One afternoon he happened to come to join Jem and Andrew and me at one of the tables near the door to the back lounge. We let him in to the seat by the window, where he sat, sniffing, bashful of the attention he thought he had caused by coming out of his den. He tried to downplay it by staring with fake concentration at the passing trees.
We all talked for a while. Andrew got up to go and lie down somewhere. Jem retreated into his book. I watched the frieze of forest slide by the window, punctuated by the occasional hamlet or the forest dropping away beneath us as the bus went over a bridge. I could see Shane falling asleep, his feet stretched beneath the table. Soon his tatty head had lolled back. His eyes closed, but not quite. His jaw hung open, revealing the adhesive barm which collected in the corners of his mouth. A twisting blue sleeve of smoke undulated from the soggy cigarette between his swollen knuckles. In his other hand his bottle of Piesporter nestled precariously between the Zantac-encrusted legs of his trousers.
Sleep came upon him this way. He never planned it. He was heedless of the fact that the passage of time was divided into dark or light. Whatever sleep-cycle he might once have had, he had bent into more or less a straight line, punctuated with random periods of unconsciousness. These periods didn’t synchronise at all with the diurnal round, nor much with the routine of being on the road. I pitied him for it and for what seemed not so much his fear of unconsciousness but the transition into it. The workings of his intellect were tireless and gave him no release. A malevolent energy possessed him. It goaded him to talk, draw cartoons, scrawl lyrics across crumpled pieces of paper, clink the rings on his fingers incessantly against the side of his bottle of wine or on a tabletop, tap his foot on the floor.
With him sitting dozing off opposite me, I found myself in a constant state of watchfulness. I knew the butt was going to fall out from between his fingers onto his filthy trousers. I knew that it would burn down to his skin. I knew he would wake in a fury of batting and shrieks and resentment. His bottle of Piesporter made me anxious too, suspended from his fingers.
I tortured myself as to whether I should remove the dangling bottle to safety. I fretted about whether I should nip the smouldering cigarette out from between his smoke-tanned fingers and put it out in the ashtray. The trouble was that I couldn’t entirely convince myself that Shane had actually gone to sleep, since, as when he sang, the pale blue of his irises was visible through the lashes. If I didn’t act now, though, the outcome looked likely to be not only that the bottle would fall and spill and the cigarette end burn him, but also that he would blame me for wetting his trousers and shedding his Piesporter all over the floor of the bus. As much as I told myself it would be a simple act of kindness I couldn’t put out of my mind the time I had aided him down the street from Dingwalls, after the two Black Zombies had rendered him spittingly abusive, resulting in his calling me a sanctimonious cunt.
At the end of it all, I leant forward to pluck the bottle out from between his fingers and nip away the burning cigarette. He woke up instantly and lunged for the Piesporter.
‘Aagh!’ he screamed. ‘What the fuck!’
He flashed a look of fury at me. I regretted my compulsion to help him, and to try to do so without detection. I burned with shame at my presumption to think that I could help him at all, with anything.
We ended the tour – a cold, drear and dismal three weeks – in Utrecht. It was a freezing night. The sky was wintrily mauve. A fog had descended which formed a nimbus round each of the streetlights outside the Muziekcentrum.
After the gig we flopped on the wheezing leatherette banquettes round the walls of the dressing room, a huge chamber with white walls of breeze block, harsh with fluorescent strip lighting. A grand piano stood in the middle of the fibrous, rust-coloured carpet. I felt vaguely disappointed to have completed three weeks of a tour with a gig that was indistinguishable from all of the others we’d done. We would be going home in the morning, but a couple of days later were due to play the National Ballroom in Kilburn, followed by another two weeks of what seemed to have become the expected Christmas tour, ending the Saturday before Christmas in Dublin.
The separation of tours had become illusory. The transition from landmass to landmass had become more or less meaningless. The printed itineraries which Frank handed out to us at the beginning of each tour looked identical to one another. The exchange of one bus driver for another had become irrelevant. By the last gig of the year in Dublin, we would have been on tour for thirty weeks.
Twenty-Four
At the beginning of February 1987, we went again to Elephant Studios to record music for the soundtrack of Straight to Hell. Shane had written a couple of songs. I had once criticised Shane’s songwriting as a matter of stringing a load of swear words together and making them rhyme. He never let me forget it. ‘Rake at the Gates of Hell’ was a stream of invective submitted to meter and a rhyming pattern. He was so unsure about its biliousness that he went to seek Jem’s absolution for having written it. The second song was called ‘If I Should Fall from Grace with God’.
The opening melody of ‘If I Should Fall from Grace with God’ was gorgeous. I loved the unaffectedness of the pentatonic scale and its passing embodiment of ‘The Bonny Banks o’ Loch Lomond’. The song was as elemental as the best of all Shane’s songs. It had mud and land and rivers and oceans and corpses in it, in a landscape as expansive and ancient and threatening as the melody, bringing to mind the high road and the low road, one of which – after the Jacobite Rising of 1745 – led to death.
The remaining pieces for the soundtrack were instrumental, inspired by our five weeks in the south of Spain: boleros and tangos, with zapateado and palmas.
After recording ‘Rake at the Gates of Hell’ and ‘If I Should Fall from Grace with God’, Shane did not return to the studio much. The week at Elephant was my first experience of composing: a bolero based on a melody from Anton Brückner, played on a pan-flute; a piece of incidental music using the drone made by blowing into the mouth of a bottle of San Miguel – the sound I’d listened to, lying out on the sand beyond Blanco Town. Cox also wanted a treatment of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain. I sketched out an arrangement on a couple of pieces of foolscap and played it on a honky-tonk thumb-tack piano.
Spider showed up a couple of times during the recording. Snow had descended on County Cavan and had isolated Terry in what I imagined to be his lodge – a squat, rain-lashed pile in the wilds of the Irish countryside with a clapped-out BMW of rare vintage immobilised in the driveway.
Cox had finished editing the film and came to us wanting a version of Ennio Morricone’s ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.
‘To save the film!’ he said.
In an attempt at hip-hop, we built a beat on the drum-machine they had at Elephant Studios – instead of a real drum kit and against the advice of D.J., who knew about hip-hop. We layered samples taken from Morricone’s original music – bells, gunshots and Eli Wallach’s shouts of ‘Blondie!’ – over the top, along with the banjo, accordion, tin whistle. I borrowed Darryl’s Gibson SG guitar with the late-night idea of emulating Steve Vai’s guitar-playing on Public Image Ltd’s Album/Cassette/Compact Disc which had come out the previous year and for a time had taken a place in the constellation which included Rain Dogs. I didn’t possess a shadow of Steve Vai’s talent, but I thought at least I could pull off a handful of stock heavy-metal licks. I had never yet been able to rid myself of the sometimes elegiac compulsion to impress Shane. The Eden of his estimation of me, it seemed, had been when I had been a guitarist.
We pridefully brought a cassette of our finished version of the song into the Devonshire Arms to play over the pub’s sound system. As soon as the drum-machine beat started, I knew it was wrong. I wanted it to sound powerful and authoritative, but instead my shirt stuck to my back to hear how lame it was and how my playing sounded like guitar-shop guitar licks. The drum pattern turned out to be several thousand miles distant from Run-DMC and more in the p
rovince of Ultravox.
*
Soon after we’d finished recording, Philip admitted himself to hospital. Other than his looking more haggard than normal at Elephant, I hadn’t noticed anything particularly the matter with him. The explanation was that he had been drinking too much and had cutaneous oedema.
I went to visit him. He was sitting up in bed in a hospital gown, reading. There was a stack of books on the bedside table. There was a hollowness to his cheeks which made him look mournful. Though his complexion was only ruddy at the edges, he looked hale enough. His hair had a lift to it as if the hospital barber had been to visit.
‘I’m an alcoholic!’ he said. ‘I had to admit that to myself. It’s the first step to my recovery.’
I was surprised. During the months he and I had shared a room, his drinking had been nothing to remark on. I hadn’t noticed that he had been drinking any more than the rest of us. Our drinking of an entire bottle of schnapps on the Baltic Sea, resulting in the perforation of his ulcer and near-death, was a distant memory. He swung his downy leg out from under the bed covers.
‘Look what happens when I do this,’ he said. He leant down with the full weight of his mop-handle forearm onto the top of his bare thigh. We both watched as the impression it left filled in.
‘Water retention,’ he said.
In the third week of February, seeming to have neither improved nor deteriorated, he was out of hospital in time to begin promotion of the single release of ‘The Irish Rover’. Frank’s suggestion after recording with the Dubliners had become a reality.
First we flew to Dublin to appear in The Late Late Show’s tribute to the Dubliners, where we performed with Christy Moore and U2. The latter and their entourage drifted through the corridors with ecclesiastical gravity.
His appetite for acting whetted by our four weeks in Andalucía, Spider left for Nicaragua to take a part in Alex Cox’s next film, Walker, with Ed Harris and much of the cast of Straight to Hell. We flew without him to Northern Ireland for our next promotional appearance at the Tom O’Connor Roadshow in Derry’s Guildhall.
The damp countryside of the Six Counties was still bleak from the winter, though the ochre turf, where it was exposed in banks and in the hillsides, was almost lambent in the late-afternoon sunshine. In the middle of the fields stood small A-frame pens, we guessed for the sheep to find shelter, though in each there would only have been room for one.
‘You know what they’re doing in there,’ Terry said, in a low voice.
‘What?’
‘They’re plotting,’ he said.
We were staying in a hotel just outside Derry. Ronnie Drew, we were told, was staying at a hotel across the border between the Six Counties and the Republic. The very idea of staying in the part of Ireland that was still under British rule was anathema to him.
Most of our promotional appearances were a matter of miming to a backing track. With the exception for the most part of the Dubliners – particularly Drew, who I was told had been off the drink for a few months – and Philip, recently out of hospital, it relieved us of the necessity to stay sober. At the minimum, for the cameras, it should look as though we could be playing our instruments.
At the Tom O’Connor Roadshow we performed in a large hall to an elderly audience in frocks and blazers. Shane and Drew sang live. Shane stood tall, jug-eared by virtue of a recent haircut, one hand in a pocket. During the alternate verses he turned to watch Drew singing, then, closing his eyes, sang his own verse, awkward and suffering with abashment.
Afterwards, we found ourselves in the mayor’s office. It was a severe, wood-panelled room with a couple of huge oak desks, one of which spanned the bay window. Part of the room was lined with bookcases, the other ranged with portraits. Pediments capped the hefty doors. We sat around one of the desks with the mayor Noel McKenna and John Hume, the leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. Hume was a red-faced teddy bear of a man. He had a chin set halfway up his face and wiry sprouting eyebrows. His eyes flashed with the thrill of being in the same room as the Dubliners.
A bottle of Tullamore Dew appeared and went from man to man. It wasn’t long before we were all singing ‘The Auld Triangle’ – the mayor, the leader of the SDLP, together with the journalist and Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association organiser, Eamonn McCann, and James Ellis, the actor who played Bert Lynch from Z-Cars, the Dubliners and ourselves. Hume’s face glistened red with drink. Terry’s head twitched with emotion. Shane sang to the floor, his face solemn with meaning. I regretted Spider’s absence. He would have exulted in the occasion.
‘Well,’ I overheard John Sheahan murmur to Eamonn Campbell. ‘Ronnie’s well and truly off the wagon.’ I looked round at Drew. His eyes were swimming in their sockets, red and straining to focus. He was resting on Barney McKenna’s shoulder, leaning into his face, cackling piratically into his ear.
When it came time to leave, the bottle of Tullamore Dew was gone and most of us were drunk. Drew stated his intention to drive back to Dublin that night. The other Dubliners implored him to stay.
‘I’m not staying one fucking night in this fucking province,’ Drew said. Red-faced and gesticulatory, they argued about how they were going to get him home.
‘For fuck’s sake let Barney drive your fucking car!’ they beseeched. In the end, Drew consented. We hugged the Dubliners goodbye, clapped them all on the back and said safe home, see you in London. We were all booked to appear that weekend on a programme called Saturday Live for Channel 4. We got into the van to go back to Belfast.
When we met again for camera rehearsals in London, as he came into the studio in mackintosh and wine-coloured dark glasses, there was a contrite air surrounding Drew. As it turned out, his car had been an automatic. McKenna had become confused by the scarcity of pedals and had set the car off lurching down Queen’s Quay to the Foyle Embankment where the alternating screeches and bursts of speed attracted the attention of a patrol of the Royal Ulster Constabulary Traffic Branch, who pulled the car over.
Realising who they had in the car, charges of drunken driving or even driving without due care and attention were not brought. Instead they were each given a cell at a nearby police station to sleep it off.
When Drew woke the following morning, he woke the others with his shouting.
‘Barney! What kind of fucking hotel is this you booked us into?’
I could only imagine his chagrin on coming round: the ruination of his principle of never staying a night in the Six Counties, and in an RUC cell.
At Saturday Live the Dubliners were introduced to the floor of predominantly teenage dancers as the Dub Liners.
When ‘The Irish Rover’ reached No. 12 in the charts, we reconvened at BBC Television Centre in White City for Top of the Pops.
During the rehearsal, before we ran through the song for the cameras, I saw Frank take Sean Cannon to one side, to inform him that since Spider was away in Nicaragua he would be playing the whistle. Cannon demurred.
‘Sure everyone where I live knows I don’t play the whistle,’ he said.
‘You do now, right?’ Frank said, his falciform nose a foot away from Cannon’s schoolboy face.
Again, I had no real work to do, other than pretend to play the accordion and do my best not to indulge Campbell’s excitement too much. During performances of ‘The Irish Rover’ his yellow-toothed smile and his crazed face, surrounded by a haze of nicotine-coloured hair, would appear bobbing in front of me.
Towards the end of April, our last television appearance with the Dubliners was for RTÉ’s Sunday Night at the Gaiety in Dublin. By the end of the week ‘The Irish Rover’ vanished from the charts.
*
At the end of March, between our performances on Saturday Live and Top of the Pops, we started our next album, in the Penthouse of Abbey Road Studios. In order to circumvent our contract with Stiff Records – from legal necessity or not, I didn’t care – Frank enjoined us to let no one know, going so far as to pretend we w
ere assisting Terry in a solo project. The sessions became known as the Terry Woods Solo Album.
We had already been rehearsing what we thought might be described as a Tex-Mex song, called ‘Fiesta’. Jem had not only written the melodies of both the verse and the chorus, but had composed an instrumental section too, folding into it a couple of lines from the ‘Liechtensteiner Polka’, which we had all heard blaring out over the Parque de Nicolás Salmerón during the Feria de Almería. We walloped the song out over a norteño beat, with a bass-line restricted to fifths, the guitar on the offbeat, and as much as I could replicate on the accordion from a couple of tracks on Los Lobos’ How Will the Wolf Survive?.
We played the song back in the control room in the Penthouse. The gaps after the choruses and throughout the instrumental melodies begged to be filled up with the cracks from the shooting galleries and the clangs of bells, the whistles and shouts we’d heard throughout the Feria de Almería. To demonstrate, I detached the top of one of the steel ashtrays in the studio and at the right moment dropped it into the metal waste-bin in the control room. Otherwise I made finger-pops, stuck my fingers in my mouth to let loose a Swanee whistle, or, as I had as a kid, mimicked gunshots with a plosive clearing of the tonsils.
Though still apparently embroiled in an endgame with Stiff Records, we came out of our bolthole in the Penthouse of Abbey Road in order to start work recording our next album in plain sight. As a precaution, Frank suggested we finance the recording ourselves. We set up our own label, Pogue Mahone Records, owned by Warner Music Ltd. Through his previous management and tour management of Kirsty MacColl, Frank was able to secure Kirsty’s husband, Steve Lillywhite, to produce the record.
Here Comes Everybody Page 26
