Afterwards, drained by the exertion and cowed by the cycle of count-ins and finishing flourishes, we sat with our hands dangling between our knees and our heads hanging between our shoulders.
Frank came into the dressing room. His eyes were opaque with drink. His mouth clacked with dry spit. He laughed breathlessly. He ushered in some other men who more or less looked like him – wearing navy blazers and faded jeans. They gave off a superior air of having rooted for Frank from the beginning. They nodded at us and clapped Frank on the shoulders. As the congratulations proceeded and Frank got drunker, a flap of his shirt came loose and he gave up training back the lock of hair behind his ear that kept coming adrift. His face was flushed with vindication. Recovering from the concussion of noise and heat and light on stage, and because we’d had a drink or two from the fridge – Bloody Marys in pint plastic glasses, bottles of champagne – some of us draped arms over Frank’s shoulders. A chant went up.
‘Fuck the begrudgers! Fuck the begrudgers! Fuck the begrudgers!’
*
I spent Christmas with Debsey’s family at her grandmother’s house in Cambridge. Granny Butcher had haystack hair from which slid wisps of grey. Her low-ceilinged kitchen was humid with cooking. Upstairs in the room I shared with Debsey’s brother, it was so cold that ice formed on the inside of the windows. On Boxing Day, I got up before light to get a train to London to meet up with the rest of the band at Heathrow for another tour of Ireland.
Before we could relish the heady exclusivity and the leatherette seats of the turboprop fifteen-seater Frank had chartered to fly us to Waterford, we had to wait for Cait and Costello to show up – until we couldn’t wait any longer. We boarded, leaving to Frank the job of sorting out how to get our bass player to the first show the next day.
Whatever loftiness and rock-and-roll privilege had come with the chartering of an aircraft ended on arrival at Waterford airport. Our plane drew up in the middle of an otherwise vacant plot of tarmac in front of the terminal – an observation tower with canted windows and a squat arrivals hall. The place was deserted. We collected our luggage and walked to where a couple of vans were waiting. Freezing rain drifted across the trees surrounding the scrubby airfield. Lichen grew on the concrete posts which struggled to hold up the chicken-wire perimeter fence.
By the time of the gig the next day, Cait still hadn’t shown up. We drafted Darryl into the line-up. He knew all the songs. He had heard them often enough. How could he not know how to play them? Cait didn’t show up until our second date of the tour in Tralee.
It was a tour of unrelenting cold. The hotels were interred in the off-season and sparsely patronised, the radiators frigid, the bedding meagre, breakfast dilatory. A few of the gigs took place in drinking and entertainment emporia attached to the hotel we were staying in. They were vast, dowdy places in the middle of nowhere, full of smoke and what we took to be farmers, a lot of whom wore hairpieces of staggering conspicuousness. The gigs provided the only opportunities to warm up. Not even soaking in the bath prior to going downstairs for show time seemed to help much, the water tepid at best.
At the Fairways Hotel in Dundalk we had to be led to the stage down an outside corridor and past the door to the kitchens. My leather-soled shoes slipped on grating slimy with kitchen grease. Keeping my accordion from damage, I went down. The grate tore the skin on my elbow into a hanging lobe. A doctor we found fashioned butterfly stitches out of a couple of sticky plasters a barman came across in a drawer behind one of the bars.
As our opening act, we had travelling with us a singer-songwriter called Ron Kavana. He was a friend of Frank and Terry’s – a stocky guy with a flat nose and the beginning of a widow’s peak. In Belfast, he and Costello both opened for us, each of them with an acoustic guitar. Before he had even opened his mouth to say or sing anything, Costello was greeted with a gob of saliva spat from somewhere near the front of the crowd.
Kavana stayed in the same hotels as we did and travelled with us – in the bus we had or the car in which Scully sped through the country roads, sometimes within door-handle-striking distance of oncoming traffic, Frank and Terry his usual passengers.
‘A Corkman,’ Shane sneered. I liked Ron. He was a nice guy, if a little earnest and prosaic.
The drinking and cigarette-smoking and lack of fresh air got to me. In Limerick I became short of breath and my head had started to pulse. I stepped out of the bar we were in, hoping for the refreshment of the cold on my face. The air outside was acrid with peat smoke which seemed to have concentrated in the freezing fog hanging in the streets. The sulphurousness of the street lighting made the atmosphere look yet more noxious.
Fresh air, however, we got. On a detour between Limerick and Galway, Darryl took us to Cait’s family’s hometown of Lehinch, County Clare. The day was Cait’s twenty-first birthday. We walked through the town. The roofs of the bungalows shone with orange lichen in the low afternoon sun and their windows gazed out to the ocean. Fresh air we got too, and in great gusts blowing off the Atlantic, when Darryl stopped a couple of miles up the road at the Cliffs of Moher. Ragged piers of black shale marched in from the sea out of the mist and channelled such a gale up the bluff that I could hold my coat out like wings, jump into the blast and float for a second or two.
When we got to Galway we were told the news that Philip Lynott had died in Salisbury Hospital, of renal and coronary failure due to internal abscesses and blood poisoning. I remembered his pallid face and blank eyes at the Clarendon Ballroom the previous March. Backstage at Leisureland, against the seaside-blue paintwork and frosted glass of one of the corridors, Frank, Terry, P.V. and Scully were standing like a bas-relief in the grim fluorescent light. All of them had known Lynott. Each stared into space. The news of his death was a brutal end to an otherwise luminous day of sunshine and cold, sea and wind, sand and cliffs.
No one took Phil Lynott’s death more to heart than Cait. Unfortunately, the promoters, having heard that it was her birthday, had stationed beaded buckets of champagne and flutes on both ends of a table to await her in one of the function rooms at the hotel after the gig. A gleaming birthday cake was the centrepiece. It was too much for Cait. Inconsolable over Lynott’s death, her voice broken with anger and grief, she scooped up handfuls of yellow sponge and icing and splattered the walls, floor and anyone within range with it. After her fury, her party ended with racking sobs and heaving embraces. Her face was smeared with mascara. When I went back to the function room, corks rolled over the floorboards and broken glass ground underfoot.
Our last gig was in Shane’s hometown of Puckane, a few miles outside the market town of Nenagh. It seemed the entire village had come out to fill the sizeable, stone-flagged saloon in Paddy Kennedy’s bar, with pride of place by the iron kitchen range bestowed upon the MacGowan family in their navy blazers and print frocks. Towards the end of our set, a man I assumed to be Shane’s dad, Maurice, with a little girl in a cotton dress in tow, mounted the stage to speak a few words into the microphone – about his son, about us, about how welcome we were, what a great honour it was and so forth. When the speech was done, Maurice and little girl, bereft of a plan, stayed where they were, staring haplessly at the audience, while we played the last song around them.
*
Frank had already given us a sketch of a tour of the United States, to take place at the end of February. New York would be our base for shows up and down the East Coast. The whole thing would take a week and a half. The prospect of going to America filled me with dread.
In order to have some sort of release in advance of the tour, Frank had put forward the idea of recording an EP. Forgetting Shane’s animosity or oblivious to it in the first place, Costello had agreed to produce.
When we got back to London we started again at Elephant Studios.
‘London Girl’ was a pop song, urgently puerile and fun to play. Against a shuffle beat, Shane sang in an American accent.
When it came to overdubbing the accordion part, I
played my heart out. Jem tacked a sign up on the hessian wall of my booth in the studio.
‘Cajun!’ it read.
I’d been listening to Nathan Abshire and Clifton Chenier – and Rockin’ Dopsie and the Zydeco Twisters. I played nothing like them, and made it up myself. I chattered chords against Andrew’s shuffle in semiquavers, toggling index and middle fingers all the way down the keyboard in a descending scale of couplets. By the time I was done with my overdub, I was exhausted and went to rest on the corduroy sofa in the control room while Terry went into the live room to overdub his parts on one of the other songs: ‘The Body of an American’. I lay curled up, going in and out of sleep. Terry’s cittern part infiltrated my dreams, the root note he kept striking on the offbeat mutating into a testicle forever dropping out of his Y-fronts.
We knocked out a jig Jem had written called ‘Planxty Noel Hill’, dedicated to the traditional concertina player who had been so scandalised by the Pogues at B. P. Fallon’s radio show at RTÉ the previous September. In Irish traditional music, the prefix of planxty denoted tribute. In the case of Jem’s instrumental – full of stops and starts and screams and yelps – it was intended ironically.
Before we left Elephant, we tried to record Jem and Shane’s Christmas song, which Shane had given the title ‘Fairytale of New York’, after J. P. Donleavy’s novel. In the duet, Cait sang the girl’s part. Costello played the piano. The fact that the song was divided into two parts, each with its distinct tempo, gave us no end of trouble. I wondered if the problem was symptomatic of Jem and Shane’s writing collaboration. Shane had written both lyrics and melody for the opening verses and the chorus. The main body of the song was Jem’s melody with Shane’s lyrics. We left ‘Fairytale of New York’ for a later date.
An orchestra was vital for ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’. Elephant Studios were too small. Through Frank’s connections with ZTT Records, Trevor Horn’s studios in Notting Hill were made available. Studio 1 at Sarm West was a huge place with oak flooring, a Bösendorfer piano in one corner and, in the distance, the window of the control room.
An arranger Frank knew called Fiachra Trench came in with a string orchestra and brass section. Trench had worked with Van Morrison and Phil Lynott. His nobility when he lifted his baton to conduct eclipsed the goofiness of his face. I watched in awe through the window. The presence of an orchestra in the studio beyond the glass and playing one of our songs put me in ferment. Trench’s arrangement included here and there a meticulous countermelody or a glissando to hoist the theme to a higher octave. The fourths which underpinned the instrumental verse towards the end of the song classily recalled Ravel’s Bolero.
In rehearsal we’d been playing ‘The Body of an American’ with the theme from The Guns of Navarone for a middle eight. Averse to sharing royalties with Dimitri Tiomkin, we had Tommy Keane come in and obscure the tune with uilleann pipes. One afternoon, we took pains to teach Tommy to play Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’, dumbfounded that he’d never heard it. Once he’d got the notes, as we had seen before, his face tilted upward, his eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling.
We were taken out into the streets of Notting Hill to have our photographs taken for publicity for our American tour and for the cover of the EP. It was the end of January and we wore our coats: Terry, his tweed three-quarter length and his battered hat; Spider, his leather coat Wolfgang. We found a Budweiser hoarding which propitiously depicted Mount Rushmore.
‘We should call it Poguetry,’ Frank said. Thinking it was a pun on ‘purgatory’, I liked the idea. ‘Poguetry in Motion,’ he added.
The EP, Frank was of the opinion, would be our calling card. His excitement to go to the United States was palpable.
‘You’ll be beating them off,’ Frank said. ‘You’ll all be getting blow-jobs.’
Despite the recent fourth anniversary of my relationship with Debsey, the remark added a twang of cupidity to my eagerness to go to the United States, and to my fear of it.
Nineteen
On the Air India flight from Heathrow we voided the bar of all the miniature champagne bottles. Halfway through what seemed the interminable five-hour flight, we moved on to whatever full-size bottles of Piper Heidsieck the long-suffering steward could come up with. When those had run out I drank vodka and tonic upon vodka and tonic. We took over the back of the plane, standing and smoking. I started to reel a little, gazing down through the fish-eye window in one of the exit doors. Through a layer of haze over Greenland, Newfoundland and New Brunswick I watched the shattered ice fields and the enamel-blue ocean drift by. The sunlight that streamed in through the windows, combined with the drink, provoked a festive optimism in all of us, not least Philip, who clambered all over the seats. None of us slept. We cackled, shouted and passed bottles of champagne from row to row.
The plane descended over forests punctured by sad, slate-coloured ponds, over sere and wintry fields and came in to land over row upon row of clapboard houses and a confusion of factories amid the vaguely purple blush of wintry trees.
We shuffled towards immigration control, tacking back and forth under the rather stiff, hatched quarter-profile of Ronald Reagan up on a banner welcoming us to the United States. Eventually I staggered out of arrivals into the cold February air, taking in great lungfuls in an attempt to alleviate the symptoms of the misspent flight. My head ached. My face burned. My eyes grated.
Dowdy limousines with huge hoods of faded lustre awaited us. The interior of the one Terry, D.J., Philip and I got into was musty with plum-coloured plush.
I sat up front with our driver. He was called Larry. He wore dusty, vaguely maritime livery – a worn jacket and an embroidered cap. He had the pasty and pitted complexion of a heavy smoker. Larry was from a district called Queens. Graciously, he gave me an answer to each question I bombarded him with. If this was the Van Wyck Expressway who was Van Wyck? Those rusted things next to the lake – what were they? Were those things water-towers?
I didn’t listen. I heard only his accent. I had never heard anyone talk like that, not in the flesh, not outside television or films, not in the confined space of the front of a cheap limousine bringing me to Manhattan. The limousine coasted down the expressways. The hood drank up the road. Insulated from the imperfections in the pavement by the limousine’s suspension, all I was aware of was Larry’s granular voice and the slapping of the wheels. Now and again the hood ducked towards the road as Larry braked to pull up to a line of brake-lights and for a paper popcorn cup that was bowling along between the wheels of the cars.
The rusted things next to the lake turned out to be the site of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, corroding monsters engraved by the fading light between the trees.
The water-towers were a novelty. That the millions upon millions of people who had come to live here should not get their water from the ground but from tanks built on spidery ironwork above the city was exotic beyond belief. Something about the light, the angle, the intensity, made the paint-peeling timber tubs pulse with maroon, oxblood and zinc under their conical roofs.
The conversation with Larry petered out. I sat in the front of the car, stricken by the scale of the place. There passed a confusion of storage facilities, cemeteries, factories, warehouses, tenements, hoardings, tyre dumps, chain-link fences, razor-wire, yards full of piles of ink-coloured stone, more yards full of glinting mounds of sheared and madly twisted metal, roofs, chimneys, fire escapes, ventilators, cowls. Beyond the chaos, water seemed to be everywhere: razed grey estuaries and sounds bound in by iodine-coloured hursts and threaded together by bridges.
The limousine crossed the Queensboro Bridge. Before me stood a defiant frieze of skyscrapers. As the sun descended in a furnace between the buildings and water-towers, however, it looked as though the whole city was careening towards some sort of crisis and one to which I might as well give in now.
The lobby of the Iroquois Hotel was no more than a corridor with a chequered floor and a staircase. Philip and I let ourselves i
n to our cramped room. It had walls the colour of soap and a carpet the colour of builders’ tea. An ancient push-button television whose plastic had faded stood on a pole next to a cast-iron radiator. There was a blocked-up fireplace and a mantel. The drink and the jet lag caused me to sit so heavily on the loose-jointed chair next to the television that my weight snapped the webbing underneath. I sat with my arse on the floor and listened to the sound of traffic through the window.
We walked through the streets around Times Square, staggering a little down the sidewalks, our hands thrust in the pockets of our overcoats against the chill. It was dark. The air was thick with the smell of honey-roasted peanuts and burnt chestnuts. Plastic orange flues vented steam into the wintry air. The avenues were floods of lights, red on one side, white on the other.
We marvelled how everyone in New York City seemed to wear overcoats such as ours. The men wore suits, the women pencil skirts and heels. It was our kind of town. We stood before the statue of George M. Cohan on 47th Street and Broadway.
I had never come across such commotion. Black delivery men still working this late in the evening leant against a wall with a hand truck, conducting a conversation at bellowing level with a couple of other guys in the back of a lorry. Cars banged going over ill-set steel plates in the road covering a construction hole. Horns sounded constantly and at the least provocation. Hubcaps rattled. Detached fenders clanked. Doormen blew into pea whistles or emptied lungs into pipes that sounded like trains. Constantly in the background motors were running – diesel, petrol, air-conditioning vents, fans. The sounds blended into a tireless tinnitus. Above the commotion, the winter clouds obscured the tops of the skyscrapers in a sulphurous veil.
Bill Rahmy was our driver. He was a big, burly guy with dense hair. He had a huge face, with eyes close together beneath lush, dark eyebrows. He drove us down to our first show – at half past eleven in the morning – in what was billed as a ballroom but which turned out to be the concourse of a community college on Long Island, for the benefit of students filing through between classes. None of us questioned the hour of the gig. Those of us who hadn’t been up since four in the morning from jet lag had been up all night in any case. Through the windows we had a view of dry couch grass, and in the middle of the expanse the wheeled yellow reader-board with our name on it. The students gawped up at us in bemusement as they passed by. A couple of them stopped to listen but then moved on.
Here Comes Everybody Page 20
