Behind the Portrait: Kev Kiernan

In the latest Behind the Portrait, long-time Southside activist and DJ, Kev us about his involvement in Love Music Hate Racism. Why he became a ‘recovering journalist’ and his experiences in New Orleans and Chicago.

As told to Devon McCole | Portrait by Simon Murphy

Kev is a long time activist who has been involved in local action groups in the Southside, including Love Music Hate Racism. He is also a DJ and ‘recovering journalist’, a job he got with no prior experience or education in journalism. These days Kev focuses more on his writing as a poet. He is working on a new book about his life and time spent in New Orleans and Chicago.

I grew up in Cumbernauld, which won the Carbuncle Award a few years in a row. The award is for Scotland’s most dismal town centre. It’s quite a rough place; drugs, alcohol, violence, that sort of thing but you learn to stick up for yourself in a way, not just physically but verbally.

I became a poet in Chicago. When I lived in the US for three years I got really sick, then heard two of my really close friends had died. I then learned my mum had cancer. When I was well enough to stand up again, I just started writing poetry to make sense of it all.

I arrived in Govanhill in the ‘90s, aged 19. I’ve lived on pretty much every street here. But I’m glad I grew up in Cumbernauld because it’s surrounded by countryside. I think it’s why I’ve got a real love for festivals and the outdoors. 

I tried to live in the West End and it was the loneliest six months of my life. I lived amongst students and old people and I was neither an old person nor a student. I quickly came back to Govanhill. 

Govanhill is the sort of place people claim as their own because people have fought to make it that way. The Govanhill Baths is a good example. It was a real hub in the community. We held that building for 146 days, it was the longest occupation of a building in the UK.

During the ‘Save Our Baths’ campaign,.. It was an amazing campaign to be a part of and the fact that we’ve now won it is amazing. It’s a success story, which is kind of unusual.

We fought Nazis in the streets. When I moved here there were lots of Kosovan refugees who were just getting dumped here and abandoned without support. They started getting a reputation for hanging around the streets and begging, some fascist types tried to come in and stir up hatred and racism. We’ve always managed to unite everybody against things like that. 

Govanhill’s hot shit now isn’t it? Everybody wants to live here. I don’t think it’s changed that much. What I’ve noticed in the last five years is quite a big influx of young people coming in, I think that’s fantastic. Say what you want about ‘hipsters,’ but I think it just adds to the diversity.

I feel like you can be yourself here and no one will bat an eye. If they do it’s usually with a smile. I’ve seen men walking down the street holding hands with each other many times over the past few years in Govanhill. I’m proud people have the confidence to do that in our neighbourhood. 

I was sitting outside MILK and this guy started chatting away. It was Simon Murphy. We walked round the corner and he was like, ‘that’ll do’. Then I had these really beautiful portraits in the post.

I was quite proud that ACAB was in the background of one of the photographs he took. It was dead funny, and totally accidental but on purpose. ACAB was one of the first DJ gigs I did in Cumbernauld. Whenever the cops would catch us fly-postering, they’d know it meant ‘All Cops Are Bastards,’ but we always came up with these funny acronyms to get into less bother. The best one was ‘All Cubes Are Boxes’.

They created this horribly named ‘war on terror’. There was a local group called Southside Against War that I joined in 2002. In 2003, we had a massive demonstration in Glasgow where about 100,000 people marched.

We organised a student walk-out of all the high schools. We were in our 20s and found ourselves standing outside playgrounds, leafleting young people saying, ‘On the day the war happens, walk out of school. We’ll have a demo.’ I can’t believe we got away with that.

All the parents got letters from the pupil’s headmaster warning them not to walk out. We told the pupils to bring their letters to the demo and they set fire to them live on STV.

There was a real sense of rebellion back then. It was a big ‘F you’ to the government. We’d never met anyone who was totally in favour of invading Iraq. I think people learned then that we do not live in a democracy, or at least not the democracy we believed we lived in.