The cult of Cutler
The legend of poet and performer Ivor
Cutler is intact, 50 years after he started songwriting.
Will Hodgkinson meets him
The Guardian
"That's my chair," says Ivor
Cutler, when I make the mistake of sitting down in the dark and cluttered
living room of his little flat in north
"I'm an extremely sensitive man and I'm very sensitive
to noise," says Cutler. "There was some noise on the house opposite
earlier today, and it was hell. So I went round there to complain and actually
the man was very nice. There are a lot of nice people around. Have you
noticed?"
Cutler has been enchanting audiences of nice people for over
40 years now. Dismissed from the RAF in 1941 for dreaminess, he became a
teacher, and in the 1950s started to write songs in the hope of making enough
money to give up teaching and become a painter. It didn't happen, but he did
manage to broadcast his stories on the BBC's Home Service. Since then
successive generations have formed their own Cutler cult: he hung out with a
hip crowd at Peter Cook's Establishment Club, was lauded by the Beatles, and
has kept his legend intact - with the help of John Peel's patronage - ever
since.
"John Peel has a show on Number One [Radio 1] on which
he plays the latest gramophone records," Cutler tells us. "He put one
of my records on, and a few days later there was a cloud of envelopes coming
in. But some people like Cutler, and some people don't. When I did Monday Night
at Home one man called in and said 'Hey! Get rid of that guy! He's driving me
nuts and his voice is making my wife's hair stand on end!'"
The flat is something of a shrine to its inhabitant. Cutler
wrote a good percentage of the books on the shelves and the floor; there are
large black and white prints of his younger self leaning against the windows;
and some of his finest poetry moments are taped to various surfaces, such as
this line on the top of a bookcase: "The earth meets the sky over the
hill, I was told by a sparrow with a lump on his head." Poetry neophytes
come to the flat to learn from the old master, and his advice is always the
same: learn to bypass the intellect and use your imagination.
"The intellect is the thing you get from your teachers,
and - what are those big places that people go to for education?" Universities? "That's it. But the intellect doesn't
come from the person. It comes from people telling you how to do things. As a
teacher in
There isn't much music that interests Cutler now, although
he can point to musicians that have made an impact on him over the decades: his
favourite composer is Arvo Part, his "second
best song" is Didn't It Rain by the American blues singer Mahalia Jackson, and he feels an affinity with the folk
music of eastern Europe, especially when it is performed by the Hungarian
singer Marta Sebestyen. "Because I'm 80 there
are not many people who I can look up to anymore, and my capacity for listening
to music has become very sluggish. But I used to like going to see Marta Sebestyen when she came over. Then at the last concert I
went to, she went for a heavy sound and completely killed the thing that I was
once desperate for. I've stopped getting my kicks from Arvo
Part, too.
"Who was that miserable German guy, the one who died?
His book is up there somewhere," says Cutler, when asked about writers
that he likes. It turns out that he means the Czech writer Franz Kafka.
"The Castle was the one I loved because it was me he was writing about.
The empathy was there - I was empathising with him, but really I was thinking
about myself. But I don't read anymore. Shall I show you something
interesting?"
Cutler gets up to lead us to the toilet, but he collapses
over the photographer's camera bag on the way. For a moment, as he lies
groaning on the floor, it looks like this might be the first Home Entertainment
that has actually killed off its subject. This would be awful, as not only is
Cutler a unique talent, but also he has a gig to do at the Queen Elizabeth Hall
in