The thwup-thwup-thwup of a helicopter announces another load of oil workers returning from the North Sea. It’s been three weeks since they last stepped foot on shore. Any minute now, they’ll file into The Spider's Web, right next to Aberdeen Airport, for one last pint or four.
“A Tennent's,” they'll say, in Scottish, Geordie and Liverpudlian accents, before dispersing across Scotland, northern England and beyond.
No British city is more dependent on a single industry than Aberdeen. Since the UK’s first offshore oil licences were granted in 1964, an entire economy has grown up around the rigs: hotels, taxi firms, cafés, strip clubs and, of course, pubs like The Spider's Web. It’s not called “Europe’s oil capital” for nothing.
In Aberdeen, even the word drilling has acquired a life of its own.
There is the literal drilling that transformed the city into one of the richest places in Britain. There is also the cruder kind of drilling, the language of its sex industry, which flourished alongside the offshore boom. And then there is drill music, the new soundtrack to a generation coming of age in a city whose fortunes are no longer rising.
Today, those declining fortunes feel particularly acute. North Sea production has slumped, and whether Britain should keep drilling at all has become one of the defining political arguments of our time. If the rigs eventually fall silent, what else will remain?
I spent a week in Aberdeen's pubs, strip clubs and recording studios, trying to find out.
Drilling for oil
It didn’t take long for him to become known as Monsoon Molloy: every time he stepped onto a rig, the rain seemed to follow. But in 1981, standing on a helipad waiting to fly offshore for the first time, he was simply Jake Molloy, a 21-year-old plumber from Dundee.
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