50 Songs

or Now That’s What I Call 50!

It’s my fiftieth birthday this year and, for a bit of fun, I thought I’d make myself a mixtape, a playlist of The Fifty Greatest Songs* of My Life…

*OK, so perhaps they’re not objectively the “best” songs that have been written in my lifetime, rather they’re the songs I have enjoyed most or which have resonated with me on some level. There’s also a practical element in that the playlist has been put together to soundtrack a birthday roadtrip my partner Katy and I are taking at the end of November. But that’s another story.

Some of the 50 songs are purely emotional hyperlinks to a time in my life that the music brings alive in a particular way, songs that vividly conjure up places and people dear to me. Some are earworms that ruled my brain for extended periods of time for no other reason than I happened to be especially receptive to being imprinted with music at that moment. Some, particularly the ones nearer the top of the list, are songs I come back to again and again, that are woven tight into the fabric of my life. Reflecting on the process of putting the list together, it’s clear how much the live experience has shaped my love of music – both as a player and performer and as a listener and fan.

I have put these songs in order – not necessarily a Best Of order, but an order that makes sense to me, both as a measure of how long the song has been a part of my life, as well as the depth of resonance it has on me now. There could easily have been another fifty songs here, endless permutations, but to get to this fifty I felt I had to use some selection criteria, namely:

1. Does the song still spark joy?
2. Is it, in the widest possible interpretation of the word, a banger?
3. Can I imagine requesting this song to be played at my funeral.

With all that in mind, here’s the fifty songs with tweet-length commentary to boot.

50. I Got No Common Sense by Ivor Cutler

• Speaks for itself, really.

49. Welcome to My World by Jim Reeves

• I used to think my parents weren’t really music lovers. Music was something they played for vibes at dinner parties. But in Gentleman Jim’s soothing baritone, I hear my Dad’s own voice and know that he savours every note.

48. Alpine Slopes by Dermot O’Brien 

• The music I grew up to. Scottish country dance music meets European polka. I was initiated, aged 7, into the rudiments of accordionism at the stubby grubby hands of sadistic maestro “Wee Joe” Vettriano.

47. Petite Fleur by Acker Bilk

• My accordion tutors hated me playing by ear but in high school my music teacher Mr Morrell was all for it. He gave me a clarinet & a tutor who wasn’t mental. This was the 1st song I learned off a record & my intro to jazz.

46. Don’t Be That Way by Benny Goodman

• I adored the sound BG made on the clarinet more than anything for what felt like years. Weekly trips to the EK music library took me in new directions, with new kinds of music to get obsessed by. My true musical education.

45. Let ‘Em In by Wings

• Homage to the car tapes of our classic orange Ford Cortina estate that took us on countless holidays from Devon to Moray, France to Monkton. I hear that litany of names in the chorus and remember all my brilliant aunts, uncles, lost pals…

44. Labour of Love by Hue & Cry

• Local Lanarkshire pop heroes. Took my brother to see them Nov ’89. Only learned much later the lyric is about Thatcher & her toxic Tory politics that fucked working class areas like ours for generations.

43. You Take Me Up by The Thomson Twins

• Another song about “working”. I was a big fan of these guys. My music teacher was always asking me about the music I was listening to, what it was I was responding to. Dunno. Maybe it was the hair.

42. Locomotive Breath by Jethro Tull

• One-legged rock flute! Beards! Men in tights! I became a Tull fan in my late teens after my cockeyed stoner drummer pal Les introduced me. Edinburgh Playhouse ’89 (my first proper gig), then a freebie in Berlin ’91.

41. Willie Stewart by Eddi Reader

• The songs of Robert Burns always seemed a dour exercise in heritage interpretation. Eddi Reader & her band magic them into catchy, dancy, joyful pop songs, which, it turns out, is what they had always been all along.

40. Bağlama Uvertürü by Çetin Akdeniz

• The Keith Richards of the Turkish bağlama. Abiding memory of a line of young Turks dancing down the aisle of a coach barrelling around the twisting country roads of central Anatolia on a school day out. Glorious.

39. S’agapo by Alkistis Protoptsalti/ Goran Bregovic

• “I love you
  I love you because you are beautiful
  I love you because you are you
  I love
  I love the whole world
  Because you live in it”
  
  (Bit much?)

38. Harramt Ahebak by Warda 

• The Belly Dancing Years.
  
  The song translates as the opposite of the one previous. Literally, “I have given up loving you”.

37. Snip Snip by The Tiger Lillies 

• In an alternative universe, I am a lairy old clown in the spirit of Martin Jacques of The Tiger Lillies and I sing a jolly falsetto like this in a never-ending cabaret of doom and debauchery across the world…

36. Start Wearing Purple by Gogol Bordello

• In a different alternative universe, I am dirty old and useless clown in the spirit of Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello and I make gypsy punk party music like this in a never-ending carnival of chaos across the world, etc.

35. La Marée Haute by Lhasa

• “The head is satisfied, but the heart has not enough”. Story of my career right there.

34. Le poinçonneur des Lilas by Serge Gainsbourg

• Referred to by my mum, when I listened to it incessantly at home over a period of months, as “Dipty Troo”.

33. I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango) by Grace Jones

• Russell introduced me to her amazing One Man Show – which I’m immensely grateful I got to see at Barrowlands in ’03. This song, accordions & all, set me up for Astor Piazzolla much later.

32. Oblivion by Astor Piazzolla 

• If my soul was a musical instrument, it wouldn’t have the sound of the clarinet or the saxophone, or even the accordion, but the bandoneon. And it would sing like this. Maybe.

31. Legend by Huun-Huur Tu/ Angelite Bulgarian Voices

• Witnessing this performance at Greyfriars Kirk at the Edinburgh Festival in 1999 was as close to a transcendental experience as I’ve ever had. Utterly utterly incredible.

30. Chicken Payback by The Bees

• Just one of the greatest songs of all time.
  Also, that video.
  Also, RadMac.

29. Three Hundred Pounds of Joy by Howlin’ Wolf

• “Hoy, hoy! I’m the boy!
  I got three hundred pounds of heavenly joy
  I’m so glad that you understand
  I’m three hundred pounds of muscle and man”

Howlin’ Wolf gives voice to my inner bluesman.

28. Accra City Blues by Blitz the Ambassador

• Spent several days googling flights and investigating travel possibilities to Ghana on the strength of a single hearing of this song on 6Music one night. Sometimes the music just finds you.

27. Yekatit by Mulatu Astatqe

• Sometimes the music just finds you (Part II).

26. Life’s What You Make It by Talk Talk

• Sometimes the lyrics just speak to you.

25. Europe Endless by Kraftwerk

• “Life is timeless, Europe endless.”

24. Prenzlauerberg by Beirut

• There was a time, in the mid-to-late 2000s when this band, this album, ruled my world entirely. The songs just dance along ecstatically, one into the next, like an evening revelry spinning through hot southern European streets.

23. Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd

• Started playing in bands in the late 80s. Everyone seemed to be into prog, esp Floyd, exemplified by my pal Brian & his pal (who became my pal) Russell. InterRailed across Europe to see this show at the Berlin Wall in 1990.

22. Love & Hate by Michael Kiwanuka

• Just a beautiful, soulful piece of music – that voice, that arrangement – in the spirit of the great soul singers of the past. I met Katy at Kiwanuka’s gig at the Art School in October ’16, the beginning of a great adventure.

21. Real Gone by Sam “The Man” Taylor

• This cured me of thinking I had to enjoy widdly jazz just bcos I was a sax player & absolved me of the guilt of preferring stuff the jazz snobs I knew sneered at. Big blues. Big tone. Big joy.

20. Hideaway by David Sanborn

• In El Paso, my band pal Clarissa gave me a cassette of Sanborn’s music when I was still just a clarinet player – but I was 100% alto sax from that moment on. That sound of his lives in my bones.

19. Tahah by Masada

• Mid 90s Edinburgh, this on repeat for months on my portable CD player. Experienced their unbelievable intensity at Queens Hall in 98, again in Aosta, Italy, in 2005 with Luca & Roberto.

18. Lonely Woman by Naked City

• Zorn’s genre-mashing jump-cut speedjazz has been a gateway drug to a lot of weird shit. And more Zorn, obvs. Visited NYC in ’92 & bought this. Saw him at the Knitting Factory (with Lady Kitay); missed him at the Stone on NYE 2016.

17. My New House by Sonic Youth

• We saw The Fall at QMU a year before Mark E Smith died, their final gig. (He didn’t look well tbh.) Katy hated it. This isn’t The Fall.

16. Rock Music by Pixies

• Another gig with my brother in ’91 at the SECC. They aborted after three songs cos the crowd was going mental and someone down front got hurt when the stage collapsed. The whole thing was terrifying, but also sort of cool.

15. Spanish Key by Miles Davis

• My greatest gig regret was not going to see Miles at the SECC in 1990, a year before he died, choosing instead to see a trio of randoms called The Pointy Birds. By all accounts I didn’t miss much, but still. Miles fucking Davis.

14. Make it Rain by Tom Waits

• Tom opened with this at the Bourla Theatre, Antwerp, when I saw him there in 2004. I’d say it was an unforgettable experience – which it absolutely was – if only I could remember the actual concert…

13. Nude by Radiohead

• I avoided them for years, thinking they were too “obvious” a band for me to like lol. Then they found me during a break up and stayed with me all the way to a rebound in Vancouver. This song came in at the end of all that.

12. Women of the World by Jim O’Rourke

• More Cutlery.

11. Fireworks by First Aid Kit

• Apparently, it’s about “the goals and demands you put on yourself in life and how they can break you down to emptiness & loneliness.” Whatever. I will forever associate their angelic voices with Katy & I decorating our new living room.

10. Graceland by Paul Simon

• I was so excited by this when it came out. It just opened up so many musical worlds. Listening to it again, it’s easy to forget what a perfect piece of genius this album is.

9. Jacket Hangs by The Blue Aeroplanes

• Bought the cassette on a whim from Our Price and instantly became a fan4lyfe. Again with Graham, back-to-back gigs at King Tut’s, him very underage. We swaggered and swanned, let our arms rotate like helicopter blades.

8. Home by David Byrne/Brian Eno

• There’s a lot of David Byrne songs I could have included but this is the one that found me when I knew I had found, in Katy, the person I would finally make a home with. It – all of it – still fills me with joy, love, hope.

7. Lean on Me by Bill Withers

• It was a toss up between this one and Lovely Day, which became the theme song to Sophie’s 6th birthday last year. But my God, the power of this song and the grace with which he carries it…

6. Amsterdam by Jacques Brel

• The force of nature that is Brel’s voice was introduced to me by my wonderful flatmate Victoria in Girona. That voice, those songs, subsequently tore through my life like a hurricane. I’m still picking up the debris.

5. Go Or Go Ahead by Rufus Wainwright

• A couple of previous relationships had introduced me but it never really felt like Rufus was my guy – until I met Katy and we both sort of re-discovered him. Excited to see him in Amsterdam next year.

4. Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads

• And you may find yourself
  Living in a semi-rural location
  And you may find yourself
  With a beautiful wyfe
  And a smol sectional concrete outbuilding
  And you may ask yourself
  
  WELL HOW DID I GET HERE?

3. Ana fil houb by Lili Boniche

• In Arabic it means “I’m in love”, as I have been with this song since I heard it played at a beach bar in Dahab in summer 2003. Deliriously, passionately, tragically doomed love. It’s all I ever want in a piece of music.

2. I Believe in You by Talk Talk

More about this song here…

1. A Doughnut in My Hand by Ivor Cutler

• The song lends itself well, I find, to making up your own verses and is endlessly adaptable to many different situations. You should try it.

Thanks for joining me on my journey through my fifty best songs. You can watch/ listen to the entire playlist, below…

The Black Hole

Dir: Gary Nelson (1979)
With Robert Forster, Anthony Perkins, Ernest Borgnine, Maximilian Schell et al

Sometimes a piece of art, a movie, a book, music, reaches you at exactly the right time, the right age.

The Black Hole came out in 1979 when I was 8 years old and it captured my imagination like nothing else. I saw it that summer with my best friend from round the corner, David. He was a bit older than me but we were completely on the same wavelength. We enjoyed the same stuff and we played brilliantly together. It was the first time I had gone to the cinema on my own, or at least without a grown up. The film possessed us completely. We took forever to walk home afterwards. It felt that we had to act out every one of our favourite scenes, channelling the moves, the mannerisms and the spirits of our favourite characters.

Star Wars had come out two years earlier, when I was just a bit too young for it. My Nana took us to see Star Wars on the vast screen at the old Kelburne Cinema in Paisley one rainy day in the summer holidays. My brother, a toddler at the time, had fallen asleep during the matinee and Nana didn’t want to wake him, so we stayed put and sat and watched it all over again. I enjoyed the film, but it didn’t resonate with me the way The Black Hole did.

One criticism you can make endlessly about The Black Hole – it’s no Star Wars. In the first three minutes of Star Wars alone, there’s more action than in the first twenty of The Black Hole, maybe even the whole film. There are many obvious comparisons between the two movies – they are both set in outer space with laser guns and cute robots. And while there is more than a hint of bandwagon jumping in the latter film, they are fundamentally different movies, arguably even different genres – if Star Wars is a space western, The Black Hole is more . . . space gothic horror. But more about that in a bit.

I didn’t care about any of that back then. I loved everything about The Black Hole. I had the original soundtrack LP, which Nana won in one of the competitions she was always entering. I bought Alan Dean Foster’s novelisation with summer holiday pocket money and read it many times (which possibly helped to fill out a lot of the plot holes and inconsistencies I can see now in the movie). And somewhere on my shelf I have the DVD version, bought on impulse in Fopp one rainy day ten or so years ago. I threw out my dodgy old DVD player so right now I’m streaming the film on Disney+ from my laptop. Does anyone even have stuff on shelves any more?

Sometimes it’s better not to interrogate the reasons for returning to a particular text or piece of art, sometimes the reason reveals itself as you write and reflect. I’m not quite sure why I’m watching this film now. I haven’t written anything for months, most of the year in fact, since the start of the coronavirus crisis, with lockdown and all the anxiety and uncertainty it has brought into our lives. I realise as I start to write that words are trickier propositions now after so many months away from using them to organise my thoughts. They don’t come as easily. My line of thought is too easily broken. It makes me aware that my internal life has been increasingly dominated by imagistic sense impressions, emotions, all of it vague and unarticulated. Nothing seems clear anymore. It’s been a weird year.

Maybe I just want to be spirited away to the far edges of the universe. I want to feel totally immersed in that world again, as I did when I first saw it because it’s deep into 2020 and I’m in the mood for some escapism. I’m ready to descend into some kind of fantasy void.

The Disney+ version starts with an “overture”: two and a half minutes of John Barry’s main theme over a blank black screen. (Way to get the kids engaged, Disney!) I have always been a fan of Barry’s music – his ear for a great tune, his swooning harmonies, his love of a strident french horn – and I have always loved this soundtrack because it’s a pure nostalgic hyperlink to that summer and the first time seeing the film. Listening to it now, however, over that black screen, I find the music oddly jarring. It’s a kind of military march, imperious and bombastic, like it’s setting the scene to a film about Americans in WWII. The black screen overture gives way to the opening title sequence and another grand theme from Barry, this time an eerie, spiralling waltz. I can hear flashes of Strauss (Richard) and Mahler in the orchestration, maybe; some zingy synth work distantly recalls Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony. But really it’s all a bit of a plod: a stately adagio compared to the sparky andante of John Williams’s brassy Star Wars opener.

Watching it’s a bit of a plod, too, I’ll be honest. I want to love the film as much as I did back then but it’s a hard movie to stick with. There’s a lot of expository dialogue, religiousy wiffle-waffle, wibbly-wobbly sci-chat, portentous philosophical doomchat. The movie finally begins with a robotic voice incanting this nonsense:

2130; day 547. Unscheduled course correction due at 2200. Pre-correction check: rotation axis plus three degrees. Nitrous oxide pressure: 4100 rising to 5,000. Quad jet C and D on pre-select. Rotor ignition sequence beginning in 3-0. Thruster line reactors on standby.

The voice belongs to V.I.N.CENT, a floating puppy-eyed robot whose name stands for “Vital Information Necessary Centralised”. V.I.N.CENT is very obviously a cuddly C-3PO/ R2-D2 hybrid but doesn’t quite have the charisma of either. As a boy, I absolutely adored V.I.N.CENT. I sort of wished I could have him for a pet, to teach me interesting things, to stand up for me and fight my battles. For my birthday that year, I was given model kits of him and his evil robot nemesis, the silent, glowering Maximilian.

Where Maximilian is a mute maroon hulk, V.I.N.CENT is endlessly rattling off folksy aphorisms and improving epithets. He variously quotes Greek philosophers, Arabic proverbs and American Civil War Admiral David Farragut (“Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!”), amongst others.

“Are you put on this ship to bug me, V.I.N.CENT?” asks one of the humans. “No,” V.I.N.CENT replies. “To educate you.”

I had rather enjoyed V.I.N.CENT’s capacity for smart sounding bits of wisdom, whereas now it seems laboured and just slows everything down. If there’s any education going on in this movie, it is certainly not of the scientific kind. For all the talk of anti-gravity bubbles and event horizons, “the science” on display is as wonky as the dodgy greenscreen backgrounds. The film was famously derided by celebrity astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson as one of worst movies ever made, one which “didn’t get any of the interesting science about black holes right”.

It’s not a perfect movie by any means; a lot of things just don’t stack up. But it seems almost churlish to pick holes in The Black Hole like that. Movies get stuff wrong all the time. History movies get history wrong. Biopics get biographies wrong. Comedies fail to make you laugh.

The fact is that black hole in The Black Hole isn’t really a black hole, not in the astrophysical sense, but rather in the metaphysical sense. As a cinematic presence, there is no questioning the hole’s awesome aura. From the giant glazed ceilings of the control tower of the USS Cygnus, it lurks like a cosmic maelstrom, drawing stars into its swirling cerulean vortex. Is that what black holes really look like? Does it really matter? There’s something irresistible, something undeniably beautiful about it and you kind of get why crazy Max Reinhardt is obsessed by it and wants to launch himself into the centre of it. Who wouldn’t?

Watching again, I’m struck by the range of references to other texts. For a sci-fi kids’ flick, it’s surprisingly literary. Dante’s Inferno gets a name-check within the first five minutes. V.I.N.CENT quotes Cicero. Reinhardt quotes from the Book of Genesis. There is something of Poe’s Descent into the Maelstrom in its Gothic mood and the mariner’s obsession with a whirling void. Milton isn’t quoted directly but his vision of Hell is all over this movie, especially in the final “Heaven and Hell” sequence as the characters spiral off on divergent paths at the black hole’s event horizon.

Its literariness is a distraction, though, and not central to the business of the movie which is . . . what, exactly? What’s the film really about? What on earth, you ask yourself, is going on?

What’s going on, for example, with Old B.O.B.? What’s with the sad eyes and Texas accent? And what’s with the acronym? His name, he tells us, stands for “Bio-sanitation Battalion”, which isn’t even a proper acronym. It’s details like this, like the gratuitous intertextuality, that bring me right out of the drama. For Neil De Grasse Tyson it’s bad science. For others it might be bad acting or bad set design or continuity gaffes. For me it’s stupid acronyms. Why did the writers give them these ridiculous tortured names? And while we’re at it… robot/ human ESP? Robot pubs? That ending? There’s a lot to unhook you from the story, here.

Old B.O.B., though, may hold the key to the mystery of the movie’s Big Theme, or its controlling idea. It’s not a heroic quest, not a whodunnit, not a ghost story or a horror or any kind of good vs evil thing. It’s something else.

“This is a death ship,” says B.O.B.

And sure enough, death is everywhere in this movie. The robot funeral that Captain Holland witnesses. The walking dead of the Cygnus’s “crew”. Dr Kate’s dead dad. The death of Anthony Perkins’s character, Dr Alex Durant, at the hands/ blades of mad Maximilian. Harry’s own self-inflicted death during his bungled escape. The script references death all the time. It’s the great Disney death movie in space.

“Death is the point of all our searching”, this movie seems to say. “Death, the ultimate prize”. At one point, in a line almost thrown into the void so casually and with such little moment is it uttered, Reinhardt seemingly invokes St. Thomas Aquinas when he says, “Some cause must have created all this . . .” gesturing out towards the black hole. “But what caused that cause?”

Perhaps Reinhardt believes he will, within the black hole – “In, through and beyond!” – find proof of the existence of God. Perhaps, in some ways, The Black Hole is a quest story after all. As Reinhardt says, the prize of sailing his ship into the black hole is, “The possibility to possess the great truth of the unknown.” Is this a quest for death-in-life, a quest for immortality?

The tragic irony here is of course that, as B.O.B. explains, “The most valuable thing in the universe, intelligent life, means nothing to Dr. Reinhardt.” It is this, rather than his belief in Thomas Aquinas’s “first cause” philosophical proof of God, which ultimately dooms him, in the closing section of the movie, to burn in a Hell of his own making. As the characters pass through the black hole, Reinhardt becomes weirdly subsumed by the dark Satanic mass of Maximilian, his eyes flickering in terror from behind the robot’s visor as machine and man roast upon a craggy rock amidst a raging inferno, as the cloaked figures of the Cygnus’s undead crew file below them towards the flames. A robot hell designed by Milton.

It would be terrifying if it wasn’t all so perplexing. You also have to wonder how a film about such existential matters ended up with cuddly robots and laser battles. Is it even a space movie?

But why am I watching this nonsense? Why am I giving it the time of day?

Maybe there’s that feeling of being tethered to the edge of the abyss that the coronavirus pandemic has allowed to grow in our locked-down lives. Maybe there’s nothing to look towards except our own oblivion. I can feel my own mind starting to splinter, as the gravitational pull of the void asserts its hold. What am I looking for? Or have I in fact stopped looking?

I’m taking far too long (again) to find the point of this. My insomnia returns with a vengeance as November grows long and the days grow short. Events pile up. America has gone mad, schisming into a heaven/ hell of its own making. We try to buy a new house. The world beyond our windows seems to shrink as lockdowns return across the country. The virus seems to be circling around us. I begin a brief period of self-isolation, due to a contact at work testing positive, but I’m fine and staying in doesn’t seem any different to the way the rest of the year has gone.

And then, one night, wrestling with insomnia, I make the connection, about my need to revisit my imaginative wanderings in space. At some point earlier in the year, I had started doing a guided meditation with my daughter at bedtime. It was based on the idea of what you see when you close your eyes. Those swirling shapes and blocks of blurry colour that float behind your eyelids, and the imprint of your retina that you can still see distantly as a black circle through it all.

We called it The Big Black Dot.

Artwork by Chrissie Callaghan
www.sketchybeaststudio.com

Every night for four or five months after stories, cuddled up cosy in bed, I would take her through the inner space of her imagination, in search of the big black dot. It was far away at first, gradually drawing closer as we floated and drifted through the fuzzy red stars and blurry blocks of green and orange and purple. Up and over the the rainbow bridge, into darkest space, the big black dot loomed like a planet. As we drew closer still, its edges became clearer. Was it really a planet? Or was it a window you can look through? A door you can walk through? A pool of water you can dive into? A fluffy carpet you can lie on?

And as we hung in space, the big black dot moved gradually beneath us. We let go of whatever we were holding on to and fell, down down down, and landed softly on the surface of the big black dot. It held us there, safe and comfortable, looking up at the stars we had been floating in only moments before. And as we looked up, there, in the sky just above us, would be . . . another big black dot, shiny this time, like a giant eye gazing down on us. And we would see ourselves, reflected in the shining surface of the big black dot, stretched out, relaxed and happy, looking up.

And we see the eye blink. Once. Then again. Until finally it closes and we fall into a deep, deep sleep. . .

I am reminded that I had big plans this year to do more writing, in a serious and committed way. I had plans to attend a writing retreat with the Arvon Foundation, to edit the many stories I had written for my daughter, to commission artwork for them and to work towards finding an outlet for them. Maybe even a publisher. Of course, none of this has happened.

The artwork, above, with the Big Black Dot lettering, was an attempt at this, belatedly, to try and put this “story” into a book for my daughter. But like many other plans this year has disappeared into the void, sucked up – in, through and beyond – into god knows where.

The Black Hole suffers from its portentous over-working of a giant metaphor that’s almost too big and to vague to really do anything with. The Big Black Dot is something else. It’s not a metaphor for anything. And in writing this it makes me think that somewhere, dimly, on the event horizon of the soul-sucking maelstrom that has been the year 2020, there is the glimmer of a life beyond the darkness.

Taco Talk – in search of the authentic taco

In 1987 at the age of 15, I travelled to El Paso, Texas, on a scholarship to spend a year as a student on a cultural exchange programme. I lived with a Mexican-American family. The school I went to was 95% Latino. I learned Spanish, played in the band, wrote for the yearbook. 

Until this point, I’d never really been anywhere on my own before, never really communicated with anyone whose first language wasn’t English. And I’d never had a taco. 

There’s a feature about me in the school paper a month after I arrived. The last sentence reads, “Of all the foods he has been introduced to in El Paso, the taco is his favourite.” It still is!

My first lesson in tacos was about how to pronounce them. To say it properly, you have to put your tongue behind your teeth, somewhere between /d/ and /l/. If you say it with that aspirated Anglo “tih” sound – you’re doing it wrong. You’ll just sound like a gringo. And the /o/ is flat. Like El Paso. Like taco. Not like the guy from the dictionary.

As an exchange student, I was obliged to get the hang of stuff like this. Cultural differences, obvious disparities, subtle nuances.  

The family I lived with were generous hosts, and Mum Norma was a brilliant cook. I was fortunate to eat home-cooked tacos every other day for the whole year. When dinner wasn’t a taco, it was a bean burrito or a quesadilla or a stack of enchiladas. I was taught how to use a flour tortilla to mop up a plate of frijoles. I was introduced to the wonders of chile con queso made from a block of Velveeta and a can of Ro-tel. 

Every Friday night after the ball game with the band we’d go to Chico’s Tacos and get a boat-shaped bowl of “tacos” that weren’t really tacos, but flautas – flutes – rolled, fried and soused in Chico’s watery salsa, piled high with shredded cheese and served with a side of zingy tomatilla. 

I still can’t say the word, but at least I know what a taco is. 

Everyone knows what a taco is, right?

In the UK, we can probably trace the emergence of the taco and foods like it to the 1980s when a greater diversity of products started to become available in supermarkets. 

The taco came in on a wave of other seemingly interchangeable foreign flatbreads, like pitta, chapatis and focaccia. Burritos were just bland, Anglicised “wraps”.

Over time, we’ve learned the difference. More than that, the taco is bound up with all sorts of narratives of travel-savvy culinary sophistication and cultural insider knowledge. 

But just as we continue to fail to master the pronunciation, the British version of this Mexican- American gastronomic staple is similarly approximate. Every festival seems to have its own taco truck, but our tacos are still gringo tacos.

The idea of trying to find an authentic taco in the UK feels slightly doomed before the off, even as it seems like tacos have become suddenly ubiquitous in the current “street food” boom.

Street food in the way that we know it in the UK, is altogether different from the concentrations of culinary entrepreneurialism across the world described by Irene Tinker in her study of street food markets in developing countries. Our “street foods” are not “street food” in anything like the same understanding of the term. 

Tinker cites an example in Yoruba, Nigeria, for example, where “Vendors … offered 335 different foods and 74 usual combinations from which customers could choose.” (Tinker 1997: 179)

There is considerably less choice on offer at Platform, Glasgow’s street food market at the old Arches venue under Central Station. Mobile vendors in adapted vehicles sell portable dishes from around the world. Or, around the corner, depending on your take.

In a culinary twist on the phenomenon known as “glocalization”, restaurants and places like Platform educate us in the unfamiliar by including familiar elements in the dining experience. No matter how sophisticated we get in our tastes, no matter how far travelled we are, no matter how exotic or far-flung the food, if you’re dining out in the UK there’s always chips on the menu. You can always get a pint. 

At Platform, a popular item on Chilli & Ginger’s menu is their Kati Roll Taco – a “folded paratha with curry, rice, lemon pickled onions, Jaipur slaw and a choice of chutneys”…

I give it a miss. It’s authentically, “glocally” something but I’m not sure a curry in a taco is what I’m looking for. 

What am I looking for? What is a taco, anyway? Is it a type of sandwich? Are they crispy or soft? Can any flatbread be a taco? If a curry can be a taco, what else can be a taco? Can a hot dog be a taco? Does it have to be made of corn?

Nobody had heard of the things thirty years ago, but now they’re everywhere.

One thing I realise is there’s no such thing as a “humble” taco. For such a tiny couple of mouthfuls, the taco does a lot of heavy lifting in the global village. In fact, the more you investigate any ingredient, or food type, the more complex it reveals itself to be. The idea that a specific food can be authentically from specifically one place gets quickly tangled in the crossed lines of global trade, colonisation, migration, tourism, genetic modification, refrigeration etc. 

In what is probably the definitive text on the history of Mexican food, ”Planet Taco”, Jeffrey Pilcher reminds us what the historians have been telling us all along, that “Mexican food has been globalised from the very beginning.” (Pilcher 2012: 5)

Even so, in a world where we increasingly communicate in shorthand visuals, foods have come to stand for certain countries. And no matter what you put in them, the taco has come to signify  Mexican food – especially since it was codified by the Emoji Corporation in 2015 – much as the burger stands for American food or “curry” stands for Indian food. 

But you could argue that the taco along with all these emoji foods – like sushi, like pizza – transcends national identity. You won’t find any mention of tacos in the UNESCO inscription of traditional Mexican food. Which is fair enough. Tacos should probably have their own separate inscription. Even in kit from. Especially in kit form.

The emoji taco is a hard shell taco, a 20th century invention borne of a desire to scale up distribution across the American continent. Corn goes off quickly, so fry-baking tortillas into a hard shell prolongs their shelf life, allows them to travel. It’s a product that facilitated the McDonaldsification – or more accurately, the Taco Bell-ification – of the taco. 

Taco kits were an instant hit, partly because the product conformed to a familiar foodway formula: you take some kind of meat protein with a starchy base, sauce, veg/ salad, optional cheese on top. 

In the UK, it’s probably still the case that the name most closely associated with Mexican food is the supermarket megabrand, Old El Paso, which has been supplying kit meals to UK households since the mid 1980s. 

For me, the great thing about Old El Paso is that they don’t pretend their products are authentic. 

The warm desert yellows, the tiled roof of a colonial hacienda on the packaging nudge us towards an innocent, idealised version of the Southwest USA, free of conflict, devoid of banditos or any of the usual cowboy movie cliches. The name harks to a nostalgic past,  to a time maybe when El Paso was part of Mexico. The generic Spanish food names are there – salsa, fajita, enchilada etc – and everything is reassuringly mild. Even the spices come in a “white” sachet. The starch/ protein/ veg/ sauce template is comforting and familiar, with a handy picture on the front for reference. It just needs you to chop a few peppers, some onions, fry a bit of steak or chicken, open a jar or two and you’re there.

The authenticity they’re going for is a kind of heritage authenticity, fostering trust in the brand through storytelling. Their packaging tells us they’ve been in business “since 1938”. Their website tells the backstory of its origins as a canning plant on the outskirts of El Paso. The brand is operated by American food giant General Mills, who know, perhaps, that culinary authenticity is not a strong motivator for their audience, that the heritage value of the Old El Paso brand is a powerful asset in the crowded convenience foods market. 

Tastes change, though. In 2012, a newcomer arrived offering some heavy-concept competition in the Mexican aisle. Gran Luchito was the brainchild of an English foodie who thought there was room on the shelf for something more strongly Mexican flavoured. 

Gran Luchito’s products come in saturated terracottas, vivid cactus-greens and sun-drenched ochres, eschewing Old El Paso’s safe, bland imagery and tired serving suggestions for bold typography, exotic Day of the Dead iconography and exciting new flavour profiles.

They obviously spooked General Mills, because in 2015, Old El Paso rolled out a new range called “Restaurante” and employed an expensive London agency to handle the marketing. 

The whole thing was geared around culinary authenticity with the strapline “Cook like the locals”. They hired a down-to-earth Yorkshire butcher and a salt-of-the-earth Cornish fishmonger to travel to different bits of actual Mexico to learn how to cook “regional” dishes. The campaign was threaded together with language like “authentic” “traditional” “local” and introduced new concepts like “al pastor” “carne asada” “chicken tinga”.

It flopped. 

Old El Paso pulled the concept after 18 months and reverted to their core generic range of Tex-Mex staples. General Mills didn’t elaborate on the reasons for the sudden recall, but we can perhaps draw our own inferences about the nature of their audience and how much regional authenticity that audience is willing to bear. 

Meanwhile, Gran Luchito goes from strength to strength, opening new markets, developing new products, adding to their reach and range. They manage to offer the kind of “authenticity” on the shelves of the UK’s big supermarkets that Old El Paso can’t get near. Their products are full of regional references, authentic ingredients. They promise “the real flavour of Mexico” with not the slightest hint of the border about them.

Which raises an interesting question about who gets to claim their version of Mexican food is authentic… The entrepreneurial tourist? Or is it the people of Mexico and their descendants? 

It’s currently fashionable to dismiss so-called Tex-Mex food as inauthentic. And if you’re taking hard shell tacos to stand for the whole vibrant diversity of Mexican cooking, fair enough. But Tex-Mex is more than just an emoji. 

For me, Tex-Mex food is Mexican food. It’s not the whole story, but nothing ever is. By dismissing it, you erase the journey the food of the Southwest USA has been on over the generations, carried by the people who cook it, from their origins in Chihuahua or Oaxaca or Jalisco or wherever migrating north to the border towns of the US. 

Pilcher again.

“The regional cuisines of Oaxaca and Sonora, as well as their Tex-Mex and Cal-Mex counterparts, are modern artifacts of culinary tourism, in many ways quite distant from the domestic practices from which they emerged. The culinary literature and restaurant menus that serve to codify recipes are similar to and often allied with the ideological work of forging national identities.” (Pilcher 2012: 224)

Right now, Glasgow seems to be having a Mexican moment. The city centre is home to a dozen Mexican restaurants, most of them fairly new. My girlfriend and I try Topolabamba. They too have a professed avowal of the “Tex-Mex”, as their website declares: 

“We’re not talking about those pre­-packed wraps, or Tex­Mex inspired kits – we mean the real deal, amigos – the real deal.” 

The portions are tiny. It’s tapas-style, we’re told – I’m not sure how authentically Mexican that concept is, but it’s on the Old-World/ New-World continuum, so I’m not going to quibble. I remind myself that I’m a “culinary citizen of a glocalized and imaginary culture” and order a pint and some chips while we study the menu.

There’s no refried beans – maybe that’s too Tex-Mex? – but they do have taquitos, little tacos, which is everything I need to hear. 

What arrives is a fitting return to the tacos I ate back in El Paso, at Chico’s: the rolled, fried crispy tacos that aren’t really tacos. They’re a bit dry – no salsa, no tomatilla, no shredded cheese – but they’re perfectly delicious nonetheless. 

Have I just eaten an authentic taco? In Glasgow? Probably. It’s not a Chico’s Taco, but then, that’s not really an authentic taco either. 

I’m happy the journey has taken me full circle, reignited old memories. I’m happy to forget about food semiotics for a minute and just enjoy the celebration of Mexican culture in whatever form it has found itself here, authentic, glocal or otherwise. I post a message to my El Paso facebook friends, ask them their take on the taco. No-one seems to have very definite ideas. 

Taco’s just a taco.

The border town of El Paso, TX with Juarez, Mexico in the background south of the Rio Grande River. (Photo: Ron Reiring/ Flickr.com)