13 London cultural correspondent

My first assignment as London cultural correspondent of The Scotsman in the 1960s was to review a comedy starring Iain Carmichael about an American  drama critic who carried scraps of paper, each of them containing a scribbled quip, around in his pockets.

It was not very funny but it was a portent because, as things turned out, I was not yet in a position to write reviews of London music in the paper. The Scotsman’s long-established London music critic, the lofty but affable John Amis, had decided not yet to withdraw from writing reviews  in order to concentrate on learning to become a Wagnerian heldentenor in Germany  - despite distinguished teachers he never succeeded - and had been privately pleading with the The Scotsman’s editor Alistair Dunnett to let him go on writing a bit longer.  John was  a good critic and Dunnett, a kindly man, relented. Moreover John was a wit whose reviews I had first read and enjoyed when I was living in Amsterdam, where the paper was readily available in Dutch shops.

Those -  thanks to Dunnett’s enterprise  - were the days when The Scotsman had developed its great  air mail edition and you could buy it in Paris, Marseille, Brussels, Rome, Germany, New York, Ottawa, or - so it seemed-wherever you happened to be. This is, of course, no longer the case.

John’s reviews were printed in the first edition and, with luck, in later ones also. I still remember the first time he wrote about a programme of music by Vivaldi, a composer far less familiar at that time than he is now. John was introducing him to readers with an opening paragraph which,  as I remember, opened as follows:  “One Vivaldi concerto in a concert. Compelling.  Two Vivaldi concertos. Attention retained.   Three Vivaldi concertos. Boredom. Four Vivaldi concertos. Sleep.”

What an achievement to be the first to say it! (It did not matter if he was wrong).   No wonder he held on to his job! In fact, Dunnett had correctly surmised that in my prentice period on The Scotsman I would have quite enough to do writing musical features and profiles, drama reviews (there was no London drama critic on the paper at the time), art reviews, think pieces, and attending press conferences, as well as a spot of foreign travel.  Concert reviews would come, but not yet.

 In the circumstances, though inevitably disappointed, I was not unhappy.   I was attending first nights of all major plays. I was interviewing actors, painters, instrumentalists, singers, and conductors. I had press tickets for concerts even if I was not reviewing them. I met Judy Garland at a press line-up in the Savoy Hotel. I lunched with Alec Guinness at Wheeler's - and it was Guinness who paid. I dined with Pierre Monteux in the Normandie hotel in Knightsbridge and when I asked him what it was like to have conducted the first performance of The Rite of Spring in 1913, he collapsed and had to be carried out. I spent a morning with Muriel Spark in Peckham, long before she moved to Italy,  and noticed how daintily she walked and how obliquely she spoke.

Writing reviews of plays - all the latest Peter Hall productions with the Shakespeare company, at one of which Harold Pinter, sitting in the stalls, shouted at someone in the circle to shut up - and heard from Tom Fleming, walking along the banks of the Avon at Stratford, of his unfulfilled plan to build a Scottish National Theatre on Cramond Island. Every day produced something new and I wrote about it in The Scotsman in a Saturday column that had been created for me.

Once in a while, Dunnett got cross, especially if I wrote about an artist who claimed that Scotland had made him an outcast but that his talents were recognised in London.  Dunnett would have none of that, and I was told where my responsibilities lay. But otherwise he looked benignly on what I wrote, not least if it was about Stanley Baxter at the Comedy Theatre, or the hair-raising scat singer Annie Ross (Jimmy Logan’s sister) or the droll comedian Ivor Cutler lying on a sofa in his dressing room at the Royal Court and singing, just for me, his poker-faced ditty, “Get away from the wall. It’s my wall.”

For the moment, the absence of concert reviewing did not distress me - or not too much. Its time would come, though I had to leave London to make it happen

25 August 2014