Roddy
Lumsden is dead. This isn’t the first time that phrase has been written down.
With an upper-case ‘D’ on the fourth word, it was the title the St Andrews-born
poet gave to his third collection published in 2003. The book contains a
sequence of 42 poems under that collective title, which began with a piece
called My Pain and ended with one called My Spring. This time, alas, it’s for
real. The lower-case ‘d’ is the giveaway. It’s the sort of semantic detail that
might have mattered to him. Either way, as of January 10th 2020, Roddy
Lumsden is dead, and one of the greatest poets – some might say the greatest – of his generation writing
in English has left the building aged a far-too-soon 53.
Roddy’s
death isn’t much of a surprise. He’d been seriously ill for four years, and for
the last two lived in a care home. But for anyone who knew him, read him or
fan-boy-and-girled him from afar, it still hurts. Roddy’s poetry was a
beguiling glimpse into the strange and complex world of a writer who squared up
to himself and others with an unflinching honesty that left himself exposed
while remaining every inch an artist. He did this over ten full collections
that went from Yeah Yeah Yeah in 1997 through to So Glad I’m Me in 2017. There
were several pamphlets besides, as well as a book on the relationship between
poetry and pop called The Message, and a book of trivia lists, Vitamin Q.
At times,
reading Roddy’s work felt like peeling back an open wound, where you could gaze
in woozy awe at the highs and lows of his complex and elaborately bared soul,
and all the fragile and beautiful psycho-drama contained therein that he’d stumbled
on and kept hold of before turning it into something else. One of his
contemporaries said his work was full of both heartbreak and hilarity, and
they’re right.
Beyond
his own writing, and just as vital, Roddy became teacher, mentor, editor, guru and
friend to what, judging by the social media outpourings in response to his
passing, seems to be an entire generation of poets, whose work has been changed
forever by Roddy’s guidance. And if those writers are his legacy as much as his
own work, for those of us who are older and dafter, and who knew Roddy back when
we were young and stupid, we’re all - not Roddy’s children, because that just
sounds silly – but marked somehow by that knowing.
Someone
said something the other night about there being seven ages of Roddy, and how
he kept all those lives separate from each other. This is what I think I know.
Others might beg to differ.
The
first time I met Roddy was autumn 1986. I’d just started first year at Queen
Margaret College in Edinburgh at the old Corstorphine campus, and was living in
town with my then girlfriend having moved here a year earlier.
“You should meet my boyfriend,” my new college friend said. “I think you might have a few things in
common.”
A few
nights later she and Roddy came round to the flat in Oxford Street on the south
side where we were living. In he came, this shy, slightly awkward figure in a
long overcoat that was pure Joy Division. I’d had a coat similar. We all had.
In those extended dole queue days, such charity shop vintage was the uniform of
serious young men the world over. He was also probably wearing one of those
short-sleeved military style shirts he always wore that we used to tease him made
him look like a darts player.
And now
here he was, this slightly strange guy with a baby-faced stare and facial tics I’d
later find out were a side effect from the lithium he was still taking then,
making an instinctive beeline for the comfort zone of my meticulously alphabetised
record collection. I eyed him warily. This was both ice-breaker and
deal-clincher that would decide if we were going to be mates or not. With his
coat still on, he stared at the album cover spines in silent concentration.
Occasionally he’d pick one out, checking my taste with the forensic and
slightly snooty eye of a connoisseur, then gingerly put it back without comment.
“It’s
very Manchester…,” he said at last, looking me in the eye, summing things
up with a phrase that was neither praise nor damnation, but something you
weren’t quite sure about. Like so much of what Roddy said during the years I
knew him, his statement was indisputable, and impossible to answer back.
That was
the start of a million and one nights that usually began with a phone call when
I’d be staying in again in a terminal state of skintness that afflicted those of
us who came of age in the ‘80s.
“Alright, Scouse,” he’d say on the other end of the line as I
stooped in the hallway, where the pre-mobile-age dial-up phone was on the floor.
“I’ve just won a few quid on the quiz
machines and wondered if you fancied coming out? I can stand you a couple of
pints.”
Roddy,
of course, was a trivia genius, so off I’d go, from my room on George IV Bridge
or Henderson Row, to pints at the Pear Tree or the Royal Oak, to St James
Oyster Bar or Black Bo’s, Queen Street on Thursdays, and sometimes to the
beautifully anagrammed Bare Story (work it out for yourselves). At various
points over the next decade or so, this succession of late night dives became
second homes, escape routes and salvation. Even more impressive, whichever bar
he was in, Roddy always seemed to know the staff by name.
There
we’d sit, drinking, smoking, spraffing and scowling till closing time with
whoever else was about, Roddy letting me in to his various circles with
strangers who would become good pals, and who join the dots between now and
then as part of some dynastic cast of thousands. He’d like that. Roddy had this
theory, something about being the centre of the universe, and letting the world
revolve around you. Ego-mania came with the territory in those days.
If there
wasn’t a lock-in happening, sometimes it would be back to flats in Melville
Terrace or Home Street or Montague Terrace for tins of lukewarm Tennant’s,
coffee after coffee, someone else’s fags, and records. Always, always records.
He might
play the Blue Aeroplanes or Monochrome Set; Microdisney, Kate Bush or Talk
Talk; Nick Drake, The Beloved, Stina Nordenstam or Band of Holy Joy; Shellyan
Orphan, Arvo Part, 10,000 Maniacs, all kinds of ambient or Scott Walker doing
Brel. Years later, he’d lampoon Brel by changing the words of Jackie to a new
song called Roddy, made, like everything else, in his own myth-making image.
Roddy
was no indie purist, although he was
a purist. Early on, we spoke about Wim Mertens, the Flemish composer who recorded
as Soft Verdict for the uber-cool Belgian record label, Les Disques du Crepuscule.
I only knew the works that had appeared on the Fruit of the Original Sin and
Ghosts of Christmas Past compilations. Ahead of the game as ever, Roddy had at
least one of his albums.
That was
Usura, which featured a track called Struggle for Pleasure that he must have played
me one night round at his. As the title suggests, the tune’s pianos and soprano
sax seemed to be trying to push itself with a slowly pulsing intensity that
built throughout its four minutes or so duration to get to somewhere else.
Later, Roddy
explained that Struggle for Pleasure was used in Peter Greenaway’s film, The
Belly of an Architect, in a pivotal scene towards the end when the architect
sees all these pictures of himself on the wall, caught by the camera in ways
which, in Roddy’s words, “weren’t possible.”
Roddy
lent me his copy of Usura, which I kept for months, then gave it back, then
loaned it again. Looking at my record shelf now, I see I have two copies of it,
so I guess I never gave it back a second time. It was Roddy’s first accidental musical
gift to me, but nowhere near his last.
Years
later, he mentioned Struggle for Pleasure in My Post Mortem, a poem in Roddy
Lumsden is Dead. He dedicated the book to his friends in Edinburgh and Stoke
Newington, immortalising old gangs, bit-part players in his latest scene.
As I got
to know Roddy better, and social circles got all mixed up the way they do, he
emerged as a character of charming oddity and life-or-death seriousness. Roddy
loved Charles Bukowski (but not the poems), Betty Blue and Peter Greenaway
films, but didn’t like reading novels or going to the Pictures. He’d read every
Pinter play except one, but wouldn’t say which. He saw pre-Sarah Cracknell St
Etienne play an indie club called Floral Riot. He sang Your Song by Elton John
at karaoke. He could be petulant, pig-headed and stubborn. He could sulk for
Scotland. The world. But he was full of mischief and gossip, and wickedly funny
too.
Roddy
and his mate Craig had a whole routine going as a couple of old duffers who
would spar like a pre-cursor of Still Game. He had a pact with another mate
that whenever The Beat’s song, Mirror in the Bathroom, came on, they had to
dance to it, no matter where they were or what the situation was. On more than
one occasion, in St J or somewhere, the song came on, and Roddy disappeared to
the gents to presumably strut his stuff in a cubicle, or maybe in front of the
mirror, lip-synching along as he threw shapes.
That’s Me in the Traverse / That’s me in the
Pear / Tree…’ he’d
sing to the chorus of REM’s Losing My Religion as we strode up the road to
wherever we were going next. He wrote haiku for his dentist, and
knocked out a piss-takey four-liner on the back of a post-it note based on my
hopelessness at parties. And then there was the Finnish girl in the Oak he got
talking to, and asked her what the word in her language was for ‘cheers’. She
told him ‘kippis,’ and of course he got a poem out of that as well.
These
were the summers of being part of a gang, living out of each other’s pockets but
being out every night, at art openings at Out of the Blue on Blackfriars
Street, or at readings in the Antiquary in St Stephen Street or the old Unemployed
Workers Centre on Broughton Street. There were Subbuteo Saturdays, rooftop
parties fuelled by high-emotion inducing marmalade wine, and
middle-of-the-night taxi rides to Portobello Beach.
Roddy
was the social glue. He was the explorer, the pioneer, setting the scene before
he let anyone else in on the secret. It was Roddy who saw The Lost Soul Band
first, when they played St James’ Oyster Bar every Sunday night, with Gordon
Grahame Singing Coffee and Hope and You Can’t Win Them All Mum, songs that
became our new anthems for a while.
He
loaned me a copy of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
when I needed it. “Take something bad,
and turn it into something good,” he said, quoting from Paul Haig’s song
that he’d later put in a poem. Roddy went deeper than the rest of us like that,
struggling for pleasure amongst the sadness.
At some
point, Roddy developed this idea about the ten-year-plan. It all tied in with
his notion of the centre of the universe in some way, though I can’t remember
how. According to him, in ten-years-time some of us would be successful in what
we were doing, some of us would be doing something else entirely, and some of
us would be dead. Putting it like that now sounds like stating the obvious, but
Roddy invested it with a weight that made it and him sound worldly wise.
He was
probably talking about himself more than anyone else. He had a drive and the
sort of self-confidence and singular self-belief that can sometimes come across
as arrogance in those who are shy like him. He knew he was good, and he worked
at being better. Everything he did and everyone he met fed into that.
So when
the back room of the Antiquary on a still bohemian St Stephen Street became our
world for a while in the just-pre-Rebel Inc early ‘90s, he was in the thick of
it. Where others ranted, Roddy read classically composed stanzas. Inbetween, he’d
be making connections, bonding especially with the lost genius that was Paul
Reekie, lovers of language and arcane knowledge both.
Much
later, five years after we’d lost Paul, Roddy posted a poem on Facebook called
Brandade de Morue, written in memorium for him. For all its sadness, the poem
conjured up with vivid largesse the boozy roar of those Edinburgh nights of old
that both of them helped light up in very different ways. Brandade de Morue
ended up in So Glad I’m Me, a book loaded with elegies of one kind or another.
When
Roddy won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry some time in ‘91, it showed he
wasn’t messing. It gave him validation in a way that you could see him skipping
inside with wordless delight about. He’d raised his game, and it was up to
everyone else to follow suit. He went to New York not long after, and stayed at
the Chelsea Hotel. He brought us all back cool designer t-shirts. Mine had a
picture of Twiggy’s face on the front, and on the back the words ‘It’s a mod
mod world, luv.’
And when
Roddy’s first book Yeah Yeah Yeah was published six years later, that was him
on the way. Everybody tells me the launch was upstairs in the Waverley, but I always
thought it was Bo’s. It probably was at some point later, but I was drunk.
Everybody was drunk, on the infectious elation of the occasion as much as the
booze.
Wherever
it was, the one image that lingers is of Roddy kneeling on the floor, holding uncharacteristically
flamboyant court to a huddle of us as he signed copy after copy of Yeah Yeah
Yeah with elaborate personal messages full of coded phrases that only its new owner
would fully get. Or not. I remember him beaming, grinning from ear to ear and
lapping up the attention like a rock star.
Roddy
went to London shortly after, and things changed, for him more than the rest of
us. He’d visit Edinburgh now and then, usually for a reading, and we’d go to
the old haunts in a way he relished, but it was never quite the same. He was in
the thick of the London scene now, with all the intense new friendships,
conspiracies and intrigues he thrived on.
I called
him a few times whenever I was down, one time when Scarlet’s Well, led by Bid
from the Monochrome Set, were playing, once when The Blue Aeroplanes were on,
but he had a new life now, and that was okay.
At some
point, Roddy went from new kid on the block to elder statesman with little in
the way of segue between. And in the thick of all that, and as has become
dazzlingly clear since he died, he nurtured a brand new generation of bright,
beautiful and brilliant baby poets, and helped them find their voices. They
clearly loved him for it, and love him still. And I bet between them they have
a million stories to tell about all the other ages of Roddy they lived through.
But in
Edinburgh, two decades after the so-called ten-year-plan was supposed to be
mission accomplished, despite never having been spoken of again, here we are. After
thirty years of triumph, failure and everything else inbetween, Roddy’s penchant
for self-fulfilling prophecy has been proved right again. We’re all older, and
those of us that are still around keep on keeping on, and even though Roddy
hadn’t lived here for donkey’s, he’s still the social glue. We’re still
toasting him with pints, despite our better judgement. He wouldn’t have had it
any other way.
The last
time I saw Roddy was when he was in hospital the first time, a bastardingly
long bus ride across London. At first he seemed woozy from the meds, but that’s
what hospitals do to you. Once the penny dropped, his mind was as sharp as it
ever was. At one point he sent me down to the hospital shop to get him a copy
of The Times and some snacks. He wanted to do the crossword. Same old Roddy.
And now,
sitting here indoors on a storm-battered Edinburgh January night, looking for
clues about those other ages of Roddy in each of his books I’m buried in, I
half expect the phone to ring like it used to in the hall of George IV Bridge an
hour before closing time. And as I’m listening to Struggle for Pleasure and
Coffee and Hope and You Can’t Win Them All Mum, I’d happily be led astray and tag
along to some brand new dive I’ve never been to before.
Roddy
will already be on first name terms with the bar staff he’ll grow to have a
major crush on by now, and his next new favourite band will play their first
gig there, little knowing who they’re about to become mates with for life. They
might have to sort out their record collection first, mind. It probably won’t
be enough to see them through, but it helps. Roddy Lumsden is dead. Kippis to
that.
Roderick Chalmers Lumsden, May 28th
1966-January 10th 2020
Bella Caledonia, January 2020
ends
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