Tam Dean Burn: 10 things that changed my life

THE first great life-changing thing I experienced only became apparent to me 35 years later when I read that novelist Anthony Buckeridge had died. His obituaries said that he loved theatre and was a life-long socialist and that these were major elements in his writing. Suddenly, everything made sense to me. I dearly loved his Jennings series of books when I was 10 to 12 years old but had never gone back to them. I’d wondered where my commitment to theatre and socialism came from and think I’d absorbed these influences from Buckeridge.

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2. The Proscenians

FIRST year at Craigmount School in 1970 was fantastic – a brand new school with a wonderful theatre space and great drama teachers in Joyce Heller, wife of actor Martin, and Ken Morley who went on to be Reg Holdsworth in Coronation Street. I loved it and adapted Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn for performance.

But I wasn’t allowed to continue drama due to streaming of exam subjects and I left in 1975 very disillusioned, quite desperate and self-harming. I was looking in the Edinburgh Evening News Situations Vacant column for jobs when I saw a post saying “actors wanted”. By this time, James Dean was my hero so I applied and joined. It turned out to be for a new Edinburgh amateur drama group The Proscenians, with a really interesting mixed bag of folk new to the am-dram scene. It enticed me away from Clerie Jungle gang culture and I soon moved into the flat of one of the group members and it was all hugely life-changing.

3. Punk

HAVING caught the acting bug, I enrolled on the drama course at Queen Margaret College (QMC) in August 1977 as the punk revolution was taking off.

I was full of it but the life-changer was still to come. Many Edinburgh punks identify the Clash (below) White Riot tour gig at the Playhouse on May 7, 1977 as the revolutionary moment but mine came exactly seven months later on December 7 (seven was the zeitgeist number!). That gig meant a lot to me too but it was when I first performed with Dirty Reds at Stewart’s Ballroom supporting The Rezillos that my DIY punk days truly began.

We’d only just formed with me singing, my brother Russell on drums and Dave Carson and Andy Copland from Corstorphine on bass and guitar.

We were still trying to figure out The Stooges song She’s Not Right in the loo at the gig. I performed Iggy-style, stripped to the waist with long black gloves from the drama department wardrobe.

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We only played that one gig but it showed me the way to the stage. Dirty Reds reformed a year later with Clermiston punks Graham Main and Davy Henderson taking over on bass and guitar. Our gigs spiralled in dangerous intensity from the start, tensions between singing and acting grew and I think I knew in my heart that Davy would be a better frontman. Sure enough they, with Murray Slade, went on to become Fire Engines, one of the greatest post-punk bands.

4. Ken Davidson

I WAS working at Tramway in December 1991 performing Bobby Sands’s epic poem Trilogy as part of my General Election campaign as Communist Party candidate for Glasgow Central when a striking young guy approached me.

He was patting his chest and seemed unsure whether to breathe or speak. Eventually, he got out that he planned to perform sections of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake there and would I be interested? The solo performance would last four and a half hours and he’d pay me £700 for three performances – more than I’d ever had for a theatre job – so I said yes.

Thus began a relationship that lasted for 20 years, with many performances at Tramway and also up Cathkin Braes, leading a donkey in a graveyard in Transylvania and at Cleveland, Ohio Performance Art Festival. There, my eight-year-old son Skye took the lead part in our performance in a disused shopping mall, dragging me face down into the audience’s midst.

Kenny (above) knew Finnegans Wake inside out but I soon found it best not to ask too many questions. The most liberating aspect of our work was that I never spoke a single word during the performance.

Our James Joyce was a slapstick blind-drunk and the landscapes Kenny created were a joy to improvise in. It was intensely sad when he died in December 2018 on the night that Skye had come up from London to Glasgow to work with me again. As Neil Cooper said in his Herald obituary, Kenny was “arguably the most avant-garde theatre artist to come out of Scotland in the second half of the 20th century”.

5. The Timex strike

I WAS arrested on the first major picket of the Dundee dispute for jumping onto the front of the bus taking the scab labour into the plant, clinging to the windscreen wipers.

I was giving the driver dog’s abuse while the cops tried to pull me off by my hoodie. A photo of me made the front page of the Financial Times and The Scotsman and my picket line nickname became Spiderman.

Around 15 of us from Glasgow and Edinburgh were locked up for the night and bail conditions were set that we were not allowed to enter the city of Dundee until trial.

Dundee was not nearly as trendy as now and cheeky folk joked saying “you lucky bastard!” but as soon as I was found guilty and fined £250 (which the strike committee paid straight away in cash), I moved to Lochee and threw myself into the worldwide Timex boycott campaign. It was hugely inspiring to join those workers, mainly women, in struggle and it was life-changing for all of us. It’s looked on as a dour battle but we also had many great laughs, not least with early morning karaoke on the picket line.

6. Irvine with an E

I WAS in a bit of a burnt-out political rut by 1994 when Boilerhouse asked me to join the Headstate production to be devised with writer Irvine Welsh (below) just as Trainspotting was really starting to make tracks.

Like many, I was astounded by its audacity, relevance and burst-out-laughing-on-the-bus humour. But I was also surprised that we’d never met before, despite being same-age, west-Edinburgh Hibs supporters who’d been through the punk scene.

We hit it off and became allies straight away. I was still in Dundee but itching for something new and this invitation to make Acid House theatre was irresistible.

I knew for Headstate that I had to experience first-hand this ecstasy culture and so on Friday, September 30, 1994, I went with Irvine to the club Sativa in the Vaults in Edinburgh. Next thing I knew I was dancing stripped to the waist as the condensation dripped off the ceiling, having all sorts of intensely friend-for-life conversations with strangers before being dragged back into “the heart of the beast” by Irvine to dance again. It went on all night and I’d never experienced anything like it. It was another social revolution for me.

I had an amazing year in the Edinburgh club scene making so many new pals whilst Irvine settled in Amsterdam. Then I moved back to London where he introduced me to all sorts of folk, such as Alabama 3 and one of my dearest friends Johny Brown of Band of Holy Joy.

I took to performing in clubs with Arthrob, run by an old Edinburgh-Chilean communist pal Ernesto Leal, starting with a Stooges/HIV/Karaoke scene from Headstate at the Ministry of Sound.

My working relationship with Irvine has continued in all sorts of ways, especially in recording 10 of his novels as audiobooks and in my solo performance tour of his book Filth.

7. River City

I’D done a lot of TV and film work by the time River City came along but nothing had prepared me for being in a soap.

It was executive producer Sandra MacIver who got me on board. She understood that I was most suited to a character who came in for a storyline and then disappeared again for a while – in gangster McCabe’s case, that was back to Marbella!

I loved McCabe’s character – a hard man gangster but with a lot of humour thrown in.

When I arrived at Shieldinch, there was a girl gang on the loose and I thought I might be a Fagin-type figure with them. But Sandra and her team of great writers at the time had me become a gay gangster with an eye for Stevie O’Hara, coaxed into selling drugs for me from an ice cream van. I’m still good pals with Cas Harkins, who played the original Stevie.

Then they dropped it on me that McCabe had a daughter Donna with Down’s Syndrome to be played by Paula Sage (above). I thought to have an actress with Down’s in the series was an incredible thing to do – no other soap at the time would’ve dared to.

It did seem a shame that McCabe was killed off but what’s been extraordinary and life-changing for me is the recognition that came with the show. Despite leaving nine years ago, hardly a week goes by without someone mentioning it.

I’ll especially never forget when, at a National Theatre of Scotland opening night, Judy Murray rushed up to me and asked for a selfie with McCabe!

8. North Kelvin Meadow and the Children’s Wood

WHEN Children’s Laureate Julia Donaldson came out in support of the campaign to save the derelict piece of land/green space from developers for the community, I was asked as a local dad – and yes, because of the River City connection – if I would come and read her phenomenally successful book The Gruffalo.

I was happy to do so but didn’t really think there was any chance of winning this fight. What I didn’t realise was just how different it is when a piece of land is run by the community for the community or just how tenacious and inventive the campaign would be – particularly its driving force, the truly awesome Emily Cutts.

The success of reading The Gruffalo led on to Julia’s other books. Then with my partner Emma Schad on flute and Del Amitri’s Andy Alston on squeezebox, we began performing Julia’s fantastic children’s songs along with the stories.

That was for the launch of our Culture 2014 project – The Marathon Storytelling Cycle Challenge – where Emma, Andy and I followed the Commonwealth Games baton for 40 days around Scotland and then spent 10 days in Glasgow attempting to read all her 185 books and sing all her songs to children for free, along the way with our then-three-year-old daughter Morgan strapped into the back of a campervan. What a glorious summer that was.

9. Joseph Malik

THE Burnsian band The Bum-Clocks that I’m in with my brother Russell, guitarist Malcolm Ross and keyboard player Stevie Christie were going for about 10 years when Joseph asked us to join his Leith Northern Soul Collective by contributing a track to an album that came out in 2019. We wrote the song Climb The Lion for it and it’s the first time we’ve mashed Robert Burns with my own words rather than the likes of Iggy Pop or Bob Dylan. It’s also the first time I’ve featured on a vinyl record – at 61!

10. Death

IT may seem strange to include this as life-changing but anyone whose been through the process of grief will recognise how much it can affect you.

My brother Russell and I lost our youngest brother Philip and then our mum and dad in fairly rapid succession and there were several suicides of friends and other sad deaths along the way. We decided on humanist funerals for all our family and this led to me reading and singing at them.

I was asked to compère funerals of friends and to contribute poetry readings as requests for families that I didn’t know. Even the birth of our daughter was bound up in this as she was born on the day that Edwin Morgan (below) died. I was directing his Gilgamesh play at the time so we named her Morgan and this was mentioned at his funeral.

The most life-changing moment of all around death was sitting up with my mum for two nights at St Columba’s Hospice as she slowly passed away. To be with her in that wonderful place, holding her hand, singing to her and watching her breathing rise and fall was very special.

On the second morning, it was suggested I go for some breakfast and when I came back I saw that her breathing was starting to change and then it just stopped. It was as if she’d waited for me to come back before saying goodbye.

That sense of breath and its profound importance inspired me towards taking up mindfulness meditation. I’m convinced that’s what has carried me calmly and safely through my recent near-death experience when I was stabbed in an attempted murder. I am glad that my mum wasn’t around to see all the publicity the incident generated. Despite that trauma, I do feel amazingly blessed with all my life. Marxism taught me that change is the only constant.