Taking the bull by the horns

In the piece below you'll find an interview with Douglas Gordon, a Scottish artist with a huge international reputation. Douglas is as nice a guy as you could ever meet, but the world's least convincing Partick Thistle fan. The article appears today in the Scottish edition of Times.

Eighteen months ago, Douglas mounted a huge retrospective of his work in Edinburgh. For another interview with him, which appeared at that time in the Sunday Times, just click here: The beautiful game

The image immediately below is of Philippe Parreno (left) and Douglas Gordon, the co-directors of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. In the article below are pictures of José Tomás, caught at a bad moment on his return to bullfightiing in Barcelona, Zinedine Zidane, and an engraving of Martin Luther, by Lucas Cranach the elder.

Art, sport and the history of IPA

The Times, January 7, 2008

The problem with a five-star success, as any Hollywood producer knows, is how to follow it up. It is conundrum the artist Douglas Gordon has been wrestling with since 2006 when rave reviews for his film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, spilled out of the arts pages into the sports supplements. This brilliant production, said one critic, was ideal if your “idea of a perfect Saturday is a morning at the Tate Modern followed by an afternoon at the match.”

Now at last, Gordon and his co-director Philippe Parreno have settled on the sequel. Ratcheting up the testosterone levels, they are shifting focus from football to bullfighting, from the enigma of Zinedine Zidane, the great French player, to José Tomás, Spain’s most famous matador.

Gordon is a Turner Prize winner, breathes the rarefied air of contemporary art. But he is a disarmingly unpretentious man, who chuckles as he describes how he was swept up in the cult of Tomás.

Last summer the bullfighter returned to the ring in Barcelona after a self-imposed exile from the sport of five years. Expectation was high and the stadium packed. Tomás did not disappoint, producing a brilliantly mannered performance and – despite being knocked to the ground - was carried out of the arena shoulder high in triumph. Gordon was agog.

“It was the most astonishing bullfight I’d seen. He is an amazing character who has obviously gone against the grain in that very macho culture and Philippe and I are interested in him as a matador. But we can also see things from the point of view of the animal, this beautiful beast,” recalls the artist. He envisages his film as “a game between the matador and the bull,” which will employ all the artfulness and technology which created Zidane – 16 cameras were trained on the footballer throughout a full match, to achieve an astonishingly intimate portrayal “every bit as detailed as a painting or a photograph”.

Winning Tomás’s continuing support for the film which will take months to plan and execute may not be decisive – another matador could step into the limelight - but with the spectre of an EU ban hanging over bullfighting, time is of the essence.

The urgency of the project only adds to the sense of activity and optimism which surrounds the artist. Eighteen months ago during the Edinburgh retrospective of his work Gordon was still coming to terms with the break up of his relationship with Anna Gaskell, and fretting over how he might maintain a closeness with his young son in New York.

Now he is relaxed and assured and in the throes of moving back to Glasgow, which hasn’t been his permanent base since 2000. Gordon is looking forward to playing golf and watching Scotland’s efforts in football’s World Cup qualifiers. And he has any number of artistic projects on the go.

The last “astonishing summer” convinced him to return to Europe. It wasn’t just Barcelona. Gordon participated in the ‘artists’ opera’, which was part of the Manchester Festival and spent enough “fallow time” in Scotland to make him realise that he had been a “bit too cranked up” In New York. He will keep a flat in Manhattan, and probably buy another in Berlin, but he already has two places in Glasgow, one of which, near Park Circus, is being converted into a non-profit-making gallery. Gaskell is likely to be one of the first artists to exhibit there.

The notion of an exhibition space in his house was dreamt up with Katrina Brown, an old friend who is the former director of Dundee Contemporary Arts. Over dinner, she told Gordon about her Common Guild foundation which is dedicated to mounting public programmes of contemporary art. “I said, ‘I have a big town house in Glasgow, but I only ever live in the kitchen. Why don’t we try to run it as an art space?’ “

The homecoming is enticing to an artist who feels both Scottish and European. “It made sense to get back to a context in which I was challenged in a different way. And people didn’t keep saying to me, ‘O your accent is so cute’, and I didn’t have to predicate everything I said with subtitles.”

Gordon was born the eldest of four children in Maryhill, Glasgow, where he absorbed all the obsessions which beset many Scottish men growing up in 1970s: sex, death, football and religion. When he was four, his mother became a Jehovah’s Witness; at nine, Gordon was giving Bible readings to audiences of 200 at the Kingdom Hall.

He would have studied literature and history and university if his guidance teacher hadn’t persuaded him to apply for Glasgow School of Art. Now at 42, he intends to right that decision and will apply to study the Reformation at St Andrews University. It should help, he says, in one of his current projects, “to rewrite the Bible”.

“I was in Germany recently looking at works by Cranach. There is a beautiful portrait of Martin Luther, and I thought, ‘Douglas, you just don’t know half as much as you should. Maybe it’s time to go back to school. You can be one of those cool, mature students for once.’”

Luther he admires for his “attempt at inevitable failure”, his 1517 protest. “I think what interests me in it – it’s very tricky - is that aspect of Protestantism which is the introduction of choice as oppose to dogma. We know that a few hundred years later it became dogmatic, but in those days …”

He lets that thought drift off. “If I study in St Andrews and have a flat in Berlin, I can go and see a lot of the paintings and go to Wittenburg.”

And you can study religion and have fun, he reckons. As if to prove the point, his most recent experiences in Berlin – absorbing the art of Cranach and Durer – were leavened by his new career as restaurant reviewer for the French edition of Playboy. He calls his column 24 Hours Gastronomy, echoing the title of arguably his best known work, 24 Hour Psycho. It first ran last October with a despatch from St Andrews.

“I thought I should start it off with a little patriotic nod. ‘Dear Reader’, it began, ‘I’m sitting aboard an Airbus, coming in from Charles De Gaulle to Edinburgh airport … Don’t go directly to St Andews. Stop off at the Oxford Bar in Edinburgh and have a pint of IPA.’ I give them a wee history of India Pale Ale. Then we stopped off in Crail for a lobster, we played golf, we went to St Monans for dinner. The French Playboy people loved it.”

He even takes his own photographs on his camera phone and e-mails them into the office. Now wonder Yan Ceh, the editor-in-chief of the magazine, lists Gordon as one of his heroes on his YouTube website.

In Berlin he wanted to dine in an exclusive restaurant, frequented by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. “I called the concierge and asked him to book. He said ‘Zees is not possible.” I said: ‘I am the food and drink editor of French Playboy magazine and I’d like to check the place out.’ I had a table in five minutes.”

Not bad, he laughs, for a man from Maryhill.

Screen but not heard

IT SOUNDS like the worst kind of joke. There are these two blokes arguing in a pub. One man, his face growing redder and redder, insists that the proliferation of television screens is destroying the traditional Scottish bar by killing the art of conversation. The other - in the person of Ian Rankin, the Edinburgh crime writer who plots his novels through a glass, darkly - says mildly that his companion is spouting much hot air.

To help advance his view, Rankin has theorised that his companion is possibly a little paranoid. Perhaps, Rankin suggests with a snigger, whenever his red-faced friend walks into a bar, someone switches on a telly just to annoy him: "Or maybe you're just a jinx."

Maybe. But I am that red-faced man and a graduate of the hard-drinking school of journalism. Years of observation and a heavy use of alcohol have convinced me that pubs - to be specific, traditional one-room Scottish bars - are spiralling into decline

A return to my one-man crusade against tellies in pubs, this time in the Sunday Herald. The images shows Ian Rankin pouring a pint and, below, an image of the interior the Oxford Bar, one of around ten on Ian's list of "great traditional Edinburgh pubs which don't have a telly". Keen-eyed readers may observe a television in the back row, second from the left. Read more at: Screen but not heard

You can visit one of Edinburgh's best bars (two tellies notwithstanding) at: Oxford Bar

The Jocky Wilson interview

It's nearly 26 years since Jocky Wilson won the World Darts championship, and since then, as you can read below, his life has pretty much fallen apart at the seams. I spoke to Wilson nearly seven years ago, and this is the only interview that any journalist has obtained with him in the last decade. The article appeared in the Scotsman, and was possible because the paper's sports editor, Donald Walker, allowed me a full week to find and talk to Jocky.

"Who is Jocky Wilson?" American and Faroese friends may ask. In 1982 he was one of the best known sportsmen in Britain, so famous that when Dexy's Midnight Runners released their song Jackie Wilson said, the producer of television's Top of the Pops show mistakenly put up an image of Jocky, not Jackie, when the band played the song in the BBC studio.

The picture shows Dexy's Kevin Rowland singing on TOTP, with the image of Jocky behind him.

Jocky's dart out of the shadows

The Scotsman, 17 March, 2001

CHRISTMAS 1995. Jocky Wilson is boarding a bus in Newcastle. He has left his house in Wallsend with a car on the drive and he is turning his back on the game that made him famous to head back to Kirkcaldy, to sanctuary.

Things don't quite work out. Five years on, a council flat recluse, Jocky is in a private hell of diabetes and depression and the whole of darts is suffering withdrawal.

"I've got lovely memories of him," says Eric Bristow for the sport's high and mighty. "I miss him. Darts misses him - the game needs characters like Jock."

Lower down dartdom's ladder the regrets are likewise tinged with warmth. Mention Wilson's name in Uncle's Bar and a few of the regulars edge closer to tell some happy tales of Jocky on the oche.

This pub was once called the Lister, and on a good day years ago, Jocky reckoned there was "a wee bit of the hustler atmosphere that Minnesota Fats and Paul Newman would have appreciated".

He learnt the game here - stung in his first game by a grannying from "Ginger" Snowden - and he played for any number of the local teams.

Now with the dartboard hidden away in the corner and Kirkcaldy's darts league disbanded, the game is dead on its feet in the town. "All the good players are away to Glenrothes," reckons Jocky, as he squints towards you across the hallway of his flat.

There's not many speak to him these days. His wife, Malvina, usually takes the calls, and "No," she tells allcomers, "Jocky won't talk." Today it's a little different. The man of the house answers the door, his Jack Russell terrier scampering round his feet. Jocky is still defiant.

"I just want to be left alone," he pleads from behind his big, square glasses, "because all they write about me is crap, and I don't want to read about that. That's it in a nutshell. I'm sorry. I don't want to shut the door in your face."

And if you protest that his friends are missing him, he's quick to cut you off. "Aye, but it's all over and done with now. I don't even go out. Only to the doctor. I'm sorry, but good luck to you."

Jocky wasn't always quite so shy. Fuelled by lager and vodka, he threw himself from novice to World Champion in 12 years. Once, when a social security official saw him on the television winning money at the Butlins Grand Masters, he had his dole stopped.

But he brought record crowds to darts, and in these parts of Fife he filled the pubs as folk crowded in to watch his big wins on television. When Jocky beat John Lowe for that first world crown in 1982, you'd better believe they were dancing in the streets of Raith. The image of Jocky was hung over Kirkcaldy's Mercat centre and Bill Hill penned a verse: "He's sixteen stain of fat and pain/ When he steps up to the oche/ When he throws the spears you can hear the cheers/ For Fife's wee hero Jocky."

For Jimmy Skirving, an old mate from Harrow's Bar, the pleasure was more immediate. He was there for the double ten that won the final. "Jocky came straight off the stage and gave me his darts - I've still got them. He just said, 'I've done it'. He gave my son the dartboard."

Others talk as warmly about Jocky, but even when you stand outside his door and tell him so, he won't respond beyond the hint of a toothless smile.

"Ach, I enjoyed it while it lasted. But that's life, eh? You get knocked for six, and then that's it. I couldn't do it now."

But then suddenly he raises his voice against the world. "I could have still been playing - I just didn't have it in me.

"Turning up at a venue and taking good money. Maybe my mind wasn't right, but I just couldn't get out of there quick enough. That's not on.

"And playing on TV - ach - I didn't have any go in me. I said to myself 'I'll just have to get out of this because I can't handle it any more'." The drink was part of it. Towards the end, suffering already from the diabetes, he was hospitalised after a drinking binge. That event came as a terrible blow, for reasons that the commentator Sid Waddell makes clear.

"He couldn't be Jocky Wilson without a lot of drink," Waddell believes. "He couldn't be the player he was. Unfortunately, the ten pints of lager and the three or four vodkas are going to kill you if you do it every night. I think, psychologically, he realised that, and quit when he was 45."

It's a tough old sport for the teetotaller. Waddell has got many a tale from days on the road with Jocky and the two remain good friends.

"I remember, at seven in the morning, drinking water from a Lucozade bottle and Jocky said: 'Is that gin or voddy?' I said: 'If you've had a bit to drink the night before, you should rehydrate'. He said: 'My granny told me the English poison the water.' So the only thing he'd drink was Fanta."

The stories might raise a smile, but these days they're no laughing matter for Jocky himself. "When I was brought up with the darts, it was drink and darts, drink and darts," he tells you, keeping the door half shut.

"When you have a few too many you do a lot of stupid things, but you don't think you have. I can understand now that I'm on the wagon, but at the time you never realised.

"They might like a pint now, but they know when to stop. I just kept going. I was always pissed by the end of the night. I enjoyed it while I was there. It got me out of a hole at the time. That's life, eh? I didn't look after my money, but that's another story."

That last is certainly true. Having dragged himself off the dole queue, Jocky wasn't always the luckiest with advisors. His first agent was Ron Clover, of Fourleaf management. In 1983, Jocky wrote: "Ron is much more than a manager; he is a friend. Thanks to him I do not have to worry about deals with sponsors, paperwork or tax."

Some friend. Within two years, his manager was sueing for a share of the earnings. Jocky countered he had signed for Clover when he was drunk, but the judge found for the agent, a decision that ultimately cost John Thomas Wilson around £80,000.

Later, when the Inland Revenue claimed a further £27,000 in back tax, Jocky was in real trouble. No longer earning huge sums from tournaments, he was making shift with a couple of exhibitions a week, for maybe £300 a night. Take out instalments to creditors and a hefty budget for cigarettes and beer and there was precious little left. He was declared bankrupt in 1997.

Financial problems were only part of it. Jocky suffered other pressures in the early years. For a start there was all that palaver over Malvina, when the player and his wife found themselves abused by their patriotic neighbours, for the accident of her Argentinian birth.

"I got stick through that with the Falklands War," he growls. "She's lived here since she was five years old. And they made a fuss of that. It's wrong. It's nothing to do with anything."

And here he will concede the help of friends, such as Jimmy Skirving and Sid Waddell. "Well, they knew," he agrees. "I mean, I've never been politically minded or anything, but a war's a war, eh? That's life."

And then he goes on: "Oh I've seen the world and that. I've travelled. And I'd have probably ended up in the jail if I hadn't because times have been hard here, you know. I don't miss it though. I'm glad I'm out of it, because of the way my mind was at the time."

It's impossible not to ask whether the problems were all down to booze. Jocky pauses. The Jack Russell at his feet has started to growl and he silences it by swiftly caressing the dog's backside with his foot.

"The drink came into it. But I wouldn't say it was just the drink. I just wasn't able to do it. I didn't have the energy."

In truth, depression had set in long before his playing career had finished and he was leading, he says, a kind of Jekyll and Hyde life. Then he adds insistently: "But, still, I did a lot of good for people when I was at the top, a lot of charity stuff. Nothing's said about that."

He's wrong on that score. His friends remember. Skirving can vouch for the player's generosity. "You could always rely on him," Jimmy says. "See the amount of trophies he won and gave away - I can assure you Jocky was taken a loan of quite a lot. Once he won a holiday and a nest of suitcases. He never got home with either - he sold the holiday for 50 quid and the cases for a tenner."

Somehow all the prizes were ephemeral. As long as Jocky could relax and recharge his batteries, he was happy. His most treasured assets became the fishing boats he bought with his winnings and if he could get away for a few days, he was more than ready for the battles at the oche.

Those confrontations, of course, were famously fierce - and none tougher than the skirmishes with Eric Bristow, when even the psychological warfare could turn violent

Bristow can remember a televised international from Livingston, when he was called to the stage to face Jocky in a singles game. "As I climbed up, Jocky kicked me straight on the shin. The officials pulled us apart and I had to climb up, live on TV even though I could feel my leg bleeding under my trousers.

"Jocky came up behind and I had to shake hands in front of the cameras and smile at him." He laughs craftily: "All I wanted to do was strangle him."

And now, well beyond the glare of TV lights and smiling in the gloom at some memory of his own, Jocky can reflect on the genuine friendship the two men shared. "I liked Eric, if you want the honest truth. I could trust him. No matter what the papers thought about cats and dogs, we got the wages."

They brought the punters in, you could say. "That was it. But no matter what, we still wanted to beat each other. Wind-ups and all that. But Eric's got a heart of gold, and I mean that."

And yet it's Bristow, who loudest of all, has urged his friend to end his self-imposed exile. In the gloom of the hallway, Jocky still won't entertain the notion.

"If you've not got it in your heart, what's the point? And I've not. Seriously, I've not. If I went back to darts, I'd end up drinking again, that's a cert. And I'd end up - bump. I'm better out of it. I just can't handle it.

"I liked a drink - Eric's probably the same because we all came up the same way. They like a drink, like's of the older school, but the younger school, they don't drink much. In fact, they're not very entertaining if you want the honest truth."

But surely, whatever his troubles with girls, that Phil Taylor's a good player. "Oh excellent, excellent. He's brilliant. It's a shame what's happened to Phil because I like him and all, by the way. I still think he was set up.

"But that's it, eh? I don't want to talk really."

And, at last, from behind the neat little door with its silver nameplate, J Wilson emerges to shake my hand before he disappears.

Jocky Wilson is a gentleman.

Writing on the wall for Captain Scott

Little known fact. Captain Robert Falcon Scott took more than 1200 books with him to Antarctica, and around half of them were novels and poetry anthologies. Click here for Captain Scott's Christmas reading list, published in today's Times.

Scott's Christmas reading list

How America rewrote Scottish literature

The Library of Congress has abolished its headings for Scottish literature, provoking outrage in Scotland. This story, my exclusive for The Times, has been picked up by the BBC and is running on the Press Association wire. You can read it in the entry below.