I once welded a washer on the QE2. I saw her dock in Sydney years later and I wondered how my work was holding up. It seemed OK!
I HAVE never hidden that I come from humble stock. I grew up in the tenements of postwar Glasgow. In fact, I used to specify exactly where, onstage: it was on the kitchen floor, ‘on the linoleum, three floors up’. The early years were spent in grinding poverty… but it wasn’t nothing. It was something very important.
I am very proud to be a working-class Glaswegian who has worked in the shipyards. I think the working class is everything. They are the builders of society, and without them the whole house falls down. I come from something. I come from the working class. And, most of all, I come from Scotland. ***** When I was a boy, the shipyards dominated Glasgow. They defined the city. Where I lived there was a steep hill called Gardner Street. If you stood at the top you could look over all of the buildings below and you could see the huge ships. It looked as if the ships were sailing right between the houses. There was this stark industrial beauty to the scene. It gave the city its heart and soul, and its identity.
I had always assumed I would end up in the shipyards. I did have a vague idea, buried deep within me, that I’d like to be a comedian, but, really, I might as well have wanted to be a f***ing astronaut, for how likely it was. In fact, I only every mentioned it once. My science teacher, Bill Sheridan, asked me in class: ‘Connolly, what are you going to do when you leave school?’ I told him: ‘Sir, I’d like to be a comedian.’ The class erupted in laughter. ‘Well, I saw you playing football at lunchtime,’ Mr Sheridan told me. ‘I think you’ve already achieved that ambition.’
Really, I just wanted away. I wanted to get away from the mundane life I was trapped in: to travel and experience the exciting and exotic outside world the ships were sailing to each day. But if I couldn’t get on the ships and sail, at least I could help to make them.
I signed up with a shipyard called Alexander Stephen & Sons to be an apprentice welder. Stephen’s, as everyone knew it, was a big, thriving yard that built all sorts of ships.
Their speciality was prefabrication – making all the constituent parts that could then be assembled and welded together to build the ships.
I was 15 the day I walked into Stephen’s for the first time, in 1958, and it felt totally exhilarating. I sensed this was where I would become a man. I was going in as a wee schoolboy with a yodelly voice and I would come out the other end as… something else entirely.
I was proud of being a welder. I knew that when my apprenticeship ended, welders were the highest paid of all the tradesmen. Welders always had a few bob in their pockets. There was a joke about this on the Clyde: ‘Two guys are walking down the street. One of them is drunk and the other one is a welder, too.’
One day, I put a washer on the QE2. I was passing by and the guy said, ‘Hey, welder, will you do this washer for me?’ I thought, ‘Oh, great, it’s the QE2!’ and I did it. Many years later I was in Sydney, in a hotel opposite the Opera House, and the QE2 pulled in. I watched all of the passengers coming off, and I thought to myself, ‘I wonder how my washer is holding up?’ It seemed to be doing OK. ***** The shipyard could be a dangerous place and I once fell off a ship. I was on deck and pulling on a cable when it came apart in my hands. I toppled backwards and went right over the edge. I fell 45ft and landed feet-first in a wee water-filled coffin-shaped space in between two cranes. I broke my ankle on some scrap metal but it was a miracle that it didn’t kill me. They rushed me to hospital and they bandaged it up, sent me home the same day and I was off work for a few weeks. That was my first ever write-up in the paper: Lucky Bill falls 40ft and breaks ankle. All the welders called me Lucky Bill for a while after that.
Employee care was not high on the agenda at Stephen’s. I would have to weld in the double-bottom of the ships, using deep penetration rods. The thick yellow fumes would turn my lips black. I would have a smoke and the guys working on the pipes in the engine room up above would be snowing asbestos on me.
I’d look as if I’d turned greyhaired. It’s really quite remarkable I’ve lived to this huge age.
I loved it at Stephen’s but at the same time I couldn’t shake off
First write-up was ‘Bill falls 40ft and breaks ankle’... so welders called me Lucky Bill
the feeling that there had to be more to life. I knew I wanted to be a somebody, even if I wasn’t totally sure who or what.
By the end of my teens I had got heavily into folk music and would daydream about one day playing it myself.
The following year my apprenticeship came to an end. By then the music bug had got me; I had started playing wee gigs in Glasgow folk clubs and I knew I didn’t want to go through life as a welder.
One night in the Folk Attic I met a guitarist called Tam Harvey. I loved the way he played guitar. He had been a rocker, so he knew how to play up the neck of the guitar. We got chatting, started practising together and decided we would become a duo. One night we were at a party and somebody suggested we should be called the Stumblebums. ‘Huh! Humblebums, more like!’ somebody else said. I thought that was a brilliant name, so that was it: the Humblebums we were.
The Humblebums roamed up and down the country playing our wee songs. I began to feel I really was living the life I wanted: being Luke the Drifter, always moving on. I discovered to my delight that even big, hairy banjo players in rainbow trousers could get groupies.
Going with loads of women had always been a big part of my adolescent fantasy of being a windswept and interesting rambling man and here I was, living the dream.
One night, the Humblebums did a charity gig at the Orange Hall in Paisley, and at the end of it a guy came up to introduce himself to me. His name was Gerry Rafferty. ‘That was brilliant!’ he told me. ‘I loved it, you were very funny.’
‘Thanks, I’m glad you like it,’ I told him. ‘Do you want to come back to my place?’ Gerry asked. ‘I write songs as well….’
Oh Christ, I thought. I’d had this happen a few times before and had always ended up sitting enduring some guy strumming some dreary dirge about being dumped that inevitably rhymed ‘rain’ with ‘window pane’. Not again…
We went back to Gerry’s house and he played us a few of his songs and I thought he was kidding me on. The songs were so sharp and sophisticated they sounded like songs from the hit parade, and I thought he must be copying them from some album that I didn’t know.
‘Are those really your songs?’ I asked him. ‘Aye.’
‘Christ, you’re f***ing brilliant! Would you like to join the band?’ ‘Aye, I would like that.’ It was as natural as that: a quick chat at a gig, a couple of songs over a beer and Gerry Rafferty was in the Humblebums. ***** Gerry and I got on like a house on fire at the start and he took the band up to another level.
We were both writing songs but his were just so much better than mine. I didn’t mind too much because I was bringing something else to the party. My comedy routines between the songs were getting longer and more inventive.
I don’t think there has ever been another group like the Humblebums. We were the weirdest outfit. Gerry would sing these extraordinary songs. People were just
I discovered to my delight even big, hairy banjo players in rainbow trousers got groupies. I was living the dream
flabbergasted by how good he was. I would step in and tell a story and have them roaring with laughter, then he would sing another song.
We weren’t like Cannon and Ball, with a straight man and a funny man: we were an inventive funny guy and a very inventive singer/ songwriter. I deeply respected his music and Gerry deeply respected my funny.
After Gerry and I had been together for two or three years, tensions began to creep in. Gerry was getting restless at my lack of musicianship. I was getting the vibe that Gerry was getting fed up with me going on for so long.
I would see him sitting on his stool with his guitar, watching me, looking impatient at having to wait for me to finish my story before he could sing another song.
These tensions weren’t unique to us, of course. They have happened to every band, from the Rolling Stones to Simon & Garfunkel. It’s the classic thing that ends up in big bands arriving at venues in separate limousines, having separate dressing rooms and throwing hissy fits.
Gerry and I were nowhere near that level and things never got as bad as that, but by 1971 it felt like things were running down.
We split perfectly amicably, as the friends that we still were, and Gerry went off to form Stealers Wheel and do very well.
I remember being in Australia in 2011 when Gerry Rafferty’s daughter, Martha, phoned me up.
She was with Gerry and said that he was in a bad way and on his deathbed, and would I like to talk to him? I said, ‘Yes, of course,’ but Martha said Gerry was not in a frame of mind to be talking on the phone – would I text him?
So I started texting him and trying to make him laugh and remind him of the old days, like the time that we smoked the Bible. I saw a prison movie once where a page of the Bible made reasonable cigarette paper.
Martha said later that Gerry was rolling with laughter, and that she hadn’t known we had done half of the things that I was texting him about. The funniest thing was, not so long after, I was walking along in London and I bumped into Martha….. and we were on Baker Street. ***** Oddly, over the years people have come to quite like my Humblebums stuff and recently, for the first time in decades, I’ve had the urge to write songs again. I might just buy myself a wee electronic keyboard and see what happens.
But after Gerry and I split, I thought of myself primarily as a folk singer who told jokes. Somebody might tell me a joke then I’d tell it to the crowd in an extended fashion.
This happened to me when I was drinking in the Scotia Bar and a pal wandered in and told me a wee joke. He said: ‘Jesus’s apostles were eating a Chinese takeaway when Jesus came in. Jesus asked them, ‘Where did you get that?’ and they said, ‘Oh, Judas bought it. He seems to have come into some money.’
I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever heard and I told it onstage that night with some added bits. It went down extremely well. I kept on expanding it and adding dialogue. I called Jesus ‘The Big Yin’.
Eventually it was about 25 minutes long, and it got me noticed. People started talking about it and came from miles away to see me do it. After the Last Supper sketch everything just grew for me, and I sometimes think everything I’ve become since was because of that.
I soon started becoming known as the Big Yin.
In 1975, Michael Parkinson was up in Glasgow getting a taxi to the airport, and his taxi driver recognised him, stopped the cab at a record shop to buy one of my records and insisted he listened to it when he got home. Parky liked it so much he booked me for his television chat show.
Parkinson was a huge deal, going out to ten million people on BBC1 live on a Saturday evening, and on our way down to appear on the programme, my manager, Frank, had one piece of advice for me: ‘Billy, whatever you do, don’t tell him the joke about the dead wife and her arse.’ Well, I meant to follow his sage warning, but when the show started, I felt the interview was going so well that I decided to chance my arm.
In the joke, the husband of the dead woman confides to his friend that he’s murdered her and buried her in the back garden. They go into the washhouse, and sure enough there’s a big mound of earth, and there’s a bum sticking out of it. He says, ‘Is that her?’ ‘Aye.’ He says, ‘What did you leave her bum sticking out for?’ And he says, ‘I needed somewhere to park ma bike.’
My bum story took the country by storm. The morning after, when I got off the plane and walked through Glasgow Airport, all the people applauded me. I had gone up a step in my fame and it kind of overwhelmed me for a bit.
After my first Parkinson appearance, my concerts began selling out in an instant and I was playing bigger venues.
Half a century since I started telling jokes on stage, I feel lucky my success has never really waned. My comedy is all about observing people leading their day-to-day lives and finding what is funny in them and about them. Life can be tough, and you either give up and moan about it or you have a go at it.
On the very best nights, I’ll come off stage and think, I wish I was in the audience. The bottom line is still that I love making people laugh. I love hitting the crowd with a smart one and hearing them roar. I don’t know how I do it, it just comes to me and I do it and the room explodes.
It’s a magic thing to have: it’s like waving a magic wand. It brings good in the room and it relaxes everybody. And I would like to carry on doing it until I can’t do it any more.
© 7 Wonder Productions, 2018
Abridged extract from Made in Scotland, by Billy Connolly, priced £20. Pre-order at offer price £16 (with free p&p) mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640.
I love making people laugh. I love hitting the crowd with a smart one and hearing them roar. I don’t know how I do it