The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
The Bard of Dundee: a man of many parts
The third in an exclusive four-part Courier serialisation of James Robertson’s biography of Michael Marra
Among the numerous projects Michael committed to in the late 1990s was another major theatre production: he wrote the songs for, and acted in, Chris Rattray’s The Mill Lavvies. This hugely popular play was first performed at Dundee Rep in 1998, then was revived in 2002 and again in 2012, just a month before Michael’s death.
Set in the early 1960s in a Dundee mill where most of the workforce are women, the action takes place in the mill’s male toilets and dips into the lives of five men whose banter, tricks, petty cruelties and occasional kindnesses to one another reflect the changes going on in society around them.
There is a particularly Dundonian underdog take on life in the scenarios and dialogue of the play. Michael’s songs are beautifully crafted to tap into this theme, and it is not doing an injustice to the strength of Rattray’s writing to say that they are the highlights of the play, partly because they slot so seamlessly into the narrative, enhancing and never disrupting it.
Some of these songs, which teeter on the edge of pathos but never quite topple in, are rightly regarded as top-drawer Michael Marra creations, Big Wide World Beyond the Seedlies, Broom Crazy and Gin Eh was a Gaffer for to Be among them. Oh Meh Goad, in which Erchie, the janny, is urged by his workmates to supply them with ever more surreal non-rhyming limericks, is a comic masterpiece.
Perhaps the most memorable song, though, is If Dundee was Africa, a geography lesson in sound-pictures. At one point in the play, Erchie wants to know where North Africa is but, since he is unable to read or write, one of the other men has to find a way of explaining its location to him without the aid of an atlas or globe. He does so with this song:
If Dundee was Africa,
And Fife was Antarctica,
If Arbroath was India,
And Perth was Peru,
In that darkest of continents How happy Eh’d be,
Cause that would mean Aiberdeen Was deep in the Mediterranean Sea, And a’ body would agree That’s a no bad place for Aiberdeen to be.
Michael also wrote short stories and plays, acted, drew and painted, took photographs, made collages, constructed objects, whittled sticks and invented things. Conversation, too, was a form of art for him.
He enjoyed the company of visual artists and engaging with their ideas: he liked hanging out in their studios, and he counted Vince Rattray, Andy Hall, James (Jimmy) Howie, Francis Boag, Calum Colvin, Eddie Summerton and many more as friends.
It was obvious to Michael’s friend Andy Pelc (a.k.a. ‘Saint Andrew’) that: “Michael was basically a rebel when it came to art or anything else. He was the rebel of the family. He was into art but almost anti-art in any formal or academic context. Anything that involved classical, formal training, he would reject that. I have it in my head that Michael might have applied to go to art school. But if he did apply, if he had been offered a place, I don’t think he would have accepted it, or he wouldn’t have stayed. He would have hated being told how to go about “doing” art.
“In the same way, if you wanted Michael to, say, watch something on television, the worst thing you could do was tell him: ‘Watch this programme, you’ll really like it’. That immediately erected a barrier. He would take umbrage at you telling him what he should watch or would like.”
During the days of touring with Skeets Boliver and Barbara Dickson, Michael had found that hours were spent sitting around waiting for things to happen. To help himself relax before gigs, he bought crayons and felt-tip pens and started drawing – often very detailed, multi-lined images that needed a lot of concentration and a fair bit of colouring-in. The influence of modern masters like De Chirico, Matisse and Picasso is evident in his drawings and paintings but his unique perspective meant there was something identifiably Marra-like in his output, which included cartoons and drawings enhanced by captions and speech bubbles.
There was always a sense he wanted to break down boundaries between different art forms. He noted that wherever painters are working – whether they are artists or painters and decorators – there is usually music too, coming out of a wee radio or a big blaster. Music, as he put it on Candy Philosophy, is “the sound of painters painting paint”. So why wouldn’t visual art have a powerful presence in a music studio?