Ivor Cutler

He became a teacher in Paisley and Glasgow, then due to a distaste for corporal discipline, left Scotland to instead teach at the radical Summerhill School in Suffolk, where rules are overtly banned and daily life for children depends on a process of negotiation. After a couple of years he moved again, this time to London, where he would live for the rest of his life, continuing as a notoriously idiosyncratic music teacher until 1980, by which time he wished never to see another child again. Alongside his classrooms of charges, Mr Cutler raised two sons of his own with his wife Virginia Pearson, whom he was betrothed to between 1954 and ’64.

In the meantime, Mr Cutler’s alternative careers had begun in earnest when, determined to become a painter, he decided the way to fund such a burgeoning vocation would be from the royalties of songs which he would write. This led Mr Cutler to spend two years in the mid 1950s unsuccessfully trying to establish his songwriting credentials. He finally got some sort of representation from Box and Cox, a pair of entrepreneurs in Denmark Street, but their attempts to place his songs with stars like Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan sunk without trace, Mr Cutler finally suggesting he sing them himself.

The first of a number of unsolicited applications, followed by tentative forays and finally fairly regular appearances of one kind or another, were made to the BBC, both for TV and radio. Around this time he was styling himself as ‘Ivor Cutler Of Y’Hup, O.M.P.’; Y’Hup being a fantastical island that appears in a tale on his first EP, which Decca released in 1959, while O.M.P. was his acronym for ‘Oblique Musical Philosopher’, one of many conceits that he and others put together as attempts to encapsulate the nature of his output, another from this time simply being Folk Surrealism. He slowly managed to gain a reputation as an eccentric humourist through short slots in various shows and occasional scripts for radio plays.

“Kafka is the biggest influence”, he wrote of his writing, while elsewhere citing Spike Milligan and the Goons, Flanders and Swan, Rebecca West and more generally, folk music from different parts of the world.

He created the soundtrack for Ken Russell’s 1964 dramatization of Diary of a Nobody and would later teach music to the director’s son amongst quite a number of well-known personalities’ children. Another pair who took note of Mr Cutler in the 60’s would brand his name more broadly onto the general public. The first was Paul McCartney, who enlisted him for an appearance as Buster Bloodvessel in the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour of 1967. Asked years later about his abiding popularity across the generations, Mr Cutler claimed he could sum it up in two words- “John Peel”. Peel first had Mr Cutler on his radio show in 1969 and would have him back on a further 21 occasions, his final session being 1998.

The episodic Life in a Scotch Sitting Room first made itself known on a Peel Session of 1970, and these affected, dubious and oddly nostalgic vignettes would capture the public imagination and even go some way to define a perception of Scotland itself.

While Life in a Scotch Sitting Room and other short pieces of his could fall into the category of Prose Poetry all on their own, their author was more sceptical of the term poetry. For one thing, Mr Cutler wasn’t always satisfied with the quality of his own content, admitting to embarrassment on occasion, and though he’d included some early efforts in Ambit and Workshop magazines from 1968 on, he only began to publish his collections in 1973, claiming it took him six years before he began writing anything any good.

He did suggest some strategies for writing poetry, and later gave lessons privately on ‘the Cutler Method’- “let it trickle out a word at a time: to concentrate on the noise that the words are making, together; to let the meaning take care of itself. The unconscious uses the words as a vehicle, and I am astonished/delighted/amused by what is going on inside”. He elsewhere advised writing while lying down in bed.

Mr Cutler was very aware of how his voice could affect the words he’d written- “People who first read my poetry on the page often think it’s rubbish. Then they hear it and I catch them”, he told John Knutas. His accent has often been declared ‘Presbyterian’, though, how a Jewish atheist gained such a brogue is a mystery, and it’s likely a rarer and more mannered inflection, subtly distinct from that of the Reverend I.M. Jolly.

Eleven of Mr Cutler’s collections were published by Arc; almost all of them being a mere 8 by 12cm, a size specified by Mr Cutler to fit into Mr Cutler’s shirt pockets. He also wrote a number of popular books for the amusement of children, sailing them “as close to the wind as I feel I can get away with”.

Though Mr Cutler generally held a low opinion of contemporary poetry, the poet John Burnside became one of his close friends and he also appreciated the work of A.C. Jacobs, a fellow Jewish Glaswegian. George Wyllie and R.D. Laing are a further pair of Glasgow-born eccentrics and occasional poets who shared something of Mr Cutler’s outlook and similarly managed to cast an obtuse slant across existence.

“Eccentricity is just a way of pushing people slightly off balance so that they can perhaps have a chance to see in a slightly different way”.

Incongruously on holiday in Ibiza in 1971, Mr Cutler met Phyllis King, who he would remain in some sort of a relationship with for the rest of his life. Phyllis was from Canada, though you wouldn’t know it from the soft, anglicized voice which, almost unannounced, intones her poetry on recordings that intersect Mr Cutler’s albums from the 1970’s, when he was signed to Virgin Records.

Mr Cutler occasionally took up political positions such as supporting nuclear disarmament, environmental concerns and also feminism, for which he credited Eileen Morgan’s anthropological study, The Descent of Woman as a key influence. In 1983, he released the single ‘Women of the World (Take Over)’ sung by his friend Linda Hirst. The song includes a caveat that the title’s directive should not apply to the most obvious example from that decade, someone he elsewhere referred to as Maggot Hatcher, a name which ironically belies his own love of bugs.

Mr Cutler was drawn towards all kinds of animals and accordingly filled his poems and vignettes with ironic takes on the pathetic fallacy. London Zoo became his chosen location for meetings and interviews (“I don’t go to pubs, people talk such rubbish in them”) as illustrated by his appearance on In Search of the Great English Eccentric (1974). Other favoured pursuits included getting around by folding bicycle, kite flying, Bach homeopathic flower remedies, joke shop paraphernalia, handing out aphorisms on stickers, extolling the virtues of the Noise Abatement Society, consorting with young admirers for tea and strolls (infrequently precipitated with doubtful proposals of marriage) and returning freepost junkmail envelopes so that their postage is paid as a punishment.

Already careworn, bald and middle aged while in his twenties, noted as outwardly elderly while yet in his thirties and suffering a heart attack in his early 40s, Mr Cutler retained a childish cant and sparkle throughout his life that is quite rarely carried into adulthood. It was really not until his 50s that he’d grown into himself, able to channel his own creation of a quietly flamboyant curmudgeon to full effect. His stage demeanour, pivoting from wry to zen and tipping into the morose, was occasioned with a heavyweight prowess for passive aggression should someone inadvertently effect his displeasure, but such displays tended to add to a discomfort that became cherished by his admirers as a quixotic figure within the Cutler landscape.

His detractors often cite the fact that they don’t find Mr Cutler funny as the basis for their distaste, and while recordings of his live performances are invariably filled with the sound of a polite and lightly-forced laughter, there is a quietly droll enjoyment to be had through Mr Cutler’s work that requires no convulsions.

His modus operandi was the harmonium, an instrument of tired languor, whose gentle drone proved a suitable foil to much of Mr Cutler’s oeuvre. His favoured instrument was emblazoned with the word ‘Sewer’; those smiling at the self-referential toilet-humour may have missed the distaffian similarity of the instrument’s action and the reciprocative nod to millions of Glasgow-made sewing machines, each one emblazoned with the word ‘Singer’.

Cutler’s Last Stand took place in 2004 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and was filmed, then later televised, by the BBC. This was the last the world heard from Mr Cutler, euthymographer and mercurial pedagogue, who merely ascribed himself the title of ‘humourist’ in his will.

“I’m a humourist therefore I’m a preacher … I realise the desire to preach … points to a weakness in oneself.”

Several years after his death at the age of 83, the BBC celebrated his life with Ivor Cutler at 90; Sandy Grierson wrote The Wonderful Cosmos Of Ivor Cutler for the National Theatre of Scotland and, in 2020, a host of Glasgow-based fans produced Return To Y’Hup – The World Of Ivor Cutler, a record and stage production that attempted to give Mr Cutler the AOR FM treatment with varying degrees of success. In 2023, Bruce Lindsey published A Life Outside the Sitting Room (Equinox). Thoroughly researched, the biography brought much of Mr Cutler’s hitherto-unknown existence to light and, though I’ve barely touched on its many intriguing points (which reach down to the layout of our subject’s bathroom), it is the basis for much of what is written herein.