We were excited to start, and with such a producer as Lillywhite. Frank was also in high feather, though he tried to hide it behind managerial aplomb, having persuaded Lillywhite to accept a reduced royalty and to decline an advance. Spider was back from Nicaragua with a goatee and moustache and a face swarthy from the sun.
RAK Recording Studios was a converted Victorian schoolhouse in St John’s Wood, with stern pillars framing the front door. The studio itself – the control room and the live rooms – was bright with light from the windows which ran the length and width of the building.
Steve Lillywhite was resolutely but ashamedly English, well spoken, meticulous in his manners and genial. His breezy affableness, though, tended to bring on a discomfiture which he would cut short by moving on and getting on with matters in hand.
Lillywhite was quick to admit that he had never recorded instruments such as the cittern, banjo, accordion and whistle, but he doughtily clapped his hands, rubbed them together and said:
‘Right! Let’s get started shall we?’
Lillywhite’s engineers, Nick Lacey and Chris Dickey, divided the large window-lined live room in half with a screen. It wasn’t long before those in the front half – Philip, Andrew and Darryl – were calling themselves the Engine Room, and the rest of us – Jem, Spider, Terry and myself – the Bridge. Shane had a booth to himself by the side.
We had already rehearsed many of the songs. ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’ and ‘If I Should Fall from Grace with God’ we had been playing for six months. ‘Turkish Song of the Damned’ we had been playing since the previous August.
Philip had been writing his song ‘Thousands Are Sailing’ for months. He managed to finish it after the end of our session for the soundtrack of Straight to Hell and a few days before he went into hospital. It dealt with the ocean passage of Irish emigrants to New York. I adored the song and let myself be persuaded that at least part of the lyric was about me. There were lines about a couple of guys in New York City visiting, as Philip and I had, the statue of George M. Cohan, and a line about whistling.
Shane had written a song about the Birmingham Six. It was as powerful as any song he had ever written, and sharpened to goading point. Terry happened to have written a song from the point of view of someone leaving Northern Ireland during the Troubles, vowing never to return. Because of the congruence of theme, we spliced the two songs together. Terry sang the first part, and plaintively. Shane sang the heavy end of the song, which concerned the continuing incarceration, after twelve and a half years, of the Birmingham Six, sentenced to life imprisonment for the Birmingham pub bombings in November 1974.
Halfway through recording at RAK, Lillywhite took a break to work on a Talking Heads record. We used the hiatus to play more or less weekly festivals in Europe, and support slots for U2 on their Joshua Tree tour.
We arrived at Wembley Stadium for the first of our opening gigs for U2 early enough in the afternoon that the turf hadn’t yet been covered and before even the goalposts had been taken down. Jem and I broke out from the mouth of the goal furthest from the stage. We deftly passed an invisible football between us, leaving behind us a trail of wrong-footed, imaginary opponents. When we got within eyeshot of the goal, I went wide, sent my non-existent marker the wrong way and lifted the ball over the baffled defenders. The ball met the lateral arc of Jem’s left foot and he volleyed it into the back of the net. We both went down on our knees and raised our fists to the sky.
A couple of weeks later we opened for U2 at Croke Park in Dublin. Before our set, Frank went to stand on Hill 16. After our set, I went out into the audience and jammed my way as far towards the front into the crowd as I could. The pounding of Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr, in andante tempo, supported a glittering superstructure of the Edge having as much fun as can be had with a WEM Copicat and an electric guitar. Bono’s singing was the grand incantation of phrases resembling advertising copy. I jumped up and down in synchrony with the crowd, pulling my arm out of the squeeze to stab the air like everyone else. I hoisted a girl onto my shoulders to give her a better view. Her bare thighs muffled the pounding of U2’s music.
In Paris we opened for U2 again at the Hippodrome de Vincennes in front of a crowd of two hundred thousand. We wandered out onto the stage like lambs, gawping at the immensity of the horde. It stretched so far back that the details of the sweaty heads, the waving banners, the girls on shoulders, the bare chests, merged into the colour of Plasticine before seeming to curve out of sight beyond the horizon. Somewhere in the middle of the throng, as if to illustrate the magnitude of the crowd, I watched a distant refuse truck slowly part the multitude, going from one side of the field to the other, like a bug.
Intimidating as the size of the stage and audience was, it came along with a requirement to produce something resembling a grand gesture, a vindication of swinging my accordion over my head, buckling up over the keyboard, foot-stamping, dropping to my knees.
*
Back at RAK in the second week in July, the heat was oppressive. We came upon Lillywhite standing with his back to a fan wobbling in the open fridge he had had brought into the control room. It blew damp air into the room to a distance of maybe three feet.
The irony of tackling Jem and Shane’s Christmas song, ‘Fairytale of New York’, in the sweltering heat was lost on us. By now, our problems with it had become so chronic, threatening to inure us to the idea that the song was probably just impossible to record, that we became even more determined to find a way of recording it. Lillywhite’s solution was so straightforward as to provoke you to slap your palm to your forehead: to record the introduction – the piano and Shane’s voice – first, and treat the duet with the full band as a separate song. We postponed the problem of who was going to be Shane’s partner in the duet. A couple of names had been put forward. Shane had been keen to have Chrissie Hynde sing. She had been at RAK in any case. She had come across us in the canteen and berated us for our carnivorism.
Lacking someone to sing the female part, we recorded the section in 6/8 time with Shane supplying both. It still made as much sense as it had in rehearsal. We moved on.
In preparation for the piano and voice introduction, I took whatever opportunity I could – while the others had lunch, or after dinner – to go down into the darkness of the live room to figure out and practise, again and again, my piano arrangement. I wanted my accompaniment to sound sophisticated and adult. Because the song was set in New York, I wanted to include identifiably American harmonies in the chords – chords with second and seventh intervals that I’d heard in Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, in Tom Waits’s songs too. Shane had a maddening talent for metabolising artlessness into beauty. Everyone else had to work at it.
When it came to recording it, I didn’t want merely to play the chords and follow Shane’s vocal melody. I wanted to make what I had come up with inextricable from Shane’s voice. I made the appoggiaturas I played synonymous with the ones Shane sang. I made myself Shane’s equal, at least for the time it took to play the introduction to ‘Fairytale of New York’. I made myself not fuck up too, despite the fact that the more coloration I had put into it, the harder it became to concentrate on what Shane was singing.
The whole agonising precarious minute and a bit, as I hung on every moment in which neither Shane nor I fucked up, was an ordeal. I attended to every syllable of Shane’s voice in my headphones. I was morbidly aware of the rest of the band listening in the control room. I strove to remember where my fingers were going next. I was ecstatic to get through it.
Of all the takes, the keeper was the one in which, after Shane had finished singing and I was on my own, in the very last measure, I hit a top E instead of a D. The mistake for ever imprinted on my mind the phrase’s similarity to Charles Parry’s arrangement of William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’. I wanted to do it again, but the rapture which met Shane and me when we came back into the control room was such that Lillywhite and everyone else declined to re-record it.<
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Lillywhite had a studio at his house in Ealing. One Friday, he took the tapes home. Over the weekend he set up his studio for his wife Kirsty to have a go at the female part of the duet with a view to seeing if the song was going to work as a duet at all.
He came into the studio on Monday. We sat around the control room to listen, perched on the back of the couch, on a cabinet, down the stairs to the door. Kirsty’s vernacular, familiar to all of us from the records she had put out, so suited the lyrics that it was as if they had been written for her. Her voice, with her slightly nasal South London accent, now breathy, now brassy, embodied the alternating buoyancy and bitterness of the girl in Shane’s song, agog with New York City, then betrayed. The harmonies in the choruses were one thing, but the layered vocals when she sang ‘Well, so could anyone!’ opened up the reprise of the opening melody as if it were a gift.
We sat in awed silence while the melody cycled out.
*
The summer ended with two last shows opening for U2, the first at Sullivan Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, and the second at Madison Square Gardens in New York City. Our set at Madison Square Gardens was a matter, as Jem said, of providing music for people to find their seats, but to play at such a place, on such a stage, struck terror. The stage had been rid of all equipment. Inclines made of metal grille hid from view the backline and the technicians. Mindful of the scale of the auditorium, the grandeur of the event and the empty expanse of the stage, I yearned to swing my accordion around and rove the metal platforms and ramps. My shoes had leather soles. Remembering my accident at the Fairways Hotel in Dundalk a couple of years before, I spent a lot of my time rooted to the spot, summoning up courage every now and then to shuffle tentatively up and down one of the inclines.
The première of Cox’s film Walker took place while we were in New York. I went with my New York girlfriend Heather. We happened to sit behind Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Newman and I were both wearing the identical Prince of Wales check suit. Neither of us remarked on the fact, and I suspected I was the only one of us to notice.
Heather had recently rented a performance space on the Lower East Side. She let us in through the sliding lattice metalwork. It was a black-painted corridor with a pressed tin ceiling. We kissed for a long time in the dark, on the plywood stage.
By the end of the summer, the record had been mastered. Frank had come up with an idea for the cover of the album. It was another spin on the theme of the head-replacement which Frank had co-opted for the cover of Rum Sodomy and the Lash: an undulating line of replicas of a photograph of James Joyce’s face, but with our faces flanking the original, each of us wearing Joyce’s fedora. We rejected the idea, and opted for a photo session in a studio in East London, a group tableau with our instruments and a steamer trunk.
Our failure to come up with a title for the record exasperated Frank so much that he burst into one of our rehearsals and demanded it.
‘All right!’ Shane shouted out. ‘If I Should Fall from Grace with God!’
Twenty-Five
‘Mr Fearnley! Covered in sweat, man! The hardest-working musician in rock’n’roll!’ Strummer was fond of saying, adding, more often than not: ‘After Mr Ranken!’
His exhortations after the gig we played with him at the Electric Ballroom in Camden in November reminded me of my games teacher at school, who said that if you came off the pitch without being covered in dirt, you hadn’t played football. I was drenched. My shirt stuck to my back. The sweat plastered my hair to my head. Sweat fell from me into the keyboard of my accordion, to the point that the wood swelled and pinched the metal rod the keys pivoted on. After a while, each key stayed down when I lifted my finger off it, until the accordion played by itself. There was no point in carrying on. I pulled the cords out of the mikes and mimed.
The previous June, on one of the weekend breaks during the recording of If I Should Fall from Grace with God, we had performed at RTÉ in Dublin, for a programme called The Session which featured ourselves, the Dubliners, John Prine and Strummer. With the Dubliners we played the two songs we both knew, ‘The Irish Rover’ and ‘The Rare Old Mountain Dew’. With Strummer we played ‘London Calling’ and ‘I Fought the Law’. He was no longer the insular and bituminous Simms from Straight to Hell. He was boyishly curly of hair, munificent and magisterial. In ‘London Calling’ we relished the vertical slamming of the chords. Spider rejoiced to join Strummer in howling out during the break.
Within a week of leaving England for America to film the video for ‘Fairytale of New York’, due for release at Christmas, and to continue on tour across the United States, Philip forlornly let it be known that he had been to see a Harley Street doctor. The ulcer which had hospitalised him in Helsinki a couple of years before had flared up. The doctor had debarred him from touring.
‘It’s all your fault,’ Spider said to me. ‘You tried to kill Philip.’
The obvious and august choice for his replacement was Joe Strummer. Amending the slogan of the Protestant campaign against the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, Spider shouted out:
‘Ulcer Says No!’
Quoting the slogan from a recent television advert for citrus fruit, Shane shouted out:
‘But the man from Del Monte, he says “Yes!” ’
‘And he’s an Orangeman!’ Spider yelled.
In the third week of November we left for New York without Philip, but with Kirsty MacColl and Strummer.
We set up for a rehearsal in New York City. Strummer had written out the chords for the entire set list on a strip of card which he stuck to the side of his acoustic guitar. It followed the curve of the body from the neck to the tail block. By the end of a run-through of the set, Strummer had to hold his guitar out to the side, away from his body, bending down to see what the chords were for the last songs of the set list. A lock of hair dangled over his forehead. His eyes squinted.
The week of Thanksgiving, New York City was magical. Cars and taxicabs whipped the steam venting from manholes into rags. Everywhere we went, strings of lights spiralled the dark trunks of the trees, uncoiled into their limbs and twinkled among the branches. Jem and I went to the Village and the apartment of a friend of Heather’s for a Thanksgiving dinner. The candlelit table spanned two tiny rooms on the second floor. Heather dampened us with the story of how the Puritan settlers stole Thanksgiving from the Native Americans.
Before our gigs at the Ritz, the first couple of days were taken up with the making of the video for ‘Fairytale of New York’. I hung about in the freezing cold in my suit, waiting, as Matt Dillon in the role of policeman dragged Shane by the scruff of the neck into the police station, and as the NYPD’s Irish pipe band performed in Washington Square Park – not ‘Galway Bay’ as Shane’s lyrics went, but the ‘Mickey Mouse Club March’.
We loved Kirsty MacColl. I felt irrationally privileged that her birthday was the day after mine. There was a staunch impishness about her, unflaggingly full of brass, except when I happened to catch sight of her while the grips set up, staring tiredly blank at the ground, waiting.
For the cutaway shots from the story of the fighting couple to the band performing the song, it had been Jem’s idea to stylise the video after footage he’d seen of Billie Holiday singing at a late-night session in the back room of a bar. On our set, smoke similarly curled up from cigarettes left in ashtrays. Jem wore a pork-pie hat. Darryl was given a string bass to play. Andrew, curiously, sat behind a bass drum large enough for a marching band.
I took my place at the piano. As I was playing the introduction over to myself, Peter Dougherty, the director, came over.
‘We’d like Shane to sit at the piano for these shots,’ he said.
‘Shane doesn’t play the piano,’ I said. I’d seen Shane play the piano. He made chords with three stabbing fingers, rarely moved them any further than the neighbouring three keys and avoided black notes. Frank happened to be nearby.
‘Shane’s going to play the piano,’ Frank said.
‘It’s just going to look better if he does.’ I remembered Frank’s nose inches away from the face of Sean Cannon when we’d appeared on Top of the Pops with the Dubliners the previous April.
‘But I play the piano on the record,’ I said.
‘And so you do,’ Frank said. ‘Only, it’d be better if Shane played it in the video.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘It’s just a video,’ Jem said. ‘We all know you play the piano. You play it very nicely.’
‘You’re a very good piano player,’ Andrew said. I pushed the chair back and went across to join the others who were in their places.
Later, Dougherty came up to me again. Because Shane was no piano player, close-ups would be needed – of my hands playing the introduction.
‘You’ll need to wear his rings,’ Dougherty said. I waited for Shane to work the rings over his swollen knuckles. One was a heavy, scuffed signet ring. The other was set with a yin and yang symbol inside an alloy flower. He cursed and twisted until they finally came off. He pushed them into the palm of my hand with a sort of peck as if I were the cause of the botheration. I played the introduction a couple of times, bridling for the song to be over. The weight of the signet ring kept turning it on my little finger. When the take was finished, I handed them to an assistant to return them to their owner.
We left MacColl in New York. Our first gig of the rest of the tour was the Metro in Boston. Strummer’s presence on stage with us seemed to be a weapon so secret that the least acknowledgement of it would amount to hubris. Strummer kept his place where Philip would have stood, but a couple of feet back from the line, tilting his guitar further and further as we got through the set in order to read the notes he’d written on his cheat-sheet.
When it came time to bring him to the front to sing ‘London Calling’ and ‘I Fought the Law’, he stood with one leg bent, stamping a heel, his arms hanging out by his sides as if reluctant to take control of his beat-up Telecaster. He’d turn this way and that as if calling us to muster and then dig into his guitar, head bent down and his leg going.
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