The fact that I had never heard of Terry Woods didn’t bother me. With the exception of the bands and players on Darryl’s tape from the Elvis Costello tour, and a couple of others besides, I had never been familiar with the identity of Irish musicians, contemporary or traditional, and I had given up trying to remember them.
Shane, however, did know about Woods. The excitement engendered in him by the mention of the guy’s name had been enough to stir up our enthusiasm despite token resentment of Frank’s imposition.
After having started out his music career in a band called Sweeney’s Men, with Andy Irvine and Johnny Moynihan, Terry Woods’s musical history impressively included founding the first incarnation of Steeleye Span, though Woods and his wife, Gay, had left soon after the first album. I found myself feeling bad for the man that he should miss out on Steeleye Span’s successes – their Christmas single, ‘Gaudete’, and ‘All Around My Hat’. After that, he and his wife had formed the Woods Band. Separating from his wife, Woods had gone on to tour with Dr Strangely Strange, whom Frank had managed. Since 1980 it seemed Woods had gone into retirement from music and, I was to understand, was now working a night shift shelving in a shoe shop. It made me sorry for him, which I couldn’t help but suspect might have been Frank’s intention by telling us.
I did my best to make him welcome and appointed myself his tutor. I took him through the chords of the songs in one of the tiny rooms backstage. I sat on a chair opposite him, ignorant at that time of his renown.
Woods played with flourish. His fingers swept flamboyantly up the neck of his instrument which he called a cittern. A distant, almost sanctified look came over his face when he played. I was astonished to see how small his hands were, with short, perfectly manicured fingers.
Terry played autoharp and concertina too. When it came to playing ‘The Wild Cats of Kilkenny’, though he said he had listened to the track, he seemed incapable of playing the instrument the way it had been played on the record. In the studio I had set the autoharp on my knee. I had dug in with my pick. I had slashed across all the strings, ringing in each bar. Terry cradled the autoharp protectively against his shoulder and played it with meaningful caresses of his fingertips and thumb.
His concertina was a Wheatstone English. It was beautiful, with bright fretworked reed-pans and thumb-loops and bellows of what seemed ancient black leather. Terry played it sitting with his back straight and the instrument resting on one knee. He suggested he should play it on ‘The Old Main Drag’. His opinion was that the plaintive single reeds of the concertina would be perfect for the song. I couldn’t hear the difference between the single reed of my accordion and that of his concertina. Terry could. We tried it out. His head moved from side to side as he drew or compressed the bellows, adding an occasional twitch as his fingers ornamented the melody.
The refinement with which Terry played, together with the reverence he had for music, seemed destined never to converge with our irreverence and lack of refinement. It made me wonder if he understood what we were doing.
By drafting Scully, D.J. and P.V. into the crew, Frank sought to raise the standard of technical production. Each addition bumped Darryl further and further to the margins. With Philip’s admission into the group, expedient as it was, we had regained the synchrony we had been losing to Shane’s waywardness on the guitar. Frank’s invitation to Terry to join, though, came with Frank’s assertion that we lacked a certain finesse. None of us could argue with that. Part of our charm, it seemed to me, derived from our amateurishness and the improbability of our getting to the end of a gig, let alone from the odds of our having become a band at all. In the course of the past couple of years, though, by dint of all the practising we had done, the hundred or so gigs we had played and the two records we had made, our musicianship had improved. We had allowed Frank’s power to become so complete that none of us put up any resistance to any of his appointments, though I knew I wasn’t alone in my resentment of his opinion of us.
Finesse, as it happened, turned out to be a euphemism for something weightier, specific to our being taken seriously not by any audience – but by an Irish one.
Until Frank came to manage us, as a whole we hadn’t much cared whether or not an Irish audience held us in any regard, high or low. We had laughed to hear that when Kevin Conneff from the Chieftains came to our gig at the Riversdale House Hotel in Kenmare, he had listened to the first couple of songs, was heard to exclaim, ‘Pah!’ and had turned on his heel and walked out.
I wondered if the fact that we were a band that was for the most part English and with just a couple of members who could boast Irish parentage might have been a source of embarrassment to Frank. If I had had the courage to express my opinion, which I dared not in the face of the power he now seemed to exert and in view of the disdain in which I thought he held me, I would have accused Frank of being snobbish.
In the first week of September a disc jockey from Dublin called B. P. Fallon invited us to take part in a radio show at the RTÉ Studios in Donnybrook. In the course of his life’s work of tagging himself to what was current, Fallon had been self-styled ‘media guru’ to Marc Bolan and Led Zeppelin, had mimed playing bass for John Lennon’s ‘Instant Karma!’ on Top of the Pops and seemed ubiquitous when it came to Irish rock music. We had met Fallon the previous March after our first show in Dublin at McGonagle’s. He was a pixie-ish man and – except for a pair of sable eyebrows and dark collar-length wispy hair – bald. After our gig at McGonagle’s he had gone from room to room in the hotel conducting interviews, peppering his language with doo-wop and vocalese. He wore pink-framed glasses to work the recorder. I had ended up standing in the stairwell of the hotel at two or three in the morning, playing my accordion for him.
Fallon’s radio show was called The B. P. Fallon Orchestra. There would be a small audience made up of the winners of a competition, which RTÉ had held a couple of days before, together with a handful of Irish journalists and a musician or two. Though the majority of the audience was likely to be fans, we had been primed to expect confrontation. The theme of the evening was to be whether or not the Pogues had the right to play Irish music – in Ireland or anywhere else. Fuelled by the beer in the green room, our dander was up and Frank was on the defensive.
We were ushered into the studio and took our places at a long table covered with a white tablecloth, opposite a couple of ranks of what we assumed would be our inquisitors across the dark floor. Fallon sat at a desk to the side between the audience and us, ready to moderate. There was an indulgent and vaguely parental expression on his face. We set down our bottles between the microphones on stands, the tumblers and pitchers of water and ashtrays. The moment I took my place at the end of one of the long tables, I knew that this studio, with its earth-coloured hessian wall-covering and pine window-frames, was the last place I wanted to be.
Fallon started the proceedings, to our bemusement introducing us as ‘probably the most controversial group in the groovy world of pop and roll’. After playing a couple of tracks from Rum Sodomy and the Lash he started the interview.
Confronted as we were by a gallery of journalists we assumed had been invited in order to draw a bead on us, we were defensive and impudent. Our responses to Fallon’s questions were niggardly. We hoped to present ourselves as people you didn’t fuck with, and to offer as slight a target as possible. Fallon faltered a couple of times.
In an attempt to take control of the interview Frank spoke up, cutting off Spider in the middle of a response, paraphrasing him in a voice full of seasoned weariness and thick with drink. When he finished there was an awkward silence.
‘If you figured out that you heard an Irish voice there,’ Fallon said then, ‘you’re absolutely correct, a hundred points! Frank, maybe you’d be kind enough to tell us a bit about your rock-and-roll history, up to now?’
‘I don’t think it has any bearing on what’s going on here tonight,’ Frank said. Fallon pressed the issue and Frank, with hackneyed fli
ppancy, blundered his way through the list – Skid Row, the Woods Band, Dr Strangely Strange, Thin Lizzy, Kirsty MacColl and, to our mirth, the Commodores. He ended the list with ‘big acts, you know, blah blah blah’. I winced in embarrassment for him, and for us.
Throughout the afternoon Frank rode roughshod over the incoherence of our responses and pontificated at length about the band. He referred to the band as ‘we’. We came across as witless and incapable of speaking for ourselves.
After the introduction of Frank it was obvious that Fallon was predominantly interested in those of us whose names and associations would be recognisable to an Irish listenership. The rest of us he merely enumerated. Anonymity suited me under the circumstances. After acknowledging Philip Chevron who, it seemed, needed little introduction, he moved on to address the weightier presence of Terry Woods. Fallon enquired as to why Terry found himself at this interview. Terry, it was obvious, had not expected to be called upon to say anything at all.
‘Well, frangly, I mean, yeah,’ he faltered, surprised by the question and addled by the amount he had had to drink. ‘I think the ban’s grea’. Simmel as tha’. ’
‘Rumour has had it that you are actually going to join this folkabilly combo,’ Fallon went on.
‘Rumour’srong,’ Terry said.
‘You’re not?’
‘I havn’t min asked!’
‘Your name’s down on the bloody itinerary!’ Spider said.
‘Oh,’ Terry said. ‘Then I’m a Pogueen!’
‘Well,’ Fallon said. ‘A round of applause, please. Let’s welcome Terry into the Pogues.’
Handclapping concluded our introduction to the radio audience and to the gallery. Fallon moved on to what we had been led to believe was the inevitable confrontation between our inquisitors and ourselves. Fallon introduced an accordionist called Noel Hill, Hill immediately taking pains to point out that he was not an accordionist, but a concertina player, stressing also that he was ‘an Irish traditional musician, playing full time’. He was a simple-looking man, bearded and wearing a pair of glasses with large frames.
Assuming our scant knowledge of Irish traditional music and in an attempt at artfulness, Hill wanted to know if we had heard of Séamus Ennis at all. I felt sorry for him that he should think that we hadn’t. We rounded on him brutally. Frank led the attack, boxing Hill’s ears for his assumption that we in any way sought to emulate Séamus Ennis. He ridiculed Hill for his preciousness about ‘Irish traditional music’.
With dogged piety, Hill continued to try to send us up as charlatans and bastardisers of Irish music, distressed as he already was by the likes of Brendan Shine and, to our surprise, by the Clancy Brothers and the Dubliners.
‘The music in this country,’ he said. ‘It’s the most bastardised music. But this music that came out of – twenty years ago – the pubs in Dublin – rowdy music, ballad music – that come out of drunken sessions and that, been labelled Irish music, is, is a terrible abortion.’
Jem, Spider, Shane and Frank fell over one another denying that we thought we were playing the Irish music Noel Hill venerated. They came close to denying that we even played the kind of Irish music Hill considered an abortion. Hill sank back into the gallery and into silence. I winced at our duplicity. I hoped that at least one of us would own up and concede that we indeed played Irish music, and, in Noel Hill’s opinion, played it badly. The point, to me, was that no one had the least cause to question our sincerity.
Later in the programme, after Fallon had played our version of ‘Dingle Regatta’, Hill managed to wring some consolation from the drubbing we gave him, interjecting: ‘Well, as Beethoven might have said, deafness has got its moments.’
The debate continued on the theme of Irish music – its sanctity and otherwise its versatility – taking in Foster and Allen, Ray Lynam and Philomena Begley, Brendan Shine, the Clancy Brothers, the Dubliners, the Chieftains and De Dannan. Our contribution was either vilified for ‘paddywhackery’ or applauded for turning Irish music on its ear. Though I told myself that I was ignorant of our supposed significance, I was proud to provoke such polarised reactions.
As the hour and a half of questioning and dissimulation were coming to a close I was relieved not to have been called upon to say anything. When it came to my giving account at all, to anyone, of what we were doing, I had little to say. I told myself that it was a function of my ignorance of the larger issues we stirred up – our subversion of traditional Irish music, our breach of the divide between genres – which disqualified me from opening my mouth. I hoped to be viewed as ‘the quiet one’, though I ruined the effect by laughing exaggeratedly at anything I found the least bit funny if only to put some sort of oar in.
I had been happy just to play the accordion – and anything else to hand. By the end of the evening, though, I found out that that wasn’t enough.
Earlier in the afternoon a fan had had the bad luck to ask Cait whether or not she was going to record further with Pride Of The Cross, the band she had been performing in with Darryl. The question had been so stunning in its irrelevance that she just shut the kid down. At the end of the ordeal, one of the journalists described Cait as a ‘pig’. She grunted a succession of oinks.
‘Is that behaviour piggish enough for you?’ she said in a petulant and sugary voice.
*
The first show we played with Terry was at the beginning of September at the Haçienda – a former warehouse on the corner of Whitworth Street in Manchester. UV strips mounted in racks above the dance floor threw an unearthly light over the crowd. Riveted iron posts painted red and green, chevronned in black and yellow, interrupted the view from the stage. We played the gig in our customary positions along the front, forcing Terry upstage, subjecting him to a rough apprenticeship.
It wasn’t just the fact that he was a new boy that set Terry apart. He was a couple of months shy of his thirty-eighth birthday. The oldest of us at the time, Andrew, was thirty-one. That Terry should have been born in the decade previous to the rest of us conferred on him a remoteness made even more preterite by his musical history. It wasn’t long before we started to ridicule his antiquity and make of him an ancient Irish chieftain, embroidering him into a spuriously mythological tapestry of Ireland.
His voice took some getting used to. It was soft with a timbre that was whispery. Its dulcitude made you listen. When he warmed to a subject, which wasn’t rare, it was accompanied by a pursing of the lips, a rhetorical device Terry used to accentuate his authority. It didn’t take us long to master the piping of his voice and his Irish accent, as well as the declamatory hand gestures he used for emphasis.
Terry and Frank were close to the point of inseparable. They had known one another for years. Latterly, during the period Frank had been Kirsty MacColl’s manager, Terry had had the job of tour manager. On our tour bus, they sat down at the front across the aisle from one another where they traded comments, jokes and recollections, back and forth. If there were a couple of hours in the day between sound check and the gig, or on a day off, Frank would seek Terry out. Terry would pull on his coat, don his hat and they would go out. Before gigs, as we assembled in the hotel lobby or when we came back from the venue, the two of them could be found together at a table or propped against the bar. Frank would lean saltily towards Terry, until Terry exploded with laughter, his eyes closed, his head thrown back.
Though we consigned him to the rear of the stage, Terry tolerated his view of our backs for just a few weeks before he took his place in the line next to me. He played loud. A black humbucker pickup, the kind one would expect to see fixed to a Les Paul, disgraced the front of his comely, chestnut-coloured, pear-drop-shaped cittern. His amp stood a couple of feet behind. In the confines of the clubs we played, his speaker cabinet blared such overdriven harmonic distortion that afterwards my right ear whined from the onslaught and the next day felt as if wadded with wool.
‘James!’ he said. ‘I’m playing single notation music! You can’t
play single notation music if you just can’t hear!’ I gave up to his seniority and his stubbornness.
When it came to Terry’s playing the concertina on stage, an elaborate set-up had to be devised. D.J. together with Darryl and Scully positioned microphones on craning boom-stands on either side of him, well away from the line of monitor wedges along the front of the stage for fear of feedback. The pushing and pulling of the concertina, towards and away from the mikes, rendered the experiment useless. Contact microphones gaffer-taped to the reed-pan were dropped too. The concertina went back into its scuffed leather cube and Terry returned to his position at the front of the stage, to flay my right eardrum with the aural equivalent of barbed wire.
As the summer came to an end we went on the road in England, from Glasgow, working our way down through Newcastle and Blackburn to the Hammersmith Palais. Frank engaged a stage manager called Charlie McLennan.
Charlie epitomised rock and roll. He had lustrously blond hair, centre-parted and layered in the fashion of the 1970s. It conjured up such people as Mick Ronson or Rick Wakeman. His jeans were more or less denim sheathing. He had worked with Thin Lizzy, Frankie Miller, Joe Cocker and lately with Joan Armatrading. One of his jobs had been to lift Keith Richards from a couch in Redlands, take him to a nearby airfield and put him on a chartered plane out of the country for tax purposes.
Well tended as his coiffure was, it framed a misshapen face which had a small mouth and a bent nose set in it. His eyes were the palest blue. They moved slowly, without deliberation. He spoke in a slurred Glaswegian accent, low, monotone and soporific.
He was seemingly indestructible. I came across Charlie at the back of the bus outside the Boot on Cromer Street as we gathered to leave for Glasgow. He was telling a story to Shane and Spider at one of the tables near the back. On tour, travelling to the next gig and needing a piss, he had descended the short stairwell from the main deck of the bus and had become confused as to which the toilet door was. The hefty handle he chose had eventually given, but the door swung out over the surface of the motorway. To save himself he grasped the top of it and swung there as the driver swerved all over the road, alerted by the alarm connected to the door. The bus skidded to a stop on the hard shoulder.
Here Comes Everybody Page 17
