Darren McGarvey: 'Why is UK such a bin fire?'

“So much of the stuff I do involves making overt political statements and claims that I then have to defend on social media and in the real world, in cafes and in taxis and on trains,” he says.

Darren McGarvey: Picture: Stephen Dewar (Image: free)

The suggestion he was “playing it safe” was prompted by the events he is putting together at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Last August, McGarvey’s The Social Distance Between Us – a show based on his book of the same title – saw him posing questions such as: “If all the best people are in all the best jobs, why is Britain such a f*cking bin fire?” while licensing his audience to ask him anything they liked.

This year – under the banner of his Common People podcast series – he is trying out a different format: a series of conversations in which two successful people, mostly from marginalised backgrounds, chat to him, each other and the audience about their experiences.

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What makes it different to other in-conversation events is that – in each case – McGarvey has paired someone at the peak of their career with someone up and coming: authors Jenni Fagan and Colin Burnett, for example; or comic book writers Grant Morrison and Etienne Kubwabo.

These pairings were not adversarial enough for McGarvey’s Twitter critic. He suggested the activist, artist and film-maker Bonnie Prince Bob, who recently collaborated on a rap-punk-metal holler for revolution called Gardyloo, would make fierier fare. But that – suggests McGarvey – is to miss the point of the exercise. Though he respects Bonnie Prince Bob (and would doubtless interview him on other occasions) he sees Common People – both the podcast and the live events – as a chance for less confrontational discourse.

“I feel strongly about not getting sucked into the trending hashtag vortex where podcasters and content creators and editors and columnists get captured by an audience because they have written one article about one subject that is controversial and then all of the metrics are telling them, and their intuition is telling them, I must deliver more of this,” he says.

“I can be contentious, and certainly the media has sometimes framed me as an aggressive person, or as a person obsessed by class, but you can end up trying to live up to the image others have of you and forget you have other options.

Jenni Fagan (Image: free)

"For me, I am interested in different perspectives. It doesn’t always have to be contentious, it can just be: ‘Let’s talk about how you see life.’ I want to challenge the idea that people from working class backgrounds only have their hard luck story to tell; that it’s all they have to offer the discourse.”

McGarvey is also motivated by a desire to give others a leg-up. “I had a lot of help from established people,” he says. “My first book was supported by JK Rowling and Irvine Welsh and that made a load of difference in terms of legitimising me in the eyes of people who had never heard of me or who had heard of me and thought: ‘Is he not just some rapper guy?’ You have to have the ability to take advantage of opportunity, but I know within myself you don’t get from where I was to where I am without help along the way, so I always knew when I had the time and the resources and the cultural capital to take a bit of a gamble, that’s the way I wanted to channel them.”

For the established figures, McGarvey has looked to those he has long admired. He first met Jenni Fagan at a Neu! Reekie! event when he was still trying to find his feet and his voice. He feels an affinity with her “spikiness” and her determination not to be defined by her background. “I could feel a disturbance in the force when she spoke,” he says. “Then she went up to do a reading and I was like: ‘Wow, she does not give a f***’. It’s not overt, it’s encoded in how she reads her work and how she presents it.”

McGarvey, who is in recovery, stumbled on a Grant Morrison talk on Chaos Magic when he was still looking for “an intellectual excuse for [his] drug use”. Glasgow-born Morrison, who is also a screenwriter and producer, came out as non-binary in 2020. “The talk started with Grant letting out this huge roar,” McGarvey says. “Then, they talked about how they were about to come up [on drugs].”

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This was 20 years ago, he quickly adds. “However they are living now, they are not being brought on to answer questions about that, but I remember thinking: ‘This sounds like a working class person’ and then finding out they were this iconoclast of the comic book world.”

McGarvey thought Morrison would be a perfect match with Kubwabo who created Beats of War, a comic starring Scotland’s first black superhero, and whose film The Difference Between Us, about a young black man raised in the Highlands by adoptive white parents, had its premiere last week. Other established interviewees include Irvine Welsh, Newcastle-born YouTube phenomenon Paul Tweddle, whose channel Heavy Spoilers focuses on TV, cinema and video games, and Kimberley Wilson, whose book Unprocessed exposed the links between processed food and poor mental health.

Welsh has been paired with poet and writer Cat Cochrane, Tweddle with 18-year-old Dylan Lombard, a talented photographer who suffers from MDP, a rare syndrome affecting only 13 people across the world, and Wilson with online coach and personal trainer Nikki Small.

Darren McGarvey: Picture: Stephen Dewar (Image: free)

McGarvey points out that Trainspotting came out at a time when a book that caught the zeitgeist could become a literary phenomenon. “He [Welsh] has said himself that it is hard for even a well-marketed book to get that level of prominence today because there will be something else next week and something else again the week after.”

He hopes Tweddle and Lombard will share their experiences of the internet and social media because, while for McGarvey online sparring is often a curse, Tweddle’s YouTube channel now has more than a million subscribers, while social media has given Lombard a platform for his photography and disability campaigning.

With Wilson and Small, the conversation is likely to revolve around “processed food, the industry, the economic incentives to produce crap, and how it affects the individual: what we can do to navigate this sensory onslaught where everything is marketed to us based on emotion and not on what is the best for our health.”

McGarvey does not want the events to become a dissection of class – more of that in his BBC2 series (working title, Mind the Gap) due out next year; but – by their very nature – the systemic barriers working class people face will be a leitmotif.

I ask him if he detects any progress over the last decade. “Sometimes the change is superficial – it’s optics,” he says.

“That’s still important. There have to be visual representations of people from different walks of life in prominent places, but the pace of change in terms of the level of representation in the interior of cultural or political institutions is a bit slower.

"The reason is that people who come from disadvantage have more baggage to carry. They need more help getting from A to B in terms of education or a career, but the current mechanisms to create that diversity still select for the people with the least baggage because they are easier to manage, they are more reliable, and they present fewer potentially difficult issues. They will be people with less experience of mental and physical difficulties because those things are difficult for institutions to adjust to.”

McGarvey’s Common People show is an attempt to confront some of those obstacles; but it will also have moments of humour. One of the difficulties of writing about McGarvey is that, in print, he can come across as intense and earnest though, in person, he is witty and self-mocking.

When we meet, he has just booked comedian Zara Gladman for the final night. Gladman sends up the middle class affectations of the denizens of Glasgow’s west end, and those working within the arts and entertainment sector.

“She is doing something that not a lot of artists in Scotland have the self-awareness to do which is satirising the narcissism of us all in this game,” he says. “It’s funny, you can identify with it and laugh at yourself.”

Darren McGarvey’s Common People Live runs every night from August 12-19 at The Stand’s New Town Theatre on George Street