One track mind

Photographer Euan Myles is the man behind the hugely successful Irn Bru ad campaign. But his latest work is fuelled by his passion for greyhounds and his desire to highlight the plight of dogs who are abused and destroyed once their racing career is over

GREYHOUNDS have suffered a spectacular fall from grace in the last few years. The racing dogs which were honoured by royalty for centuries can't even compete with the National Lottery on a Saturday night these days, as legions of punters turn their backs on decaying, wind-swept terraces for the comfort of the sofa.

The popular perception of greyhounds is of the snarling beasts pictured in betting shop windows, or on the cover of Blur's classic Nineties album Parklife. In photographs designed to raise gamblers' adrenaline levels, the dogs tear around a race track after a fake rabbit, the whites of their eyes glinting and their jaws straining against their wire muzzles. These icons of what looks suspiciously like canine aggression have hardly endeared greyhounds to a public hooked on Hamish Macbeth and his Wee Jock.

If anyone knows the power of those images, it is Euan Myles. The photographer behind Irn Bru's poster campaign, Myles has helped create some of the nation's most striking adverts. Among the series of posters that walks a fine line between humour and sheer tastelessness is the unforgettable cow poster, captioned "When I'm a burger, I want to be washed down with Irn Bru". Another, with the slogan "Irn Bru keeps me young and beautiful, unlike my daughter", was voted best poster of the century by the advertising bible, Campaign magazine.

After a decade of commercial photography for clients including IBM, Nissan and Viagra, 31-year-old Myles has made it his mission to put greyhounds back on their pedestal. He has begun with Trap 6, an exhibition of elegant photographs that should help shatter popular misconceptions of the dogs.

"Some people are really frightened of greyhounds - they imagine they are savage beasts," he says incredulously. "Everyone's got that Blur album cover-stroke-bookies' window image of them. Ladbrokes' window always had these dogs in full flight with their mouths open. They've got quite big teeth so they look quite dangerous, but in reality they're affectionate and incredibly mellow dogs."

Myles's show of six greyhound portraits is at Ink-Tank, a gallery- cum-design studio run by Lucy Harvey in Edinburgh's bohemian area of Stockbridge. The exhibition's clinical, white-walled setting is worlds away from the slowly decaying Shawfield stadium, Scotland's last bastion of dog racing, which is buried in Glasgow's East End. Each of Myles's photographs shows a greyhound standing on a pedestal; its proud stance reminiscent of the sleek, muscular horses portrayed in the paintings of 18th century artist George Stubbs.

"People don't realise the history of greyhound racing and the way it's changed," says Myles, sitting beneath his elegant photographs of racing dogs dressed in their brightly coloured, numbered bibs. "It was the sport of kings and the aristocracy were really into it. It was a massive sport akin to racing, but now it's got this very down- trodden, downbeat image.

"I wanted to take greyhounds and put them into a completely different environment, so people could see them as what I think they are - beautiful living sculptures."

EARLIER the same day, across town, Myles opens the door to his house just behind Easter Road, and a slim, leggy dog bounds past him to see who is invading its peace. This is Oscar, the lurcher who inspired Myles to photograph the greyhounds lining Ink-Tank's walls. Dog and owner usher me into their cottage-style home, which Myles explains was built in the 1840s and later surrounded by tenements on all four sides.

At one side of the entrance hall is the studio where he photographed the greyhounds, having paid their owners #100 a shot to let him use their dogs. The photographer tells of how his assistant kept the dogs' attention by waving a rabbit hair hat on the end of a fishing rod, while a disgruntled Oscar clawed frantically at the studio door.

Across the hall is a dining room where the walls are crammed with paintings and photographs. A tartan rug flung over an armchair marks Myles's territory, right in front of the television, while Oscar's bed is at the other side of the room. As the pair settle into their respective corners, Myles describes how he discovered the lurcher three years ago in the Edinburgh Dog Home. The animal had been found running around the Edinburgh bypass, neglected and worn out, after days of scavenging.

"I've always loved greyhounds and whippets," says Myles, glancing over at his pet's naturally doleful expression. "I really needed some exercise, so I finally decided to get myself a dog. I was down at Portobello at the pound one day and saw Oscar. All the other dogs were going absolutely mental barking and he was sitting there really quietly in his cage. What I didn't realise was he had kennel cough so he couldn't bark." Myles laughs at the memory of his mistake and adds: "I took him on."

The legacy of Oscar's plight is that he can't walk past a bin bag without tearing it open. "He's got a real thing about dustbins because he was living on the street for a while," says Myles. "He's always eating things that he shouldn't. He's a total scavenger."

Oscar's story isn't far from that of the abandoned racing greyhounds who make the headlines in the regional press year after year. Greyhounds are retired from racing at four or five years old, or whenever they pick up leg injuries on the tight bends of Britain's less dog-friendly tracks (Shawfield stadium is praised by greyhound lovers for its more gentle curves). Those dogs not lucky enough to be found homes by responsible owners or greyhound charities are put down or dumped at the roadside. Only three months ago, a greyhound bought for #10,000 was abandoned bleeding and battered near Airdrie after being hit by a car.

The charity responsible for rescuing it, The Retired Greyhound Trust, finds homes for about 80 of the dogs a year in Scotland - and 2000 a year Britain-wide. Don Ferguson, secretary of the organisation's Scottish branch, helps monitor the welfare of greyhounds that race at the NCRG-registered Shawfield. "I keep in touch with all the trainers and I've got a good idea of what they're doing with their dogs," says Ferguson, a retired civil servant. "Initially they have the responsibility to find homes for their retired dogs. Only then do we step in."

He stresses, though, that other dogs inevitably slip through the net. There are six independent tracks in Scotland outwith the Trust's control, running unlicensed races in a practice known as flapping. Although most owners involved in unlicensed races care for their animals, a minority see them purely as money-making machines and destroy or dump them once their racing days are over.

Myles is determined to help raise awareness of organisations like the Trust and the Greyhound Awareness League, another charity that finds homes for retired or abandoned racers. His love of greyhounds is rooted in their grace and their gentle, affectionate nature rather than their racing form, and he is appalled by the cruelty of the unscrupulous trainers who give the sport a bad name. "That whole side of it is awful and I'm not into going to dog racing for that reason," he says. "I'm into the dogs and that's it. They're beautiful when they race, but some people really look after their dogs and some don't."

Intent on proving there are good guys among the cowboys in a sport which is an increasingly forgotten slice of British culture, Myles takes me to meet the owners of Liberton Kennels on Edinburgh's southside. Ian and Janice Carmichael train greyhounds and race them at tracks all over Britain. Of the 30 greyhounds that live at the kennels, only half of them race - the rest are retired dogs the couple can't bare to be parted from. Some are destined for homes, if the right owners are found for them; the others will live out their days in Liberton's roomy kennels and grassy pens.

As we arrive at Liberton, greyhounds race across their pens to greet us, pushing their long, thin noses through the fences to be stroked. The Carmichaels walk down the path with three other dogs, their skeletal tails wagging furiously. The reality jars with the bookies' image of greyhounds with teeth bared and crazed eyes. Myles's face lights up as he sees his favourite hound, Archie, a retired four-year-old who outstripped his competitors at Liberton by winning greyhound racing's coveted St Mungo Cup. Janice is realistic about the sport, which she admits suffered with the death of Scotland's mining culture. "It was a miners' sport, so once the miners went, greyhound racing began disappearing," she says. "You've got to move with the times."

She and Ian are holding out for a new #20 million stadium being built at Wallyford, near Edinburgh. If it is given the go-ahead, it will be developed in the style of the Australian tracks, which combine dog racing with other attractions, including cafes, bars and leisure areas. They believe it would give the sport the shot in the arm it desperately needs.

According to Myles, such a supertrack is the only way to make greyhound racing seem remotely interesting to a population which sees it as outdated and unglamorous. He believes the sport has alienated its audience, not because of a media-fuelled concern for the dogs' welfare, but simply because people are bored with it.

"There's been a subtle change in our culture," he says. "It's not that greyhound racing is unacceptable, it's just not interesting. But if it's repackaged and promoted along an Australian style ..." He breaks off his sentence and shrugs, unable to get too passionate about a gleaming complex ultimately designed to make money.

MYLES'S interest in greyhounds is rooted in early childhood. The son of a Scottish father and English mother, he and his two brothers were raised in a hamlet in south Nottinghamshire. It was the perfect setting for dogs - and Myles's first choice was whippets. Later, when he left home for college, he handed his pets over to a retired miner whom he knew would care for them.

"I've always loved them," he enthuses. "Any dog in that family known as sight hounds - lurchers, deerhounds, Irish wolfhounds. My mum used to have a lurcher when she was young, and my ex- girlfriend's parents got one - a smooth-haired one called Pip, who I absolutely loved." He smiles mischievously and adds: "I really miss her, actually. She was my ideal dog."

His seemingly idyllic childhood was threatened by his parents' divorce when he was seven - his father left to join the medical corps of the army and settled in Germany, later moving back to England. His mother's determination to give her sons a happy life paid off. She gave the young Euan his first camera and urged him to take pictures, like his late grandfather David Myles, a doctor who was better known as a mountaineering photographer.

Myles's primary school education, at a tiny rural Church of England school with only 30 pupils, was followed by four years at a large comprehensive. It was only then that things began to go sour. "My primary school was like Cider With Rosie - a huge meadow to play in and all that countryside," he says. "Then I went to a huge comprehensive with lots of rough kids. Luckily I survived it by hanging around with the two toughest kids in the school. I found it all so brutal, awful. It was lots of bullying, with kids getting beaten up. I started playing truant and sleeping in, and getting involved with drugs."

His reading and writing suffered so much that Myles is still reluctant to read books. "I'm a bit dyslexic," he says. He left school at 16 and at his mother's insistence, spent a summer at the Findhorn Foundation, the spiritual community founded near Forres in Scotland's northeast during the Fifties. "I wasn't keen on going, but it was a life-changing experience," says Myles. "It wasn't like being at school - it was a place where everyone hugged you rather than gave you a whack in the face."

There, he learned how to use a dark room and began taking photographs in earnest. Returning home, he found a job as a photographer's assistant, taking pictures of pork pies, cigarettes and novelty mugs - "Nottingham's finest exports." After studying photography at college, he moved to Edinburgh to kickstart his freelance career, and began making his name in advertising and the arts. He gave the city's Traverse theatre some of its most striking poster images, which are to be exhibited there during the festival.

In 1990, he began working for the Leith Agency, creators of the Irn Bru adverts. Last month, he added to the collection, with a T In The Park poster showing two girls standing next to a condom machine. "The line was, Oh, damn, they've run out of Irn Bru flavour, something like that," he grins.

Then, three years ago, Myles began to lose faith in his photography. "To be honest, I got really disillusioned and down," he says. "I got into this when I was 21 and I just wish that I'd developed a bit slower. I started not enjoying taking photographs - it was all the other stuff, dealing with clients, chasing money and having people scream at you because something's not ready."

It took working on the greyhound exhibition to give him back his love of photography - "It has made it exciting again" - and he doesn't want to stop there. He plans to focus on the trainers, owners and stadiums for his next project.

Whether he can eclipse that enduring image of the snarling, wild- eyed brute in every betting shop window remains to be seen

Copyright 2000
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