Tam Dean Burn: Year of the Horse

Tam Dean Burn ought to be taking it easy. Having established himself as an archetypal soap villain on River City, an adventurous, engaged performer throughout the 1990s and a thoughtful interpreter of Pinter in the Citizens’ Caretaker, it is surprising that he retains the enthusiasm and imagination of an actor at the start of his career. In the next month, he can be found playing a gangster in the NTS’s Dolls, making a cameo in Andy Arnold’s Defender of the Faith, hosting political cabaret night Manifesto and presenting Year of the Horse, a personal journey into the politics and art of Harry Horse.

Harry Horse was a perennial figure on the Scottish scene. Banjo-player, singer in Swamptrash and children’s author, his cartoons for the Sunday Herald became increasingly scathing as they attacked the British state’s militarism. Until his death in 2007, Horse’s imagery revealed his distinctive vision of a decaying, brutal world. Tam Dean Burn explains how the series developed. “The first one, he just sent the image – The Demons of Baghdad – and then they asked him to add text. He’d never been asked to write like that before – he used to write songs and children’s books. I think he discovered a lot about himself.” The title was dictated by the series of cartoons themselves. “That came out of the fact that there were fifty two cartoons in total he did.”

Perhaps surprisingly, TDB did not know Harry Horse while he was alive. “I had seen the cartoons on and off. I was stunned by the ones I had seen but I didn’t really realise how much effect it had on me until I discovered that he had died.” Almost immediately, he began work. “I had been doing live plays on the radio station Resonance in London – and they said that the play for Sunday had fallen through. I came off the phone, and on the front page there was Harry Horse’s death. I was gobsmacked, and thought we could do some kind of tribute to Harry. I got some of the cartoons and the text, four tracks from his band Swamptrash and one of his books, The Last Polar Bear. Alison Peebles read this live from Glasgow onto the radio and we went between me doing the cartoons and his tracks for an hour tribute.”

As he engaged with Horse’s pieces, TDB recognised a kindred spirit. “On the very last cartoon he did, he lists his heroes: Blake and Burns. The romantic radical poets! We had so much in common.” A recurring theme of Burn’s Manifesto is the rescue of Rabbie Burns from the heritage industry, reclaiming him as both poet and revolutionary. And while neither Tam Dean Burns nor Harry Horse are luddites, they reach back to the past to understand the present. They are willing to entertain mythology and marginalised ideas. “The themes that Harry brings up are from interesting areas: the very last one he did was about Atlantis rising.”

This mixture of the mystical and the political is mirrored throughout the cartoons. “In hindsight, I saw how much we had in common politically as well. The whole anti-war thing, he was vehemently against Blair and Bush but also the way he was looking at 9/11 before I picked up on it, about the World Trade Centre, and I was thinking that this must be the only national paper in the world that had someone saying – how did World Trade Centre Seven come down all by itself?” This sympathy encouraged Burn to develop his relationship with Horse’s work. “I started including the cartoons within the Manifesto Cabaret at the Tron,” he remarks, before Horse’s “family picked up on it. His sister could see that I wasn’t just trying to cash in: we tried to get an exhibition at the Edinburgh Festival last year. We did manage the Nairn Festival, and I performed in the gallery.” The final work is even more layered and sophisticated, with Burn fusing the illustrations, original score and performance into an integrated study of the cartoons’ message. The final pieces fell into place: patronage from the Tron’s new boss, and the enthusiasm of a famous DJ. “Andy Arnold said – if you do a smaller part in Defender of the Faith, you can do another show up the stairs afterwards. I have a seven-minute scene in Defender – and then I go on at nine o’clock for Year of the Horse! Then I approached Twitch – Keith McIver – I worked with him at The Arches. Keith had put an obituary to Harry Horse on the Optimo website: Keith said Swamptrash were the best live band he ever saw. So much of my life seems to be synchronicity!”