Reflections on my 65th birthday

Murray Chalmers looks back on his 65 years so far - and what a life he's had. To quote Pet Shop Boys' classic song, ""we were never being boring, we were never being bored".

Today is my 65^th birthday - August 11, 2024.

I am now officially vintage youth with an already worn free bus pass and the state pension almost a reality, Rachel Reeves’ austerity cuts notwithstanding.

65 years ago today my mum Margaret lay in Perth Royal Infirmary waiting for me to emerge. Dad had to be prised from the pub to attend; it was decided I was to be called Murray after a Scottish beer, a product with which my alcoholic father was sadly all too familiar.

Murray at the Brit awards.

Mum wanted to call me Steven, but Dad and his beer homage won, which might give a clue to some of the horrors that lay ahead for the first part of my life.

‘Get this thing out of me’

I was a big baby and mum was wee and wiry even then, so I imagine her predating Joan Rivers by screaming ‘get this thing out of me’ rather than lying with a beatific smile as she gave birth to her first child.

A child of the 1950s (just). A child who grew up with music as a backdrop. A child who was given a record player and the 7” vinyl of the Tradewinds 1959 record Furry Murray almost as soon as he was born.

To this day I can sing those lyric at the drop of a hat, the hat now covering a shaved, almost hairless head and - oh the cruel irony – a rather larger expanse than I’d wish for; “Furry Murray got a Yul Brenner haircut, big head like a two by four….Murray don’t scurry at the high school hop, he’s really smooth as a brand new mop, All the girls think he’s cute, his boy head looks like a ripe grapefruit”.

Ostensibly a quiet person, I used to think I was an atypical Leo but now I’m not so sure. Whilst very happy in my own company, there is nothing I love more than being surrounded by people I love and trust.

Murray with long-time client, Kylie.

Writing this as the sun comes up outside, I feel myself almost purring with Gallowayan/Lenskaesque joy at the anticipation of the day ahead, when this lion can roar amongst his friends.

There will be much laughter, good food and wine and I have no doubt that - three or four glasses in - I will look around that lunch table and feel a deep sense of contentment that life actually worked out ok.

Life is what happens…

65 years in, when my glorious punk teenage rampage years of 1976 - 1978 often feel like yesterday, I have to agree with John Lennon that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.

That I never had a plan other than to avoid anything boring or provincial is something I wear as a badge of honour.

With Yoko at a Beatles premiere.

The fact I forged a career in the music industry when I didn’t even know there was that industry is still something that amazes me, some 40 years after I fell into a job as a music PR.

The first major new group I was given to work on at EMI Records was Pet Shop Boys.

That was 1985 and I still work with them today, four decades later. As they became more and more successful, I learned how to do my job. The bigger PSB became, the more I learned about the music industry.

I also learned the absolute power of saying no.

With his mum, 1981.

I was young, gay and fabulous, roaming round Soho with a haircut, an expense- account and clothes from Katharine Hamnett.

I’d go clubbing every night; when we lived in a squat we’d bunk the tube and blag our way into the hottest clubs in London - when I got a job I brought that DIY council house ethos with me, just with better clothes and a new love of champagne and sushi.

In my first music industry job a stuck- up woman refused to drink some coffee I’d made her, shouting over the whole office that someone who lived in a squat couldn’t really be expected to wash a mug properly.

Murray with Chris Lowe from Pet Shop Boys in Hong Kong. Photo by Pennie Smith.

I was on the dole then, working for free to learn about PR. She was what we used to call a secretary and her disdain for me was palpable.

She was typical of an old guard because the music industry then was largely out of touch with the realities of London life whilst me and my friends existed in what seemed like a perpetually twilit demi-monde.

It’s the artists and the art

Working with musicians including Kate Bush, Radiohead, Kylie, Garbage’s Shirley Manson, Pet Shop Boys, Yoko, Robbie Williams, and Coldplay showed me that I will always, always be on the side of the artist and the art.

That’s something that is absolutely axiomatic in my life. Art always! Art for all!!

In fact it was Yoko Ono, another long-term PR client of 30 years standing, who once said to me that you should never retire, and she was right.

In a housing association flat in Kilburn, 1979.

Whether it be retiring from a job or from seeking new stimulus in life, the most important thing is to keep your mind active and open to new experiences.

Certainly I feel grateful to have got here after quite a shaky start in life but, if we’re lucky to be dealt a reasonable hand at any stage of life’s journey,  then it’s good to remember that happiness is an option and – the perilous state of the world notwithstanding – it’s a lovely feeling to reach this age and feel contentment about one’s own singular place in the world.

So, at around 3pm today you won’t find this lion on top of a table at The Palmerston in Edinburgh belting out Sinatra’s My Way (coincidentally, my late father’s favourite song), but I might allow myself the gratitude of looking round our table of beautiful misfits, malcontents and mavericks and remembering the sense of joy you get when you find your tribe.

Because people are everything. We are nothing without each other.

Murray with Siouxsie. Photo by Mark C O’Flaherty

It took a while for me to find my gang and I had to leave Dundee to do it but now I know that my favourite people are always somehow on the outside, even if they’re globally successful.

It’s an attitude and it’s intrinsic to my being. I prefer being outside looking in, albeit often hammering at the window in protest.

Maybe it comes from being gay and having a bit of a lonely adolescence, seemingly destined to always be looking through those windows of life and yet never being able to break on through to the right room.

Growing up gay in Dundee (my mum and I moved there when we left Dunkeld, my father, my school and everything I held dear in 1965) was not for the faint hearted.

Murray with his friend Jacko Bite, 1979.

There was no support system, or at least none that was available to someone like me, a council house kid who had realised at school that he was somehow different.

I was androgynous, for sure. This was the age of David Bowie and through him we all discovered Oscar Wilde, Lou Reed and Jean Genet, all things that made teenage life in Dundee seem even more mindlessly boring and retrogressive.

A young lad’s dreams

I wanted to be on Ken Kesey’s bus with all the cool kids. I wanted a life with Angie Bowie sashaying at my side.

I wanted Pierre Laroche to make me up for school like Bowie in the Life on Mars video (ironically I did get to know Pierre later; it was me who was tasked with accompanying him back from Hong Kong to London when he had to leave the Pet Shop Boys tour due to illness). I wanted Amanda Lear to introduce me to Dali.

Those were not things that were available when you lived in a place like Dundee, growing up yearning for satin and tat but having to risk bricks and bats every time you stepped out the front door.

Homophobia and bullying

Naturally, I grew my hair even longer and I looked like a girl, which brought on a lot of homophobia and bullying at school, sometimes from the teachers themselves.

Our PE teacher would look at me with barely concealed hatred and bellow out “when are you going to get your hair cut, Chalmers? Your family will soon think you’re a girl”.

In one class he instructed us to “put your hands on your thighs boys” and, looking directly at me, he shouted “your OWN thighs, Chalmers”. Everyone sniggered.

I had never had sex with anyone at this point and it says so much about my life at the time that I fancied this authoritarian bully like crazy. Nevertheless it was a somewhat triumphant day when I saw him in the showers and realised he had a small dick. Youth!

Celebrating differences

Looking back, I’m proud of the fact that all of this hateful stuff made me celebrate and even amplify my differences, reaching a personal best the day our new and very cool art teacher told me I looked like a very beautiful girl. Can you imagine a teacher saying that to ANYONE now?!

What these somewhat random reminiscences are telling me is that the need to celebrate otherness is intrinsic to my very being, and that is very much a product of my fractured upbringing.

When I was thrown out of the family home for being gay it was obviously hugely upsetting. I had nowhere to go and nothing to get there with.

But I went to Edinburgh and a very kind nurse called Wendy took me in. I had to pretend not to be living there when her landlord came round.

Murray outside his dad’s old shop and their house in Dunkeld

In Edinburgh I started to make friends and I started to feel – eventually – that there was another life. It wasn’t all fun and games, of course.

Out with Wendy one night I got chased by some lads who wanted to get off with her and they beat me up so severely that one side of my jawbone is still vastly different from the other. That was probably the lowest point of my life, and all before I was even 21.

Life turned around

But I went on to study at Napier. Moved to London. Got my job. Life turned around. I was lucky, but I was also enriched with life skills and empathy for the underdog. I knew that there are many like me who don’t make it. That thought never leaves you.

That’s why I go into my 66^th year feeling just as strongly that there’s so much more to be done, even on a personal level.

Right now it feels to me as bad as it did in the mid 1970s and some of the 1980s. It’s a very dangerous time to be seen as different because of your race, your creed, your sexuality or your gender.

I look on with horror as a new moral majority emerges, often from quite surprising places. It pains me to see how fractured our society has become.

The abuse of power – whether it be from mob rule, the media, best-selling authors, or politicians – is absolutely the sign of a society teetering on the brink of collapse. To close your eyes to it, at whatever age, is just wrong.

The power of protest

Many of my generation grew up recognising the power of protest. And the thing about age is it slows you down. You feel like you’ve done your bit and that it’s up to the kids to pick up the torch and carry it forward.

I don’t subscribe to that, although I do agree that it’s largely the energy of a new generation which is driving something crucial like climate change protest. But we all must play our part, whatever our age. Once again, it’s that old punk ethos of getting off your arse and doing something, or at least saying something.

For me this is definitely one thing that getting to 65 does teach you. You must not be afraid to speak, no matter how comfortable your life is or how scared you might be of sticking your head above the parapet.

That’s why I resigned so publicly from writing for The Courier – I realised that I just didn’t want to contribute to a paper which seemed so alien to the way me and most of my friends thought. Also, I just didn’t like the editor.

 By speaking out you’re telling the right people, those who need to be challenged, that you don’t give a fuck.

But actually it’s more than that; by speaking out what you’re actually saying to the people who feel marginalised and cast aside and seemingly forgotten - just as you did at times in your life - is that age teaches you to give more of a fuck about the right things than anyone could ever imagine. The Leo roar packs quite the punch!

Happy birthday to all fellow lions.

Trans rights are human rights, as are LGBTQ rights.