Interview - The Times Magazine 05/04/97
The comeback kid.
Ivor Cutler
=s first fans included Lennon and McCartney. So it seems only fitting that the poet and musician should be making a comeback on Oasis=s record label, writes Ted Harrison.IVOR CUTLER is probably 40 years older than the next most senior artist represented by his record label. He is 74 and the label is Creation, of Oasis fame. And like Oasis, Ivor Cutler is on the up. He is about to be relaunched.
Fame first came to the Glaswegian schoolteacher with the doleful Scottish voice in the late Fifties. He was lying on his bed with a primitive tape recorder for company and, as he puts it, a story came out of his brain. Surprised at the ease at which he could bypass his intellect he tried again, and a second story emerged and was also recorded. Then a third. He took them to the BBC who, in Cutler=s words, Afound them to their taste@.
Cutler was invited to read his idiosyncratic poems and stories on the forerunner of Radio 4, the old Home Service, on a programme called Monday Night at Home. Frequently he performed to the accompaniment of a pedal-driven harmonium which could only, as far as listeners could tell, play in a depressive minor key.
He quickly acquired a huge following of people who hated him and an equally sizeable following who did not. Among the latter were Paul McCartney and John Lennon, who asked the BBC for his phone number, called him, went to see him, and Cutler found himself playing a cameo role in the Beatles= film The Magical Mystery Tour. Half a lifetime later he remains the grit in the oyster of respectability, producing pearls of wit and wisdom which irritate and enlighten in equal measure.
He lives in a small second-floor flat in north London, surrounded by his collection of masks, paintings and sculptures. They are the trophies of a lifetime spent in the melancholic contemplation of the human mind and its humorous potential.
Cutler dresses in a comfortable but singular manner and his face, in repose, is sad and enigmatic. It brightens in an instant, however when he cackles with delight at an absurdity, showing a wide smile and the gap between his two front teeth. His favoured means of transport is the bicycle and his preferred means of communication the sticky label, which he has specially printed with short pithy Cutlerisms, to his correspondence. ANever knowingly understood@ is one which both his detractors and his supporters could deploy with equal satisfaction. AKindly disregard@ is reserved for official correspondence, and Ato remove this label take it off@ is designed to confuse pedants.
Cutler=s genius, if that is what it is, derives not only from his ability to view life from the opposite direction to that taken by society at large, but also from his ability to empathise with the implications of that viewpoint. Who but Cutler composed this one sentence poem? AA fly crouching in a sandwich cannot comprehend why it has become more than ordinarily vulnerable.@ It is this ability which enables a man who now qualifies for a bus pass to continue writing about the injustices and the idiosyncrasies of the world from a child=s perspective. APhysiologically I suppose I am the old man, but I think I still have the child=s eye and some of my behaviour can be seen to be childish.@ He has the advantage over the child, however, in that he has retained the use of his imagination while coming to an arrangement with the child=s fear of death and darkness.
A
Death is a very good friend,@ he says with complete tranquillity. A I remember my dad when he was in intensive care. >Hey Ivor,= he whispered as I bent over and listened closely, >I want to tell you something. I=ve left you bugger all in my will=; and I thought how marvellous. I want to die like dad, making a joke.@Cutler claims his view of life, which he describes as a consequence of his neurosis, can be traced back to the childhood he spent in a Jewish middle-class family in Glasgow in the Twenties and Thirties.
AMy kid brother was born when I was three and took my place in the universe as it=s centre. Without that I would not have been so screwed up as I am, and therefore not as creative. Without a kid brother I would have been quite dull. I did try and kill him, but my Auntie Eva came into the room and thought that it wasn=t a good idea.@He decided to become an artist while training to be a teacher, and his music and humour developed with it. Until his radio debut, and indeed for some time afterwards, he earned a living as a schoolteacher. Mr Cutler
=s classes were popular with pupils, even though today his unusual approach would be thoroughly disapproved of in a system dominated by a national curriculum, and in his time he drew criticism from both disapproving parents and head teachers.It was through his art and his humour in particular that Cutler found a way of coping with his neurosis.
AIt seemed a very sensible way to go about things, because not only did I have the pleasure of doing myself a good turn, but I gave pleasure to quite a lot of other people. I was being sociable and at the same time was curing myself.@At one stage Cutler sought psychotherapy, but he discovered that it was not the way for him. He decided against taking the religious approach when he went to a minister and asked him to prove that there was a God. When the minister said that he could not, Cutler thanked him and walked out. He converted to atheism and then, in his early twenties, having explored astronomy, he decided to become an agnostic.
His entry in Who
=s Who, as well as listing his publications and recordings (which include such Cutleresque titles as Cockadoodle Don=t, Life In A Scotch Sitting Room Volume 2, Many Flies Have Feathers, Jammy Smears and Gruts) mentions his Pye Radio Award for Humour and his recreation, Acuring people who think they are tone deaf@.He knows that he does not have the energy he had when he was young and he worries that, despite the successes of his varied career as artist, cartoonist, musician, humorist and poet, he has still not entirely cured himself of his neurosis. Perhaps he would miss it; perhaps his life would lose its purpose.
After major heart surgery recently, when he had been told he was dying,
Anot knowing that it was going to be as miserable as that, I thought I might as well live for a bit longer. I really wanted to go when I was ill, but it is not easy to come across the means of dying in a pleasant way.A
When I do die I shall be glad to get away from loud pop music and motor cars, but I shall miss - insofar as when one is dead one can miss anything - the beautiful kindnesses of those people to whom courtesy comes naturally. Unfortunately there are fewer of those people than of the other kind who deal with their problems in a very anti-social way.@It would be a mistake to report the demise of Ivor Cutler prematurely. At an age when his contemporaries are embarking on great-grandfatherhood, he is about to be introduced to a new generation.