The Thrill of It All

by Joseph O'Connor

  We booked the rental in Eric’s name because we didn’t want attention. There’d been profiles in the New York tabloids, we’d appeared on CNN. Montauk had a used record-and-book store, a nice bluesy little place, adorned with posters of Fats Domino, Big Mama Thornton and Studs Terkel, and our album appeared in its windows the morning after our arrival with a handwritten sign reading ‘Welcome, The Ships’. I’d notice in a clam-bar or dawdling the antique shops with Jools and Ivelisse that people might be looking or nudging. There’s a way of making a firework display of your inconspicuousness, but we tried not to indulge in such a kickable form of attention-seeking. Seán or I wouldn’t don sunglasses indoors unless at gunpoint. If a kid approached for an autograph, we’d give it and make pleasantries, then go back to the seafood chowder.

  The Sunday morning came. I remember it was grey and drizzling, the way it gets in a Montauk wintertime. We’d half planned to catch a movie in East Hampton but decided not to bother. Instead we lazed around the house, played a record or two, cooked a big lunch of crayfish, opened wine. The weather cleared a little. We read. Ivelisse had a college assignment to finish so we left her for an hour while the three of us went walking at Gin Beach on Block Island Sound. When we got back, she told us Fran had called from New York and had sounded ‘a bit freaked’. Could we call him back urgently? Like, now.

  I tried, but couldn’t raise him. The answering machine at the house was switched off or wasn’t working. I don’t know. I was worried. It wasn’t like him to call. In truth, I hadn’t realised he even knew where we were. Seán shrugged off my anxiety, said it was typical of Fran to make a problem, he’d be afraid we might be happy without him. But I could see that Seán, too, was a bit concerned. And I’d a fair enough notion as to why.

  I will never in my life say a word against Trez, but the fact is that her behaviour had been troubling. Whether it was the tension between the rest of us that was getting her down, or the strain of combining single motherhood with ludicrous amounts of travel, she’d become a person of intense privacies, and it was unlike her. She’d spend hours in her basement, where she had a phone line of her own installed, and if you happened to drop down you’d hear her talking quietly to someone whose name she wouldn’t mention. Asked to come out to the island with us, she said she didn’t want to get in the way, the weekend would be ‘too couply’, and anyway she was busy with the little one. There was some wooer knocking around, as there usually was, and she planned on spending a day or two at his place. For some reason, I didn’t believe her. Neither did Seán. But by then she wasn’t a person you questioned.

  By mid-afternoon, Seán managed to raise Eric’s PA, a nice guy whose boyfriend lived on Perry so he often hung out in the Village at weekends. He said he’d call to the house and see if Trez or Fran were there. Neither of them was. That scared me. I put it to Seán that we should leave immediately, head back to New York, but he said I was overreacting and Jools said the same. Probably Fran had called because of some major domestic crisis like not being able to figure out how the microwave worked. They both had a chuckle at that.

  I wouldn’t call it an argument, but a kind of edgy squabble arose between Seán and me. He was smiling when he came out with the stuff, but he came out with it all the same. I was wedded to fukken Fran, was behaving like ‘his wife’, would never realise what a treacherous prick Fran actually was. It boiled up, as these things do when tired participants have been drinking. Jools and Ivelisse looked uneasy. I said a couple of things in Fran’s defence, which was probably unwise, not because I didn’t mean them but there’s a time and a place. I didn’t understand why we were talking about him at all. Now, of course, I do.

  ‘You’d want to hear what he says about you, Rob. You wouldn’t be so concerned. This bruv-affair of yours might be over.’

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘No, come on. Spit it out. What are you, the fukken expert?’

  ‘Seán,’ Ivelisse said. ‘Let’s not go there. Okay?’

  ‘I think we should cool it,’ Jools said.

  It was like being in a bad Woody Allen movie all shot in one room. Well, you don’t like the feeling that everyone’s in on the secret and you’re not. Seán went out on his bike and didn’t come back for a while. Ivelisse said she didn’t want to talk.

  At about six that evening we happened to be sitting on the deck, Jools and I, playing chess, when we noticed a helicopter in the distance. That wasn’t a totally unusual sight. Sunday evenings, the skies around Montauk would buzz like a hive as the weekend bohos choppered back to Manhattan. But this helicopter didn’t seem to be making for the airstrip. It hovered for a couple of minutes like a malevolent hornet. Then it turned and took a course right towards us. It landed on the baseball diamond directly across the highway from our rental. You’ve guessed who stepped out. You’re right.

  He told us Trez was okay, just ‘strung out and tired’ and had returned to England with the baby for a few weeks. He was in a very strange mood, wouldn’t come into the house. I felt the cause wasn’t drugs this time – his eyes were clear – but he was jumpy, a bit suspicious, watching over his shoulder. He asked if I’d go for a stroll with him. There’s a public beach called Ditch Plains near the town, and that’s where our last walk happened.

  It was a cold November evening and the waves were grey and high. We must have talked about Trez, but I don’t remember the details. Was I doing okay for money? Had I thought of seeing an accountant? I should get myself ‘straightened up bread-wise’.

  Then he said he was buying a hotel ‘as a business investment’. That one, he told me, pointing across the back lots at a dilapidated inn that was indeed for sale that winter. It was a beaten-up ruin, a surfers’ hangout from the fifties. The price was three million. He had it ‘in cash’. It needed renovation, at a further cost of ‘four or five mill’, but he hoped to have that amount soon. I tried to hide my shock, and I believe I did a good job. I’d seen him in many masks and disguises down the five years I’d known him, but Fran as property developer was a tough ask.

  An hour later we were drinking margaritas on Gosman’s Dock, the seagulls flapping about us and occasionally pecking at our bowls of nachos, when a song came on, one of that season’s biggest hits. I knew the song. You know it yourself. You’d dance to it, even now, if you were tipsy at any birthday party or wedding where the music of the eighties might be played. It was by the telegenic East London sextet Böyzll-b-Böyz, a gruesome number called ‘Big Strong Luvvah’.

  These days, experience has coaxed me into the mildly accepting tolerance it is wise to observe in the face of realities you can’t do anything to prevent. Even the early Beatles released teenybop material, perhaps aware that if you can reduce an adolescent to smouldering mists of arousal it might set you up in time for ‘Hey Jude’. Irving Berlin bought several mansions from the rhyming of ‘moon’ and ‘June’. Elvis wasn’t averse to a hiccuping croon about puppies when the Colonel put his balls in a vice. And if something as innocent as music makes the listener fleetingly happy in this lonesome vale, who are we to complain, after all? At the time, however, this wasn’t how I saw things. I regarded the harmless Böyz as an affront to civilisation. I detested the nöise they emitted.

  Their cover of Bill Withers’s ‘Lovely Day’ had spray-gunned a Monet with syrup. The wrecking ball had been taken to Suzi Quatro’s ‘Devil Gate Drive’, and, horror of shuddering horrors, Marc Bolan’s ‘Get It On’, a masterwork they transformed from its sexy dirty sweetness to a clean, shorn mutant that only an anaemic virgin could dance to. But ‘Big Strong Luvvah’ seemed to me evidence that humanity was beyond redemption. It topped the chart in eleven countries around Europe, went to two in the UK, four in Australia, three in Japan and Brazil. Thank God, it was banned in Communist China, a fact that had me reaching in gratitude towards the Little Red Book. As a lover of popular music in all its multifarious forms, I find it hard to unremittingly dislike any song. But this was lik
e listening to an assault on a well-meaning octogenarian nun who doesn’t quite know where she is.

  Up it loomed at Fran and me from the restaurant’s outdoor speaker-system, booming and pummelling to disguise its lack of soul, luscious with a disco bass-beat robbed from Nile Rodgers and Chic that went all the way up its undeserving, hairless legs to its pert little synthesised butt. Jayo, Joey, Jason (the quiet one), Justin, Dustin and Darren. I wish every one of them a happy retirement on the pro-celebrity golf course. A böy got to do what a böy got to do. But back then, I was a Partisan, and I loathed them.

  I’m your BIG STRONG LUVVAH

  And there’ll nevvah be ANNUTHAH

  So come over and DISCOVAHH

  All the luv ah got for YOU.

  Coz the other night I METCHA

  And I never can FORGETCHA

  So come over and I’ll LETCHA

  Do the stuff you wanna do.

  The hen party in the restaurant were gittin on down, stabbing their fluttering fingers at the gleeful bride-to-be, who was miming the lyrics into a lobster she was clutching to her lips and shaking her puff-skirted bootie. In my recollection, which is obviously suspect, the wait-staff were singing. Even the lobster was singing. A conga line began, and my will to live left me. Nice maids of honour pirouetted, flashing their garters, boogieing with the barkeeps, doing the bump with the maître d’. I didn’t like to see drunk people having fun, especially if the fun was mildly sexual or transgressive, which fun by definition often is. It made me feel I was missing out. No prig is happy. He smiles once a day to get it over with.

  ‘You look like Maggie Thatcher sucking piss off a nettle,’ Fran said. ‘What’s your problem? It’s only a song.’

  I don’t know, but his insouciance shot out my tyres, the way a bullet you don’t expect always does. I started into the usual default-mode guff I propounded in those days, the craft, the art, the necessary doom, something about Jim Morrison and Rickie Lee Jones, something about Randy Newman. After five or six margaritas, I could become more intolerant than I felt, especially if I had the idea that someone was getting on my case. It was a frequent stratagem of Fran’s to try and screw you up by arguing a cage-rattling standpoint you knew he didn’t believe. In truth, this was his hobby. Arguing was his bingo. The only way you could score a victory was not to play the game. But that left you with the reduced options of the guy who walks off the field with the ball. I remember wishing Seán or especially Trez were with me right then. They’d have known what to say. They’d have said it with style. Maybe it’s better they weren’t.

  ‘It’s a song I don’t happen to like,’ I said. ‘There’s enough shite in the world already.’

  ‘Reckon our stuff is better?’

  ‘I guess so. You don’t?’

  ‘Better’s a word. A song is a song.’

  ‘Thanks for the clarification. I’m grateful.’

  He chuckled into his drink. A new number came on. The hen party sat down to affectionate applause, the kind you sometimes hear in America for people who pretend they’re crazy characters. Fran wasn’t clapping. He looked at me.

  ‘That song you reckon you’re above? Got summat to tell you. I wrote it.’

  ‘Go piss up a rope,’ I laughed.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Don’t give a toss what you believe. Believe what you want. But I wrote that song. Took me twenty-two minutes. And it’s gonna buy me a hotel. So fuck you.’

  ‘Terrific,’ I said. ‘I hope you enjoy it.’

  ‘Write me a hit, Rob, then give me your thoughts. Till then, keep ’em up your arse. You fukken passenger.’

  We managed the next hour, and a couple more drinks, I think because neither of us wanted to lose face. Also, and it’s not a small thing, we loved one another. I don’t think I’d ever felt as close to him as on that night when he cut me to the core, strange as that might sound. We talked about a song we’d recorded the previous fortnight. It was close, Fran felt, but wasn’t quite there. We’d remix it the following week. He’d value my input. We talked of the new album, the tour we’d been planning, 97 dates, all over the world, kicking off at the Bernabéu Stadium, Madrid in January. We’d need to ensure Trez had all the help she needed. Being a mother must be tough. We should care more.

  I gave him a ride to the station on my Harley. Or we walked. I don’t remember. I was drunk by then, so perhaps I didn’t take the bike. But the last sight, I do remember.

  He hugged me, said he was sorry for having spoken unkindly about ‘that other thing’, said he’d see me in New York at the rehearsal session when I got back on the Tuesday, and went into the station quickly because the midnight train was hooting for departure. I recall him waving from a window as the train pulled away. Perhaps already in his pocket was the statement that would be released to the press next morning, saying the tour was cancelled, ticket sales would be refunded, the Ships were over, ‘if they ever existed’. There would be no rehearsal on Tuesday. He was in Los Angeles with his lawyers. I didn’t see him again for nine years.

  Next time I did, he and I were in a courtroom in London, where he was suing me to give him back copyrights on songs he felt I hadn’t helped him compose. Eric was dead by then. Seán and Trez gave evidence in my favour. I don’t think Fran looked at me once throughout the two weeks it took to hear the case, which I lost on a contractual technicality.

  By his side as the verdict was announced was his wife of some years. The mother of his three children. Jools.

  PART TWO

  A Day in the Life

  Final words? Don’t have none. Said enough already. I’ll say goodbye with a story about Thomas Moore, you know, the great 19th century songwriter? Him and Lord Byron are sat by the Thames. Beautiful summer morning. Everything’s quiet. Then this pleasure-boat goes past and it’s chock full of day-trippers, all singing away, one of Moore’s Irish Melodies. Poor old Byron turns to Moore with a wistful look. ‘Ah, Tom,’ he says. ‘That’s fame.’

  FROM FRAN’S FINAL INTERVIEW

  November 2012

  THERE ARE PEOPLE who reverence pop music and observe its important dates. The birth of a major songwriter, the death of a guitarist. This year marked the fortieth anniversary of Roxy Music’s first album, the fiftieth of ‘Love Me Do’, the sixtieth of the Gibson ‘Les Paul’, the twentieth of the passing of those Chaucers of the blues, Willie Dixon and Champion Jack Dupree. Ten years ago this Christmas, Joe Strummer left us, encountering in that otherworld of beautiful imaginings a trio of then recently departed champs: Waylon Jennings, Dee Dee Ramone and the Who’s John Entwistle, most mesmerising bass guitarist ever born. I knew those three gentlemen slightly and like thinking of them jammin’ with Joe. I envisage Paradise as a bit like the town of Carshalton in Surrey – nice, neatly mown, ever-so-slightly dull. But that’s a foursome could rock Heaven’s golf club.

  Pop is not a religion, but it has a little canonical calendar of its own, the moments when we remember the thunderous icons and lesser-known prophets, the shouters and pouters and heroes and whores who walk the tattered storybook of the devil’s own music as the fishermen once walked another scripture. What’s the Bible but a clutch of rants about wastrels who wouldn’t do what they were told, God’s Exile on Main Street or Blonde on Blonde? Well, the chilly month in which I write sees another small milestone, hardly worth noticing, for which few candles will be lit.

  It’s been twenty-five years since the Ships went down. Quarter of a century. Rest in Peace.

  I’m now forty-nine. Welcome to my houseboat. She’s a twenty-foot barge on the Grand Union Canal in west London. Pull yourself a cushion. Take the weight off. There’s Thai tea in the pot, over there on the stove. If you feel like a smoke, no one’s looking.

  I’ve a settle-bed inside and you’re welcome to stay. It’s ancient but unbelievably comfortable. There’s a pleasant walk I was half thinking of doing in the morning, from here along the leafy towpath, past Regent’s Park Zoo
. See how you feel. I might just make breakfast. My coffee’s pretty good, and I bake my own rolls. You’ve not lived until you’ve savoured an omelette on a Sunday morning canal in London, the moorhens whistling and the silence of traffic stilled. Sunrise is beautiful here.

  A word on my respected neighbours. They tend to have a story. How shall I put this so you’ll understand what I mean? Say few of these pasts would be centred on a double-ring ceremony and a bungalow in the unimpeachable suburbs. John, two moorings down, is seventy and tends gardens in Maida Vale. As a young man in Wales he served seven years for armed robbery. I would trust him to babysit my child. Indeed, I’ve done so. Mary and Mary wouldn’t mind me telling you they were at one time nuns. Paul and Dennis met in the army. They’re both carpenters. We have neighbours who work in offices and bicycle shops and cafés, but they’re of that particular stamp of reserved English non-conformism that prefers not to sleep in fixed places. We look out for each other. It’s a pleasant place to live. Perhaps the knowledge that by nothing more complicated than the unfastening of a knot you can be gone to new moorings in a matter of hours is the reason why nobody leaves. Impermanence seems to have fostered that awful word, community, a word no one around here would ever use. Invited to become an officially registered Housing Association, which no doubt would bring advantages among the snowstorms of paperwork, we voted unanimously not to. There’s a set of written rules but no one’s seen it for years. Everyone knows what they are.

  Here I washed up, when my life hit the rocks, to this archipelago of old longboats not far from central London. Shelter from the Storm, as Rabbi Dylan once said. I found mildness in canal water and the nesting of swans, the scrupulous tact of quiet neighbours.