10 Things That Changed My Life: Alan Bissett

1) Marvel Comics

WHEN I was about three I got really into Spider-Man. At that age, you are beginning to stretch your imagination and get excited about things that are impossible. But for a kid the idea of climbing up walls or swinging from a web is almost tangible: if you practise enough you might just be able to do it. 
Whereas Superman is dull and Batman is dark and brooding, Spider-Man is funny, always wise-cracking. He’s part of the larger Marvel world, a big canvas on which good is fighting evil. Up until that age, there’s no such thing as darkness, of things or people that could harm you. When that starts to creep in, it’s in fantasy form. That’s how you start to construct a world view. And for me that world view was constructed by Marvel Comics; that’s where the big moral ideas were first played out in my life. They prepared the ground for reading novels later on. Spider-Man was quite important to my writing, with these epic story-lines and some great one-liners. I’ve never been more excited for a movie in my life than Avengers Endgame. I’ve been waiting for that film since I was three, 40 years ago.

2) Pink Floyd

THE closest I’ve got to a religion. I know more about Pink Floyd than Pink Floyd do. I discovered them when I was about 14, when I was hanging about with the older guys who formed the basis of my first novel Boyracers. They were about 18. They were into stuff I had never come across before. Actually, my very first encounter with Pink Floyd (pictured below) was when I was about four and saw the video for Another Brick In The Wall on Top of the Pops. When you are four, you assume that an animation on television is a cartoon, that it’s for you. I remember this cartoon of kids being fed through a mincer, with marching hammers and this monstrous teacher, it was terrifying.
This seed was planted in me. I never really forgot it. When the older guys played me Another Brick In The Wall, it all came back. Pink Floyd hit me squarely in the chest. If you’re used to the charts and then hear Dark Side Of The Moon or Wish You Were Here or Echoes, it’s whoomph – all the doors have suddenly been blown open. I stepped inside that world and have never been out.

3) The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

AROUND the age of 14 and 15, as I began to enter young adulthood, I started to find the world a scary, confusing, difficult place. The book that spoke to me more than any other was The Catcher In The Rye. I had no idea about the cult around it, that it was almost a cliche that a sensitive, depressed adolescent would get into it. I found it in the school library. There was no blurb, no illustration. The only conceivable hook as to what it was about was by reading it. Once you started reading it, the voice of Holden Caulfield is so direct and honest and unique, that that’s it: you’re in. I thought it was written for me, that I was the only person to have read it. I couldn’t believe that this voice written 25 years before I was born could travel across time and space to tell me: ‘‘You’re not alone or weird. You’re right, because the childhood world you’re leaving behind was more simple and enjoyable. Now you’re entering a world of terrible hypocrisy’.” This is not a book that just changed my life – it’s a book that saved my life.

4) Going to Stirling University

NOBODY in my family had been to university before. I didn’t want to leave school and didn’t fancy the world of work. I had worked in McDonalds when I was at school and hated it. Do what you’re told, shut up, take the money, go home, repeat: you were just part of a machine to churn out a product.
I went to Stirling University thinking I would go until they kicked me out, not that I went with that intention. I was working class, suddenly surrounded by middle-class people. But I didn’t feel so alien I felt unwelcome. 
On the contrary, I flew. I was studying a subject I loved, mixing with people from all over Scotland, England, all across the UK, people from Ireland.
Culturally, it was very exciting. For the entire span of Britpop, roughly from 1993 to 1997, I was at university. It was exciting to be a young person at that time: the music was great, the movies were great – I remember going to see Reservoir Dogs (left) at the Macrobert on campus. This was pre 9/11. There was a feeling that the world was becoming a better place, which obviously has now gone to s***.

5) Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

WHEN I was in fifth year at school, an English teacher gave me a copy of Rebel Inc, a Scottish literary magazine. Irvine Welsh (above) was a contributor. 
At university, I was going through to Poems and Pints nights in Edinburgh just to dip my toe into the world of writing. Everyone was talking about Trainspotting. Someone gave me book tokens for a birthday and I got it. I remember reading the first few pages and thinking: “What the f*** is this?” I found it difficult to read, it felt alien. After a few pages I was like: “Wait a minute! That’s how I speak!” I had no idea this was even allowed, I thought you had to write in standard English. The idea that you could write about schemies from Edinburgh, in the voice people talk in, radically shifted the mental path I had been on. Up until then I was writing genre stuff, fantasy and horror. But after Trainspotting, this was what I was going to do.
If he can write about the world he comes from in the language that’s his, I thought, I’m going to write about the world I come from, in a language that’s mine.

6) The 2014 independence referendum

I WAS always what you’d call a soft No before that term was invented. I had bought into the idea of not dividing the British working class, of nationalism being an oppressive ideology. When the SNP won a majority in 2011 I think people had started to wake up to the fact we can’t safeguard ourselves within this Union. Then the independence referendum was called and intuitively I understood I wanted independence. My cultural and political journeys came together. By then I felt quite politically educated and realised the cultural journey I had been on since Trainspotting went even further back, that Scottishness is this thing you discover gradually due to being trapped in a Union with a larger neighbour that dictates terms. I wrote a poem called Vote Britain which became this viral sensation. For the next three years, it took over my entire life. I came out not wanting to repeat the experience. While I think my contribution was valuable and my audience got a bigger, I did not want to be an indy celebrity. Writers are supposed to be observers not participants. I hope enough people realise we now have another chance and that we take it.

7) Suede

SUEDE had bright, brash tunes, huge choruses and an incredible sense of purpose. They had this trick of being staggeringly aloof while also seeming like the underdog. Brett Anderson (above, right) was the first time I looked at a man and thought: “There are different ways to be male.” 
I got their first album the first week of university. It felt like the opposite of Falkirk. I was like: “This is the new me.” Following it was Dog Man Star, which to this day is one of the best things I’ve ever heard in my life.  Watching their star fade over the course of the 1990s was heartbreaking. Now they are back as good as they ever were, which is very inspiring.

8) Kirstin Innes

MEETING Kirstin (below, left) changed my life. She’s the best person I have ever met. When you realise you absolutely adore each other, that you want to be together for the rest of your lives, that alone is life-changing. But it’s what she brought with her too. She’s a much more cultured person than me and introduced me to places and things I would have previously turned up my nose to.My heart sank when she first told me she wrote fiction. I thought: “What if she’s sh*t?” She is not. She’s better than me. Her second novel Scabby Queen is one of the best I’ve ever read. She also doesn’t put up with any of my s****. And why should she?

9) No Logo by Naomi Klein

I PICKED this up in 1999. The blurb said it was about Coca-Cola, and Nike and Disney – brands I had grown up with. I had never trusted people into brands, that idea of being an outcast if you didn’t wear the right trainers. No Logo said: “Your brain has been colonised by marketing and beneath that shiny facade is a world of horror and exploitation that is destroying the planet.” That corporations are taking over the world and governments are letting them. It was jargon-free and Klein didn’t have a party agenda. It was like I had woken from a dream and reality was staring me in the face. I couldn’t unsee it. From then, I was a political person.

10) Becoming A Father

BEFORE I became a parent I found the conversation of parents boring, like their lives had narrowed to a tiny point. Then you realise their egos and desires have been shunted to the side, that the entire objective of their lives is to keep this tiny thing alive, help it thrive and be happy. A Herculean task.
For most of my life I was someone who didn’t have a problem putting their ego front and centre. Once you become a parent, none of that matters. You can look at that negatively or you can look at it as a privilege, as a way of finding layers and a level of patience and endurance you weren’t aware you were capable of.