The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
‘Men can be graceful,
The final instalment in an exclusive Courier serialisation of celebrated writer James Robertson’s biography on the Bard of Dundee
Playing football mattered hugely to Michael and his brothers, as Nicky Marra recalled: “Just underneath the line of plane trees on Harefield Road there was a flat area which we developed into a football pitch – in other words, eventually there was no grass left on it.
“There were always other boys looking for a game. That could be a bit risky if you didn’t know them, but you had a wee bit of security playing with your brothers. We’d also go up to the hat factory in the industrial estate behind Clement Park where there was a huge area of flat grass. You’d go up there with a bottle of water and be there all afternoon, just playing football for hours.”
Nicky continued: “There was a football renaissance going on in the city in the early 1960s. Bob Shankly was appointed manager of Dundee in 1959, and then Dundee won the league in the 1961-62 season.
“In our summer holidays we would walk down to Dens Park from Lochee and see the players coming out at the end of training and ask for autographs, the likes of Gordon Smith and Alan Gilzean. Gilzean was a huge hero. Michael’s later description was “he strode like a colossus over the Tullybaccart” because Gilzean was a Coupar Angus man.
“Michael was a Dundee fan whereas I became a United supporter. Mum would take us to games – if it was Dens Park one time, it would be Tannadice the next or to see the Harp, the junior team. I can’t exaggerate how important football was for us.”
The beautiful game was something that would remain beautiful for Michael throughout his life. He could see through the ugly things that accreted to it – the obscene amounts of money, the occasional outbreaks of violence on or off the park, the sectarianism of the Old Firm, the commercial exploitation of the game through merchandising and selling television rights – none of these could take away his pleasure in football at its simplest, the moments of grace and magic, the way it can be, at its best, an international language of shared humanity.
For him, additionally, as an artist, it provided endless material for songs and for reflecting on wider matters.
Michael himself was a good player as a teenager. As Nicky recalled: “He was what they would call a tasty winger, but he did not like physical contact. So he would play on the wing and when we got older, into our twenties, we played in a team called the Thomson Street Academicals. This was moving up a gear into amateur, Sunday morning football, and Michael didn’t like that because it was hard, physical, and he developed bad knees. I’m not sure if that was for real or an injury of convenience.”
Michael was a Dundee fan from the age of 10 when they won the Scottish league title in 1962. In the European Cup campaign that followed, Dundee started off by beating FC Cologne 8-1 at home. It was the first game Michael had seen under floodlights and he had never experienced excitement like it.
In later life he was also a keen follower of Celtic. He resisted the tribalism of the game and found incomprehensible its appropriation by bigots and fanatics. For Michael, football was always bigger than any one team.
Perhaps his most sublime song about football is Reynard in Paradise. It manages to connect the city to the countryside, football to freedom, the beauty of a fox to the beauty of men, and it even carries an echo of Burns’ Song: Composed in August (Westlin Winds) with its condemnation of blood sports.
This is how Michael would introduce it: “I was listening to the radio one Saturday afternoon, and it was a football match taking place in Glasgow between Aberdeen and Celtic. And during the course of the commentary the commentator said: ‘An amazing thing has just happened, a beautiful and healthy fox has just run on the park.’
“Why would such a wise creature put himself in such a precarious position. It just didn’t seem to be the right place for a fox to appear, but there he was. So I began to wonder where he’d come from.
“Maybe a member of his family had been killed by the hunt and he had moved into sophisticated Glasgow, tired of the rural way of life. Something like that. But anyway, no matter what reason, I wrote this song and during the course of the song, the fox revises his opinion of mankind, having watched Aberdeen play Celtic.”
Thus a true story became a fable in Michael’s hands. “Men can be graceful/ This much I know”, the fox says, but he speaks in Michael’s voice.