The Book of Scotlands

Introduction to

an Alternative Universe of Scotlands

Gerry Hassan

BOOKS AND WORDS define nations and times – and this is as true of Scotland as elsewhere. Some would argue that it is even more true of this nation. When people think of early 21st century Scotland years hence and ask who we were, what kind of people(s) were we, what were our hopes, fears and what drove our innermost emotions in relation to the book and the written word, many will cite the obvious volumes. These will include Tom Devine’s The Scottish Nation, James Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still, perhaps the detail and humanity of Kathleen Jamie’s Findings – and, for a few, original historical books such as Catriona MacDonald’s Whaur Extremes Meet.

Beyond these this wonderful, unique, strange collection by Momus, The Book of Scotlands, has the right to its very own special status and place. It takes us on a journey into a familiar landscape with many place names, people and histories that we know and feel we understand. But it uses them to take us somewhere utterly unfamiliar that is enchanting and spellbinding. We enter a Scotland of magic, surrealism, play and fun, which tells us something new about our country and the world, and where the author invites us to be a fellow traveller into this alternative universe of different Scotlands.

For those who need a short introduction to the world of Momus – he is that rare and unusual creation, a genuine multi-talented polymath. Born Nick Currie in Paisley in 1960, he has lived in such varied places as Berlin, New York, Tokyo and Osaka. In 1981 he took the moniker ‘Momus’ from Greek mythology (where it denotes satire and mockery in Aesop’s Fables), and whether relevant or not, there is a Herr Momus in Franz Kafka’s The Castle.

Momus has been, and is, a singer-songwriter, writer and novelist, blogger, lecturer, performance artist, and art and design critic. Throughout all of these some consistent qualities have shone through. He has been described as ‘Scotland’s Morrissey’ when that used to be seen as an unconditional positive, while more hilariously MOJO music magazine lauded him as ‘England’s greatest living artist’. More accurate than both of these, The Guardian described him as an ‘anti-Morrissey’, ‘the alternative Neil Tennant’ and ‘the new Ivor Cutler’.

Momus found a distinctive niche for his leftfield and outsider music, first in the late 1980s and early 1990s on Creation Records with albums such as Tender Pervert (1988) and Hippopotamomus (1991), and then on Cherry Red Records with such classics as Slender Sherbert (1995), The Little Red Songbook (1998) and Stars Forever (1999).

These collections were in many respects years ahead of their time. Yes there is some similarity with Morrissey before it all went wrong: the arch-wit, the constant observation of life from the perspective of the outsider, and the championing of those who are usually overlooked. But the differences were always as important. Whereas Morrissey sadly for us as well as him, took himself too seriously, with Momus there has always been an ambiguity, playfulness, and exploration of what is authentic and inauthentic. The voice and perspective of Momus has never been monochromatic and static, but always on the move, surprising, provoking and unsettling. In this, he clearly draws from Bowie, art school, punk and new wave, but also from Serge Gainsbourg, while preparing the ground for a host of mid-1990s alt-pop acts such as Belle and Sebastian, Pulp and The Divine Comedy.

There was anti-pop stardom in his take on the world yearning for pop fame in such classics as ‘I Was a Maoist Intellectual’ about being a revolutionary in the music industry which contains the great signing off line: ‘My downfall came from being the three things the working class hated: Agitated, organised and over-educated.’ At the same time there was ‘Love on Ice’, his view of Torvill and Dean as gay icons and martyrs. There is the sheer genius of Stars Forever where Momus, facing a potentially ruinous law suit, put together a double album with thirty patrons each paying $1,000 to have a song written about their lives. It is an act of survival, which raises big questions about the relationship of art and commerce, while looking into the horrid heart of the coming celebrity culture that now threatens to infect all public life.

Despite this prolific and rich back catalogue The Book of Scotlands came at first as a surprise, emerging from a purple patch which also saw Momus pen his first ever novel, The Book of Jokes. In the pages within we enter over 150 parallel Scotlands of past, present and future, of parallel universes and alternative worlds. This breathtaking mixture of the serious, surreal, unreal, magical and macabre displays ideas, confidence and daringness that deserve to be recognised, applauded and most of all, enjoyed.

There are so many joyful, thought provoking and challenging Scotlands within the pages, some just one or two lines, and many extended essays and reflections, all of which repay visiting and revisiting. I have known and grown to love so many of these entries that drawing out a couple is near impossible.

There is the ‘Scotland 45’ where sexologist Alfred Kinsey and folk music archivist Alan Lomax tour the Scotland of the 1950s together and study the sex habits of the Scottish fiddler. In the ‘Scotland 24’ a huge black swan comes to lie in Scotland over Ayrshire and becomes part of the mythology of the nation and ‘the official symbol of Scotland’. ‘Everybody loved the black swan’ writes Momus, and because of this: ‘In films and songs and books it was portrayed as a lucky charm, a saviour, a mascot’. It became part of our identity, how we saw ourselves, boosting tourism and national pride, and then it left, flying away to New Zealand, leaving people bereft and missing something they once thought a constant.

‘Scotland 166’ states, in what might be a credo for the book, ‘The Scotland in which four hundred years of influence from Calvin is replaced by four hundred years of profound influence from Calvino.’ ‘Scotland 76’ reveals the ongoing influence of Bowie: ‘The mist-filled Scotland in which people chant Hugh MacDiarmid poems over Side Two of David Bowie’s Low’. But while the last two examples show Momus wearing his own heart literally on his sleeve, most of the book takes the course of being mischievous and even gently subversive. The country of ‘Scotland 144’ takes a swipe at our attempt to invent our own homegrown pseudo-puritanism and fundamentalism of the present, under the leadership of Brent Shouter. Brent is described as ‘Scotland’s moral puppeteer’ – clearly inspired by Brian Souter – and his campaign doesn’t end the way he thought it might, for himself or the country.

The imagination and intelligence that Momus invokes in these pages has some commonalities with such Scottish rare talents as Ivor Cutler, Alasdair Gray, Bill Duncan (and his The Wee Book of Calvin in particular) and Michael Marra. Perhaps in our country this is still a male only eccentricness, but hopefully this is at last beginning to change, and Momus in a small way has offered an alternative version of maleness, gender and sexual identity. Even more, in his outsider metaphysical humour and psychosexual intelligence, he is clearly in a field all of his own.

There are so many wonderful things about this book. The fact that it exists is one, and that it is championed by a Scottish publisher to reach the audience it deserves is cause for celebration. There is also the Scotland that is self-consciously missing from this book. There isn’t an invocation of a workerist, Red Clydeside, or statist Scotland anywhere. There is no articulation of a single story as our mobilising myth, nor is there much in the way of formal politics. Margaret Thatcher – in what must be a first – does not make an appearance, as saint or sinner. Nor does Alex Salmond. But then again neither does football.

This strange world offers a welcome departure from the earnest scripts of the dominant discourses of recent decades in the book version of Scotland: the male moral certainties of the William McIlvanneys and James Kelmans and their equivalents who have had their place and given us so much, but have become an official alternative account of the country.

Reflecting on The Book of Scotlands and the joyful range of insights and surprises that are contained on these pages says something about where Scotland now sits in the lull – after the Big Bang of the indyref and the wreckage of Brexit. The imagination, intelligence and daringness on display are exactly the creative and collective characteristics we need to show as a nation and society.

Now more than ever we need to jump into different imaginations, and to provoke, play and see from different directions and perspectives our country and the world. That requires having no boundaries or no-go areas about what and how we imagine, articulate and create (beyond issues of decency, discrimination and bigotry). We should not be leaving any stones or traditions unturned and in this The Book of Scotlands is both an inspiration and in its own way a guide on how to be a provocateur. Thank you Momus for this and everything.

Preface

The Book of Scotlands was written in 2009, when I was living in Berlin. Commissioned by the German writer Ingo Niermann for his Sternberg series Solutions, it was somewhat modelled on his influential book about Germany, Umbauland, which translates as ‘construction site nation’ or, literally, ‘reconstruction land’. One of Ingo’s ten provocative visions for a future Germany was that a new German grammar should be devised, somewhere between Orwell’s Newspeak and the radically streamlined French introduced after the 1789 revolution. This was Rededeutsch, originally pitched as a satirical design project by Redesigndeutschland (Niermann and puckish Berlin designer Rafael Horzon), and first described in Ingo’s column in the Berlin electronic culture magazine DeBug.

The Book of Scotlands was my second book (the first was a scurrilous novel, The Book of Jokes, published by Dalkey Archive Press in Chicago). In retrospect, I see it coming very much out of a certain ferment happening in Berlin in the first decade of the 21st century. Sternberg is an art publisher,