Mothers and Sons

by Colm Toibin

  Julie and Lisa worked out their harmonies by instinct, from trial and error. Although they both had taken piano lessons and been taught the rudiments of music theory, they used none of that in their singing. Now they watched as their two new colleagues had a name for everything as they arranged a set of songs. Shane turned out to know intimately an entire body of work he still insisted he despised – the songs of Tim Hardin, Tom Paxton, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. Sometimes he would take one of Cohen’s more doleful tunes, or one of Joni Mitchell’s sillier songs, and exaggerate their worst qualities to the accompaniment of a mandolin.

  Then it turned out he also knew classical music.

  ‘It was the Brits,’ he said in an even more pronounced Northern accent than usual. ‘They taught us everything we knew. You folks in the Free State don’t know nothin’.’

  They found him strumming a tune on his mandolin, making it slow and melancholy and then fast. It was a melody they did not recognize. They stopped and watched him as he sat hunched on the chair, alert to the fact that he was performing now, offering sudden variations, but coming back all the time to the slow haunting melody they had heard at the beginning.

  ‘It’s just a wee tune,’ he said and put the mandolin away.

  ‘We know that,’ Julie said, ‘but what is it?’

  ‘Just a song I picked up.’

  ‘With words?’

  He glanced up at her, serious.

  ‘You want me to sing it?’

  ‘That’s what we pay you for,’ Julie said.

  Lisa and Phil stood back as Shane began to strum again, this time with more uncertainty, seeming to try out a number of keys and different ways into the melody. Then he started to sing, and the song, Lisa, realized, was a classical song.

  It was only in the second verse that he moved out of a classical mode, stopped sounding like an altar boy and began to riff on the melody, singing in an American accent, his tone slow and dark like a blues singer. Sometimes the mandolin failed him and he stopped playing; other times he had stretched the tune too far and he stopped singing and tried to recapture the melody on the instrument.

  ‘Can you give me the mandolin,’ Phil asked, ‘and you try it on the guitar?’

  Shane nodded and handed him the mandolin, crossing the room to fetch the guitar which he set to tune. By the time he was ready, Phil was playing the exact melody, but had somehow, in a way that Lisa did not understand, made it sound like an Irish tune. They began to work together, finding a key and watching each other at intervals as they strove to find a tempo. Shane, once more, started to sing, this time more simply, as if he meant the words.

  ‘Who wrote the song?’ Julie asked, when they had finished.

  ‘Handel,’ Shane said.

  ‘As in Handel’s Messiah?’ Julie asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He’s dead and he has no live relatives,’ Phil said, ‘so he won’t mind us making a pig’s mickey out of his song.’

  THIS WAS THE SONG they sang on The Late Late Show; it became their signature tune. For the first album they added new versions of Irish songs and Irish versions of modern songs, including a rendition in four-part harmony of ‘Lady Madonna’. For their second album they signed with a small British record company. The sound they made was new but closer to what was happening in England than in Ireland, where their work was too hybrid to be respectable and not hip enough to be very popular. So they played the clubs in England, turning up where they were asked, travelling the motorways and staying in cheap hotels. After the first six months, Julie agreed that they could share the takings, and that future decisions could be made by all four of them, at least in theory. In practice, everything was decided by Julie and Phil.

  Most of the time they sang into one microphone. They were utterly dependent on each other when they stood on the stage, and, even though the music was rehearsed, in order to have any life it had to allow for chance. They each had to concentrate fiercely, listen with care and be ready to respond. Usually, they were led by Julie’s moods, because Julie’s voice was the strongest, it was often what people came to hear. Lisa never minded how little she herself was noticed. When they found a solo song for her, she was uneasy about taking the limelight, always glad when it was over.

  Phil was more stable than Shane, had no temper they ever saw, his moods never changed. A girlfriend appeared regularly, she was from near his home town. He never mentioned her, but paid her complete attention even in the hard hours after a concert when there was much distraction. Shane, it seemed to Lisa, fell in and out of love with girls who already had boyfriends or were married or were unavailable. One or two of them enjoyed backstage and the parties, but appeared to find the prospect of being alone with Shane less enticing. Shane’s troughs in love were like Julie’s periods, they were picked up by the microphone, they immediately were relayed to the other singers who had to compensate, or else they could appear as brilliant riffs or changes in register, which the others would have to follow.

  Once their second, more sophisticated album was released, small success beckoned. They were almost fashionable, especially their songs in Irish which, Lisa remembered, English audiences seemed to love. They were called a contemporary band rather than a folk group. Even John Peel approved of them and played a track from their album a few Saturdays. Alan Price played a single from it on his show. They had cult status, but there was always the possibility that they could become popular. It would take the right song, some luck, and, it was suggested, a manager, but Lisa always knew that Julie would not be able to work with a manager.

  The song that nearly made them stars was the one that Shane detested above all. It was Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’. No one at that time, Lisa remembered, had noticed the song much or made cover recordings of it. Phil and Shane, despite Shane’s hatred for manufactured sadness, as he called it, worked at isolating the melody, discovered that by leaving some parts bare and unadorned and filling other parts with voices, echoes, instruments and harmonies, the song could be made very powerful. For once they had a good recording studio and a sound engineer who liked their work.

  Lisa was surprised the first day when Julie asked them if she could sing it alone, without any flourishes or accompaniment, and if they could record her first take. Phil and Shane were impatient, they had worked out where to put the emotion and when to pull back, they were busy making a map of the song and they did not want Julie to sing until they were ready. She still wanted to do it now.

  Lisa had never, until that morning, stood back and observed her sister. But as Julie began to sing, she demanded full attention. She put no effort into the melody at all, instead she concentrated on the words, using her voice at its huskiest, the voice of a woman who has been up all night smoking and drinking. Lisa loved how she sang it, wished her sister would let her in on one of the verses to accompany her in a light harmony. She could see, however, that Shane was irritated by the unaffected display of emotion. When it was over, Phil walked across the studio and stood in front of Julie and bowed. It was, Lisa thought, the best piece of singing Julie had ever done and it was recorded that morning, even played back a couple of times over the next few days; but it was never released. Lisa wondered if, more than thirty years later, it lay in some dusty archive of out-takes and unrecorded reels made by long-forgotten singers, but she supposed it would have been thrown out as the new technology took over and the band’s small fame faded to nothing.

  Phil and Shane decided that only Julie and Lisa would sing on the track, working on many takes of Julie opening the song, using echo effects and laying down track over track so that at times she sang alone and unaccompanied and at other times in many layers to the accompaniment of her sister, a cello, a saxophone and a mandolin. They asked Lisa to go through the whole song singing with Julie but at the same pitch using a separate microphone. She found it almost impossible not to harmonize, she had to let Julie guide her, pull her along like a small boat. When she had finished, they to
ld her that they had, in fact, recorded only her, and for one of the verses they were going to cut between the two singers. When she went to listen to the tape, she was amazed at how close her voice was to her sister’s, almost as deep and strong in certain sections.

  The track they made was seven minutes long, twice the length of a normal single. Because the band was winning the confidence of the label, and because Sandy Denny had built up a following and Fairport Convention had had a hit with ‘Si Tu Dois Partir’, it was agreed that it could be released with an Irish song performed by all four of them on the other side. No one expected much radio play; instead, they hoped that a new tour with Martin Carthy as support might help the sales.

  Lisa remembered that they were somewhere in the north of England when they were told what John Peel had said about their new recording. He introduced them as a cutting-edge acoustic band, brave enough to release a seven-minute single, making a new sound. He made them seem almost hip and counter-culture. And then the following week ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ was played just after midnight on Radio Luxembourg. A week later, their single was hovering outside the Top Fifty. It began to be played on Radio 1, mostly being faded out after the first three minutes.

  On one of those nights when their single was in the Top Thirty, two men from a small independent record company and an American journalist came to a packed-out concert in Glasgow and appeared backstage later. For the rest of the tour Shane did imitations of them offering an instant contract and top billing with the Rolling Stones as support.

  ‘You want Carnegie Hall? We get you Carnegie Hall. You wanna make an album with Jackie Kennedy? We fly her in. You wanna be more famous than Jesus Christ? You wanna meet Peter, Paul and Mary?’

  He could not be stopped.

  Instead of offering a contract, however, or wishing to talk business, they came backstage looking for sex, it seemed to Lisa. At least one of them did, making suggestions to her about where they might go once they had had a few drinks. She told him Phil was her boyfriend. When he asked if Julie were attached to Shane, she laughed in his face and said she did not think so.

  They never saw the executives again. It was the journalist, edgy, talkative and knowledgeable about the business, who turned up in London as soon as they were back there; he wanted to attend one of their recording sessions to write a long article about them which he would sell, he said, to a magazine back home. His name was Matt Hall. He did not have a sense of humour; he was skilled at displaying resentment when he thought he was being mocked or ignored. Since Shane mocked him half the time and the others ignored him when they could, he had many opportunities to show how he felt, his face pale, his brow furrowed, his broad frame almost threatening. He would stand alone, deep in thought, his eyes fixed on a point on the ground.

  In the weeks when ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ failed to make the Top Twenty and then stopped receiving radio play, Matt did not disappear as they hoped he would. He waited, Lisa thought, to be sneered at by Shane and spent much of his time in their company in a sort of seething silence. Slowly, he stopped mentioning the magazine article he was meant to be writing. His presence, it seemed to Lisa, made all of them uncomfortable, yet so apparent was Matt’s vulnerability that none of them had the courage to tell him to go.

  Lisa remembered a concert they played in the Gaiety in Dublin during this time. It was a fund-raiser for something, with six or seven bands playing. She had her camera with her, had been photographing Planxty, and was standing in the wings watching Tríona and Maighread Ni Dhomhnaill. As she moved backwards, searching for a chair, she noticed a figure behind her on the other side of the green-room door where heavy curtains hung. As the figure stepped into the light for a moment, she saw that it was Julie, whom she had thought was in the bar, and Julie was smiling at someone in a way that Lisa had never seen before. The smile was shy and girlish and unselfconscious as Julie retreated into the shadows to embrace whoever she was with. Lisa realized that, since she herself stood in darkness, she could not be seen. Julie’s smile, it appeared to her, as she had watched her, had an edge of gratitude to it, almost simpering in a way which Julie hated in other women.

  It was clear to Lisa that the person Julie was with had won her affection and this brought with it not only shock and surprise but also a sharp dart of painful jealousy. Suddenly, then, a burst of applause began, and this caused Julie and Matt Hall to move into the faint light of backstage where they could both be seen.

  As SOON AS they had returned to London to work on the new album, with Matt Hall never absent, it occurred to Lisa that Phil had known about Matt and Julie for some time. He took Matt’s presence for granted, listened to him when he intervened and nodded when he made suggestions. No one, however, seemed to have told Shane; he responded to the American with blunt incomprehension and rudeness when he came into the studio with a list of songs they should record – more up-tempo material, as he put it – which were essentially, Lisa thought, three-minute pop songs which might suit Julie’s voice. It was obvious to Lisa that when Julie suggested they should bring in some session musicians, including a drummer, the idea had come from Matt.

  One morning Matt and Julie arrived in the studio with two new songs. They were by one of the up-and-coming new American songwriters, Matt said, who had heard the band’s last album, loved it, and was ready to grant them exclusive rights to both songs. He passed the sheets around with the lyrics and the music. As Julie began to sing the lyrics Lisa realized that she knew them by heart. The tune, Lisa thought, was banal and derivative. When Julie had finished singing, Shane stood up.

  ‘The words are cat,’ he said. ‘I think your friend, the American songwriter, is a bit of an eejit, Matt. What do you think?’

  ‘I think it’ll sound different when we’ve heard it properly arranged,’ Matt said, his face already pale.

  ‘Well, you can arrange it yourself, then,’ Shane said.

  ‘We will do just that,’ Matt said.

  ‘Let’s give it a chance,’ Julie said. ‘We need a few contemporary songs on the album.’

  Lisa noticed that Phil was sitting quietly watching Julie. Later, he told Lisa he knew at that moment that the band would break up. He did not intervene, and it was his silence as much as the determination of her sister and Matt which allowed the track to appear on the album, complete with drums and upbeat arrangement and Julie trying to sound like an American rock singer and Lisa tagging along with an equally fake accent. Luke, she thought, could be burning that too, and he would be right to feel that it might embarrass her. If he went to the album sleeve he would notice that the song was composed by Matt Hall, who had told them, when the copyright for the songs was being checked out, that he himself was, in fact, the talented young writer who admired the band and wanted it to be the first to record his songs.

  One day on the tour to promote the album, as Shane became increasingly demented by Matt’s gradual gaining of influence over the band, Lisa had lunch alone with Julie. They must have been waiting for the others, because Lisa remembered they had more time than usual. It was a while since they had been together for so long. Julie eventually asked her why she had never said anything about Matt.

  ‘I take it you don’t like him,’ she said.

  ‘Well, you like him, that’s the main thing, isn’t it?’ Lisa said.

  ‘Hey, I asked you.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lisa said.

  ‘This is serious,’ Julie said. ‘Tell me what you think.’

  ‘I feel he’s put you in a sort of cage.’ As she watched her sister colour, Lisa instantly regretted the remark.

  ‘I love him.’

  ‘I hope he doesn’t cause you trouble,’ Lisa said.

  ‘If he does,’ Julie said, staring directly at her, ‘you will be the last to find out.’

  As the tour progressed, relations between the five of them were not improved by a number of reviews, both of the concerts and of the album, which suggested a turn towards commercialism, giving Shane more
ammunition to fire in the direction of both Matt and Julie. On the last night of the tour, when the lights went down on the stage, Shane packed his instruments and left the venue without saying goodbye to any of them. Somewhere in her files, Lisa remembered, there was a photograph of him that night, angrier than he had ever been before. He never played with the band again. Soon, Phil announced that he wanted to take a break and go to New York. Lisa, on a trip to Dublin, read in the Irish newspapers that Julie was to begin a solo career in the United States.

  Over the next year in Dublin she heard news of Julie from their father, whom Julie telephoned every Sunday with news of gigs and plane journeys and hotels. A few times when Lisa was asked to sing, she refused. Without Julie’s voice, it was pointless. She preferred to take photographs. The only sign she was ever given of what was to come was a phone call from Phil from New York. It was nine in the morning Dublin time. He was drunk. He told Lisa that he had met someone who had seen Julie in a sort of folk bar in San Francisco. She was not well, he said. She was on crutches and wearing sunglasses and her face was bruised and, when she had realized that someone there knew her, she had left the bar quickly.

  Julie was not on the bill that night, Phil said, but Matt was, complete with guitar, singing some of his own songs and singing also some songs associated with the band. Lisa asked Phil to find her a number for Julie, even for Matt, and he said he would find them if he could and call her back. Her father, she found, did not have a number for Julie either, but as the calls continued to come each Sunday he was not worried about her. When Lisa went to her father’s house one Sunday and managed to answer the phone before he did, she found Julie friendly and distant, giving no sign that anything was wrong. Lisa wondered if Phil had not been too drunk to judge what might have been idle gossip. Phil had not seen Julie himself. Her father, when he had finished speaking to Julie and hung up, remarked at how happy she was and what a power of good America seemed to be doing her.