‘So,’ Charlie said. ‘I dropped down and walked up to the driver’s window and asked the guy, “Where’s the fucking toilet on this bus?” ’
*
Rum Sodomy and the Lash entered the charts at No. 13. A couple of weeks later it had vanished. We consoled ourselves with the explanation that we owed the record’s brief but sudden and fairly lofty showing to the vehemence of our fans.
The day before our gig at Barrowland, erstwhile Celtic and Scotland manager Jock Stein died of a heart attack at the end of Scotland’s World Cup qualifying game against Wales at Ninian Park. On the afternoon of our show Frank took us all – P.V., D.J., Scully, Darryl and Charlie too – down to Moss Bros on Renfield Street to deck ourselves out in Royal Stewart dress tartan: kilts, black tunics with brass buttons, white socks with red flashings. We went back and forth from the changing rooms appraising one another’s outfits, jealous of the fluke of a good fit or politely complimentary if arms extended beyond cuffs or shoulders drooped. Jem filled out his tunic handsomely. His legs were sturdy, his socks drawn neatly up to his kneecaps, the flashings trim. Spider had skinny legs, with pommels for knees. Andrew’s were almost Grecian in outline. Shane stood tall, skinny, one sock rumpled mid-calf, both flashings awry, his tunic half-buttoned up and the lace ruff hanging open at his throat.
The unfamiliarity of each of us shedding our usual drabness and becoming a Bonnie Prince Charlie made us hot in the face. Frank’s face shone. His colour was high. His blue eyes flashed and he tittered helplessly.
Barrowland Ballroom was a barn of a place with a latticed ceiling which arched over what looked like acres of wooden dance floor. The capacity was two thousand. It seemed an impossibly large number and the prospect of filling it remote, but half an hour before show time we were sick with anxiety, listening to the mounting chants of the crowd beyond the double doors to the hall.
When the lights went down, in defiance almost of Jock Stein’s death, a roar rose up. As it crested, we walked out on stage. When the crowd saw what we were wearing, another roar swelled up. Both seemed to break together and crash across the stage.
The audience was a seething bedlam of wet hair and suet-coloured faces laced together by green and white Celtic scarves.
Hail Hail, the Celts are here,
What the hell do we care?
They continued through the gig. After ‘And if you know the history, it’s enough to make your heart go whoa-oh-oh-oh!’ the clamour of the repeated ‘oh’ forced us to wait for them to finish before we could start another song.
They chanted ‘The Soldiers’ Song’ and bellowed about how much they hated Rangers, whom the songs referred to as ‘Huns’ and ‘animals’. They scared the shit out of me. I was relieved that these lads – there weren’t many girls out there – were on our side. I pitied those who weren’t.
After the gig, we strewed ourselves exhausted on the dusty velour seats in the dressing room. Spider raised both hands, in honour of the Glasgow crowd.
‘Fucking hell!’ he said in awe.
Scully and P.V. came in from the hall in their tunics and kilts, their faces pink from the heat. P.V. smiled with pride. Scully was chortling.
‘That was gas,’ he said.
I looked around at us all in our tartan finery. We were no longer the six strangers from the tenements opposite King’s Cross. We had somehow become a family.
‘Meat and two veg,’ I heard Frank say. He was nodding across at Shane. Shane was sitting on the wall-seat with his head back, his eyes closed and his mouth hanging open. His legs were apart. His kilt had ridden up and exposed his genitals.
Seventeen
For our tour of Germany in October 1985 – a symbol of our gathering momentum – we journeyed in a forty-five-foot green Van Hool tour bus with a panoramic front window and multiple wing mirrors. Inside, behind a few rows of forward-facing seats, were a couple of tables with domed table lamps and recesses for drinks. Halfway down the bus hung a television monitor upholstered with carpeting and a VCR tucked above it in the luggage rack. Separated by a curtain from the rest of the bus was a back lounge with foam-filled seating upholstered in grey faux suede. Throughout, there was a smell of Glade deodoriser.
With the exception of Frank, we shared rooms. There was a first-come first-served rotation of the coveted single room, if one became free, but this was so seldom as to discourage dwelling on. With Costello accompanying us, he and Cait roomed together. Due to their inseparability, the hours they kept and their predisposition to chronic garrulousness, Shane and Spider often shared a room. What the arrangements were for the rest of the band I didn’t know. As a matter of course I shared with Philip.
Outwardly my and Philip’s relationship must have appeared felicitous enough. The kindling of our friendship on the Finnjet, more or less fused by its near-perilous result, had become lore. Our urging one another to show off on stage, together with our fondness for quality suits, probably supported the assumption that we would room together. When it came to Frank’s brusque and impatient distribution of room keys when we checked into hotels a key would come our way with the call: ‘Philip and James!’
A few weeks before, after an evening drinking with Philip in South London, I was going to go home. We had happened to be so close by the block of flats in Kennington where Philip was staying with Phil Gaston and his girlfriend Dee O’Mahony that we went up to the flat. We sat together on the spongy leatherette sofa listening to a record. I slouched with my feet up on the coffee table, my arse way down in the seat, smoking a cigarette. I was spent from drink.
Philip reclined next to me with his elbow on the back of the sofa, a hand propping up his head, looking at me. I was drunk but not so drunk that I wasn’t aware of Philip’s attentions. I had spent the past few months since he joined the group flattered by what had become his obvious crush on me.
Philip suddenly leant over and put his mouth on mine. I was drunk enough to dismiss the shock of the unfamiliar, but even after just a while the kiss seemed to have gone on for ever. In the end, the tedium and my drunkenness overcame me and I passed into unconsciousness.
I woke at the sound of Phil Gaston coming in the front door. By the time Gaston came into the room, Philip and I had done our best to resume our positions and were drinking, lighting up cigarettes and listening to a record.
The episode was never mentioned again. I was happy to assume that Philip considered it to be as much an irregularity as I did. By the time the tour of Germany started, though, it seemed Philip was falling in love with me, if he hadn’t already.
After picking up our key from the desk, the business of letting ourselves into the hotel room was straightforward enough. Philip and I deferred to one another as to which bed we wanted. We put our stuff out on the bedside tables and our wash bags by the sink. We hung the clothes that were still wet from the gig the night before up in the cupboard. We went down to see what could be found to eat or if the hotel bar was open before going down to the venue.
After gigs, back in the room, I went about my business as if he were not there. After a shower, I blithely went about the room clad in just a towel. I was unashamed of sleeping naked. It had been my custom since teenage. Before turning the lights out, we exchanged our good nights.
In a matter of days, once I’d turned over to go to sleep, Philip entered into exaggerated writhing in his bed. I tried to ignore his restlessness but it came to be accompanied by groans and, now and again, the release of a great gust of a sigh. After a while his disquiet would subside and I would fall asleep. I wanted to put it down to poetic agony but knew it wasn’t.
At the end of the day I began to dread going back to the room. I would postpone it as long as I could, drinking with everyone else in bars after the gigs. A couple of times I took myself off on a walk through the town. No matter how quietly I might let myself in Philip would still be awake.
One night after his bout of thrashing had died down and I was beginning to drift off, his bedding whistled w
ith sudden movement.
‘Say good night to me!’ he cried out. ‘That’s all I want.’
‘Oh, fuck,’ I said. To pre-empt his getting up and coming to my bed, leaving me less control over what saying good night might mean, I got up and went to his.
My nightly embrace with Philip became the pattern. I got it over with as quickly as I could.
‘I’m a gay man,’ Philip said to me one night. ‘I’m in a group, on the road. You’re lucky to be in love. You all have girlfriends, and wives, people at home.’
Strangely, it angered me that he should include Shane in the list, for whom no one seemed to be waiting at home.
‘I’m on my own,’ he said. ‘You don’t know how hard it is.’
‘We’re all on our own, Philip. You just get on with it.’
‘That’s not what this band’s about,’ he said. ‘We should all care for one another. We all love one another. We’re all misfits. It’s not just Shane who’s a misfit. I’m a misfit. You’re a misfit. We’re the Town Musicians of Bremen for fuck’s sake!’
‘I’m going to go to sleep now,’ I said. I resented his assumption that he knew anything at all of what the band was about; he had only been in it since May.
‘You’re all wound up,’ he said.
‘I’m not,’ I said.
‘Yes you are!’ he said. ‘I can see it in your neck.’
I was tired. The marrow in my bones was tired. My ears whined from the gigs.
‘Fuck off, Philip,’ I said. ‘Please.’
In the mornings a couple of times he reached under the covers of my bed to tickle my feet. One morning, I listened to him going through what turned out to be my bag, rattling through the cassettes. His jittery fingers opened one of them up and put it into my Walkman. In a moment or two I felt his shaking hands put the headphones over my head.
‘Time to wake up,’ he murmured.
‘Oh, Christ, Philip!’
On the bus I tried to keep to myself. I sat with my knees up against the seat in front, staring through the window listening to classical music on my headphones. As the tour went on, though, Philip would plop down next to me. I took to piling my coat and bag of cassettes on the empty seat.
*
All of us got up earlier than we ever wanted to. Alarm calls bored through our sleep. If we made it down to breakfast at all, it was at the last moment. Frühstück was a matter of palate-scouring draughts of grapefruit juice, dry bread-rolls, a tile or two of sweating cheese and some salami. If there was time, we’d wrap a couple of rolls, an apple or an orange in a serviette, check out and then get onto the bus, and wait.
Andrew would lumber onto the bus with his bag over his shoulder. He’d grunt and take a seat in the corner at one of the tables where he would fold his arms, close his eyes, and make a forbidding line of his mouth. Now and again a densely lashed eye would crack open to signal his displeasure at a commotion and then close again.
Spider would come down the aisle, bag bumping on the backs of the seats, in the leather coat he had bought in a second-hand shop in Berlin and had named Wolfgang. He would lean both elbows on the headrests on either side of the aisle and crane his face down towards whoever was sitting at the tables at the back. His eyes were swollen from lack of sleep but tiredness seemed only to goad him on.
‘Oh!’ he shouted. ‘I am seen you of the Pogues! You are hitting yourself over your head with a trampoline! No! I am stupid! I am seen you hitting yourself over your head with a trombone!’
Costello and Cait sat together at one of the tables, knees touching, hands dabbling. Terry sat nowhere but at the front, happiest with a view of the road ahead through the panoramic window, with his book on the empty seat by his side – a historic tome or other on the subject often enough of the American Civil War or Irish repression, occasionally a book of poetry. My holdall on the empty seat next to me forced Philip to take a seat down the bus.
The tiredness which set in crowded Darryl’s eyes with capillaries. There was a papery wanness about Jem’s face. A week into the tour Shane had brought to our attention teardrop-shaped blotches under Jem’s eyes.
‘Stigmata!’ Shane had cried out.
Shane never seemed to look any worse, unless his pallor was more deathly, unless denser stubble encroached upon his mouth and cheeks, unless his lips were rawer from wiping the crust of kaolin and morphine from them with his forearm.
He came out of the hotel wearing shades and in his shirtsleeves, seemingly oblivious to the pinch of winter in the air. His trousers were as shiny with grime as they had been in London. He mounted the step onto the bus, stopped to emphasise to the driver, with stabs of the finger, a requirement about the air-conditioning. He would conclude with an exaggerated nod, push his sunglasses onto the bridge of his nose with a forefinger and make his way, sniffing, up the bus, angry about the way his luggage snagged on the seatbacks. He would briefly take in those of us already sitting waiting to go. He would nod, and then disappear behind the curtain to the back lounge.
As the bus lurched away from the kerbside we’d look across one another and out of the windows and watch the shop fronts, kiosks, banks, the tramlines, trolley-cables and trees go by, until the city gave way to the suburbs and the suburbs to the autobahn. The drives – Berlin to Nürnberg to Zürich to Hamburg – were long and punishing.
The fir forests slid across one another, opening and closing over fields of winter wheat speckled with gulls or, a mile or so later, a clutter of orange roofs and the inky prong of a steeple. Winter was coming and the leaves were turning. Towards the end of the morning, mist still hung in the friezes of woodland which fringed the forests.
‘Eagle,’ Andrew pointed out, and we strained to pick out the tawny italic soaring against the pines. When dusk drew in, a train of headlights filed past, as the rush hour evacuated the city we were entering.
*
Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs had been released the previous month. It was never off the bus’s cassette player. We loved Waits’s cantankerous voice, half lover’s whisper, half carney’s barking. The clanks of the banjo we loved too, along with the ventilation of the accordion, the bonks and crashes of the percussion, the respiration of the pump organ and harmonium, the wailing of the musical saw, the booms of the parade drum, the clonks of the marimba. The otherworldly grating, creaking and thumping sounded throughout the bus. It was as if we were truly on board a ship with the straining of timbers and the constant motion.
We were already familiar with a couple of Waits’s previous records. Jem had played us Heartattack and Vine and Swordfishtrombones in the past couple of years, but it wasn’t until Rain Dogs came out that we knew that, if any record pointed the way towards what we wanted to do, this was it.
We waited for our favourite bits to come up, to point them out to one another. We would stare into each other’s eyes waiting for a choice phrase or sound. We delighted in spotting ‘Chim Chim Cheree’ in one of the verses of ‘Diamonds and Gold’, and Frank Sinatra’s ‘Witchcraft’ in the melody of ‘Rain Dogs’. We groaned in wonder at the brutality and spontaneity of the playing: Marc Ribot’s angular guitar, Michael Blair’s bonkers percussion, the thumb-heavy banjo on ‘Gun Street Girl’.
We relished Waits’s imagery – as American as Edward Hopper and as fucked up as George Grosz. Along with the brutality of the music came a zoetropic parade of slaughterhouses, roadhouses, shovels, whiskey, pistols, umbrellas, tumours big as eggs, Cincinnati jackets and paladins’ hats. The procession of images was as protean, as crystalline and as haggardly illuminated as in Shane’s songs.
When we weren’t listening to Rain Dogs, we were watching Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America on the VCR. Along with Tom Waits’s music, Morricone’s – the minor chord and semitone dissonance of the opening strings, the pan-flute of the title melody, the violins and soprano of ‘Deborah’s Theme’ – became the soundtrack of the tour. Not only did the music weave itself into the fabric of our day, but the dialogue too.
‘You coming? We’re going. You coming?’
‘You dancing? You asking? I’m asking. I’m dancing.’
‘Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!’
‘You’d be better off you stayed in the Bronx.’
‘Woulda been better for you, too!’
In the Raststätten we pulled into, one or other of us would be sure to stir his coffee for minutes on end, in homage to Noodles’s sixty-three seconds of spoon-turning in the film. It wasn’t long before the joke wore off.
Contrarily, the long journeys were inspiring. The sequestration, the physical proximity, the boredom, the fatigue, the constant motion seemed to imbue everything with a prodigiousness that drove me to write in my journal whenever I could. Andrew, when he wasn’t gazing out over the forests, drew. I could hear Jem at the back of the bus playing a mandolin. He came to find me where I was sitting near the front. At one of the sound checks I had been playing something in what I supposed was an East European mode. It was a scale with four harsh semitone intervals. He took the mandolin back to the back of the bus. I listened to him piecing together a kind of rondo melody.
Shane, too, was writing. If I happened to be sitting in one of the backwards-facing seats at the rear of the bus, I could see him in the back lounge hunched over crumpled pieces of paper holding a felt pen in a clenched fist. Despite it being the end of autumn the roof-hatch would be open. The downdraught snapped the curtain in the doorway and lapped at the sheets of paper pinned between his elbow and knee. It flattened his hair onto his forehead. He’d stop for a minute and look out of the window, working his nostrils absent-mindedly as if something in one of them constantly itched. His foot tapped all the while. Then, after cuffing the paper on his knee, he’d wipe his nose with his forearm and set to again. He filled the flapping sheets of paper with large, angular letters and the margin with violent dots. When he’d finished with one of them he brushed it out of the way. The pages lay scattered. The wind pinned one of them on the floor where it shivered under the gusts from the roof-hatch.
Here Comes Everybody Page 18
