Put in place and let it happen: Introducing Tom McGrath

Central to the story of the Third Eye Centre is its founding director Tom McGrath. A poet, playwright and jazz musician, McGrath's counter-cultural nous and democratic approach to the arts helped define its early years. His aim was to expose the public to "things that zap the mind".  

So who was Tom McGrath? A Scottish poetry anthology introduces him in one word: “explorer”. Raised in Rutherglen by Irish and Italian parents, McGrath fell in love with music and poetry at a young age. He was drawn to jazz and blues, and was an avid reader of the Beat and Black Mountain poets. By the early 1960s, he was hanging out in Glasgow's bohemian enclaves CND Late and The Cell, where performances by his jazz and poetry group caught the attention of Magnus Magnusson, who featured them on BBC Radio. The Cell also brought McGrath into contact with touring big band musicians who'd come down to play modern jazz late at night. As he told historian Angela Bartie, “It was really exciting what went on in that place, there were some wonderful musicians around.” 

As an aside, any information readers might have on The Cell is most welcome. I'd understood the club as being in the basement of the St Andrews Hall - the historic venue that hosted John Coltrane's only Scottish gig - but this might be slightly off. In a 1987 interview, saxophonist Bobby Wishart remembered the club as "a tiny attic hovel" behind the St Andrew's Hall, while a 1990 interview with jazz musician and TV producer Andy Park makes reference to a "steamy all-night jazz club in a seedy club behind [the building that would become the original Charing Cross] Cafe India". Sounds like they're talking about the same place.  

In 1963, McGrath and his wife Maureen moved to London, where the first of their four daughters was born. McGrath balanced family life with newspaper work and adventures in the nascent counter-culture. He read at Peanuts, an East End CND club frequented by the young saxophonist Mike Osborne, and participated in Mike Horovitz and Pete Brown’s Live New Departures events, which combined poetry with jazz, theatre and experimental composition. In 1965, he performed at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall, a key event in the advent of the counter-culture. As he told Gavin Selerie in The Riverside Interviews No. 6 (1983), “The Albert Hall was a mind-blower. It was such a huge event with all sorts of different styles. [It had] that political thrust as well, which was important.” 

Through Trocchi, who he had first encountered in Glasgow, McGrath became involved in Project Sigma, an attempt to establish an international network of counter-culture activism. After a two year stint at Peace Times, McGrath was invited by John “Hoppy” Hopkins and Barry Miles to edit a new underground paper, International Times. To IT, McGrath brought journalistic experience, a love of jazz and poetry, and as Miles put it, a “spot-on” sense of humour. 

After the existential bleakness of the post-war years, McGrath welcomed the “new mood” of psychedelia. But while he thrilled to the sounds of the underground – Cornelius Cardew, AMM, Pink Floyd and Soft Machine – he never fully bought into the hippy dream. “Although peace and love is a part of me, I thought I'd like to go with the sinners: people like Trocchi and [RD] Laing,” he told Selerie. But while the energy generated by Trocchi was intoxicating, McGrath felt there was a “tyranny” about the activities of these underground gurus: “the junk habit was so entrenched.” McGrath alluded to his own addiction in IT #8 (“Heroin is a beautiful kick but it’s insidious. It gets inside you and fills you with longing – for more heroin.”). Ultimately the pressure got too much, and in late 1967, a disillusioned and junk-sick McGrath escaped to Scotland. 

When McGrath returned to Glasgow, it was the last place he wanted to stay. As he wrote in 1972, “It was that place where there was ‘nothing happening.’ If you stayed in it, you were a failure.” Glasgow was going through major social and architectural upheaval, with slum clearances and motorways cutting swathes through working-class communities. The decline of major industries like shipbuilding reinforced a sense of Glasgow as run-down and depressed. Yet those that stayed were determined to make a go of it. A proposed Arts Lab, modelled on the multi-disciplinary spaces that appeared in the wake of Jim Haynes’s original initiative in London's Drury Lane, failed to get off the ground due to its organisers being, as McGrath recalled, “too stoned”. 

After getting clean in 1968, McGrath enrolled at Glasgow University, studying English and Drama. Making “grateful contact” with younger writers like Alan Spence shook McGrath out of his post-heroin funk. At 28, McGrath felt part of an older generation, and was struck to find that the new creative forms that he had helped bring in via IT were “an accepted part of life with this second wave of hippies.” His flat in Bank Street soon became a gathering place for writers, artists and musicians. Ideas were shared and plans hatched. Inspired by the “poor theatre” of Jerzy Grotowski, McGrath formed an improvisational theatre group, The Other People, recruiting young writer friends like Spence, Jean Milton, and Tom Leonard, engineer Jim Torrance, and musician and actor Allan Tall. While the results were, according to McGrath “terribly hit and miss”, the Other People had “an energy.”

McGrath also began jamming at home with local jazz musicians, including bassist George Lyle and drummer Nick Weston. With percussionist Alex Jamieson, they formed the group Proprioception, who are listed as playing the Jazz and Poetry Festival at Edinburgh's Traverse theatre in 1973, and the Jazz In The Galleries festival at Glasgow's McLellan Galleries the same year. Prior to that McGrath - and as I understand it, at least some members of Proprioception - contributed music to Tom Buchan's 1972 play Tell Charlie Thanks For The Truss. That led to McGrath becoming musical director of Buchan and Billy Connolly's smash-hit The Great Northern Welly Boot Show the following year.

In 1973, McGrath became the Scottish Arts Council’s Glasgow director, tasked with founding a new arts centre. From his base at the Scottish Arts Council Gallery in Blythswood Square, McGrath edited a newsletter, Nuspeak, in which he set out his plans for the new arts centre and promoted local events. With its irreverent mix of cartoons, listings and rambling editorials, Nuspeak resembled a Scottish IT. In Nuspeak 3 (1973) McGrath argued that art “is the opposite of alienation.” The Third Eye was to forge an organic relationship with its locality, and reject the elitism of scenes where art is something “to discuss over cocktails.” In McGrath's vision of cultural democracy, everything was valid: “Put into place and let it happen.”

The Blythswood Square Gallery became a laboratory for McGrath's programming ideas, with Allen Ginsberg and Derek Bailey among the acts appearing there. Thanks to McGrath and his colleagues' pioneering adoption of video technology, these performances were recorded. McGrath was also a founding member of Platform Glasgow, the Scottish Arts Council supported jazz organisation. Their first show was from Don Weller’s jazz rock outfit Major Surgery in April 1973, but the major coups were concerts by Duke Ellington and The Mahavishnu Orchestra (other important events that year, including a Miles Davis concert and a festival of avant garde music featuring Sonic Arts Union and Steve Lacy, were promoted directly by the SAC).

A home for the Third Eye was found in an empty storefront on Sauchiehall Street - videos of McGrath's team exploring the site can be viewed on the Glasgow Miracle website - and it opened in Autumn 1975. Public facing, the Third Eye featured a cheap vegetarian cafe up front and performance space and long gallery behind. The villa behind, which is now incorporated into the CCA, housed a rock and blues club, The Maryland, and John Kraska's pop art design studio, The Artifactory. 

The Third Eye became Platform's Glasgow hub and McGrath's Trio performed there on several occasions. In May 1976, they supported Ken Hyder's Talisker and in May 1981, they performed with the saxophonist Lol Coxhill. There are also a number of unlisted performances which I'm hoping to find more about, including a 1979 McGrath Quartet concert with John Sampson guesting on crumhorn and trumpet, and the actor Karen Black, of Nashville and Five Easy Pieces fame, reading poems and singing. I also have accounts of early 1980s McGrath gigs at other venues, including the Tron Theatre and Hallibees, a cafe in the West End of Glasgow. If you were at any of these, please do get in touch!

During his time at the Third Eye, McGrath worked on his first plays, Laurel and Hardy and The Hardman. As his theatre career took off, he left his post, leading to Chris Carrell taking over the directorship in 1978. McGrath never lost his love of music. In the 1980s, he ran a popular session at Cumbernauld Theatre, playing piano and reading poems alongside guests. And as McGrath's partner Ella Wilridge recalls, his final unfinished work was a play about boogie-woogie piano players. In 2017, McGrath's work was celebrated at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and actor Tam Dean Burn performing a jazz tribute, Electric Contact. You can hear a recording of the concert here.

During my residency at the CCA, I've already found some exciting archival material relating to McGrath's adventures in jazz and improvised music. We'll share more of these in due course. In the meantime, we'd love to hear your memories of McGrath - musical or otherwise - and the Third Eye Centre. Drop me a line at: thirdeyejazz@gmail.com