The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
‘There’ s nowhere else I’d rather be’
Dundee was this week named one of the world’s 21 places of the future alongside the likes of Toronto, Atlanta… and Outer Space. It was the only UK city to feature in the report by Cognizant’s Centre for the Future of Work, which examines how work is changing in response to new technology. Here, two Dundonians who have travelled the world in the fields of music and sport – Simple Minds bass player Ged Grimes and broadcaster and Courier columnist Jim Spence – have their say on the City of Discovery and the place they are proud to call home,
Dundee has been absolutely pivotal in my other career, making music for computer games, says Ged Grimes.
Chris van der Kuyl (Minecraft entrepreneur) has been a friend of mine for years and when we sat down to work on our first game together, the music was an incidental thing.
In in the last 20 years it’s become central to the games process and it’s one of those things that could only have happened here.
Now when I go to other places and tell people I’m from Dundee – the place that gave the world Grand Theft Auto, Minecraft and Lemmings – they see it as a powerhouse.
Technology means you can be located anywhere – the last big game I worked on was with a company in New Orleans. But when I started out in the music industry with Danny Wilson in the 1980s we had to move to London.
The great thing was you stood out. But I think there was a sense then that
Dundee was a city that had a past and less of a clear idea about its future, and you can’t say that now.
There’s a can-do attitude to the place and the people.
The 1980s maybe weren’t a great time for the city – a lot of the old industries were going – but people just got their heads down and started doing the things that had to be done to get us to where we are now. A lot of the creative industries that are doing well grew out of that spirit.
I think the size of the city is important. It’s easy to scale up when a project suddenly takes off because you know musicians who can help, or people in the gaming industry.
I find people in Dundee are less competitive than in places like London. There’s a sense of collective responsibility – if we stick together we can all be lifted up.
People have a confidence in their own abilities that means they don’t feel threatened when they give someone else a leg up, and that benefits the whole city.
A lot of people deserve credit for the huge range of creative industries in Dundee right now.
Look at all the smaller companies that started as spin-offs from the likes of Abertay University and initiatives like Dare to be Digital.
As a Dundonian it’s easy to take that for granted, but when you stop and look at it through the eyes of other people, it gives you a real kick up the backside.
There are still challenges – we can’t allow it to become a two-tier society.
It’s got to be inclusive and there are still people in the city who are not doing so well. We have to make sure the successes trickle down to everyone.
But honestly, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
It’s great to see Dundee getting this recognition, says Jim Spence.
And it’s nice to see everyone jumping on the bandwagon of celebrating the city’s success, but I do find it irksome when I hear people talking about what’s happening now as if it’s out of the ordinary.
There’s this idea that Dundee is suddenly doing well after long years when everything was terrible.
You hear it from some of the professional Dundonians, as I call them – folk who haven’t lived in the city for years.
This sense that Dundee has always lagged behind – it’s just not true and I find it quite offensive.
It’s not so long ago that Dundee was a bigger city than Aberdeen.
In the post-war years it was thriving. This image of a bustling, vibrant city hasn’t come out of nowhere.
Yes it went into a brief period of industrial decline in the 1980s but that was the bit that was out of the ordinary – not the recovery.
The growth we’re seeing now has been the result of a recalibration rather than anything more dramatic.
The other thing you have to remember is that Dundee has always enjoyed a good reputation overseas.
It’s only here in Scotland that people had this very dated view of the city.
I did the bulk of my travelling as a sports reporter, throughout Europe and further afield.
Wherever you went, from Athens to Madrid and Moscow, people knew about Dundee and held it in the highest regard – largely because of football.
The people I met in other countries regarded it as a world-class city even when people at home didn’t.
They didn’t know about Hearts or Hibs but they could reel off the names of United players.
More recently, I travelled a bit in my role as rector at Dundee University. When we went abroad people knew all about Dundee and understood it to be a city that punched above its weight in areas like dentistry, biotech and the creative industries.
It was only in Scotland – Glasgow in particular, dare I say it – that the parochial attitudes persisted.
If reports like this help to put all that behind us, I’ll be happy.
Dundee was this week named one of the world’s 21 places of the future alongside the likes of Toronto, Atlanta…and Outer Space. The Courier’s Head of Arts & Entertainment, Lorraine Wilson, writes about her relationship with her home city.
My Dundee experience is unique. As is yours.
It’s shaped by when you arrived here – in my case the late 1960s – and if you decided to leave.
I returned in 2005 after 13 years away and saw the city through the more mature prism of having lived in a bigger city that brought many opportunities, but didn’t feel, well, like me.
Due to my vintage as a child of the 1970s, the tragedy of how they could have torn the old Overgate down is lost on me.
The old Overgate is my Overgate, where I liked nothing more than scraping a knee playing on the concrete geometric structures.
My Overgate makes me think of Mary, Mungo and Midge, chips from the Deep Sea, and swinging my legs from a function room chair at the Angus Hotel, bored of waiting as my mum attended her weekly slimming club.
It has also left with me an overly pretentious attraction to European Brutalist architecture.
The Dundee of the 1970s is etched on my psyche, a young sponge who took the 33 bus from Fintry into the city centre for a wander on a Saturday afternoon.
The McManus, the
Barrack Street Museum, sometimes a trip with friends to the Olympia, a Saturday morning show at The Gaumont, and the final act, the parting of the ways with pocket money in Woolies - a Winfield jotter or two, some pick ’n’ mix and maybe a 7-inch single.
When we ventured as far as Blackpool on holiday, none of my temporary friends had heard of Dundee. It seemed to be a secret place.
I’m one of many prodigal children who were told there was nothing here and believed it.
I thought I hated it and then spent the years until I returned defending it to anyone who dared call it “Scumdee”.
I have nothing poetic to say about it – Dundee is not “a light across my heart” as Michael Marra put it so elegantly.
It’s part of the family and I’d have been a different person had I been born and raised anywhere else.
In a previous generation would I have worked in a mill, married a kettle biler, and behaved badly in the city’s hostelries?
OK, that last one might still have been true, but I stand on the shoulders of women like my mum, aunties and grannies who did the heavy lifting so that I could complain about being so tired after slaving over a hot keyboard.
As long as I remember that, it keeps me grounded.
I believe it’s that drywitted, quietly confident pull that allows people to be drawn here, or return, and contribute to its continued success.