I’d look up again and he’d be unconscious, but never so deeply that he would let go of the pen or the bottle of wine he was drinking. He lay with his arse half on, half off the sliding foam-filled upholstery. His raw hands rested in his lap, an arm clamping one of the half-scrawled sheets to his thigh. The hairs on his forearm stood up. The wind snatched the smoke coming up from his cigarette lying in the ashtray.
*
Ever since he came to join the group we had forced Andrew to stand up to play. I had been the loudest to insist that if everyone else had to stand, so did he. Playing the drums standing up wasn’t easy. To play side stick Andrew had both to lean forward onto the snare drum to dampen the skin, and then draw back to wallop it. Within a week on the tour in Germany, he had nicked the knuckle of his forefinger on a burr on one of the lugs. The sticking plaster he wrapped round his finger was no protection. His knuckle continued to knock against the hardware.
Within a couple of days the laceration became septic. He showed me a vein which had begun to trace a pink line up the underside of his arm. Frank took him to a doctor. Andrew came back with his finger in a beak-shaped aluminium cast wrapped around with gauze. He held his hand protectively to his chest. He regretted not being able to play for a few days, but when he said that the injury had advanced to septicaemia and had threatened the loss of his finger, tears welled in his eyes.
In Bremen we talked about who was going to play the drums. Both Darryl and Costello volunteered. We decided to alternate the two of them night by night.
Before he came out on stage to take his place behind the drums, Costello took off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. He bent towards the kit in readiness, head erect, eyebrows aloft, alert to his new responsibility, the expression on his face deferential but convinced of his talent. He counted in the first song. The snare-beats rang out like gunshots. The floor-tom became a battery of explosions. It was a relief the next night to have Darryl take his place at the drums.
Familiar as Darryl was with the songs, and with our ethos, a couple of days later it was a further relief when Andrew resumed playing, but behind the bass drum and hi-hat Charlie McLennan had found on our day off between Berlin and Nürnberg – and sitting on a stool, cradling his bandaged finger against his chest out of harm’s way and playing with one hand.
*
‘You know guinea pigs can die of fright?’ Andrew said, as we drove from Osnabrück to Lübeck, to catch the ferry to Copenhagen. ‘Fright, and frost,’ he added.
The afternoon in Copenhagen was warm enough to walk around the Tivoli Gardens, but at night the temperature plunged to a stinging cold. None of us were prepared for how bitter it was, least of all Shane who went around everywhere without a coat. I walked across the Rådhuspladsen with him. The night air was opalescent from frozen mist. The neon lettering between the lines of windows and above the buildings seemed to float in the sky. I pulled my coat tight across my stomach and turned the collar up to my ears. Shane seemed unconcerned. Though he might have hunched his shoulders and tucked his elbows in against the chill, he bowled along across the square, hands in pockets, steam issuing from his mouth.
On the way to Malmö the next day he was in his usual spot in the back lounge of the coach – but sitting rigid, his eyes half-open, head back, his arms folded stiffly over his stomach. His lips and face were white. The only motion was his mouth chewing his stomach pills into a chalky glue.
After the sound check Frank helped him up to his room. After Shane had vomited what Frank described as ‘bile’, he took Shane to the hospital. Frank showed up in the dressing room within an hour of the gig. There was a defeated look on his face.
‘Pneumonia,’ he said. ‘What do you want to do?’
The doors of the club had already opened. We agreed an announcement should be made. We reconfigured the set list, choosing who was going to sing which song. Though Spider put himself forward to sing most of them, Costello took the plum ones.
On stage, as we struggled to salvage what had turned out to be the last gig of the tour, a wretched delirium came over us. I fought with the impulse to let it all go to hell. We passed a bottle of whiskey round the stage. Spider threw himself at the first half of the set, from ‘The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn’ to ‘Billy’s Bones’. When Cait sang ‘I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day’, Costello crooned unison in the choruses. Costello’s otherwise strident harmony vocals reamed through the monitors. In the second half of the gig, he larded ‘The Old Main Drag’, ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’, ‘Dirty Old Town’ and ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ with a regret seemingly dedicated to our stricken singer.
Afterwards, in the dressing room we threw dinner plates against the wall until the floor was covered in broken pottery. We bellowed at one another without restraint. Philip got so drunk that he couldn’t walk. When it came time to leave, P.V. and I helped him out to the bus. At the hotel we dragged him up to the room we shared and threw him on the bed. I left and closed the door behind me.
In the hotel foyer I came across Cait sitting on the sofa, her elbow on her knee and her chin resting on her knuckles. She and Costello had fought bitterly in the street outside the hotel and Costello had stormed off. But for a glow of pink under one eye, she was wan with fury.
‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ I said. ‘He’s drunk. You’re drunk. We’re all drunk. It’ll be all right tomorrow. Forget about it. He’s the best thing you have.’ I couldn’t think of much else to say. I was drunk. I wanted everyone to get on.
‘Let’s go and find the little man,’ she said. We got up and staggered arm in arm to the lift.
The sight of Costello in his black coat and his hat marching up the corridor towards us from their room threw Cait into such a panic that she fled in the opposite direction. I stood, baffled for a moment or two as he chased after her.
I didn’t want to go to bed. As I passed, I could hear Andrew’s voice talking on the phone behind the door of the room he was sharing with Jem. I explored the hotel, trying handles up and down the corridors as I went. Most of them were locked except for one which opened onto a surprisingly large linen cupboard and another one leading to the service stairs. The staircase took me through the staff changing rooms and the humming, fluorescently lit kitchens until I pushed through a door, surprised to find myself back where I’d started in the foyer.
In the same spot I’d come across Cait earlier in the evening sat Costello, in his coat, his face in his hands. I went to sit down next to him. His eyes behind his glasses were small and slimy with tears.
‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ I said. ‘She’s drunk. You’re drunk. We’re all drunk. It’ll be all right tomorrow. Forget about it. She’s the best thing you have.’
At that moment, Cait came across the foyer. She sat down and put an arm over Costello’s shoulders. I was about to leave them to it when another argument erupted. This time Costello was the one to storm off, leaving Cait fuming again on the sofa. I sat with her for a while in silence until Costello reappeared, with his luggage.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ I shouted.
I left and went up to the door I’d heard Andrew’s voice coming from. Andrew was still on the phone. Jem was happy to come out.
‘That’ll be a hundred-quid phone call,’ he said.
The lobby was empty of Costello and Cait. The bar was long closed but we persuaded the night man to let us have a couple of bottles of Pripps.
There was nowhere else to go but to the linen cupboard I had come across. We closed the door behind us and hoisted ourselves up to the top shelves where there was room to sit across from one another on bales of linen with our bottles of beer. The light from the bare bulb hanging from the biscuit-coloured ceiling was harsh. We turned it off and talked into the dark, about the band: how worried we were for Shane, his pneumonia, his stomach, his drinking, and how pointless the little we tried to do was. We talked about how things had changed since Frank had come to work for us. Despite such benefits
as the acceleration of our career and the living we were now making, we talked about how much we had lost since we had taken him on. We talked about how the dynamic of the band had shifted, since, first, Philip’s inclusion, and then Terry’s. We talked about Spider’s drinking, which at one time had merely been funny but which now wasn’t. We talked about Cait’s volatility, which, though her relationship with Costello seemed to have dampened it, turned out to be just as prone to combustion. We talked about how much we liked one another.
‘I wouldn’t want to lose you from the group,’ he said.
‘Same here,’ I said. ‘It’s not likely. Don’t seem to be able to do anything else,’ I added.
In the morning, we left for England. Shane had discharged himself from hospital. His bloody-mindedness had vanquished his pneumonia sufficiently to prompt him, to our astonishment, to light up a cigarette as soon as he got on the bus.
We had a three-day journey ahead of us – to Hamburg and then across the North Sea to Harwich. It was decided that Shane should fly home with the Irish contingent – Frank, Terry, Scully and P.V., together with Costello and Cait.
We dropped them all off at the airport in Copenhagen. They collected their luggage from the hold and disappeared into the terminal, leaving Shane standing in the cold outside. He looked up and down the wet pavement, bereft of his bearings. We shouted to him where the rest of them had gone. He lifted a forefinger in acknowledgement and went inside.
Eighteen
We started rehearsals at John Henry’s, a converted Victorian factory at the end of a brick alley off Brewery Road in Holloway. But for the sagging black fabric which covered the walls in the rehearsal room, everything in the room was grey, from the cigarette-burnt synthetic carpet to the dinge which managed to filter in through the filthy window.
Andrew’s finger had healed, but his first demand at the start of rehearsals was that he should continue to be allowed to sit down to play. He had had Charlie McLennan pick up his kit from home. Around the familiar turquoise cocktail drum and snare snuggled a bass drum, cymbals and a hi-hat.
Shane seemed fully recovered after his pneumonia. He came to rehearsal in a dove-grey suit like the one he had worn for the video of ‘Dirty Old Town’, freshly dry-cleaned, over a black shirt. He wore latticed leather shoes.
He paced back and forth across the floor with a hand in his pocket, smoking, avoiding our eyes, waiting for us to finish chatting and reading our papers. He tapped on the windowsill as a couple of us drifted in late from the Balmoral on the corner or in from the café next door.
He moved me off the piano to show us a song he had written, called ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’. With his index, middle and ring fingers separated in such a way that they moved in a group, he stabbed out the three chords.
There was an introduction to play, repeated at the beginning of the middle eight and at the end. There was a three-note refrain in between each of the verses. He demonstrated it by pecking the keys with a tar-tanned forefinger.
As soon as we started rehearsing it, I understood the reason for his imperiousness and the impeccability of his clothing. The song was gorgeous. The lyrics were generous and grown-up. Despite the mysteriousness of some of the lines, there was a beautiful clarity in the song.
When we had learnt the chords and the structure I took over on the piano. Shane stood tall in his suit, his fingers round the barrel of the microphone, looking with feigned abashment at the carpet as he waited for the introduction to play through. After a while, he took the microphone off its stand and walked up and down, singing. Now and again, he lifted an arm for emphasis. The performance was too artless and too abashed to be pastiche. His embodiment of Frank Sinatra made me want to look away in embarrassment, but I was simultaneously compelled to watch, the conviction he had of the worth of his song was so conspicuous.
Another song Shane brought in was one he had written for the Clancy Brothers. In endearing hyperbole, it was called ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’. Like ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’, it was in 6/8 time. The lyrics were vivid with images and locations in Shane’s beloved County Tipperary. The melody in the middle eight he had based upon a sixteenth-century harp tune, ‘Tabhair Dom Do Lámh’ – ‘Give Me Your Hand’. Terry closed his eyes and nodded in approval.
The mandolin melody Jem had been playing on the bus in Germany formed the introduction and middle eight of another song Shane brought in to rehearsal. It was a song full of horrific and haunting images. Shane explained to me, with haggard relish, that the figure of the woman with the comb in her hand in the chorus was the banshee of Celtic mythology whose keening presages death. I sat on a speaker cabinet in the rehearsal room with Shane standing over me. He leant close. He mimicked the action of the woman forever combing, her hair falling half over her face, screaming and screaming. It wasn’t so much the phantasm of the banshee herself which struck me with horror, but Shane’s looming demented phizog, his ruined teeth, crusty lips, mouth blooming with cold sores, the blowholes of his nose and his terrorful eyes.
When we had been in Berlin, in the dressing room, Shane had been surrounded by fans, breathless with excitement to be in his company and desperate to impress, reeling off punk bands and pitching songs to him they regarded as seminal.
‘The “Turkey Song” of the Damned!’ one of them had shouted.
‘What?! Turkish song of the damned!? Fuck!’
The title of the new song was ‘Turkish Song of the Damned’.
Again we took up rehearsing the Christmas song we had worked on at NOMIS after coming back from Scandinavia the previous May. Marcia contended that a Christmas song without conflict was boring and predictable, and came up with the storyline of a straw-clutching loser bickering with his girlfriend. The song now had a couple of introductory verses. The melody of the first line was an undisguised reiteration of the theme from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America.
Our rehearsals were interrupted by a visit from Dave Robinson, who came to plead with us to stay with the label. Stiff Records, it seemed, was finally going under. Unshaven, the skin around his eyes papery, Robinson sat in front of us on a flight case and implored, his hands defiantly thrust in the pockets of his car coat. The balance of power seemed to have swung diametrically the other way. The record company had now come cap in hand to us. We stood with our instruments hanging from our shoulders and pretended to consider what he had to say.
Almost to spite Dave Robinson, in the couple of weeks we had before going out on a Christmas tour, we went into Elephant Studios to record music for the soundtrack for Alex Cox’s film about Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, Sid and Nancy.
The majority of the music we made for the film was suitably scourging, a synthesis of what we thought were basic elements of the Velvet Underground sound: rigidly down-struck guitar set against a grim Phil Spector beat. Jem had written a melody we submitted to a suite of variations, including one in which, when the location of the film moved to the French capital, the accordion evoked the streets of Paris. Otherwise it was a matter of setting up a groove around two chords with bass, drums and guitar, with Jem laying on banjo and myself a mandolin beaten with teaspoons or a violin meant to conjure up John Cale.
Shane had written a song for Cait to sing. It recalled the Shangri-Las and was called ‘Haunted’. In keeping with the music we’d been making for the film, the song relied again on a Phil Spector beat to underpin Shane’s favourite chords outside folk music: E, A and B, with the two top strings open, ringing across the chord progression.
By the end of November we had recorded as many as nine pieces of music, before going out on the road for what was becoming our customary Christmas tour of England, taking in the Midlands, the North-West and Scotland.
The tent-pole gig of the tour was the Hammersmith Odeon.
It was deemed a major gig, despite its less-than-grand location under the concrete span of the Hammersmith Flyover and the fact that there was something démodé about the place – the tabernacle for meta
l and the occasional glam band. Whitesnake, Deep Purple, Lynyrd Skyrnyrd – and Boney M – had played there. On the other hand, so had Frank Zappa, Bob Marley and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I tried to imagine people saying: ‘The Pogues at Hammersmith Odeon? That’s cool!’ I hoped the ethos I was convinced we embodied would carry us through and transform even the uncoolest situation into triumph.
The Hammersmith Odeon wasn’t cool, but then it happened not to be our gig. It turned out to be Frank’s. Once the gear was set up, Frank sauntered out onto the stage. He scanned the sweeping balcony with a self-conscious meekness, taking in the plush gloom of the empty seats. He tapped the stage with the metal toe of a snakeskin boot and then knocked a heel against it. But for the cigarette he was smoking, which was unusual for him, he was like a footballer getting the feel for the turf and the terraces.
The gig itself was a matter of the dreadful hurtle of song after song. We played by the seat of our pants and finished by the skin of our teeth. The beginning of each song felt like sheer folly.
Near the beginning, Philip went up to the microphone.
‘Hello!’ he said, in a voice which instantly invoked Val Doonican’s cameo in the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s ‘The Intro and the Outro’. ‘We’re the Pogues!’ The cheering and jeering of a couple of thousand people or more who bore nothing but maniacal goodwill for us carried us to the end of the gig.
Here Comes Everybody Page 19
