Here Comes Everybody

by James Fearnley

  ‘The house is on fire,’ Caroline said.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Debsey’s mum said. ‘Oh good Lord!’ she added.

  We gathered at the foot of the stairs to see flames coursing under the ceiling of the landing above. I went up with a bucket of water which I ended up pitching uselessly across the floor. I closed as many doors as I could and came back down.

  We stood out on the street waiting for the fire brigade to come. When it drew up, four or five men in whistling yellow trews ran from the tender carrying a hose. They crashed in through the front door and we listened to the muffled crepitations coming from inside and watched the flames in the windows of the upper floor flicker down. I had to leave to go back to the Wag Club.

  I went to visit Debsey’s family the following day. The doors I’d closed had caused the fire to surge up the stairwell and char the attic where her brother sometimes stayed. Debsey’s room had been spared, but was uninhabitable. For ten days the painters and decorators worked on the Wykes’ flat. Debsey came to stay with me. During the day she had things to do, but in the evenings she brought a toothbrush, a couple of books, a change of tights.

  *

  London Weekend Television, for an instalment of their series on pop culture called South of Watford, came to film us at the Fridge in Brixton and to interview Shane at the Pindar of Wakefield. Hosted by Ben Elton, the programme would be devoted to what was being called the ‘alternative country’ music scene in London and would feature the Boothill Foot-Tappers and the Shillelagh Sisters.

  In March we opened for the Clash at Brixton Academy. I was elated. The Clash had been one of my favourite bands. When I was living at home, earning the money for my Telecaster, the top floor of my parents’ house of a Friday night pounded to ‘Janie Jones’, ‘White Riot,’ ‘I’m So Bored with the USA’ and ‘48 Hours’, as my brother and I got ready to go out after work. Once I’d bought my guitar and had gone back down to London I had been to see the Clash at the Music Machine. I had turned up from work in my suit. I left the gig drenched and all the money in my pockets stuck together. The Clash we supported at Brixton Academy, though, was what was known as the Clash Mark Two. Topper Headon had been let go after the Clash had recorded Combat Rock in 1982 and Mick Jones in the autumn of the following year. The Clash Mark Two was a darker, more virile incarnation.

  We played outside London for the first time, in Longleat, at the wedding reception of someone Shane knew, after a forty-minute stop to play at a festival on an athletics field near Ladbroke Grove. In the afternoon the festival site was an expanse of orange gravel, empty but for a handful of friends from my school who showed up to linger by some barriers at the far edge of the field. Up at the front barriers, Scottish John, a road-sweeper fan of ours, stood with his forearms draped over the rail waiting for us to begin. When we did, Scottish John exploded into a flurry of paroxysms, sideways punches and capering.

  Afterwards, we packed up and drove out of London in the Transit van we’d hired, to Shane’s friends’ wedding reception. We were required to play two sets. We argued in the interval about how to stretch out the limited material we knew. Shane started to put forward songs I took to be Irish folk standards. None of us had any idea how to play even the ones we’d heard of. Shane clawed his face in incredulity.

  On the three-hour drive back to London we sat where we could find space in the back of the van with the gear. Corks banged against the roof of the van from the case of champagne we had stolen and hidden near the base of a tree in the gardens outside the reception marquee.

  For St Patrick’s Day, Jem rented a bus to drive us, and whoever wanted to come along too, up to Wolverhampton to play the Students’ Union at the Polytechnic. He photocopied a map from the A–Z, highlighting where to pick up the bus, the parking bay next to King’s Cross Station. Forty people showed up. On the way back from Wolverhampton the toilets overflowed and drenched our equipment.

  A couple of days later we travelled to Oxford to play at the Jericho Tavern. The stage was a dais against the wall. The audience sat on chairs upholstered in burgundy velour and brass nails. After each song, they applauded briefly and then waited, listening to every discussion we had as to what song to play next, our voices even at the level of whispers audible throughout the room.

  We had a return gig at the 100 Club on Oxford Street. We met outside Shane’s flat. Jem and Cait and Andrew were standing under his windows on the corner. It was pleasant enough to wait in the sunshine of an October afternoon.

  Spider came up ruffling his hair and apologising for being late. We said not to worry. Spider told us that he and Shane had been at the Electric Ballroom the night before.

  ‘And then I lost him,’ Spider said.

  We waited a while longer. We started to worry too. Time was getting on.

  ‘I hope he’s all right,’ Spider said.

  Shane eventually came up from the direction of Judd Street. The side of his face was swollen and his left eye closed with fluid.

  ‘What happened to you?’ we said.

  ‘That looks like it hurts,’ Spider said. Shane sniffed, his hands in his pockets. It was hard to pull on a cigarette because of the shape of his mouth and he had to work to get suction. It turned out that the night before a couple of guys at the Electric Ballroom had kicked him around the toilets.

  ‘Like a fucking rag doll,’ he said. He kept touching his mouth where the stump of one of his teeth was missing a dental cap. He slurred his words and avoided our eyes.

  ‘Must have said something to cause offence,’ he said and wheezed a laugh, but carefully and with minimal effort. I found myself laughing too.

  ‘James,’ Jem murmured. He turned to Shane.

  ‘Do you think you can do the gig?’ he asked him. Shane shrugged.

  ‘Give it a go,’ he said.

  He was worse off than we knew. He held onto the mike stand for support. His eyes closed, he teetered back and forth, but tall and with the mike up high. He blundered through the songs he could remember. He forgot words but sang on, letting his mistakes go, if he was aware of them. In between songs, he stood waiting for the next, as if bracing for a renewed ordeal.

  When he began to stagger, Stan Brennan shouted to take him off. Jem went across to him. They exchanged a couple of words, Shane bending his head down to Jem. I saw Shane nod. Spider came across to put his arm round Shane’s shoulders and lead him to a seat by the side of the stage. We played what we could without him, but our spirit was gone and we finished after five or six songs.

  ‘He’s got the constitution of a fucking mountain goat,’ I said to Cait afterwards.

  ‘He’ll make old bones,’ she replied.

  *

  ‘The Dark Streets of London’ and ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ came out in a limited release of 234 copies, with a white label, in a white sleeve, and a sticker with a picture of a harp on it and the words ‘póg mo thóin’ – Irish for pogue mahone.

  After the record’s release David ‘Kid’ Jensen, the Canadian DJ, friend and foil of John Peel, started to play it on Radio 1. Our prow jibed distinctly seaward.

  At the end of the following week, South of Watford was broadcast. I phoned my parents to tell them. I settled down to watch. Shane’s interview with Ben Elton in the bar of the Pindar of Wakefield was a tour de force and made light of the editorial weighting of the show in favour of the Shillelagh Sisters and the Skiff Skats, because Chas Smash, a member of Madness, was in it. Shane sat insolently on a stool, leaning on the bar. He wiped his nose with a finger, stirred his eye, scratched his jaw, pulled lungfuls of smoke, paused to lift his pint to his mouth, flicked ash and otherwise bent shapeless the preconceptions I had, not just about folk music, what was called countrybilly and even the Clash – whom he labelled as ‘dinosaurs’ – but also about how you were supposed to behave on television. I was mortified about what my father’s response would be. The following day he rang me up.

  ‘Your singer’s a moron, I’m afraid,’ he sa
id. ‘Do yourself the service of finding another career, or at least another group. Because if you hitch your fortunes to that man, you’re sunk.’

  Ten

  We sat crowded together in the front parlour of the Pindar of Wakefield. By custom, Shane sat in one of the straight-backed chairs opposite the velvet seats in the bay window. He was a difficult person to sit next to. He couldn’t sit still and would lean across his neighbour to address a point with his neighbour-but-one-or-two.

  One of the items on the agenda was the matter of what clothes we should wear on stage and for the photo sessions that were beginning to come up.

  ‘Like the Kray twins!’ Shane was saying. He had brought with him a book about London gangsters. It was open to the page of a photograph of Reggie and Ronnie Kray. Shane stabbed it.

  ‘Sharp! I mean! Fuck!’ he said.

  The photograph depicted the twins striding, in gleaming shoes, away from a block of flats. Each wore a lightly checked, boxy jacket with narrow lapels. Reggie looked into the camera, jacket open, black tie. Ronnie frowned off, one jacket button done up, pale tie, slightly patterned.

  ‘Know what I mean?’ he said, brushing an imaginary fleck from the photograph.

  With the number of gigs we were doing and money more or less regularly coming in, we could afford to buy new suits. We talked about opening a joint bank account and buying new instruments too.

  We wanted to get Shane a twelve-string. We thought it would generally fill out the sound. Better still, it suited the metreless accompaniment we had discovered, where chords shifted one to the other according to the dictates of Shane’s singing. Andrew rolled on the tom-tom, Cait rumbled on the bass, Jem turned arpeggios on the banjo, I held down the chords, Shane scrubbed, Spider followed the vocal melody line. We could make the accompaniment murmur, underpinning Shane’s voice in a dreamlike whisper. The jangling sonorities of a twelve-string we knew would best suit what we’d found.

  The meeting turned to the matter of who we could get to roadie, who we could get to do the sound, who to make T-shirts and badges and who to sell them, and who we could get to manage us.

  The roadie and sound-engineer part was easy. In the past couple of months, since our first dates at the Pindar of Wakefield, Darryl Hunt had simply taken over the various jobs of mixing our sound, humping our gear and driving us to gigs. Darryl was a doyen of SCH. He lived in Gray’s Inn Buildings on the corner of Rosebery Avenue and was an aficionado of local events.

  He was a musician himself and with a veneer of celebrity about him, having founded a band called Plummet Airlines when he was a student of Fine Arts at Nottingham School of Art. Plummet Airlines had been among the first bands to release with Stiff Records in 1976. His girlfriend Julie had already taken up the publication of a fanzine. She took up making and selling T-shirts.

  When it came to a manager the candidate seemed obvious. Stan Brennan had taken on the entire production of ‘Dark Streets of London’ and had managed to get it played on Radio 1. He seemed reasonably well situated when it came to the particular echelons of the music business we worked in. He was a nice guy, if a little earnest. He seemed to care for Shane with a solicitude that was almost parental.

  Most of the gigs we had been getting, so far, had come by way of a combination of Shane’s notoriety and Jem’s doggedness. Jem had become the person whom the music press had begun to seek out for interviews and to arrange photo sessions. It was Jem who had finalised the contract to record our first radio session for John Peel on the 10th April at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios. Though we seemed to be doing well enough without a manager, Jem and Shane appealed to the rest of us to step up to help. I suffered a panic of irresolution when it came to organising anything. Though I dreaded the responsibility, I took on the booking of a gig at the Ritzy in Brixton.

  Furnished with a new banjo for Jem, a new bass amp for Cait and a twelve-string guitar for Shane, we turned up at the bar across from the BBC studios on Delaware Road. There was a dartboard and, through the windows draped in creeper at the back, a small sunlit lawn. We crowded one of the tables in the corner by the window to wait for Cait.

  When she turned up she climbed over us with her pint of cider, standing on the wooden bench in crêpe-soled shoes and voluminous black trousers before plumping down in the middle of us.

  ‘All right lads?’ she said. ‘Look at this place! The BB fucking C!’

  She sat with her forearms on the table. When she drank she banged the glass down on the table and wiped her mouth on the back of a fingerless leather glove.

  ‘What the fuck!’ she said.

  We sat round the scuffed table, drinking. None of us went across the road to find out where and when we were needed. With a sad and wide-eyed face, his mouth protruding, it was Jem who pricked our consciences to drink up.

  When we finally trooped out of the bar, we were all drunk, but Cait more than anyone, her inebriation intensifying her scorn of the BBC as the repository of Englishness, a despised flagship of the British Empire, the pre-eminent organ of Irish repression. A subterranean passageway went from the bar under the road and into a labyrinthine system of corridors. It took us a while to find Studio 4.

  We took our instruments from their cases and set up the drums. An engineer stationed the amps and microphones and cables about the room. Our allotted producer turned out to be Dale Griffin, Mott the Hoople’s drummer. He knew Shane and me through Howard Cohen. He remembered the recording I’d done with the Giants, which he and Pete Watts had produced. Griffin was an earnest, seasoned sort of man, tow of hair, deviated of septum, hunched of shoulder, denim of jacket.

  Once we started running through the first song, it was obvious that Cait was too drunk both to play bass and to realise it. We beseeched her to hand her instrument over to someone else. She became irascible and pugnacious.

  Griffin summoned a couple of us into the control room. We left Cait plonking notes in the studio. Griffin suggested we just forget about the session, that we pack everything up and go home. Over a pot of tea up in the canteen, Jem and I persuaded him to continue, provided we could get her out of the studio and have someone else play bass.

  When we got back, Cait put up a great fight. Jem and I took a leg each, Andrew her arms, and we lifted her out of the studio. As we wrestled her past the control room, I saw Griffin staring with as much unconcern as he could muster at the ranks of knobs on his mixing desk. On our way down the serpentine corridors, Cait’s long body writhed and snapped like a landed eel. She jammed her brothel-creepers against pretty much each door jamb or pipe along the way, jarring our progress to an exit.

  ‘Fuckers!’ she shouted.

  *

  Kid Jensen had been playing ‘Dark Streets of London’ regularly on his evening programme on Radio 1. When a producer from BBC Radio Scotland informed Broadcasting House that each time Jensen uttered the words ‘pogue mahone’, he was saying ‘kiss my arse’ to any Gaelic listener tuning in, Jensen blithely swapped to calling us the Pogues. Another Radio 1 DJ, Mike Read, famous for – on air – having taken off Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ and proclaiming it obscene, castigated us for our choice of name and refused to play our record. We were hot to protest at being banned, hoping for a publicity coup of some sort, but Jem urged pragmatism.

  ‘I’d rather they just played the record,’ he said. We went along with Kid Jensen and called ourselves the Pogues.

  With the purpose of securing us a record deal, Brennan took us into a demo studio in West Kensington where we recorded almost sufficient material for an album. Along with ‘The Repeal of the Licensing Laws’, ‘Greenland Whale Fisheries’ and ‘Connemara Let’s Go’, all of which had been included on the tape we took away from Justin Ward’s flat, we recorded traditional songs we’d been playing live – ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ and ‘Kitty’ – and a parcel of songs Shane had written – ‘Transmetropolitan’, ‘The Boys from the County Hell’, ‘Sea Shanty’, and an instrumental, ‘The Battle of Brisbane’. Whe
n we’d done, Brennan told us he would let us know when he’d finished mixing. I chafed against being banished from the studio.

  ‘Broth,’ he said, with a defensive tilt to his head. ‘Cooks.’

  After a week or so he met us in a pub and handed each of us a cassette copy. He had had fun with some of the songs. ‘Connemara Let’s Go’ now had a driving backbeat.

  In another couple of weeks, he met us to announce that Stiff Records wanted to sign us. As long as Jem understood what the meanings of such things as options, advances, recoupment and territories were, I wasn’t worried. My elation at the prospect of a record company giving us a contract to make an album – perhaps two, possibly three – eclipsed the concerns I had at my lack of familiarity with the terminology.

  Brennan was in high feather when we went down to Chiswick to sign with Dave Robinson. It was a bright spring morning. We filed through the offices with our guide, Jamie, a benevolent if opaque guy dressed in black windjammer, jeans and crêpe-soled shoes and with de rigueur buzzed back and sides. The offices were open-plan, filled with light, with white-painted walls, carpeted ramps, slabs of handrail and an interior balcony or two with tubular iron railings. There were dry-erase whiteboards everywhere. One of them charted the performance of Stiff’s record releases: the Belle Stars, Madness, Yello, the Gibson Brothers, Tracy Ullman, the Passion Puppets.

  ‘You’re going to be going up on that board,’ Jamie said. Up until that moment I had been content to think we weren’t much more than a product of our locality, of the sisterhood of grim tenement buildings on Cromer Street, and the Norfolk Arms, the Boot and the Pindar of Wakefield. The accumulation of our record being played on Radio 1, the South of Watford documentary, the John Peel session – and now the fact that our name was going up on the project board at Stiff Records – meant the expansion of our milieu to include the whole of London, and maybe the nation itself. The perspective which opened up made me reel.