading ones had one role to play right the way through. There were maybe 20 or 30 people, men and women, working together on this, doing improvisations progressively about each scene, each historical moment, that we’d decided to focus on. This was downstairs in the Drama Centre: elaborate improvisations, where we would take costumes if we wanted to, produce props for them - sometimes they might go on for two hours or so - like a scene where everybody got converted by the preacher, or a scene where we made a kind of informal Protestant-type communion, or scenes of theological debate and so on.
Hugo was the boss, and he had two very important helpers and supporters, Bertie Scott and Alistair Cording, who were effectively assistant directors But Hugo really was ‘The Boss’ in the end, and he, incidentally, cast himself at John of Leyden; he was the leader of this crew in the story, this gang of Anabaptists and at the same time he was the director and leader of us as well, so it was quite profitable in terms of our relationship to John of Leyden when he became megalomaniac and so on - and so did Hugo in his own way (laughs)
The original time-scale turned out quickly to be unrealistic; we would improvise in August, write an actual script in September, rehearse it and try to stage it in October or in November - the whole thing in three months - and it quickly became apparent that that was completely unrealistic so, I suppose, in late September or October we realised we weren’t going to be able to stage it then, but we still wanted to do it and so we decided another deal: we would take much longer doing it and try to stage it in the next August in Glasgow Cathedral and then take it to Edinburgh for two weeks to St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral during the Festival. And this was problematic for some people - a few people had to drop out because they knew they weren’t going to be available in the summer, there were tears from them, and one or two people were in terrible trouble from their spouses because they were told they had to be available for their regular two weeks of holiday in July. One leading person negotiated two weeks off, from Hugo, in July, even though it was getting so near to production time, because we wanted that person so much - and he went off on his holidays and came back - that’s fine! And also the group said to Hugo, that they wanted to do a show of some sort, so Hugo in the interim, around about Easter or so, staged T S Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in the choir of Glasgow Cathedral. So he staged a full-scale production there at the same time as keeping up the improvisations, the preparation and the writing of The Golden City. Groups would meet at 126 Ingram Street, improvise scenes, Hugo would be there as director, sometimes participating as the character John of Leyden, as well. We would all make notes of what we’d experienced - what it was like to do it - and eventually the scenario got expanded and we started writing a script for these scenes. A script, setting it in the historical period, though using contemporary language and employin a number of different theatrical styles for the different scenes. So one of the big fight scenes was written as a pantomime in rhyming couplets – in very good, amusing rhyming couplets. There were about six or eight of us who contributed a number of the written elements to it. I’m amazed to look at it now and see how wordy it is compared to how any big play like that would be written nowadays.. . . . .but we typed it up and then rehearsed the staging of it.
The staging was hugely complex, very ambitious - the very first show to do promenade on this scale in Scotland. We’d used the whole of the nave of Glasgow Cathedral with all the seating cleared out and we had big high scaffolding structures at each end of the nave, and we had a number of specially built trolleys - made with scaffolding poles which were about five feet high or so, and on four wheels each, and about two or three times the size of an office desk so that actors could be pushed around, climbing onto them and doing a little scene between two or three people. Or we could push six or eight of them together and sometimes we could make a passage from the scaffolding stage at one end to the other end (which was the plan, but I don’t think we had enoigh trolleys to reach!). That gives a bit of a sense of the ambition of it all. The audience, in the meantime, stood around on the ground, and most of the time the people of Munster also stood round on the ground, acted, emoted, singing hymns, falling to the ground possessed by the Holy Spirit and so on with the audience standing all round them. But sometimes you had a named chracter role – one of mine was Holy Roman Emperor - the whole play started as if it were a fairground and carniva, then modulated into a wrestling match between Martin Luther and The Pope, refereed by me as the Holy Roman Emperor. A parody of a wrestling match done on one of the trolleys.
So it was very ambitious theatrically - there were two live bands playing as well, and synthesisers, sound effects, lighting hung from scaffolding raised up by the columns in the nave of the cathedral. A rope (laughs), scandalously, hanging from the vaulting of the building into which our production manager had got to by climbing inside the vault and boring a hole in the wooden roof with a brace and bit, exactly when Hugo was standing underneath talking to the Dean of the cathedral and round him were - I saw this - floating little bits of curling wood as Kris was making a hole in the cathedral’s fabric overhead, so we could let down a rope on which a terrifying dragon was later to swing right through the whole building, ena ting a terrifying Armageddom – but Hugo just moved him away and nobody bothered.
The synthesisers were then quite a new thing. We thought that the Moog-synthesizer was pretty cutting-edge, we were quite up-with-the-game to have something like that available. But as I said, two live bands as well, especially written rock - or sub-rock - music. Religious music as well and music for a fantasy ballet – a stately pavane danced by King John’s court. The second half of the play began with with six or eight of the cast in full ballet-type white costumes into which, on the first night at the interval, they were still being sewn into by our wardrobe people because there generally was with Hugo a lot of last-minuting and because he was at the same time a perfectionist.
And so, in August 1974, we opened in Glasgow Cathedral to a reasonable-sized crowd We got pretty good reviews and we went on to Edinburgh, with a week’s break, as we had to build the theatre space in St Mary’s Cathedral. We had two complete weeks of occupation of that contracted for, but we had to take down all the theatre things on the Saturday night of the first week of our run because they weren’t willing to do their Sunday services with our theatre stuff in there. So, we had to demolish both of the very large stage structures at each end in St Mary’s Cathedral on Saturday in an all-nighter on Saturday night, put the stuff away then sleep through part of Sunday and come back late Sunday evening after all the services, and rebuild our theatre for the next week’s shows. I think Hugo had actually agreed to that without in the first instance telling everybody that that was what we were going to have to do, in order that we could have the full two weeks’ run.
We were very pleased with ourselves, and we got a very good review in The Guardian by Nicolas De Jongh - the sort of thing that I would remember - and we got a Fringe First, which was a fairly rare thing in those days and we got fairly good audiences most of the time and it was a very big hit. Occasionally I’ve met people I didn’t know at the time who in years later said “Oh I saw that - were you in that - that was great, it was terrific,” and it certainly was very ambitious, it was certainly the first large-scale promenade show that had been done in Scotland in those days.
But it was very expensive, and here’s a great part of the story, Hugo, who was an appointed member of the English Studies department had been granted the right to sign expenses chits, (which I know you could never get away with nowadays).. - We had to have rental vans to go back and forth between Glasgow and Edinburgh because many of the people appearing had full-time jobs at home and they had to be transported after work each night of the week to Edinburgh although a number of the cast who weren’t working full-time were staying in a flat that had been hired. And at one point,, during the week of the break there was a bad accident in which several of the actors were quite badly injured. transport was expensive I think all of them except one were able to go on in the play in the next week, but that was really quite a nasty accident on the M8. So, transport was expensive, many elements were expensive - lamps had to be hired, we had sometimes to buy materials, altbhough we did make all the costumes and props ourselves. Hugo, as I said, was a perfectionist; when he wanted something, when he had conceived something, he wanted it and either we would make it or actors would do it themselves, but sometimes money had to be spent, so he just signed and signed and signed because the bills didn’t really come in until after the production. I think Hugo probably knew he shouldn’t be, but he could be was quite ruthless, frequently, when he wanted something for a production (laughs) Directors can be like that! So he probably knew what he was doing and knew that he could postpone the trouble till later. Of course the bills came in to English Department and, while there was of course a budget, he’d gone over it, scandalously, and he got into very bad trouble with Professor Clarke, because Professor Clarke got into very bad trouble with Finance office and the theatre group actually had to try to make money itself to pay back the gross overspend - we had to do jumble sales and things like that for much of the next year and so a lot of the group’s energy had to go into this. But there more shows all the same at the Ingram Street theatre. But the late ‘70’s Hugo decided he would resign from the job - he wanted to do other things in theatre - and then he died in July 1981 as quite a young man.
Like everyone else, I have the fondest memories of that period, especially of Hugo who was an inspiration and a wonderful, generous teacher. He opened my eyes to what was possible. STG & the whole enterprise seemed full of incredibly glamorous, talented , creative people. After the rather dry academic approach at Glasgow Uni, where I was doing my degree, it felt intoxicating & dangerous & incredibly ambitious.
I'm lucky enough to have worked in theatre, TV and film my whole life, with a few detours along the way.
Thank you Hugo and STG for giving me the courage to follow my dreams of becoming a professional actor. It's been a blast! I'm now Dialect Coach on "Outlander" but the lessons I learned about focus & resilience still hold good.
The memories are sketchy at best, and possibly inaccurate. I wonder why?
Of the production, I remember being immersed in feelings of joy and terror. The musicians were incredible, as were the crew. Every night brought feelings of exhaustion and exhilaration. Old and young worked together under the sometimes-scary, but always inspired, dynamo that was Hugo Gifford.
Particularly memorable scenes were the religious hate screamed at each other over the length of the vast spaces, the starvation scene and the Pavane, which I might even still be able to perform with the right partner!
Socially, the production brought lifelong friendships, a lot of growing up together, memories of sleeping in a cupboard, never alone and sometimes four to a bed. Golden memories.
In hindsight, the GC influenced me in many ways I couldn’t have realised at the time. The understanding that, if something doesn’t seem right, you should holler from the rooftops - never be a sheep. A lifelong distrust of the power of religion led, in my later years, to my becoming a humanist celebrant - the best job of my life.
Thank you, Hugo et al. It was not always pleasant but it was a privilege.
In December 1973 I accepted a lecturing job in drama at Strathclyde University. For several months I negotiated the terms of my job and looked for accommodation for me and my wife Kathy Rooney and I met new friends particularly Donald Fraser Hugo Gifford and Alastair Cording who were to play a major part in my life. Kathy and I had only just moved to Scotland when we began working on front of house for The Golden City in Edinburgh. I can't now remember whose idea it was, but it was an explosive beginning to a very important part of our lives.
The sheer scale of the enterprise was exhilarating, the performance showed the many benefits of working with Hugo and the energy made a lasting impression on us. A few scattered memories: Romilly Squire making light of climbing a ladder in genuine mediaeval armour; me failing to persuade a very committed member of the cast who was attempting to convert me to anabaptism to try their luck on a critic rather than a member of the team, the Pavanne of course, the moving scenic trucks traversing the venue. And the never to be forgotten punter on our first evening falling blind drunk from his stool in a pub at the Haymarket at 5:30 PM.
Then the Fringe First award and the less than pleasant aftermath when as a very new lecturer in my first job, I was tasked willy nilly with dealing with the financial side of what was essentially a pyrrhic victory: the production exhausted the financial goodwill of the university as well as the energies of the cast and crew and we were left to negotiate our way out of the impasse with as much energy as we could devote to it. There was a sense of gloom that something that had been so exciting might also be the end of the activities of the theatre group. Much of my first year at Strathclyde was spent fund raising and we ultimately lived to fight another day. We went on to do some really good work under Hugo and Alistair and later with their successors. I don't think my time in Glasgow would have been nearly as profitable, exciting, enjoyable and stimulating without that early introduction to the joys working with STG, even if it did mean I had to find a way of explaining the holes in the roof of the cathedral and not only explain them away but even pay for them.
Trevor R Griffiths. Lecturer Strathclyde University 1974-81. Director for STG of The Education of Skinny Spew, Not I (with Hugo Gifford), Obstacles (co-devised), The Philanthropist and the Dryden-Davenant Tempest (co-directed with Viv Gardner).
Hamilton Academy, did Gilbert and Sullivan operas – so I started out on those. A bit of staging a little electrics, build a dragon, man the front end of it – not clever. During the dress the conductor, the Principal Music teacher, suggested I could perhaps move in time. Fortunately, I was enveloped by papier mache and unable to communicate that the failing was the education system’s – not mine.
Arriving at Strathclyde in September 1971 for a plumbing degree I inevitably sought out the Drama Society, and by way of finding that folk could not wire dimmer boards in without swapping neutral for earth and suchlike found my way to STG. I understudied Kris on The Business of Good Government and rolled my eyes in sadness at the poor work turned out by the UoS Master of Works wood butchers – one shot staging. Summer ’72 I did my first Fringe, I must have made a very poor job of demolishing Milton House School, at the bottom of the Royal Mile, as it continues to educate the young. In those days the Edinburgh air was of course more enervating – brewery malt rather than overpriced accommodation.
The next academic year was split between not segueing into Mathematics at Imperial, doing the Spring Tour with Scottish Opera and a Summer in London.
Back at Strathclyde in the Autumn of ’73 for an Elec Eng degree, starting in the 2nd year, I spent as much time refining my computer skills on the STG (ICL 1900 mainframe) computer account as I did studying the electrical arts. One eventual fruit of this endeavour was the “2000 line” computer program credited in the Golden City programme; its function was to pretty print the plugging and dimmer level plots, indexed by cues – but that was 15 years before spreadsheets.
The Golden City was in development throughout 1973, while I was South. My friends from the Master of Works came back into the frame in Spring ‘74 when the cage was being built for the Building the Golden City Exhibition. Their concept was to make it from stripwood, I had done enough theatre by then to know this would be unlikely to make it to the tech. So, I intimated that the sides should be routed from ply: we can’t do that without patterns – tomorrow morning – some minor suit announced. VG says I, and enlisted the assistance of Douglas McCarron who was studying architecture at the time and had access to a dyeline machine. By drawing a segment and replicating it, an evening was sufficient time to provide full size templates for the under manager. The cage lasted through the exhibition, Glasgow and Edinburgh runs, and thereafter was occasionally brought out for STG parties, in Ingram Street. Sara Heid punch, served at Ingram St parties, comprised fruit (never certain what it was for myself), white tornado, champagne cider and if it was getting weak some fortification.
The Golden City was Summer 74’s project, first Glasgow then Edinburgh. The Glasgow lighting rig comprised two nave length rails seated on the column’s collars, and two transverse beams with suspended lighting bars – just on the house side of the East and West stages. The lighting rig comprised about 75 lanterns patched into 36 ways of dimmers, probably two 18 way Mini Two boards. One of my clear recollections is tying to teach young lassies, probably my betters from an Arts course, how to wire 15A plugs : as unsuccessful as teaching folk how to do anything beyond computer trivia is with the surviving cohort – evident exceptions excluded. Another is of attending a busbar box which was sparking copiously, woefully undertightened clamps – the fruit of delegation to non-plumbers.
I have no recollection of what I did during the shows; I suspect an endless round of snagging, make and mend, and some deping. Once the Glasgow shows were running we transferred our attention to Edinburgh – well, during the day. So, the routine was: Glasgow performance, o/c drive to EDB in the company minivan (all pile in), spend the remainder of the night rigging (scaffolding in Edinburgh), sleep until afternoon, drive back to Glasgow and repeat. Interupted one night, by the crash on the M8. The road curved right, the slip road curved left, we went straight up the grass median and the van performed a corkscrew roll. Steve (Callan) was driving, Roddy Fox was in the front passenger seat, I, McGinty, Carol Ann and Pat Doris (?) were in the back. Roddy wound down the window and evacuated, I opened the door he has just passed through and evacuated. Other folk were less fortunate; we picked up the pieces - the show went on.
The Edinburgh rig was similar but different to Glasgow. The lighting rig had to be suspended from the quadriforium above the nave arches. Access was “external”, ie up a scaffolding tower; 50 years ago I could go up the outside corner of one of those in 2 ft strides. The rigging was a mixture of heavy and skill. I suspect I installed all the Acrow props … Basically hold ~8 kg up with one hand, put in a pin and tighten up the jackscrew; all this about 40 ft up in a stone niche. The net effect of this grunt work was a lighting bar on each side of St Mary’s nave. Then all the staging had to be moved to Edinburgh, and the lights and cabling re-rigged, a lot of work for a week. We got the show open by working three all-nighters straight through, ie working continuously for about 90 hours, and opening several days late.
The St Mary’s get out faced the problem of vanishing thespians – the festival was over. Disbursements had to be made to provide a crew; differential rate for high work and low work. I recollect having to break the bad news to some folk that they were so inept up a ladder / tower that their aspiration to big money was not to be. And, then it was time to study engineering again.
Thereafter I did comparable rigs for the ’76 Festival and then the Slab Boys at the GSA, and put some hours in at the Theatre Royal. In Summer ’76 I received an SRC grant for a PhD in Signal Processing – the rest as they say is mere engineering.
In the autumn term of 1970, I arrived in Glasgow to enrol on a postgraduate course at Strathclyde University, with the vague intention of building an academic career. It seems amazing, looking back, what you could do in those days to explore career options, with no tuition fees and a discretionary maintenance award! My academic ambitions lasted little more than a year and before long I found myself employed as a retail manager – managing the record department of Biggar’s music store in Sauchiehall Street - and living in a shared flat in the West End. My work and social life enabled me to develop my interests in music and electronic sound production. I was listening to a vast range of musical styles and started to explore my pretensions to creativity through the medium of an early analogue synthesizer (the Synthi AKS) and a four-track tape recorder.
Through the grapevine Bertie Scott and Hugo Gifford heard about my musical doodlings and one day they came to visit and invited me to take part in a show planned for the Strathclyde Theatre Group about the Anabaptists of Munster. They thought I might be able to help the show with some electronic sounds evoking theend of the world. It sounded unlikely subject matter for a theatrical show and it was with some trepidation that I agreed to take part. It turned out to be a momentous decision that led to my meeting a host of talented people, to my playing live in a band for the first time, and to taking part in one of the most audacious and innovative theatre shows ever produced.
I left Glasgow in 1975 to pursue a teaching career in further and adult education that took me to Cornwall where I have lived ever since. Subsequent theatrical work has been sporadic, but I have wonderful memories of devising quadrophonic sound effects for a college production of “Oh! What a Lovely War.” My active work with synthesizers continued for around 20 years and in the 1980s I worked with my sister, Anita, providing synth-based dance tracks for an innovative three-woman vocal group, based in Bedford, called Zenana. To the amazement of all involved, there has recently been a revival of interest in the band’s retro synth music and in 2023 there was a re-release of songs on vinyl and streamed or downloaded from Bandcamp (https://zenana1.bandcamp.com/album/witches-with-the-spell-of-love) Fifty years after my only ever live performances as a synth player, in the Golden City, I am in danger of becoming a minor synth legend!