Unraveling the Mystery Behind Glasgow City Centre's 'Silent Raver'

Every city has its gallery of local 'characters'. The rogues and loudmouths, the charmers and chancers, the just-about-outsiders and semi-mythical apparitions that somehow manage to capture and explicate a place better than any Rough Guide or Big Red Tour Bus.

In a nation that treasures the faintly bleached, faintly boring, faintly conservative idea of 'eccentricity'—the kind that smirks approvingly at homemade tie dye t-shirts and waves your uncle's casual racism away as a delightful quirk—these are the genuine outliers and societal transgressors treading and occasionally overstepping the fine-spun tightrope between genuine affection and genuinely unkind mockery. One part myth, one part shared memory, one part genuinely unaccounted for, they occupy plus-sized positions in so many of our responses to the cities we inhabit.

Bradford had its JesusMan, Bristol has Big Jeff, Norwich boasts its own Puppet Man, and London's history is crammed chock-full of a constantly refreshed and replenished cast. And contemporary Glasgow, dear old Glasgow town, has the Silent Raver, Mr Leo Mushet. Anyone who's spent any real period of time in the city will immediately know who he is and what he does. Even if you haven't, it's not much of a stretch to work it out.

Dressed in neon clothing, occasionally with—and occasionally without—glow-sticks, one earphone dictating whatever tune he's compelled by, limbs shifting into angles most could only dream of, he is, quite literally, a one man city centre rave. Yet little was known of his story, until last week, which saw Mr Mushet give an interview to Glasgow Live, an online publication covering all things, yes, Glasgow.

"I just love to dance, I always have," he told the publication. "I used to do the same in Edinburgh on Princes Street and on busses and (in) shopping centres." The 46-year-old raises money for several different charities through his steadfast raving, with one particularly close cause being cancer research charities. His sister Elizabeth died from Leukemia at just 12-years-old.

Yet, even in a city whose own aggressively marketed moniker is "People Make Glasgow", it's not quite right to suggest that Leo's story is purely one of unambiguously recognised local treasure. He records instances of negativity and abuse, with people calling him a "junkie, or a nutcase"—instances that have made him wanted to pack in his public raving days for good.

Despite the public rhetoric and self-congratulatory myth building, Glasgow can be a desperately unforgiving, cruel city, particularly for its vulnerable. The idea that the city is somehow more accepting, and more "friendly" towards its local characters is one that bears very little scrutiny. And if people really do make Glasgow, then surely Leo Mushnet is a perfect fit for local canonisation—the wry, uninhibited raver in a city of minimal pretension. But when are things ever that simple?

Maybe then it's a matter of personal redemption. Maybe there's no need to become a local treasure. Leo acknowledges his previous battles with drugs and addiction, while a brain injury sustained in a "bad accident" in 2005 acted as a turning point in his life. Perhaps he dances for something a little greater than public approval.

Maybe, despite the occasional negative comment or unkind word, it's enough that, in Leo's words, "people say they love to see me dance, I don't want to stop so I never will. People can say what they want but I won't change."

And nor should he. A city that prides itself on a carefully cultivated, carefully exported, occasionally quite smug, reputation as a northerly club culture utopia can hardly do with denigrating its genuine transgressors and embodiments of what the 80K-a-year civic marketers would call 'Genuine Glasgow'. Simply put, like all the best in this strange, wonderful city, Mr Leo Mushnet does not give a fuck. Where that clarity of purpose might take him? Who knows. He has a singular mission; it is to rave silently, wildly. It might be high summer, it might be a sub-zero November night, but that mission will be achieved.

So here's to you Leo Mushnet, the silent raver and silent hero of Glasgow city centre. Even if your favourite song is "Party in the USA", it still seems fitting that you "change the words to Party in Glasgow, as that's what I love to do". The day your fist pumps stop illuminating the Buchanan Street drabness will be a dark day indeed.

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