I was thrilled to be asked by Cliff Hanley’s family to write an introduction to the republished Dancing in the Streets, which had an enormous influence on my life and career. And on many others I think, including the great Ian Jack. My foreword follows below. You can order the book (published by Birlinn) in any bookshop or buy it on Amazon here.

Freshers Week, Glasgow University, 1973. Getting on for a half a century ago, and I was swilling about Gilmorehill with hundreds of other hapless 17-year-olds, simultaneously thrilled with myself and absolutely terrified. Swaggeringly confident second-and-third years told us world-weary tales of drinking, political activism and more drinking. The Christian Union bussed prospective ultra-Calvinists out to Loch Lomond for a barbecue, possibly the only beer-free event of the seven days. And Cliff Hanley spoke at a debate.

I can’t remember who else was on the platform, or what the motion was. Only that the
diminutive Clifford Leonard Clark Hanley (five foot three in his hand-made brogues)
gave one of the wittiest, most awe-inspiringly impressive public speaking performances I’d ever heard. And I’d competed in the Daily Express Schools Debating Competition, by the way (knocked out, first round).

I was vaguely aware of Cliff (goatee, receding white hair, long at the back; he seemed a kind of leprechaunish Soviet intellectual type) from TV and radio and the fact that he’d written the words to pre-Flower of Scotland informal anthem Scotland the Brave; but the only newspaper columnists I read were Jack Maclean and Iain Archer in my dad’s Herald. Cliff at the QM, though, was something else. Fast, literate, screamingly funny and utterly Glaswegian. What else? What did he talk about? I can’t remember.

When I could afford it, I bought his book Dancing in the Streets, first published in 1958. Slivers stayed with me all down the decades. An elegantly brutal takedown of the 1955 Billy Graham crusade at the Kelvin Hall. Hilarious and note-perfect recollections of his childhood in the Gallowgate and then Shettleston, and most of all, a seductive picture of what it was like to be a journalist and radio broadcaster. All written in crisp, sardonic prose that flowed better than any non-fiction I’d read up to that point.

At least, that’s how I remembered it.

Time passed. Lots of it. I became a reporter, a columnist, a broadcaster, an author. Cliff appeared, towards the end of his life – he died in 1999 – on one of my Radio Scotland shows, and while he was less rumbustious than I remembered, elements of his verbal skill and sprightly verve were still evident in his write-and-read that morning.

Recently, something prompted me to search him out online. I knew about The Taste of Too Much, his coming-of age-novel that became a staple of school curricula, but the vast range of his work was a surprise – numerous pseudonyms (Ebenezer McIllwham, poet, is my favourite), thrillers under the name Henry Calvin that were hits in the USA, scripts for famous films like Seawards the Great Ships – for which he won an Oscar, no less – and gags for some of the biggest comedians in Scottish history, like Jimmy Logan and Tommy Morgan.

So I ordered Dancing in the Streets second-hand off Amazon and prepared to be let down. Of the writers who thrilled my teens (Alistair MacLean, Hammond Innes, Desmond Bagley, John Creasey) only MacLean’s earliest work still pulses with energy. But still, it was worth a try.

And Dancing in the Streets remains an absolute belter, as fresh and classy as it ever was. As a snapshot history of Glasgow, from the 1920s onwards, it’s invaluable. Hilariously funny, pin-sharp in its capture of dialect, and unlike other books in the ‘jeely piece’ genre, unsentimental. Written when he was at the very peak of his journalistic powers, it’s full of sharp observation and forensic detail.

There are things you rarely read about now – the
Independent Labour Party in its dying days, all park bench trainee speechifying and
Saturday socials; a deft portrait of Jimmy Maxton, and what it was like to be a
conscientious objector in World War Two, when all your brothers were serving and
friends were dying overseas. TB and cancer, plucking the most talented from imminent success. Art and alcohol. Sex and the lost showbiz of the Glasgow Empire and the city’s many other music halls.

And it’s so stylish. One of the stars of the Daily Record in his day, when the best tabloid features were written with intellect and flair, Cliff is the enemy of dull. His prose sparkles, converses, leads you like an old pal (often to lost pubs like the Corn
Exchange or ones that are still thriving, like the Kirkhouse in Shettleston).

Yet Cliff himself was always modest about what was his first published book (serialised in one newspaper of those very different times as ‘My Gay Glasgow’) out of around 20. It was pretty much a journalistic comission, written at the suggestion of his publisher, who simply wanted “a book about Glasgow.”

Cliff wrote later:
“At the time I thought it a rather pedestrian recital of childhood memories, and was
taken aback by its critical and commercial success.” And he added, pondering a lifetime of writing and his ‘serious’ literary work: “I suppose cheerfulness keeps breaking through. I am an entertainer as well as novelist, and the two may be compatible. My first commandment as a writer is not at all highfalutin. It is Thou Shalt Not Bore.”

He never did. And yet there is a strength of purpose in all his work, beyond the desire to entertain and amuse:
“On looking back, I realize that the tone… tends to be affirmation rather than despair.
This may be a virtue or a fault, or an irrelevance.”

Of course, on re-reading Dancing in the Streets, I realise how influential it was on my
own life. My own scribbling. The arc of a career, though mine has been nothing like as stellar. I used to dream of one day being able to walk into a newspaper office and breathe the billowing cigarette fug that shrouded chattering typewriters. Of phoning from some distant call box and shouting ‘copy!’ while mayhem broke loose around me. Of seeing my name in print, somewhere, anywhere. As the chapter entitled ‘The Thin Red Line’ begins: “A writing job isn’t the same thing either as fame or the top of the tree, but it’s better than working.”

That life, of the weel-kent city newspaperman, columnist, boulevardier and wit, author, print-and-radio star, cabaret performer, (much) larger-than-life character, is hard to imagine in these digital days. Because when I think of Cliff Hanley, when I read this wonderful memoir, I see, hear and smell a city energised and blackened by heavy
industry, by smog and industrial grime. Teeming, roaring with life. I can inhale the
pungency of ink and hear the clattering roar of the big presses in Renfield Lane, Mitchell Street, and Albion Street, all long gone. When a journalist was expected to be out and about, meeting, eating and yes, drinking with the great and the definitely up to no good.

Cliff died aged 76, and in his Guardian obituary, Ruth Wishart memorably described
him as someone who lived off his wit. “His hallmark was that brand of self-deprecating, but sharp, humour which ensures that no Glaswegian can entertain ideas above his station in the company of a fellow citizen.” Dancing in the Streets, she said, “is still considered one of the most engaging books about Glasgow, the grittier experiences always leavened and laced with Hanley’s irrepressible humour.”

Another great journalist, the late Ian Jack, wrote how he was “a Fife boy who wanted to be a Glaswegian” and reading Dancing in the Streets was his passport to “this great black city that seemed inexhaustibly interesting.” Writing in 2013, Jack added:
“(Dancing in the Streets) never plays cheap or false to the city it describes. I loved
it, and must have read it half a dozen times. Rereading it again, after a period that
I’m daunted to calculate is half a century, I was struck by how much of it I
remembered and how much vim went into each chapter’s opening sentence.”

Read this book. Relish it. Treasure it. It’s a lot funnier than yon Shuggie Bain. And I think what comes rippling through it is a great optimism, that glinting, sardonic joy to be found amid even Glasgow’s darkest corners in the years after World War Two. It’s so much more than a period piece. It throbs with life. This republication is long overdue.