Why Ivor Cutler is my Spirit Guide, by Hamish Hawk

Following the release of my album A Firmer Hand in August 2024, and after the promotional tours, sessions, interviews and sundry other bits and bobs had more or less dried up, my diary was given the briefest of chances to breathe. Mine is rigorously colour-coordinated, as those who know me might expect. As autumn rolled in, the tomato red I use for all the music-y stuff was replaced by sage green, the colour I reserve for socialising (and fun little errands). There had been for some time, however, a uniquely bright swatch a few pages down the line: a blob of tangerine slap bang in the middle of September. I assign orange to appointments I can’t quite work out where to put; curious, exciting, surprising things; professional, perhaps, but always with the promise of something else besides. The orange in this instance was a meeting with Jenny Niven, the director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF).

It’s true, I’m often billed as a “literary” songwriter, an adjective seemingly interchangeable in my case with “wordy”, “verbose”, or simply “self-interested”, but truth be told, book festivals have made me feel somewhat deficient in the past, bookish though I may seem. Jenny had kindly arranged the meeting to ask me whether I might like to put something special together for the festival’s 2025 programme, incorporating music, lyric, poetry and performance – a homage of sorts to a Scottish literary hero. My answer was immediate. There’s only one writer who has ever merited that kind of title for me, and his name is Ivor Cutler.

The term ‘spirit animal’, in the strictest shamanic sense, refers to a spirit which provides someone with protection, guidance, and perhaps the odd wise teaching throughout one or more phases of life. Since discovering his work as a teenager, Ivor Cutler is the only writer ever to have fit this bill for me, and has provided as much joy and inspiration as any New Romantic poet or garage-rock mystic. I decided he would serve as my twinkly-eyed spirit guide throughout the festival, uniquely positioned to blow absurdist holes in any stuffiness I might encounter. He would protect me more than any number of tweed jackets I might drape across my anxious frame.

Ivor Cutler was a poet, musician and humorist, as well as a visual artist. Born in 1923 to Jewish parents in Govan, Glasgow, at the age of 19 he began a career as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, but was soon grounded as a result of his ‘dreaminess’. He moved to London, then onto Leiston, Suffolk, where he worked as a teacher at Summerhill, a Rudolf Steiner-adjacent boarding school. Incorporating songs and games of his own creation into classroom proceedings, it was around this time that he made his first musical appearances on the BBC Home Service, singing in what would become his trademark grandfatherly Scots brogue, accompanied by a pedal harmonium. These performances brought him to the attention of Paul McCartney (as well as Robert Wyatt of Soft Machine and Viv Stanshall of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band), who invited Cutler to star as the bus conductor Buster

Bloodvessel in The Beatles’ 1967 film Magical Mystery Tour. Later that year, Cutler recorded Ludo, an almost traditional LP produced by George Martin. Subsequent decades would see him release numerous albums comprising more avant-garde harmonium-led compositions, as well as many children’s books and poetry collections. Championed by English DJ and tastemaker John Peel, Cutler amassed a cult following which remains devoted to him long after his death in 2006.

My first introduction to Ivor Cutler was his 1975 album, Velvet Donkey. Featuring tracks such as ‘Oho My Eyes’, ‘Little Black Buzzer’, ‘Go And Sit Upon The Grass’ and ‘Gee Amn’t I Lucky’, it sounded to me at the time like I’d stumbled upon some ancient relic; a pre-historic recording that only a select few had ever been granted the golden opportunity to hear. Thirty-one tracks long, yet each one scarcely over a minute, the album is a treasure trove of surrealist stories, endearing ditties and non-sequiturs, alongside two episodes of a multi-part series of spoken-word vignettes continued across several albums, called ‘Life in a Scotch Sitting-room, Vol. 2’. A masterful work of autofiction, the series details the inner-workings of Cutler’s childhood home in Govan. It is considered by many to be Cutler’s magnum opus, and it was this series that inspired my own ‘Life in a Scotch Sitting-room, Vol. 0’, performed at the EIBF in August, 2025, and due for physical release in December.

Halfway through my first listen of Velvet Donkey, I felt myself drawn hook, line and sinker into Cutler’s beautiful cosmos, compelled to collect every CD, LP, poetry edition and ephemeron I could lay my hands on. The search continues to this day. My most recent acquisition is a copy of Befriend A Bacterium, a pamphlet-thin illustrated collection of Cutler’s “stickies” – adhesive labels he took to sticking to passers-by whilst out on his bicycle. Classics include: “I’M A LABEL! HOW ABOUT YOU?”, “I AM YOUR LABEL NOW,” and a personal favourite, “THE ESSENCE OF A LABEL IS TO INFORM, BUT – NOT THIS ONE AMIGO”.

Since first I heard Velvet Donkey, and onwards through Jammy Smears (1976), Privilege (1983), Gruts (1986) and A Flat Man (1998), Ivor Cutler has been the best-kept secret I tell to almost everyone I come across. The fits of laughter he has gifted me are numerous, the gasps of bewilderment too, but the tears are every bit as gratefully received. Cutler’s work to me is pure magic, the mechanics of which I will never seek to understand. Utterly unique, unrepentant and wholly uncategorisable, his simple, powerful constructions leave me in complete awe, just like a good spirit guide ought. He is, and will remain my dearest tangerine blob, glancing back at me, always a mischievous glint in his eye, forever a few pages ahead.

Hamish Hawk’s Life In A Scotch Sitting Room Vol 0 is out on 5 December, find out more here