Excited to have stumbled on the idea of key changes, Costello took up the matter of modulation again with ‘Dirty Old Town’. He cited Johnny Cash’s ‘I Walk the Line’ which modulates down a fifth, two times in the song, to return the way it came to the original key of F. Giddy, Costello swept us along before him towards a similar structure. Costello played the guitar and Andrew the harmonica for the introduction in D. The verse with the full band came in a fifth lower, the melodies played on the whistle and, in preference over the accordion, on the mandolin. For the middle eight the key modulated another fifth downward, to return to G for the last verses. It was beautiful in its simplicity and almost noble in its provenance. I was proud to share with Costello his enthusiasm for such a construction and wished I had thought of it.
To complete the record Shane came up with the Scottish traditional song ‘I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day’, and volunteered Cait to sing it. The minatory cordiality of the song suited her. Spider’s willingness to sing ‘Jesse James’ – the romantically fallacious biography of the murderer and train-robber – wasn’t entirely inapposite either.
We used few session musicians. Tommy Keane and Henry Benagh came in to overdub, respectively, the uilleann pipes and fiddle on a couple of the tracks, notably ‘Dirty Old Town’. Benagh was a bearded Tennessean. Keane was from Waterford. Both played up at a pub in Camden called The Good Mixer. When Keane took up the pipes, such a look came over his face that you’d think he was blind. He worked the chanter, lifting it up and down off his thigh, staring sightlessly into space.
*
St Patrick’s Day at the Clarendon Ballroom was a clamorous, tumultuous and deranged event. The hall seemed huge. It had ancient-looking fluted columns covered in peeling brown paint. A black curtain hanging from scaffolding separated backstage from the ballroom where I could hear conversations against the cacophony in the background. It was airless and hot. Fluorescent strips lit a concrete corridor lined with chip-frying machines and dented kitchen furniture.
Frank had brought his friend Phil Lynott to the gig. I tried to get a glimpse of him. I had been in my last year at school when the first incarnation of Thin Lizzy had released ‘Whiskey in the Jar’. I had been more into the likes of Amon Düül, the Strawbs and Peter Hammill. The laddish glamorisation of sex, drink and violence of ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’, which a couple of my friends never seemed to have off their record players in 1976, hadn’t interested me much. Nonetheless, I was fascinated by Lynott’s presence and by the rumour he was going to come out and play with us.
I eventually managed to get a look at him. He was sitting on a metal table under the fluorescent light. Frank and a couple of other people were standing by. I mistook his slumping on the table leaning up against the wall for charismatic ennui. The fact was, he looked ill. His face was filmy and pallid, his eyes blank and watery. When we went on, Lynott stayed backstage. When we came off, our shirts stuck to our backs, faces running with sweat, he was gone.
Frank had read an interview with Alex Cox, the director of Repo Man which had come out the previous March and had been acclaimed for its punk energy and oppositional politics. On the strength of Cox describing our music as ‘quite interesting’, Frank had apparently got in touch. In the week after our shows at the Clarendon Ballroom, Cox, who lived nearby, came out to see us at a gig at Liverpool Polytechnic. He was a gangly guy, lanky, dressed in a tan duster coat and eager to work with us. A couple of weeks later Frank hired him to film the video for ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’, in which a literal pair of brown eyes in a paper bag becomes a metaphor for the blindness of society to a totalitarian state under Thatcher.
We resumed at Elephant Studios to do overdubs. We were sitting squashed together on the brown couch, behind Nick Robbins and Paul Scully who had replaced Colin Fairley. Costello stood on the far side of the mixing desk, the window to the studio behind him, his arms on the ledge, the grey pork-pie hat set at a junior reporter’s angle, listening to playback through the speakers mounted in the wall behind.
At the end of the song, Costello stationed his destined-to-go-uneaten pomelo or star fruit, persimmon or guava on top of the Yamaha speakers behind the far side of the mixing desk and stepped around in front of it. On the way, he picked up his guitar. He wafted a space for himself on one of the wheeled chairs. Robbins got up.
‘I hear this,’ he said. He took out a plectrum from his pocket and picked something out on the guitar – a line of notes, low down, ascending. He wheeled round to look at us all squished together on the corduroy couch.
‘For the bridge up to the chorus,’ he explained. His eyes came into view over the top of the rims of his glasses – not so much questioning as declarative.
We all nodded at Costello’s idea. Sounds good, we said. Let’s give it a try, we said. Swivelling back to the desk, he twirled a finger to indicate he wanted the tape rewound. He listened back to the section a couple of times, swizzling his finger once more, refining the line. He got up and floated the guitar over our heads, towards the door into the studio.
‘Set me up,’ he said.
Robbins and Scully followed him. Through the window I could see them station microphones, run wires, plug in things, deliver headphones, adjust, tweak a little and then leave.
I smarted at his droit de seigneur and became glum with myself for not coming up with something. I was always alert to the possibility of an overdub, not just to supplement a particular sequence or highlight a transition with a sonic frill, an amuse-oreille, but also to show off my ability with any instrument I laid my hands on. It should have been me out there, one of the band, the one who worked out all the chords to the songs, the musician in the band – as we had always joked but which I had always believed. I resented Costello’s encroachment and I wondered if anyone else was aware how embarrassed for myself I was.
Later on in the afternoon when he’d recorded his overdub and everyone else was either round the pool table at the end of the corridor or had gone for something to eat, I overcame my restraint and put it to Costello that when it came to doing overdubs, didn’t he think it should be one of the band to play them?
‘Why?’ he said.
‘Because you’re the producer,’ I said. ‘And we’re the band.’
‘You want to do overdubs?’ he said. ‘Here, take my guitar. There’s mandolins, an autoharp. There’s a pair of fucking maracas lying about. You’ve got an idea? Go and do your overdub. I had an idea and I went and I had them set me up and I did it. If it doesn’t work, you can tell me. I’m not a child. I can take it.’
I wished I hadn’t had the temerity to contest him, exposing my resentment towards him, and my jealousy. My failure to prevail seemed also to have exposed my abiding awe of him.
When we resumed to tackle another track, Costello took up his customary position on the far side of the mixing desk.
‘Anyone of you wants to fly the idea of an overdub,’ he said in his vaguely Scouse accent, ‘be my guest. I’m trying to make a good record here. You’ve all probably got good ideas. Let’s have them. But if I’ve got an idea, I’m going to go in there and try it out and if you don’t like it we’ll just move on.’
‘James!’ Spider said. ‘What have you done now?’
Embarrassment coursed over my skin like fever. I wanted revenge on Costello but gave up expecting it to come in the form of plucking a sonic ornament from the air and taking it into the studio.
The recording continued amiably enough, and in Costello and Cait’s case amorously enough. They were very much in love. Occasionally we found ourselves sitting in the control room waiting, as Costello took time with Cait in the studio, patching up a bass-line she’d fluffed. He stood close behind her – she almost a head taller than Costello – his arms encircling her, from which position he could guide her hands over the neck of her guitar and put her fingers on the correct fret. Now and again her shoulders wriggled with resistance.
At the beginning of the recording we all deferred
to Costello as befitted his status and accomplishments. As the weeks passed, his presence in the studio became a more and more familiar one. We ceased to be curious about what kind of exotic fruit he’d picked up on the way to the studio and whether or not it happened to rhyme with his name. We had become used to his standing behind the mixing desk, bending over a guitar or a mandolin in the control room. The wonderment of being in the daily company of such a luminary wore off. In Shane’s case it wore off sooner and more dramatically than in anyone else’s.
One day Costello brought to the studio an Ovation Patriot Bicentennial acoustic guitar. It was blue – like a bluebottle – and one of the ugliest guitars I’d seen. It had the signature Ovation rounded fibreglass back which caused it to be forever sliding off my knee when I took it up to play one afternoon, and it had what were called the ‘multi-sound hole epaulets’ – the abstract, Seventies-style filigree near where the neck met the body. The sound that came out of it was by no means the acme of acoustics but in the course of our recording with Costello, the guitar, to Shane, seemed to attain hyperbolic importance.
Costello, like all of us, was in awe of Shane’s talent, nervous of appearing not to understand him, shy of his irony, fearful of his temper. Costello, aware of Shane’s covetousness of it, gave the guitar to him.
The guitar would not have been the only one Costello owned. I imagined the walls in Costello’s flat in Holland Park to hang with all manner of vintage instruments – a couple of which he brought into the studio to play overdubs: an acoustic lap guitar with playing-card motifs up and down the fret board and a beautiful chocolate and tan J-series Gibson. Shane’s inability to take care of anything would have precluded Costello from letting Shane even look at any of the guitars that really mattered to him.
Though the gift looked careless, I wondered if Costello hoped to rub Shane’s nose in his distinction. It was as if the Ovation, too, was a means of distracting Shane, the way a parent jangles a bunch of keys to distract a child from the pain of fingers shut in a door. I suspected Costello of seeing how much Shane wanted to be in control, and of throwing a sop to Shane by letting him have his guitar.
In a week or two it seemed Shane thought the guitar possessed a mysterious power, as if it were not just the repository of all the songs Costello ever wrote, but a sacred charm to summon up songs as yet unwritten, hidden within Shane. The guitar never left Shane’s side. It came to the studio with him every day, in a plastic bag. At the end of each day, it went back into the plastic bag and went home with him.
As the recording went on, the guitar seemed to become a talisman which somehow in Shane’s mind stood for Costello himself. Shane’s possession of the guitar appeared to have become protection against some sort of malevolent power he was beginning to convince himself exuded from Costello. As long as he had the guitar, he had Costello where he wanted him.
If Shane resented the way Costello was going about producing our record, it was difficult to tell. That he should covet Costello’s crap guitar and keep it in constant sight should have alerted us that something was irking Shane. Shane’s propensity for superstition didn’t surprise me, but I had not been aware of how much it was a symptom of his lack of ability to say what was really on his mind. The bile that had been building in him only became obvious through the violence with which it erupted.
Costello happened to leave the room. As soon as he had, Shane levelled a kick at the Ovation Patriot Bicentennial as it leant against the arm of the sofa. Clumsy as he was, he did no damage to the guitar. It spun on its axis and ended up against the wall with a boing of strings. I was appalled not so much by the ferocity with which he laid into it, but by the fact that Shane seemed to have lost his marbles.
In fear of Costello’s return to the control room and his probable puzzlement at Shane’s behaviour and what it signified, we implored Shane to calm the fuck down, which he did, and as suddenly as his fury at the guitar, and at Costello himself, had flared up. At the end of the day, as usual, he bagged up the guitar and went home with it.
Fourteen
After our St Patrick’s Day shows at the Clarendon Ballroom, with a sheepish bluffness, Frank had announced he had booked us a television appearance in Munich, together with a string of gigs in Germany. He had driven a hand into a pocket and rubbed his stubbly, red face. It was as if he expected resistance and was never prepared for the eventuality that we never offered any. At the beginning of May we would be going on a tour of Scandinavia too.
The birth of Jem and Marcia’s second child was just two months away. With his staring, forehead-furrowed face, Jem said he would come to Munich for the television show, but would have to go home afterwards. Frank briskly put forward Philip Chevron to deputise. Chevron, it turned out, happened to be under Frank’s management too.
Chevron had been the lead singer and songwriter with a Dublin band called the Radiators from Space. In the past couple of years, since we had first met him at the Pindar of Wakefield, he had produced the first single and a handful of tracks on the début album by the Men They Couldn’t Hang and had worked with German chanteuse Agnes Bernelle, producing a collection of cabaret songs from the Weimar Republic. Chevron was a fan of ours. It was he who had brought Costello to see us play at the Diorama in Regent’s Park, just as we were about to start to record Red Roses for Me.
Philip Chevron standing in for Jem was a daft idea from the beginning. Philip was no banjo player. He played it like a guitar. Heavily, with a plectrum and with quivering fingers, he picked out arpeggios that were intended to mimic the forward and backward rolls which Jem had made second nature. I was surprised Chevron’s fingers had the ability to hold the strings down. Everything about him was diminutive, from his shoulders down to his shoes.
It was our first trip abroad. I loved being in Germany, its trams and trees, the angled grids of windows, the rectangles of grass and warm spring sunlight. In each of our hotel rooms was a greeting from the hotel manager and a bottle of wine wrapped in noisy cellophane. I took the wine to indicate the elevation of our status.
After performing a forty-five-minute set for a programme called Alabamahalle at the Bayerischer Rundfunk studios, we were taken across the road for a tour of U-boat 96, the submarine in Das Boot. Its cramped confines, its strangulated bulkhead doors which required one to both raise foot and duck head to climb through, horrified and excited us. Bunches of brightly coloured plastic bananas hung in nets under the ceiling. They did little to offset the severity of the rivets and the iron plating.
Ludicrous as it was, we were incapable of not drawing parallels between Das Boot and the confinement of our minivan. We understood the film’s German tag line: Eine Reise ans Ende des Verstandes – a journey to the edge of the mind. From that day Das Boot became a touchstone for our own experience of prolonged physical proximity magnified by the detachment that came with our particular brand of nomadism.
Jem flew back to London. We drove up into the Ruhrgebiet. After a couple of gigs, we crossed East Germany on the dilapidated transit road towards West Berlin. We bought vodka from an Intershop. There was a picture of a bison on the label, a sideways view against a green background with the word Zubrowka in gold across the top. The vodka was pale green with a grass haulm floating inside. Shane held up the bottle to compare the bison’s features with Andrew’s.
‘Bison vodka!’ said Andrew in his liquid bass. ‘Na zdorovje!’
‘Vorsprung durch Alkohol!’ Cait sang out.
It was late when we got to West Berlin. We were drunk. It was dark. A firework rose and embroidered the sky above the dismal high-rises. It happened to be Hitler’s birthday. In the tiny club, at the back of the crowd, a clutch of skinheads chanted with expressionless faces and heiling arms. We played on regardless, shooting looks across at one another until Cait swaggered over to the microphone and started to harangue them. I admired her spunk but it just made it worse. The Nazis shoved to the front and gathered before her, a thicket of angled arms and flattened hands.
<
br /> Chevron stepped up to the centre microphone. He was all composure. In measured English he announced that we had come to play for those who had come to see us, and no one else, and that the best thing to do was to ignore the Nazis among them and enjoy our music. Cait backed off and lurked in the shadows.
Backstage we fumed about neo-fascism and regarded our deputy banjo player with wonderment.
*
On our journey back to London Andrew regaled us with naval monographs. One of them was his description of what he assured us was known, below decks in the boiler room, as the ‘Dance of the Flaming Arseholes’. It involved rolled-up newspapers, bare buttocks and a cigarette lighter. Another was an epigram describing the Royal Navy and attributed to Sir Winston Churchill: Rum, sodomy, and the lash. We all agreed, there and then, that that was the title of the album.
Just the mixing of Rum Sodomy and the Lash was left to do. Costello was going to take a break before committing to it. He promised mixes by the time we were finished with our tour of Finland, Sweden and Norway.
We had one show in London supporting Richard Thompson at the Dominion Theatre before going back out on tour. It was a tumultuous and – deemed by the tabloid press – disrespectful opening gig. During our set there was a stage invasion. During Thompson’s show the crowd chanted to the tune of ‘Cwm Rhondda’:
Here Comes Everybody Page 14
