FIVE-MINUTE INTERVIEW

NORMAN IN TALKING MODE

FIVE-MINUTES WITH NORMAN EVANS

Years ago, an American Sailor in Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, in full uniform, lurched towards me with a girl on each arm His grin told me, Look at me!  Ain’t I the lucky guy. 

The threesome were laughing and swaying along Byres Road.  Being a 16-year old and a highly impressionable yoof I was…well, highly impressed.  Here was a Yank in a high state of inebriation with wee Glasgow herries [whores] hanging on to his every smile and swagger; and he had all the charisma that any poor Glasgow punk could desire, especially if you wore the uniform, had the accent and the money that got you the chicks.

Not to be American, but to live the American dream in Glasgow with the language and style that those so cool guys stationed at the Holy Loch tending their nuclear submarines could instil in us was the ambition of all my peers.  We saw them in the movies – James Dean, Marlon Brando, Spencer Tracy, Paul Newman, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, Steve McQueen, Sidney Poitier were our heroes – and we swaggered out of cinema halls after watching The Great Escape, Giant, Rebel Without a Cause, Citizen Kane, etc. – as well as the programmes that were pumped out of tacky studios in US for TV: and we adopted their language and their cool.  Five shillings became a dollar as two and sixpence became a half dollar.  Words and phrases like cool cat and man, way and far out, groovy and totaled were the currency of speech that kept you in with the…well, in with the in crowd.

Like many Glaswegians in the 70s, Norman eventually left with his wife and two-children to live the American Dream – in Canada!  In retrospect, this has turned out to be a positive and successful move.  I’ve known Norman since I was pre-barmitvah, about – more than 50-years, and recently met up with him in his home town of Toronto.  

He had this to say:

I was born of the James Dean, Marlon Brando [scene], Norman says.  I had an American cousin in the American Air Force who came over in 1957 or ’56 in uniform and he was a big influence.  He came to my parents’ house in Abbotsford [in the Gorbals in Glasgow]. So, I always thought I was going to go to America.  And then Vietnam showed up – got in the way – and then I was caught in a dilemma because I always wanted to go America.  America had a huge influence.

THE INIMITABLE SPENCER

Later, Norman flipped a coin while in Piccadilly Circus, London, thinking he’d like to go to Israel or to America. But the air fares became more expensive to Israel because of the seasonal spring rise in fares.  He found out there were flights going to San Francisco and to Toronto. He chose Toronto. 

Norman, at this point in time, defines his life as perfect.  He says, I’m not searching for any happiness ever again. I have happiness, he states.  When I open my eyes I acknowledge that I’m alive. My father taught me, fundamentally, that I have everything that money can’t buy.

He defines his relationship with other people in Toronto as varied and the people he interacts with is at a pure level.  He feels that nowadays there is less of a business motive in his dealings with others.

He talks about the converged medium in order to communicate ideas.  The new medium is the combination of television, radio, internet and print. He says he came from an analogue world of printing and had to transform from the world of analogue to digital.  I’ve seen the re-definition of the paradigm as one of wysiwyg – “what you see is what you get” – which is  feeding on an unconscious response to “I want it when I want it” and maturing, hopefully, into a digital citizen world where it’s…”what you need is what you get”.

Dell takes converged systems to small sites 

Norman believes that nowadays people have evolved an attention span of a gnat and that the short transmitted format of radio is an underused and powerful medium and if you can transmit one-minute of your idea clearly and succinctly with a call to action…then that’s the way to communicate…we can sound-bite all of human knowledge as we know it into one-minute increments so that people can get what they need when they need it.

As he was involved to a large extent with the media, Norman has developed a clear-sighted appraisal of the past, the present and the possible future development of communication in a digital world.  His predictions about the future of communication are measured and likely to come about, if they haven’t already been assimilated into the collective unconsciousness of people.

How far on are we from our raw impression of the sight of that inebriated American sailor staggering along Sauchiehall Street?  

Well, after a whole bunch of wars and the leeching of American and “adversaries’” blood on the stages of several theatres of war, maybe the dream wasn’t as near to the expectation as we would have liked. But then, everything is relative: and in its own context, the positives for Norman have certainly surpassed the childish dreams of his youth.

BIODATA

1971 - 77 Creative Director/Owner Evans Advertising - Glasgow, Scotland
1977 - 79 Confederation Life Insurance - Financial Consultant
1980 - 82 Apple Corporate Retail Marketing SES Computing
1983 - 85 Tyme/VARNET/UniVARsity - Creative Marketing 
1984 - Founder Unix User Group Canada

1989 Published The Creative Marketers Handbook - PLAN THE WORK - WORK THE PLAN - STAR 2.0

1985 - Present - Founder The Creative Marketing Network, Inc.- Creative Director/ Marketing Strategist/Corporate Coach for various corporations and foundations, with a particular expertise in emerging technologies and transformational strategies.

A confirmed nowist.                     

THE GORBALS

SWEEPY WATCHING THE KIDS PLAY

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The Gorbals engendered a community that was largely able to overcome the gloominess of the slum dwellings . As seen so often in the impecunious universality of life, people were inordinately happy with their lot. The place, having belonged to the Lennoxes and subsequently the Elphinstones, it eventually grew to be a parish in 1771: a dense population comprising of tradesmen and mendicants, eased into 28 acres; and from abroad where the mines failed and the population dwindled in the villages and the towns of eastern Europe, economic migrants and refugees fleeing from barbarism escaped for an uncertain future into what was to become the cabbage patch of Europe. The result was a peculiar mix of nationalities, not unlike New York at the time, of the Irish, European Jews, Italians and Poles, living in the Victorian dwelling houses of tenements and terraced housing.

Castlemilk Place became Hospital Street nos 118-128 as St Ninian’s Croft became the rest of Hospital Street and Elphintone Cross became Gorbal’s Cross. Mysteriously to me, Kincaid and Lucknow were also part of Hospital Street at some time.

Hospital Street, to further my adumbration, is formed upon the site of St. Ninian's Leper Hospital, founded by Lady Lochow in 1350, her name suspiciously congruent with the Indian Lucknow.

Leprosy. I last saw the results of this disease in Pharphing in Nepal. Visiting a leper colony there were the families of the lepers, disfigured terribly with their vestigial limbs and suppurating eruptions. Further added to this was the complete castigation from society who saw this affliction as a punishment for sins committed in the past. This is kismet? Karma? Destiny? There but for the grace of whoever go I or you I thought.

And it was in Hospital Street where the ghosts came kicking and screaming out in the streets and I came, kicking a screaming (I hope) into the world at around 6.30 am, I am told, my aunt Rosie, a qualified midwife, no doubt wiping away the mucous and inevitable blood of childbirth from my body.