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Linklater’s Scotland - Pete Irvine, impresario
Magnus Linklater
Columnist, Scotland on Sunday
This article, which
was originally published in the Spectrum section of Scotland on
Sunday
on 8th May 2005, is reproduced on Land-Care with the kind permission
of the author and the newspaper.
Filed 13th May 05
THERE is an argument to say that
no one has boosted the image of modern Scotland more than Pete Irvine.
It is an argument to which Irvine himself would not be entirely
averse. Let us consider some of the events of the past ten or 15
years that bear his imprint: Glasgow Big Day in 1990, Edinburgh's
Hogmanay Festival, the opening of the Scottish Parliament, the Glasgow
Art Fair, big-name concerts at Ibrox Stadium, Murrayfield and Edinburgh
Castle, the MTV party - the list rolls on. These days if you are
thinking big, you ask Irvine to help you out.
This may help explain why Lou Reed,
one of rock music's iconic figures, will be appearing later this
month on stage at Culzean Castle on the Ayrshire coast, as part
of the Robert Burns Festival. It is an event which has, in a very
short time, become a fixture on the Scottish cultural scene, mainly
thanks to Irvine's drive and vision.
I remember its nervous start, on
a freezing night four years ago, when the audience huddled in rugs,
clutching their thermoses, listening to Eddi Reader, Aly Bain and
Phil Cunningham. No one then would have put its chances of surviving
very high. This year, it lists 20 main festival events, and it has
developed a "fringe", with more than 50 performances spread
across Ayrshire. Lou Reed is coming because Irvine asked him to
come. The concert is a sell-out, of course.
With a track record like this, one
might have expected the man in question to be a hustler, all gold
bracelets and wide ties, talking percentages and gabbling conspiratorially
into a mobile phone. In fact, he's more likely to have lost the
mobile phone. A big, shambling figure, with a permanently distracted
look on his face, as if he were trying to remember where he was
meant to be, Irvine is described, kindly, as “languorous”.
Awkward would be better. When, at a Prince's Trust event recently
in the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Prince Charles invited him to stand
beside him at the front of the crowd to watch a beating of the retreat,
Irvine stood, embarrassed, in a crumpled suit, looking a bit like
a lost urchin in a Joan Eardley painting.
Nor did anything in his background
suggest that he would become one of the great impresarios of the
day. Born and brought up in Jedburgh, he came from a family of farming
people whose closest connection with showbusiness was the annual
Border Ridings. Somewhere, though, perhaps from some distant Reiver
ancestor who happened to be good at cross-border raids, he seems
to have inherited an organisation gene.
As a young man living in Edinburgh's
Stockbridge in the late 1970s, Irvine noticed that a dance hall
called Tiffany's was closed on Monday nights. He was also aware
that, across Britain, bands such as U2, The Police and Talking Heads
were on tour and looking for venues. Within months he had ensured
that Tiffany's was on their list.
Next he turned his attention to Glasgow,
where the Barrowland ballroom, famous, or infamous, for its Bible
John connection, had been closed for 20 years. Off the beaten track
in a dark and inhospitable part of the city's east end, it looked
a distinctly unpromising prospect. Everyone advised him against
even attempting to re-open it. Irvine shrugged the objections aside,
took a three-year lease on the building, gave it a lick of paint
and booked Simple Minds, then the hottest band in town, to head
the bill. Today the Barrowland is still one of Glasgow's major venues.
There followed the big open-air concerts
at Ibrox, Murrayfield and Edinburgh Castle. But then he became bored.
Irvine, one senses, has a low boredom threshold. “Dealing with
international artists became stifling and entirely non-creative,”
he says. “In the end you were completely at their mercy, reduced
to noting down lists of their demands. All the job amounted to was
delivering cases of champagne to dressing-rooms.”
He changed course, from promotion
to producing, when he became caught up in the excitement of Glasgow's
year as European City of Culture in 1990, and organised the Big
Day in July, a rolling 24-hour party which is still remembered as
the highlight of the celebrations and drew 400,000 people. It gave
him the idea that Scotland was capable of far more than it was apparently
achieving, that things could be made to happen if you knew where
to look, and that there was a lot to celebrate that was going unnoticed.
He travelled the length and breadth of Scotland to produce a book
called simply Scotland the Best!, listing all the best hotels, restaurants,
tearooms, chip shops, waterfalls, ancient monuments, hill walks
and distilleries in the country - an idiosyncratic, Irvine-style
Michelin guide now in its 12th edition.
What clearly suits him the most,
however, is arranging great parties, and when it came to transforming
Edinburgh's Hogmanay celebrations, he was in his element. Irvine
persuaded the city fathers to throw the mother of all parties. He
got them to cordon off Waterloo Place and have a street fair. He
suggested a giant ferris wheel right beside the Scott Monument.
He proposed three days of non-stop fun, with music and street theatre.
He wanted the most extravagant fireworks display ever. And lo, it
happened. Today, Edinburgh's Hogmanay is the biggest New Year party
in Europe.
I asked the staff at Unique Events,
his company, how it worked, and they told me they didn't know. “He
has the ideas, and all we do is help make them happen,” says
one. “I can't quite understand it myself.”
The outcome is that Scotland now
has more festivals and events per head of population than any other
part of the UK. “There is nothing comparable in England,”
says Irvine. “My colleagues down south look on amazed at what
we have managed to do here.”
And what is remarkable is that it
has happened in a place once described by the poet Alan Bold as
“the land of the implacable no”. Local authorities, not
noted for being either wantonly extravagant or wildly adventurous,
have become Irvine's most enthusiastic partners. Edinburgh's Hogmanay
party is a £2.5 million event, of which the city contributes
a third. Glasgow spends £85,000 on the Art Fair. South Ayrshire
Council has invested £650,000 in the Burns Festival.
I suspect they do so because they
know that Irvine will deliver, and because he has an innate understanding
of what they want. The Scottish Executive clearly trusts him too
- it has commissioned him to come up with a major event to promote
the Highlands in 2007. At the same time, he is motivated by a keen
desire to see the raising of Scotland's international profile. He
would like to see the Burns Humanitarian Award, which is now a highlight
of the festival, becoming Scotland's answer to the Nobel Prize.
This year the short-list of contenders includes Romeo Dallaire,
the UN hero of Rwanda, Aung San Suu Kyi, the prisoner of Burma,
the brave McCartney sisters of Northern Ireland, John Miller, the
former moderator who has done so much for the deprived parts of
Glasgow, and Pius Ncube, the fearless opponent of Robert Mugabe.
All have been touched to be nominated.
All have recognised that the award reflects Robert Burns as a powerful
symbol of humanity. And all have been won over by Irvine's sure
touch and reassuring manner. “What,” he muses, “would
Robbie Burns have made of it all?”
I really don't know. I suspect that
Lou Reed might have been slightly outside the bard's sphere, but
I think he would recognise in Irvine a man who shared his view that
a right guid-willie waught is what Scotland really needs.
©Magnus Linklater
This article:
nttp://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/spectrum.cfm?id=483992005
Earlier articles in the series
 1.
Linklater, Magnus (2005). Linklater's Scotland. Scotland on Sunday
20th March 2005
See SOCIAL/ECONOMIC/POLITICAL Homepage, filed 24 Mar 05,
www.land-care.org.uk Click
Here to View
2.
Linklater, Magnus (2005). Linklater's Scotland - Easter in Easterhouse.
Scotland on Sunday 27th March 2005
See SOCIAL/ECONOMIC/POLITICAL Homepage, filed 31 Mar 05,
www.land-care.org.uk Click
Here to View
3.
Linklater, Magnus (2005). Linklater's
Scotland - Farming. Scotland on Sunday 3rd April 2005
See SOCIAL/ECONOMIC/POLITICAL Homepage, filed 07 Apr 0505,
www.land-care.org.uk Click
Here to View
4.
Linklater, Magnus (2005). Linklater's
Scotland - Pitlochry. Scotland on Sunday 10th April 2005
See SOCIAL/ECONOMIC/POLITICAL Homepage, filed 15 Apr 05,
www.land-care.org.uk Click
Here to View
5.
Linklater, Magnus (2005). Linklater's
Scotland - Supermarkets. Scotland on Sunday 17th April 2005
See SOCIAL/ECONOMIC/POLITICAL Homepage, filed 19 Apr 05,
www.land-care.org.uk Click
Here to View
6.
Linklater, Magnus (2005). Linklater's Scotland - Kelvingrove. Scotland
on Sunday 24th April 2005
See SOCIAL/ECONOMIC/POLITICAL Homepage, filed 29 Apr 05,
www.land-care.org.uk Click
Here to View
7.
Linklater, Magnus (2005). Linklater's Scotland - Scottish regiments.
Scotland on Sunday 1st May 2005
See SOCIAL/ECONOMIC/POLITICAL Homepage, filed 05 May 05,
www.land-care.org.uk Click
Here to View
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