Art, mate!
Updated: Jun 8
When Art Still Smelled of Work
AUG 17, 2025
I think about art alot. Like, all the time alot.
Not in the gallery sense. Not in the grant-application sense. Not in the way people talk about it when they are trying to sound as if they own a small part of civilisation.
I mean art as a thing that comes out of ordinary life. Songs written after shifts. Jokes told in vans. Stories passed around kitchens, pubs, building sites, football buses, hospital wards, offshore platforms. Art that arrives without asking permission. Art that still has work under its fingernails. Because that's all art too.
There was a time when that kind of art seemed to break through more often. Or maybe it only feels that way now because I am getting older and nostalgia is a sneaky wee bastard. But when I think of Billy Connolly coming out of the shipyards, or Oasis coming out of Burnage with cheap guitars and impossible swagger, I do not just see entertainment. I see evidence. Evidence that ordinary people were never short of imagination. Never short of rhythm, humour, style, courage, madness, beauty, or vision.
What we were short of was access.
That is the part that has become harder for me to ignore.
Because when you come from a working-class background and you try to make art, there is a strange sensation that follows you. It is not always obvious. It does not always announce itself. It is not some moustache-twirling villain standing at the door saying, “Not you, son.” It is quieter than that. More polite. More sophisticated. More difficult to argue with.
It is the feeling that you are somehow in the wrong room.
You can write the book, but you wonder who will take it seriously. You can record the song, but you wonder who will hear it properly. You can have the idea, the instinct, the taste, the hunger, the vision, but somewhere inside you there is still a small voice asking who the hell you think you are.
That voice does not come from nowhere.
It comes from years of seeing certain people treated as natural owners of culture and others treated as raw material for it. It comes from seeing working-class life welcomed as subject matter, but working-class people quietly discouraged from being the authors. It comes from watching our humour, our dialects, our clothes, our music, our schemes, our football, our grief, our swagger, and our survival instincts get translated into safer language by people standing at a comfortable distance.
I do not think this is always done with malice. That is maybe where I have softened with age.
It is not that every middle-class person in the arts is sitting in a candlelit room plotting the removal of the working class from culture. Life is rarely that tidy. Some are decent. Some are brilliant. Some have opened doors. Some have fought for voices unlike their own.
But systems do not need every individual to be cruel in order to produce cruelty.
Sometimes a system only needs to reward polish over truth. Confidence over experience. Connections over hunger. The right accent over the right sentence. The ability to speak the language of institutions over the ability to speak the language of life.
And that is where working-class artists can start to disappear before they even begin.
Not because they lack talent.
Because the whole process feels like it was designed to make them feel daft for trying.
I have felt that in my own life. Not just in art, either. I felt it in professional spaces too. In the NHS, I could sit with nurses, healthcare assistants, porters, support workers, patients, families, and feel human. There was warmth there. Swearing. Laughter. Directness. Care with rough edges. Nobody had to perform intelligence by sanding themselves smooth.
Then I would step into other rooms — clinical rooms, academic rooms, professional rooms — and feel myself become aware of every word in my mouth.
Too common.
Too blunt.
Too Scottish.
Too much.
Not enough.
I remember being told, directly and indirectly, that the way to move forward was to refine myself. Sharpen the language. Drop certain words. Make the accent less noticeable. Make the rough edges less rough. I knew someone from Lanarkshire, a brilliant Clinical Psychologist who was told her farmer’s accent would hold her back if she wanted to become a Clinical Psychologist.
Think about that.
Not her compassion. Not her intelligence. Not her discipline. Not her ability to sit with another human being in distress.
Her accent.
That sort of thing stays with you. It teaches you that upward movement often comes with a hidden cost. You can climb, yes. But the higher you climb, the more you are asked to leave bits of yourself at the bottom.
And then we call it impostor syndrome.
As if it is only a private insecurity. As if it is simply a wee confidence issue. As if the problem lives entirely inside the individual and not also in the architecture of the room.
But sometimes impostor syndrome is not irrational. Sometimes it is the body correctly noticing that the space was not built with you in mind.
That does not mean you do not belong.
It means belonging has been made unnecessarily difficult.
That distinction is important.
Because for a long time I thought the answer was to get accepted. To become good enough that the gatekeepers would eventually open the door. To write well enough, speak well enough, behave well enough, polish myself enough, until some unseen panel of cultural adults finally nodded and said, “Fair enough, you can come in now.”
I am less interested in that now.
Not because I do not care about standards. I care deeply about standards. I care about sentences. Songs. Structure. Discipline. Taste. Effort. Craft. I am not interested in some lazy fantasy where being working class automatically makes something good. It does not. Bad art is bad art, no matter what accent it arrives in.
But I no longer believe the highest aim is permission.
I do not want to spend my life trying to be admitted into rooms where I have to become less myself to be considered acceptable. I would rather build another room. One with louder laughter. Better music. Worse language. More honesty. Better trainers and no shame at the door.
That, to me, is the real work now.
Not just complaining about exclusion, though there is plenty worth complaining about. Not just raging at the arts, though God knows the arts can invite rage with both hands. The real work is creation. Building presses, labels, websites, bands, books, nights, magazines, clubs, conversations. Making places where ordinary people do not have to translate themselves before they are allowed to speak.
Because art was never the private property of the educated classes.
Before it was ever a course, it was a song.
Before it was a panel discussion, it was a story.
Before it was a funded initiative, it was somebody trying to make sense of being alive.
Working-class people have always done that. We did it in patter. In songs. In nicknames. In gallows humour. In the way people told stories at funerals and made the whole room laugh through tears. In the way a man could describe a workplace, a woman, a neighbour, a dug, a football match, or a disaster with more poetry than half the shelves in Waterstones.
We were never uncultured.
We were unofficial.
That is different.
And maybe that is why the best working-class art carries a certain charge. It does not come from leisure alone. It comes from compression. From pressure. From having no time and making time anyway. From writing after the weans are asleep. Recording after work. Reading on buses. Dreaming in stolen hours. Building something while the rest of life keeps demanding the gas bill, the school run, the shift pattern, the hospital appointment, the shopping, the overtime.
There is beauty in that.
Hard beauty, maybe. But beauty all the same.
I think of all the songs never written because somebody had to get up at five. All the novels never started because the writer thought novels were for other people. All the actors, painters, comics, filmmakers, poets, photographers, designers, and musicians who never submitted the thing, never made the call, never sent the email, never stepped on the stage because some part of them believed culture was happening somewhere else, by people with softer vowels and better shoes.
That is the tragedy.
Not that the arts are full of middle-class people.
The tragedy is how many working-class people never even knock.
Or worse, they knock once, feel the temperature of the room, and never go back.
I understand that feeling. I have carried it. I still carry it some days.
But I am trying to put it down.
Because the older I get, the more I believe the job is not to become acceptable. The job is to become undeniable. Not by shouting louder than everyone else, though sometimes shouting has its place. But by making the work. By telling the truth. By refusing to be embarrassed by your own foundations.
I do not want to write books that sound as if they were assembled in a seminar room by people terrified of being unfashionable.
I want to write books that smell of rain on concrete. Fryers. Diesel. Aftershave. Damp football kits. Pub carpets. Hospital corridors. Offshore laundry rooms. Cheap guitars. Bad decisions. Good jokes. Men trying to speak. Women holding worlds together. Families surviving themselves. Scotland in all its beauty and damage.
I want to make art that knows where it comes from.
That does not mean staying trapped in the past. It does not mean worshipping poverty or pretending hardship automatically creates virtue. There is nothing romantic about being skint. Nothing noble about being ignored. Nothing sacred about struggle when it is avoidable.
But there is something sacred in refusing to be ashamed.
That might be the whole point.
To make art without asking it to apologise for its accent.
To make art that does not arrive scrubbed clean for someone else’s comfort.
To make art for the people who keep the country running, yes, but also for anyone who knows what it is to feel outside the room. Anyone who has ever changed their voice to be taken seriously. Anyone who has ever hidden their intelligence because their environment punished ambition. And not just in one direction, either. Sometimes the pressure is to polish yourself for acceptance. Sometimes it is to shrink yourself for belonging. To play down your curiosity, your creativity, your ambition, because standing out can feel like a betrayal of where you come from. Anyone who has ever felt caught between those worlds. Anyone who has ever mistaken exclusion for personal failure.
I am not interested in bitterness as a permanent address.
Bitterness is useful for a while. It tells you where the wound is. It gives you heat. It gets you moving. But stay there too long and it starts eating you.
What I want now is something better than bitterness.
I want clarity.
I want the confidence to say: this is where I am from, this is what shaped me, this is the language I trust, and this is the work I am making.
No permission requested.
No shame carried.
No accent surrendered at the door.
Art still means something when it comes from life. Real life. Not life as branding. Not struggle as aesthetic. Not working-classness as costume. Life as it is actually lived by people who are usually too busy to explain themselves to the people explaining them.
So maybe the question is not: remember when art meant something?
Maybe it still does.
Maybe it always did.
Maybe the real question is whether we are brave enough to make it before someone else makes a safer version of it for us.
-Ray x
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