Life in a Scotch Sitting Room

The poet and musician Ivor Cutler has died from a stroke at the age of 83. It is one of those odd coincidences that I had begun thinking about, and listening to Cutler a lot in just the past couple of weeks. Several of his songs are at present on my iPod and I have made my journey into work listening to Get Away from the Wall. So though it was perhaps not surprising that the old man should have died (I remember reading an interview with him some years ago in which he seemed quite reconciled to the prospect of his approaching death) the announcement still shocked me in quite a significant way.

It seems a fitting response.

'Old man dies', is not a headline that seems destined to surprise a listener to the radio, but it was surprise that Cutler revelled in; he took the everyday, the ordinary seeming, and stunned one with the most outrageous, trivial absurdities. No matter how often one listened, he remained unpredictable. Somehow, the lugubrious, Glaswegian voice fooled one into trusting there to be normality at the heart of his writing, as with his song ‘Where the River Bends’ the absurdity of scores of blind men falling into a river at this one point, still surprises me when it has been heard countless times:

Where the river bends,
The blind men fall in.
Where the river bends,
The blind men fall in.
Where do they come from?
(The blind men.)
Why do they all fall in?
I don’t know.
And neither do they.

Though Jim O’Rourke’s cover of ‘Women of the World’ is undeniably beautiful, it is Cutler’s original that I return to. I think Cutler believes it. The end of the world never seems too far away from him, and always a disappointing, tedious event; the battery of the little black buzzer on which the world’s most important message is to be tapped out, runs out after it has only reported the fact that its operator has a cold bum. There is never enough said, and one always wanted more from him even if he didn’t always want to give it, as his poem ‘No I won’t’ demonstrated:

I'll leave you with this thought.
No, I won't. It would not be fair.

Ivor Cutler, 15th January 1923 – 3rd March 2006

Comments

[Thomas Conolly]

I didn't know Ivor Cutler existed, or that 'Women of the World' was his brainchild. Now I do, and shall endeavor to find out more. Could you recommend any resources/CDs/downloads?

This is why thefilter is worthwhile.

[JRWB]

Really? I imagined your dad would be a big fan/know him.

Here's a good place that has some recordings of his radio sessions, which you *could* surreptitiously download, I imagine. It includes ‘Women of the World’: http://www.ivorcutler.org/sessions.html

As for recordings, it's hard to say where to start. He's been signed to practically every record label going.

[large stencils for painting a shed]

It's an interesting and pictorially beautiful book. Imagine another room in the home with similarly wonderful
mosaic furniture, such as end tables, curio tables, and sofa tables.
The creative possibilities are many and it
always depends on the size of the floor area that will be
painted, the colors of the walls, the fabrics, the furniture, and the space decoration in general.

You just use warm water with a little soap in a pail.
Contact up any jagged lines having a skinny paint brush.
This must be repeated with each different colour desired for the design with colour overlap
producing mixtures of the colour basics.