Photo: Thanira Rates
Tonight is Burns Night, traditionally a time for all Scottish people to emulate the legendary 18th Century wordsmith by getting so drunk they forget that consonants exist.
But let’s not forget that Burns wrote some pretty nifty poems between whiskey shots, so let’s celebrate the art of Scottish poetry with a run-down of who, in the wide-ranging world of rock, might one day have their own night of boozy celebration on which 23rd Century Glaswegians toast their name by sucking Bell’s through a hosepipe.
JOCK SCOT
As anyone who has heard his recordings with The Nectarine No 9’s Davy Henderson on ‘My Personal Culloden’ will attest, Jock Scot, who died last year aged 63, was punk rock’s own Robert Burns. His laconic slurs about wasted youth, urban decay and his own personal battles were both savage and deeply affecting – take ‘Just Another Fucked-Up Little Druggy On The Scene’ from The Nectarine No. 9’s ‘Saint Jack’ album, a poetic snarl at a hedonistic waster with “a look that hurts” that’s as rammed with envy as it is cruelty.
AIDAN MOFFAT
Once chief mumbler-about-shagging with Arab Strap, Aidan Moffat is the epitome of the modern Scots-pop poet, releasing an album of his poetry called ‘I Can Hear Your Heart’ in 2007 and smearing his melancholic, beard-muffled spoken-word musings, largely about booze, across such celebrated records as his 2012 collaboration with Bill Wells ‘Everything’s Getting Older’.
STUART MURDOCH
The laureate of indiepop, Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch is something of an icon for the shy and dispossessed, having documented his debilitating health issues, struggles with religion and the vacuum at the centre of his life on early albums. Since then his lyrical palette has widened and brightened, and he has published a book called The Celestial Café, collecting together his whimsical blogs about life on the road. Kerouac with a wheat allergy, if you will.
BOBBY GILLESPIE
In terms of minimalist political diatribes, few come close to our Bob, once the spaced-out acid rock loverman, now our most astute and direct documenter of working class oppression and global imperialism. For prying open so many (swastika) eyes Gillespie easily deserves his own day, although we worry for the future Scots honouring him with something rather stronger than whiskey.
