Happy new year. It’s out with the old and in with the, er, old
FRANZ Ferdinand songs get longer as you age. No harm to the guys. They are, after all, one of Scotland’s finest musical exports and most musicians would have to work a few lifetimes to accomplish what the lads have in just a couple of decades.
Still, as I sat in my living room, tolerating the Hogmanay cheer as the band “did the hits”, it occurred to me that Scotland is a country running fast out of ideas.
Somewhere between Jackie Bird being heckled and the anti-climactic unveiling of a tented ceilidh near Princes Street in Edinburgh, I experienced a sense of disconnection from the festivities taking place.
This continued right up to the bells, where even the countdown sequence (which seemed to jump from 20 to 10 in just a few seconds) was surreal and disorientating.
The clip, stringing together images of Scottish landmarks, underscored by dramatic, self-aggrandising music, portrayed a confident, outward-looking nation. A nation I no longer recognise, if I ever knew it at all.
Then there was the rather surreal spectacle immediately after the bells, when a man in full military regalia stood next to a cannon, saluting a television camera as a stramash of poorly chosen music urinated all over the moment.
Underwriting the festivities was a desperate desire to be all things to all people. It was less a variety show and more a nation in the grip of an identity-crisis, slugging back dram after dram to cope with being so unsure of itself. The Scottish cultural landscape is a showreel of empty slogans and past glories. Everything is a remake. We’re always “getting the band back together”, regardless of how out of tune we are or how long it’s been since anyone was interested in seeing us play.
We are less concerned about the Scotland of today and more fascinated by the myths of what Scotland used to be.
Scotland is adrift. A nation on pause. The country that practically created the modern world has become a tribal backwater, littered with flags, syringes, underscored by fiddle music. A nation where the brightest political minds look to the medieval public squares of Facebook and Twitter to measure the temperature of our over-heating society, while the rest of us cling dearly to whatever shards of cultural or political shipwreck will keep our sinking, self-serving dreams afloat.
Scotland is trapped in an awful purgatory between a terrible wedding ceremony we’d rather not attend, and a pompous, over-cooked meal, surrounded by people we find insufferable, who couldn’t care less whether we left or remained.
Even on a good day, when the grounds for optimism seem fertile with possibility, I cannot escape the lingering suspicion that we are in some way diminished. That we have become a cautious, directionless and intolerant nation. A people defined not by our ingenuity, industriousness or humour, but by our self-serious delusions of national grandeur and shameless capacity to blame everything but ourselves for the problems we face.
I’m not saying this is Franz Ferdinand’s fault. It just occurred to me, as I watched them belt out the hits at the dawn of 2019, that Scotland may require fresh blood, across many fields and professions, to shake itself awake from this God-awful cultural coma.
Fresh blood, with something new to say, if we are to generate the inspiration required to haul our drunken hides from this social and political quicksand.