We walked out on stage. The ballroom was not much more than a large saloon, sparely furnished with a fruit machine near the steamed-up windows at the back, and a bare chimney-breast and mantel in the wall near me. A boisterous, drunk, predominantly male audience pressed against the flimsy barrier.
Things went well at first. The opening song, ‘Streams of Whiskey’, seemed to act like an astringent on the crowd of men, convulsing the throng, sending shoulder against shoulder, elbow against elbow, hip against hip, buttocks against groin. I winced to see a windjammered body collide obliquely with a neighbour, elbows high enough to catch a cheek.
From my vantage point by the side of the stage, I loved to watch the line of us step up to the microphones, as one, to sing the chorus and then to step back for the instrumental section. Shane scrubbed his guitar, head down. Cait, her hair recently dyed red, the collar of her duster coat up, scribed an arc with the neck of her bass. Spider, the only one remaining at his mike, twitched his leg. Jem stood looking out with the detachment of a maître d’hôtel, his lips pursing and puffing from the concentration of playing. Angled away from the crowd, fag in my mouth more often than not, blinking against the smoke, I bent over the accordion and stamped my heel.
A quarter of the way through the set, alerted by a rumbling in the audience, punctuated by shouts and a girl’s angry scream, I looked up from my fingers to see frantic shoving going on in the middle of the crowd. The guy I’d seen in Archbald’s, his face pink and distorted with the effort, lunged, arms straight, palms up, into another guy who in a valiant but ridiculous attempt to both keep his balance and to fend the guy off was windmilling his arms. People stepped back to get out of the way but others came striding in, clambering to get through. They pulled at jackets, hands clawing and swiping, their legs in half-crouch. Some of them dragged arms free from the press and turned them into swinging fists arcing down into space or against someone’s shoulder. The occasional sickening knuckle-blow glanced against an ear or someone’s temple.
All the while we kept playing. The image came to mind of the bewhiskered piano player in a Western saloon pulling his hat down over his ears as the saloon explodes in gunfire and smoke, the tables go over and the ranks of bottles disintegrate into a cascade of liquor and shards. We didn’t look at one another but gawped at the turmoil on the dance floor and kept going, thinking that the end of the song would bring the furore to an end.
Eventually we were able to finish the song, and with a flourish I hoped might come across as conclusive, but the fighting continued, the non-combatants flung to the edges of the dance floor, the participants going at it, deaf to anything else that was going on in the room. We stood there watching, Shane gawping at the tumult in front of him with an expression of bemusement on his face. I didn’t have a clear plan when I stepped up to the microphone that Spider wasn’t using.
‘Quit fighting!’ I found myself shouting. ‘Quit it! Just stop the fucking fighting!’
My command did nothing. The squall lurched sideways as if the ballroom floor had tilted. Fists opened into claws grabbing for stability. Legs that a moment before had waded into the rumpus now capered backwards, trying to find a grip on the dance floor. The ruckus sent itself against the wall and along it into the corner. A couple of guys lost their balance altogether. When they hit the ground they tucked their knees up and covered their heads as the scrimmage appeared to bounce off the far wall and back towards us.
We stood and watched. Hostages to the chaos, there was nothing else we could do. I went around the stage in panic, appealing to everyone, anyone, to do something, vainly assuming that there was something we could do. Shane just shrugged. The fighting eventually ended with a couple of guys – one of them the guy from Archbald’s – being dragged to either side, penned in by their mates and subjected to bellowed appeals to reason. There was panting and gasping and nodding of heads and hateful stares and eventually capitulation. The rest of the crowd started to return to press against the barriers. In a moment or two the combatants seemed to have vanished, absorbed by the rabble.
We played on without further incident. I played on without enthusiasm. I couldn’t help thinking that beneath society’s superstructure of civility and mutuality was a basement writhing with blind and inchoate urges.
‘The fucking cunts!’ I said when we were able to finish and go backstage. ‘What a bunch of fucking cunts! We’re supposed to be playing fucking music out there. It’s supposed to be entertainment! Christ!’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Shane said. He scratched his nose, bored, and pulled on a cigarette.
‘Fuck off Shane,’ I said. ‘That was just fucking debasing.’ I appealed to the others, who looked just as depressed and stunned as I was. ‘We can’t allow that to happen again. We should have the lights go up, shine torches on them or something. We should leave the stage and only come back when . . .’ I ran out of ideas just as Shane screamed:
‘Oh, shut the fuck up with the fucking whingeing, you fucking faggot!’
His hands were gripping his face. His eyes slowly appeared from behind his brown fingers, staring dementedly at the floor. In a show of mastering his fury he spread his fingers in front of him, level to the ground. It took him a moment to get some sort of a grip on himself.
‘Listen,’ he said, as if he were talking to a child. ‘Listen. They do what they do and nothing you can do or say makes any difference. People are – not just these people – people, you know – people just want to kill one another.’
‘People,’ he went on in a hoarse, supercilious whisper, ‘are just this much away from murdering each other, this much away from raping one another, this much away from knifing, shooting, massacring, garrotting. It’s fucking dog-eat-dog out there. It’s fucking dog-eat-dog wherever you look. It’s what they want to do and you got to let them get on with it because it means the fuckers are not likely to rape or knife or shoot or garrotte me or any of us. It’s what they want to do and if it’s what they want to do they’re going to do it anyway no matter how much fucking whingeing and screeching and flapping you do. So shut up, stay away from my fucking microphone or anyone’s microphone. They’ll come and kill the fucking lot of us. They’re just looking for an excuse. And shut the fuck up with your fucking debasement and all that shit – just play the fucking accordion and stay out of the way. That’s what you’re paid for.’
‘And if only he could do that properly,’ Spider sighed.
When I got back to the hotel, first back to the room I was sharing with Jem, I stood between the bed and the cheap dresser by the window and then crouched down to the ground, tucked myself into a ball and pounded my head with my fists. I couldn’t understand how anyone could let himself become so bereft of responsibility for anything and yet write songs of such incisive beauty, full of chastening pity for the human condition.
*
Depending on whom we talked to, our gig at Trinity College in Dublin had been cancelled because of a protest at the University or because the Students’ Union had bottled out of putting on our gig. Either way, the venue was changed to a club called McGonagle’s on Anne Street for the following night. We had a day off. I drank whiskey and reds all afternoon in the hotel bar. It was dusk when I staggered up Grafton Street under a triumphal arch into St Stephen’s Green. Willows draped the walkways and water birds shunted about. The road alongside the Royal Canal crawled with traffic. Reeds choked the canal. Somehow I ended up back in Grafton Street and drinking whiskey and red in Kehoe’s with its moulded ceiling and bar dividers. McDaid’s was crowded. I sat at a table with Jem and a couple of students. Jem laughed at how drunk I was. The tabletops were scrubbed oak. Every inch of wall was filled with framed pictures. The only one I recognised was James Joyce. People kept going on about Brendan Behan. A journalist from Hot Press magazine reckoned we could all breeze into a club called The Pink Elephant because of who we were. We squeezed arse to arse into cabs. The club was dowdy, concussive with music and full of people who knew of som
ewhere else to go.
The next day, I took the DART out to Howth. I looked out over the estuary – the flashings of the Poolbeg power station chimneys, the distant lattices of cranes under the dappled sky. I climbed up Howth Head, my shoes crunching on the granular quartz on the paths. Up on the top, I breathed in lungfuls of salt air blowing off the sea out of the mist. I wanted to go home. I dreaded McGonagle’s.
A line of punks squirmed forward against the chests of the bouncers along the front of the stage, behind them a crush of puce faces and wet hair. The first song, ‘Greenland Whale Fisheries’, seemed to send a charge through the crowd. In one mass, they jumped, staggered backwards and rushed forwards, pitched sideways. Heads shook, bodies cavorted. Here and there shoulders twisted to free an arm, but to my relief only to wave or let loll over someone’s shoulder. Though I stared down the keyboard of the accordion, I watched the audience, bracing for a repeat of the gig in Carlow. Now and again a bouncer rammed the pistons of his forearms into the crowd to push them away. Otherwise, nothing happened until we were clearing up after the set and people were leaving. The two bouncers in the middle of the apron, relaxing now that the compression had eased, let a kid through to collapse with his forearms on the stage and his head buried in them. Just as Jem came to the edge to pull the cables out of his DI box, the kid’s arms opened up like a claw, wrapped around Jem’s legs and started to pull him off the stage. Jem shouted. The bouncers detached the kid and hauled him away.
Afterwards, in the dressing room, Spider shouted:
‘See? Dublin loves us. It loves us so much it wanted to keep our banjo player!’
Thirteen
‘You sick fuck!’ Spider said. ‘ “Labelled parts one to three?” What sort of a twisted, fucked-up sort of mind comes up with lyrics like that?’
‘Mine,’ Shane said.
We had been rehearsing in the attic of Andrew’s house, a Victorian white-painted bay that he and his long-time companion, Deborah Korner, shared in West Hampstead, a walk along the railway line from the station. The room we rehearsed in was under the roof and had a dormer window. It was a job getting us all in.
The first song we rehearsed was called ‘Sally MacLennane’ and was in jig-time, full of shouts of ‘FAR AWAY!’ and explosions of single stroke rolls on the drums. The melodies were so seamlessly Irish that I was surprised to find out that the song wasn’t traditional. The words of the chorus brought to mind the ceremony I knew Shane indulged in, when he would gather his bosom friends in one of the bars at Euston railway station to see him off on the boat train to Holyhead for the ferry to Dun Laoghaire.
Another of the songs Shane brought in was a waltz, in C, called ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’. There was a delicacy about the chord progression I hadn’t heard in Shane’s writing before. A relative minor chord changed position from verse to verse. The harmonic structure of the chorus avoided resolution, going instead into a refrain of single notes, to be played on the banjo, stepping down in an aching reiteration of the chorus melody. A couple of verses and refrains later – finally resolving the melody of the chorus and underpinning the words – came a cadence so reminiscent of songs immemorially older than this one that it nearly brought tears to my eyes.
I tried to make sense of the lyrics I could hear – streams and rolling hills bearing with them images of water lilies and canals. After a couple of runs through, I started to become aware of an almost nightmarish kaleidoscope. As soon as I thought I had got used to the scene I’d happened on – a pub somewhere with a jukebox and an old man – a smash cut deposited me in a landscape worthy of Wilfred Owen, full of dismemberment, with arms and legs scattered all around.
As gruesome as the words were and as elusive as the meaning was, what I understood and felt for most of all was the guy at the end: Shane, I supposed, in the dawn, crawling and walking, talking to himself.
To our surprise, making good on what had seemed in the dressing room at East Anglia University a casual proposal of recording with us, at the beginning of 1985 Costello had let it be known he wanted to produce ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’. At the end of January, however, it was no longer Elvis Costello who sat waiting for us in the subterranean control room at Elephant Studios, but a guy he wanted to be called Declan Patrick MacManus. MacManus wore a black linen suit with a pork-pie hat tilted back. Though he still inclined his head to lift his eyes and brows over the top of them to view us, his glasses were no longer Holly but burgundy-tinted Lennon.
He sat on one of the swivel chairs with his arms on his knees peeling a pomelo. We sat on the lumpy couch in the control room, respectful, somewhat in awe, and listened to his account, told with an endearing diastematic lisp, of the recording of Almost Blue, the country record he had made in Nashville in 1981 with Billy Sherrill, the producer of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, who routinely brought a gun into the studio and had once emptied it into the mixing desk.
The recording was straightforward. We had rehearsed ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ over and over and had been playing it live since Christmas. A short snare roll brought in a straight C chord on the accordion with Jem playing an arpeggio, Shane strumming underneath. An accordion hook I’d lifted from Dermot O’Brien’s ‘Connemara Rose’, one of the tracks on Darryl’s tape, brought in Shane’s voice. Costello had hired Colin Fairley to work alongside Elephant’s engineer, Nick Robbins. Fairley had worked on Costello’s Punch the Clock and knew how to execute ‘radio-friendly’ mixes.
Once the backing track was finished, Costello brought his musician/producer’s attention to bear on the matter of overdubs. He had an idea to lift the chorus by means of a roll on the snare, to be answered, every measure but one, by a beat on a tambourine.
Andrew played the snare, Costello the tambourine. To listen back it was Costello’s custom to lean on the far side of the mixing desk, an impish expression on his face, his arms up on the ledge and the brim of his hat tilted up.
‘I hear mandolins,’ he said. ‘James?’
I sat across from Costello, our knees close to touching, both of us on swivel chairs in the control room. Each of us cradled a mandolin. His was a scroll-neck Gibson of some ancient provenance. Mine was the one we used on stage. We duplicated the banjo melody in the refrain, Costello taking a harmony above mine. We extended the tune downwards and, where the song was to fade out, played couplets in a style we both agreed was ‘kind of Greek’. I was elated to submit to the tutelage of a musician I had revered for years, lofty with his approval, hot with embarrassment when I fucked up.
We broke from the studio for our gigs in Belfast, Letterkenny and Carlow. When we got back, we played a couple of gigs in Leeds and Nottingham. A grey-haired guy wearing a combat jacket buttoned up to his throat met us on the gravel driveway of the hotel in Nottingham. I assumed he’d come to fix the van, which had something wrong with it. The guy turned out to be a long-time friend of Frank’s and the front-of-house sound-engineer for the bands Frank had managed in Dublin – Skid Row and Dr Strangely Strange. Paul Scully had crystalline-blue eyes in which flashed a mixture of benevolence, sensitivity and mischief. His arrival whittled Darryl’s functions of general factotum down to those of roadie and driver.
If the recording of ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ and ‘Sally MacLennane’ was Costello’s baptism by aspersion, after our shows in February he committed to full submersion by taking on the production of our second album. So completely had we come to like and trust Paul Scully that we asked him to engineer alongside Nick Robbins.
Most of the new songs we’d practised and practised either in Rick Trevan’s back bedroom or at Andrew and Deborah’s house, and many of them we had been playing live. ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘The Old Main Drag’ we’d been playing for over a year. We had recorded the former the previous February with Stan Brennan. The latter dated back to my first rehearsals with Shane and Jem. Over the past couple of months we had been working not just on ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ and ‘Sally MacLennane’ – and on one by Phil
Gaston, Brennan’s partner at Rocks Off record shop, called ‘Navigator’ – but also on another two of Shane’s newest songs: ‘Billy’s Bones’, which referred to a traditional Irish anti-war song called ‘Mrs McGrath’, and which borrowed the traditional Scottish melody ‘Highland Laddie’ for the introduction; and ‘The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn’, a song which seemed to tower above the others, lyrically and musically, from the start. The mandolin introduction was like the turning of the flimsiest of flyleaves to reveal a frontispiece of prodigious conceit: the figures of the Irish tenor John McCormack and his Austrian counterpart Richard Tauber in attendance at the bedside of, in Irish mythology, the equivalent to Achilles.
Costello would sit hunched on one of the wheeled swivel chairs contemplating the item of fruit he’d brought in from his local delicatessen, the sleeves of his black coat rolled up halfway. His fingers would turn the fruit he would never eat in his pudgy hands, all the while listening as the tape machine recorded. He would summon us into the control room to play back what we’d done. We would line up on the lumpy sofa or, if there wasn’t room, perch on a radiator or lean against the wall and listen to the playback. Once we had arrived at consensus, we did repairs – a clunky dyssynchrony between the tom-tom and the bass, a flubbed note, a mishit. None of the songs was particularly problematic. Those we hadn’t rehearsed much, we worked on in the studio: ‘The Wild Cats of Kilkenny’; ‘The Gentleman Soldier’, yet another of the songs on Darryl’s tape; ‘Dirty Old Town’, Ewan MacColl’s song about Salford which we knew from the versions by the Spinners and the Dubliners.
Now and again, Costello would point out a structural problem. ‘The Old Main Drag’ in particular seemed to proceed verse after miserable verse, its protagonist suffering degradation after degradation until, with the final expiration of hope, it ended. Costello’s solution was more the product of necessity than inspiration. In rehearsal, at the end of the song, a drone from a bass button on the accordion a fifth below the root note cut underneath the last line: ‘For some money to take me from the old main drag’. By way of caesura Costello suggested we should similarly shift the key down a fifth for a couple of bars for a middle eight – appositely, we thought, after the mention in the lyrics of Tuinol. The respite was hardly a relief. The bass, banjo, guitar and tom-tom tolled fatefully over the low drone of the accordion until the horror resumed.
Here Comes Everybody Page 13
