Gentlemen Prefer Blends
Arsenal manager George Graham receiving the Bell’s Manager of the Month award. Photograph: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo
Do blends have more fun? Damn right they do, says novelist John Niven, who stills bears the scars of his hedonistic 20s spent fizzingly alive and fuelled by frantic sessions on screw-top whisky
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Sipped 25 Year Old Glenfarclas in the oak panelled library of a Highland hotel while I watched the breakers glitter in the North Sea. Savoured a tiny drop of Octomore – as rich and dark as a slice of chocolate cake – from a silver hip flask on the prow of a ferry as it cleaved the water towards Iona. I have drunk a sherry-sweet single Speyside from a crystal tumbler while up to my chilled thighs in that very river, watching the salmon rise, the speckled colours on their backs proof enough of God. From Tokyo to Mexico, I’ve tasted the flavours of malts of many ages.
But bollocks to all that nonsense.
Because fine malt whiskies are a connoisseur’s game, aren’t they? It’s an aficionado’s racket, the province of the older, more restrained gentleman. The man of wealth and taste. And we all know those guys don’t have any fun, right? Go to a high-end restaurant, or the bar of a five-star hotel, and look at all the dudes in their fifties frowning into a teardrop of 200 quid Scotch. Does that look like a riot? Balls does it.
No, when did you have your killer times? Your absolute off-the-charts, let’s-go-crazy, whenever-men-gather-to-talk-of drinking-these-tales-will-be-told times? It was when you got absolutely spangled on what we might call a session-whisky: a bottle of utter, blended nonsense that cost less than the current price of a packet of fags in central London.
In fact, it is written on my body. My skin still bears the scars of all the good – and bad - times I had on cheap, blended whiskies. Let’s go through some of them...
‘Go to a high-end restaurant, or the bar of a five-star hotel, and look at all the dudes in their fifties frowning into a teardrop of 200 quid Scotch. Does that look like a riot?’
Bell’s. 1981. In Scotland, your alcohol tastes are as strongly inherited as your politics. You parents vote Labour, so there you go. My dad drank whisky, so I drank whisky. Craig’s dad drank vodka, so Craig drank vodka. I see us now, in the rain in the winter of 1981, outside the off-licence next to the Three Craws pub on the edge of the Castlepark estate.
We are fifteen years old, and we are asking the traditional question of every male by passer over the age of 18. ‘Hey, big man, gonnae get us a cargo?’ When we finally score and our benefactor takes our damp fiver and heads in, our order is always the same: a quarter bottle of Bell’s for me, a quarter bottle of Smirnoff for Craig and four cans of Bass Special between us. Back to Craig’s house we go, where we will get torn into this bounty while listening to The Clash’s six-disc triple album Sandinista on repeat.
For us, in 1981, this is the highlife. I drink the Bells the same way my dad does: cut with lemonade, the lemonade having been made by Craig in their Sodastream, an object as wonderful and exotic to me at the time as a private-jet or a walk-in humidor. Even through the lemonade, I can still taste the harsh, metallic tang of the spirit as I lie on my back, drunk on possibility, on being fifteen. And on cheap scotch. The Artex ceiling swirls above me, as intricate and moving as a cathedral dome, as I listen to Mick Jones singing about murder and dreaming of getting out of here, of getting away, of getting to do all the things I talked about in the opening paragraph.
Most nights, this is where it begins and ends for us. But one evening, we ventured out into the dark streets of Irvine, the four cans and half our quarter bottles inside us, the remainder clutched in our fists as we stumble and fall. We meet some boys we know and get to talking. I pass one of them the Bell’s for a swig and when he hands it back, I do the traditional thing of running my palm around the neck of the bottle to clean it.
‘I drink the Bells the same way my dad does: cut with lemonade, the lemonade having been made by Craig in their Sodastream, an object as wonderful and exotic to me at the time as a private-jet’
I have failed to notice that on one of my stumbles I have chipped the glass of the neck. I don’t feel anything but when I look down moments later I see my fist is covered in blood. Still, today, I have a small, pale scar where my index finger of my left hand meets the palm. I look at that scar now and I think: Bell’s, Castlepark, 1981.
One for the road? John Niven on the whisky trail, Glasgow, mid-80s
Ballantine’s. 1985. I am in my first year at university and have begun writing for the student paper, reviewing records and gigs. The editor snags a case of Ballantine’s – at the time the number one selling blended whisky in the world - from the manufacturer, to be used as the prize in a competition. Twelve bottles for the twelve winners. Unfortunately, only one person enters the competition. And gets the question wrong. Which leaves us with twelve bottles to drink at the staff Christmas party. Twelve bottles of whisky between ten or so eighteen-year-olds. Well, you can imagine...
At one point in the evening, I am running wild through the office in my pants, screaming, drinking straight from the bottle, when I go to charge through the door that connects with the editor’s office - at the same moment someone pushes the door open from the other side and its leading edge connects hard with my forehead precisely at my left eyebrow.
The next thing I know, I’m being helped up. And then, against my protests, and with much blood running down my face, I am in a cab and then in A&E, where a long-suffering junior doctor puts the stitches in. So, today, when I see the faint white crenelation behind my left eyebrow, which I’ll catch only now and then in the shaving mirror, in certain lights, I will think to myself: Christmas 1985. Ballantine’s.
Whyte & MacKay, 1987. We are living in a basement flat in Ashley Street, near Glasgow’s Charing Cross. ‘We’ meaning seven of us – the largest flat share I have ever, will ever, be part of. The flat is huge and Labyrinthine. And very damp: on our first night there my girlfriend Vicky goes into the bathroom and screams. For the floor is covered in snails and slugs. Conditions deteriorate over the freezing cold winter at the end of ‘87. Our standard carry out at this point is a case of Lowenbrau (the big silver and blue cans), and a bottle of Whyte & MacKay. (I think the Haddows on Great Western Road had a deal on.) For Friday nights or special occasions, we simply double the quantity: two cases and two bottles.
‘Our standard carry out at this point is a case of Lowenbrau and a bottle of Whyte & MacKay. For Friday nights or special occasions, we simply double the quantity: two cases and two bottles.’
One Friday night, far into this mountain of strong liquor, Vicky goes to the bathroom. It is possible to see into our bathroom if you climb out of the living room window and crawl along a ledge about six feet above the gravel-lined pit that surrounds our basement dwelling. I decide that it will be the funniest wheeze imaginable if I crawl along the ledge and surprise Vicky in the act of her toilette. I do not quite factor in that I have drunk half-a-bottle of whisky and five or six cans or premium lager (a feat that would hospitalise me now.)
I fall off the ledge, tumble six feet down through the air and land hard on my left side, where a sharp stone cuts a chunk out of the underside of my left arm. So today, I look at the little crescent moon shape of tissue on the back of my left forearm and I think – winter of ’87. Whyte & MacKay.
Famous Grouse, Easter 1989. The Grouse had been my dad’s favoured tipple in his later years, when he’d made a little money. A proper working-class man’s idea of a top-shelf whisky, it was considered a cut above in our town. The king of the blended whiskies.
So, as I got a little older and slightly (though not much) better funded and a little (but not much) more discerning, Famous Grouse was what I gravitated towards. It was this we were drinking in Oxford at an end-of-tour party for the band I played guitar in at the time, having dropped out of university for rock and roll. But there were problems in the background, all of them, of course, entirely of my own making. I had begun an affair with the singer’s girlfriend (later my wife), the affair had been discovered and tensions in the band were running high.
‘Reader, I am no fighter. My punch was so badly thrown that the point of impact was the knuckle above my right thumb. Straight into my friend’s teeth.’
Given such circumstances, only a 22 year-old would think it a good idea to drink an entire bottle of Famous Grouse. The argument between me and the singer began in the kitchen. Over batteries for the guitar tuner or something (obviously it wasn’t really about that at all) and soon escalated. He got up and picked up the empty Grouse bottle and moved towards me. In my cheap whisky-addled mind it was simple: either I hit him, or he hits me with the bottle. Reader, I am no fighter. My punch was so badly thrown that the point of impact was the knuckle above my right thumb. Straight into my friend’s teeth. My fist came away with a good chunk of his front tooth embedded in it. And blood. A lot of blood. Mostly mine – for his tooth had been driven a good quarter inch into my flesh. So there, on my right thumb-knuckle today, 34 years later, is the tiny white worm of the scar.
Whenever me and the people mentioned in these stories get together now, we are older and wiser and wealthier, and we tend to do and drink the kind of things I talked about earlier: golf and fishing and fine dining and single malts. But it’s the blended whisky days of lunacy we talk about. So, do gentlemen prefer blends? I’m not sure about that. Do blends have more fun? Up until about the age of 25, you bet your damn life they do.
It’s written all over me.
John Niven is a Scottish author and screenwriter.
