For
the duration of the show I am present, my back to the audience,
Real Life tattoo clearly visible, singing my heart out. Everything
in this work is visibly false, fake, ersatz. The mountain is
constructed from a wooden armature covered with M.D.F. ribs,
chicken-wire and plastic grass. There are fibreglass rocks and
trees, with electronic waterfalls coruscating past the many
stuffed animals populating the hillside ; fox, capercallie,
stoat, rabbit, wildcat, hooded crow, raven, goat and weasel,
all indigenous to the locale.
The
only thing that is real is me, singing, sitting, on a glass
fibre rock on a plateau half way up this construction. The songs
I sing are drawn from three periods in the history and tradition
of Scottish popular songs ; the late 18th century, early 20th
century and late 20th century.
I
begins with songs from, amongst others, Lady Nairne and Robert
Burns. Many of these songs are politically motivated focusing
on the last of the Jacobite Rebellions in 1745, the last time
Scotland was close to political autonomy. Then there are others
which are simple, beautiful love songs. Many of these are themselves
based on melodies and fragments of lyrics gathered from an oral
tradition going back to the middle ages. There are songs from
the early 20th century from what became known as the Scottish
Music Hall tradition. Performers such as Will Fyffe and Harry
Lauder travelled far and wide across the globe with their brand
of kitsch tartanry and in many ways reified a questionable global
perception of the Scots which persists to this day. These performers
were very successful, big stars of their day, particularly in
London and in America. This cliché, heavily romanticising and
mythologising Scotland’s history and influenced by the
fictions of Sir Walter Scott, spread rapidly until the perception
of Scots as kilt wearing drunkards, who are parsimonious in
the extreme, becomes accepted history when it was, in fact,
based on nothing more than a comedic myth. Finally I sang songs
from the last decade from artists such as Teenage Fanclub and
Edwyn Collins which reflect the experience of living today in
a small northern European nation.

Real
Life Rocky Mountain uses popular music as a lens through which
to re-focus the cultural and political development of a small
country at the end of the twentieth century. It gently warns
of the dangers of the emergence of theme park nations, completely
subsumed into the heritage industry where the popular myths
of history (which often never quite existed in the first place)
are re-created for the global tourist. Is it possible that small
nations which have, historically, been emasculated by a more
powerful neighbour successfully reinvent themselves in an international
political and cultural dialogue? Real Life Rocky Mountain asks
where the cultural heritage of any nation actually resides,
in politics, history books, geography, memory or fiction? And
could this change in perception become part of that dialogue
when we consider that countries past, present and future? The
Sound of Young Scotland Part 2 Vol. 2.
A
video shows my real life character singing traditional Scottish
songs in the Highlands and Islands, often in the specific geographic
locations from which they were inspired. Shot in such a way
to render the whole of modern civilisation invisible, no roads,
no cars, no buildings, nothing at all except me, Real Life tattoo
framed from behind as usual, singing at the top of my lungs
into the timeless emptiness of the remote countryside. Standing
in the gallery in a busy city centre watching this video, one
was free to ponder the distance, physical and psychological,
between the context where one is standing and this other location,
ambiguous in place and time.