4point3 collective on debut show Pylon

The Skinny talks to Graeme Cameron and Paul Montgomery of 4point3collective about creating, funding and appreciating their debut production, Pylon.

Feature by Amy Taylor | 13 Mar 2017

Inspiration, it is often said, comes at the strangest of times, and for Graeme Cameron, a dedicated runner and musician, a succession of injuries lead to an unexpected new focus. Unable to keep running after tearing cartilage in his hip, he took up cycling. “I started cycling my bike with one leg, and on my 31st birthday I cycled 100 miles with one leg,” he laughs. “And then I damaged that knee, so I couldn’t cycle and I couldn’t run! So, then I started doing Pylon!”

Cameron’s first play, which will be performed for one night only later this month at the Palace Theatre in Kilmarnock, began life as a book, which he began writing as he recovered from his injuries and corrective surgery. Pylon centres on allegations that the electricity pylons in the town's Shortlees estate, where Cameron grew up, were responsible for a spate of cancer diagnoses within the region. The stories first surfaced in the mid 90s, and made local and national news at the time, and during his convalescence, Cameron realized that he wanted to revisit the story that he remembered from his childhood.

“I wanted to do something that’s true to myself," says Cameron. "I grew up in Shortlees, where the pylons were... so I just wrote about that, and it just grew from there.” Eventually he approached fellow musician Paul Montgomery, where the book, admits Cameron, “fizzled out”. It became something else entirely; a live performance with music. “When we first started the idea,” explains Montgomery, “we were talking about almost doing like a slideshow presentation... with a wee bit of stand-up comedy and an acoustic guitar in front of 50 folk in a community centre!”

They quickly ditched the slideshow idea, but kept the music, and as they worked together, the ideas – and in particular, the music – flowed. As Cameron explains: “I actually wrote a couple of the songs just as a bit of fun. I wrote five songs in five days, and basically what happened is it just grew arms and legs, more and more people got involved.”

The more people that got involved, the more songs that were written, with Cameron admitting that he wrote 33 sings in total for the show, of which only eight are being used. He adds: "There’s only one from the original five that is getting used as well. It’s been hard work."

One year, many rewrites and one new theatre company – 4point3 Collective – later, the play is ready to make its debut. Completely financed by the Cameron family’s double glazing fund – “How we pitched this to Graeme’s wife was, if this is a success, the double glazing will be in a brand spanking new house, that’s how we managed to sell it to her”, giggles Montgomery – Pylon has grown to become a full-length performance. Montgomery describes the show as "a mix between a play, a live performance, a film and a theatre piece". He says: "We’re trying to mix every form of art form up on put it into the one play, that’s what we’re trying to do. But this is the first time we’ve done this, we don’t know the rules."

But more than 20 years after the events first unfolded, and the people of Shortlees began going public with their concerns about the health effects of living so close to electricity pylons, why has this story resurfaced? As Montgomery explains, it remains an incredibly personal topic, two decades on: "The reason that we’ve focused on the story of Pylon is because it’s obviously close to home. The real events it is based on, and I think, very importantly, it’s about people that we know. It deals with a lot of social commentary and working class people; there’s a lot of childhood memories for us and our families and how we’ve seen things unfold."

The personal nature of the play is plain to see. Although not based on any one story and featuring a fictitious character – David McFarlane, played by Montgomery – Pylon uses the tale of the Shortlees electricity pylons as the basis for something much deeper; the story, and the people behind the sensational headlines.

“I think what we try to do," says Cameron, “is talk about the community aspect of it. How a community deals with it, how working class folk deal with issues, how we deal with illnesses, we deal with it in a different way. David’s a working class guy, and you see his story, and how his health is affected, trying to deal with these situations, actually, more than people on the street.”

Although Pylon's focus is on the human cost, Cameron is keen to stress that the story will not focus on the pylons or the allegations at length. “We kind of frame it against that, that’s not necessarily the story we tell. There’s obviously elements of that (but) it’s not a documentary, we don’t necessarily document the comings and goings of that story.”

Both Cameron and Montgomery say the play is not supposed to answer any questions, but instead leave the audience to make up their own minds. "We just stick the questions out there," explains Cameron. "We're not here to say this or say that, you make your own opinion.”

While the process of creating Pylon has had its challenges, from editing a mammoth 33 songs down to a much more palatable eight to creating a play from the beginnings of a novel – “I’m a fireplace fitter," Cameron laughs, "do you know what I mean? I’m just a normal guy, right?” – the final product has been the result of a year of hard work that Montgomery says they’ve both found it hard to switch off from, especially when they’re trying to balance it with their own lives.

“We find it hard to take a day off because we’re like, 'Do you know what? There’s something we could be doing, we could be working on this, we could be making this better'. So, having to balance that up with living your normal life so to speak, it has been quite tricky.”

Cameron admits that the play has taken up a lot of their time. “I don’t know how much time we’ve spent on it, it must be hundreds of hours. Sometimes me and Paul sit for about six hours and we write five lines, but there’s not one word in that script that we haven't sat and gone 'is that the right thing? Why are we saying that?'

“We’ve kept working on this so hard,” Montgomery adds, “I’m proud of this, I think it’s going to represent us in the right way and I’m really, really, really proud of that.”


Pylon, 31 March, 7.30pm, Palace Theatre Kilmarnock, sold out

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