John Byrne Graduation Address

My Lord and Chancellor I have the honour to present to you John Byrne.

John Byrne's biography is the fascinating tale of a local Paisley lad's rise to fame. Described in The New Statesman as "the first post-modernist from Paisley", it is almost impossible to do justice to the huge span of his interests and to the restless and relentless intellectual curiosity which has led him from the visual arts to Scottish Opera via Broadway and Hollywood.

John Byrne was born in Paisley in 1940 and was brought up in the Ferguslie Park housing scheme He was educated at the town's St Mirin's Academy, but in an act of teenage rebellion left school without formal qualifications. At seventeen he started work as a ‘slab boy’ at A.F. Stoddard, the firm of carpet manufacturers in Paisley, in what he describes as a ‘technicolour hell hole’ where he worked mixing paints. John then applied for, was accepted by and studied painting at Glasgow School of Art from 1958 – 1963 where he was hugely encouraged by their strong tradition of figurative painting. Art schools in the nineteen sixties still had life drawing, painting and still life classes at their core and John Byrne was considered a star pupil. He won a scholarship to Italy where he visited Assisi where he marvelled at Giotto’s frescoes, and at the paintings of Duccio and Cimabue. John returned from his travels a highly accomplished and confident young artist. He married in 1964 and had a son and then a daughter the following year. Fuelled by his fertile imagination his career began in earnest, if slowly. He worked as a graphic designer for Scottish TV and illustrated book jackets for Penguin Books. He quickly returned to work for the carpet manufacturers, this time as a carpet designer. But this could never hold him. In 1967 Byrne sent some paintings in a primitive style to London’s Portal Gallery signing them ‘Patrick’ and claiming that they were by his father, a Glaswegian newspaper seller. This was partly to do with John’s amusement at inventing odd characters, and also his thinking that a gallery which at the time exhibited self taught artists might not be interested in work by a highly skilled art school trained painter. He was wrong! Portal exhibited his work with great success.

John Byrne found that his painting career took off and his work soon reached a wide audience in the form of record covers for the Beatles, Gerry Rafferty and Billy Connolly as well as the famous banana boots for Connolly’s Great Northern Welly Boot Show – now of course preserved at the People’s Palace. He clearly thrived in this new and exotic environment. Singer-songwriter Rafferty's song Patrick is written about Byrne (the lyrics begin: "Patrick my primitive painter of art/ You will always and ever be near to my heart"), and the pair co-wrote several songs together.

From the early seventies John Byrne’s growing career reflects his rich and varied talents, first as a designer of theatre sets and record covers. He made an animated film. His first play ‘Writer’s Cramp’ (1977) was followed by ‘The Slab Boys in 1978 which won him the Evening Standard’s most promising playwright award. In 1983 there was a New York production of ‘The Slab Boys’ with Sean Penn, Val Kilmer and Kevin Bacon. His theatre work was and is substantial and unstoppable. It continued with the rest of what is known as The Slab boys Trilogy, with One-Eyed Jocks, Candy Kisses and in 1993 his play about two Scottish painters, Colquhoun and MacBryde, plus adaptations of The Government Inspector, The London Cuckolds, Uncle Vanya and The Seagull. He has also designed sets and costumes for 7:84, the Traverse Theatre, The Royal Court, The Bush Theatre and Scottish Opera. In 2007 he wrote the stage version of Tutti Frutti for the National Theatre of Scotland and has just completed a fourth part – Nova Scotia - to what we must now call the Slab Boys Quartet, which opened at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh last week.

In 1987, John Byrne’s legendary six-part BBC TV series Tutti Frutti not only introduced the world to the talents of Robbie Coltrane, Emma Thompson and Richard Wilson but seared itself into the imaginations of a generation where, twenty years later, it lives on with the Majestics still playing the Deep Sea Ballroom in Buckie and thanks to it never having been repeated, with illicit and grainy dvd copies proudly possessed by the most staid and law-abiding citizens. This success was followed by another well received tv series, ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ starring John Gordon Sinclair and Tilda Swinton.

But Byrne was and is above all a visual artist – and a notably successful one. He has exhibited his art in Glasgow, Edinburgh, London, New York, Sweden and Croatia and was chosen as an artist for one of the Royal Mail's Millennium Stamps. His portraits hang in the National Gallery of Scotland and has had two one man show at the Fine Art Society London in 2004 and 2006

Byrne is blessed with a restless artistic energy. He has written, designed and directed stage and screen productions, Recently, he illustrated Selected Stories by James Kelman, winner of the 1994 Booker Prize. John is currently working on a novel, an autobiography, making prints and paintings together with creating the fourth Slab Boys play, which is now showing at the Traverse. Not content with writing the play, he is also listed as costume designer.

And honours have followed. In 2004 he was made a member of the Royal Scottish Academy. He also holds Honorary Doctorates from the Robert Gordon University Gray’s School of Art and from Paisley University and he is a Fellow of the Glasgow School of Art.

Byrne’s reputation is truly international - "from Darkwood Crescent to Sunset Boulevard " – as he has joked, but his roots are deeply and firmly embedded in Scotland. Asked recently about being Scottish he said: “Well, I only know (or think I know…i.e. have a rough idea of what makes me tick - and I’m Scottish) what it’s like to live in this particular culture. It’s what makes me laugh and it’s what moves me. It’s what comes up out of the ground and makes you. You don’t get it anywhere else which is why I’m here . . . it’s where my heart, viscera and muse lives “in the particular is the universal”. We become ‘Americanised’ at our peril. There’s bugger all in the generic.”

If ever anyone could be described as a modern Renaissance man, it must be John Byrne. And it is for the sheer breadth of his intellectual curiosity, for his vision of working-class Scotland as a place full of energy, colour and exotic possibility, as well as for the sheer lustre of his work that, with the authority of Senate, I ask you, my Lord and Chancellor, to confer on him the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa.