During Strummer’s songs, Shane found himself with little to do. He would stand staring at the floor while Strummer sang the verses, occasionally lift what he was drinking to his mouth and look across at Strummer with a combination of leniency larded with irony, but full of awe.
Wherever we went, before and after shows, groups of various sizes gathered round Strummer. Between sound check and the gig I would come across him in huddles – in catering or seated along the wall of an empty hall, in a sagging sofa, round a table – leaning forward on his knees, talking to anyone who wanted to talk to him. His pow-wows were not so much platforms for pontification but symposiums for his cherished themes of brotherhood, solidarity, outsiders and underdogs. Scattering his discourse with watchwords and apothegms, he let his circles know that he would take up the cudgels for them, that he had their backs.
In Toronto, Strummer came into the dressing room in a lather about the Toronto Blue Jays’ near-success against the Detroit Tigers. Both teams had been in contention for top of the division in American League East baseball.
‘The only Canadian baseball team in the American League, man!’ he said.
On stage too, he took up cudgels with us, stirring us up with foot-stamping, chin-thrusting, and guitar-stabbing.
‘ANDREW RANKEN! ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR!’ he would shout out at the beginning of ‘London Calling’.
‘JAMES FEARNLEY!’ he would cry, to signal an accordion solo.
‘TERENCE WOODS!’ he would yell when the break for ‘I Fought the Law’ came up, and then wheel away from the microphone.
I swelled with self-worth when, with barely discernible slyness, Strummer broke the fourth wall and glimpsed up from his guitar at me to wink in comradeship.
At the end of ‘London Calling’ and ‘I Fought the Law’, finished with his Telecaster, in one motion Strummer ducked under the strap of his guitar and, his hand under the tailstock, launched it spinning over Darryl’s head in the direction of the wings in the trust that someone would catch it.
In Montreal and Toronto, the kerbsides were lined with compacted snow, blown hard by the wind. By the second week in December we were on the West Coast, where it seemed the winter did not exist.
The frontage of the Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara was white as a wedding cake with a scalloped awning and a vaguely astronautical spire rising above the pantile roof. The ceilings in the lobby were heavy with weathered beams, but the interior of the auditorium gave you the impression, in spite of the plush theatre seating, that you were sitting outside in the plaza of a colonial pueblo. An earthenware roof spanned the stage between what looked like a pair of bell-towers. Stucco townhouses with balconies, staircases and arched windows were built out from the theatre walls. The ceiling was painted night-blue.
We opened for Los Lobos, though we all agreed that the gig was really a double bill.
On our tour of Scandinavia in 1985, Costello had been eager to have us listen to their first album, How Will the Wolf Survive?, in the van. It was a selection-box of music. There were country songs, something rockabilly and a drinking song. The two tracks on the record played on traditional instruments threw the rest of the material into shadow and confirmed that Los Lobos and the Pogues were kindred.
During Los Lobos’ performance, I longed for them to play traditional norteño music, and when David Hidalgo drew on his accordion, and when the guitarrón, bajo sexto and saxophone came out and they plunged headlong into it, I laughed out loud with joy. I loved their polkas, the guilelessness of the marching 2/4 beat. The vocal melody passed from man to man. An instrumental passage flipped the metre on its head. I was glad to hear how much of ‘Fiesta’ we had got right, from the polka beat to the blowzy saxophone melody.
We met them backstage in the green room after their set. There was a conspicuous aura of success surrounding Los Lobos. For a week at the end of August, their version of Ritchie Valens’s hit ‘La Bamba’ had been No. 1 in the Billboard charts. Los Lobos had provided much of the music for the soundtrack to the film, which had been released that July. In a matter of months they had been promoted from pets to paradigms.
César Rosas was a stocky guy with a goatee and impenetrable behind shades. Louie Pérez looked like a boy. David Hidalgo was a giant, with sloping shoulders and a florid face. When it came to meeting Hidalgo, once the introductions were over, we stood in front of each other in awkward silence. I wondered if, like me, he beseeched the hubbub in the green room to beckon each of us to something less uncomfortable.
I went into our dressing room to get myself something to drink. A couple of girls were doing the same. It wasn’t unusual to come across people I didn’t know helping themselves to drinks in our dressing room. One of them was tall as a model, with shoulder-length ginger hair and angular shoulders, wearing a white T-shirt and a short skirt. The other was a blonde in a green vintage zip-up jacket, short black skirt and dark tights. I waited while they fished inside the plastic drinks cooler. The ginger-haired model re-assumed her full height. She was half a head taller than me. She smiled wanly at me. The blonde girl wiped water from a bottle and stepped out of the way.
‘Sorry!’ she said. Her face was astonishingly symmetrical, framed by long, straight hair. She was limpidly beautiful with blue eyes. ‘Thanks!’ she sang.
‘Not a problem,’ I said. The girls went past me into the green room with their beers. Spider appeared at my shoulder.
‘She’s gorgeous, isn’t she?’ Spider said.
‘She’s lovely,’ I said.
‘She’s Ritchie Valens’s girlfriend in La Bamba,’ Spider said. ‘And Joe Strummer’s in real life. Bastard,’ he added.
The following night we turned up at the Palladium on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, again opening for Los Lobos. I came across the girl from the Arlington Theater backstage. She was carrying a shirt on a hanger.
‘This is Joe’s,’ she said. ‘I’m going to put it in the dressing room.’ I was going the same way.
Her name was Danielle. She couldn’t have been more than twenty or twenty-one. I asked about La Bamba and if I would have seen her in anything else. She had started acting, she said, when she was still at school. For a year she’d had a part on a soap opera until her character got killed off in 1984. She had done a couple of things for television since, and an independent film. She described herself as bi-coastal. Her apartment in New York was draped in wisteria. The one in Los Angeles was next to a shopping mall. I struggled to pay attention. She had remarkably level, perfect teeth. Her complexion was pellucid. A slight cast to her eye prevented her pupils from completely aligning their focus.
We talked about England. It turned out that her parents owned a sixteenth-century cottage in the Cotswolds. Her dad was a television film producer and her mother a product of something called the Philadelphia Main Line. Her voice was as beautiful as she was, her diction precise and her voice young. The following night in San Juan Capistrano would be the last gig of the tour. I would be going home to England.
‘I’d like to write to you,’ I found myself saying.
‘I’d like that,’ she said.
‘Okay then,’ I said.
‘Okay,’ she said. We wrote out our addresses on scraps of paper and swapped them.
The next day, we drove in a couple of Econolines down to the Coach House, an hour or so from Hollywood down the freeway under sweeping concrete overpasses, past huge car dealerships and the bleached flanks of the Laguna Hills.
The Coach House was a single-storey roadside restaurant just off the freeway with a hardwood floor and a wrought-iron balcony. Dining tables and bentwood chairs were set together in lines extending from the small stage. The dressing rooms were a pitilessly white-painted suite of rooms with walls of hardboard. I kept coming across Danielle in the narrow corridors backstage. We smiled awkwardly.
During the sound check she sat at one of the dining tables, watching. Though I was careful to begin with, to check to see whether or not Strummer was aw
are, I could not prevent myself looking over at where she was sitting. The more we met each other’s glances, the less I cared if Strummer knew of our flirtation. The strength of my yen for Danielle overrode my compunctions about going behind Strummer’s back. They had been eroded by my crush on Jennifer Balgobin in Almería, not to mention his infidelity to his wife. After the sound check I went over to sit with Danielle, caring nothing for what Strummer might think.
We played in front of people having their dinner. Strummer shuffled over to me on stage. With a flick of his head he beckoned me to follow him stepping out over the monitor wedges and onto the tables. I did my best not to lose my balance. My feet flipped plates, spilled glasses of water and overturned a couple of red glass candle holders. We went the length of the dining tables. A table tilted under me. A woman shrieked and held her hands up. I turned around and made my way back through the spillage to the stage. When Strummer got back, head bent over his guitar, he winked at me.
Danielle offered Jem and me a lift in her car back up to Hollywood. She drove a Honda. It was more cramped than I expected. Jem and I sat in the back with our knees against the seatbacks. Strummer got in the passenger seat.
As we set out he put on a tape the two of them had been listening to. It was a collection of Roy Orbison’s songs called In Dreams: The Greatest Hits. We were listening to ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’. It sounded more fake than I remembered. It was difficult to tell. All the parts were there. There was the thumping downbeat on the snare, the tinkling piano. There was the tremolo guitar. There was the wooden part-meow, part-purr, part-snarl after the words: ‘Are you lonely, just like me?’ The more I listened though, the more I became convinced that these songs were not the originals.
‘These aren’t the original recordings,’ I said. ‘Listen.’
We all listened.
‘It’s Orbison,’ I said. ‘But it’s someone else playing the instruments.’
‘You sure?’ Strummer said. I felt sorry for him that he didn’t know.
‘Pretty much,’ I said.
Danielle brought the tape cover out of the glove compartment. Strummer turned on the ceiling light. It was hard to read the lavender printing on the fold-out against the blue background.
‘A collector’s fantasy,’ he read. ‘A treasury of nineteen Roy Orbison classics totally re-recorded for the best state of the art sound possible. Can you believe it? Man! For fuck’s sake!’
I felt awful. Strummer clapped the cassette case closed and put it back in the glove compartment. Before he could shut it, Danielle ejected the cassette and tossed it in.
Danielle pulled into the subterranean car park of the hotel on Franklin Avenue. We all got out and stood in the unforgiving light and the sour air.
‘Thanks, Danielle,’ Jem said. He stretched his shoulders and yawned. ‘I’m going to go to bed.’ Jem’s brevity did not surprise me. Though I knew he liked Strummer and appeared to like Danielle too, I was familiar with his view of illicit affairs.
‘I’m going up too,’ I said, not knowing what else to do.
I hugged Strummer goodbye, suddenly guilty to realise that this was his last night on tour with us, and Jem and I were just going to bed. I took Danielle into my arms and kissed her cheek.
On my way up to the room I stared at the scuffed steel shell of the lift in a mopish rapture.
*
While we had been away in the States, ‘Fairytale of New York’ had been released in England. The day after landing at Heathrow from Los Angeles, we performed on Top of the Pops with MacColl. Two days later, our last gigs before Christmas, we played three nights at Glasgow Barrowland. I took a late train down to Manchester to spend Christmas with my family. At Preston I had an hour or so to wait between trains. I hadn’t let anyone know when I would be arriving in Manchester. I rang up my brother.
‘It’s at No. 2,’ he said.
‘Fuck me,’ I said.
To kill time until my connection to Manchester, I crossed the rusted bridge over the railway lines to a pub I’d seen from the station. Halfway across, I burst into tears.
Twenty-Six
‘It’s the other side of the world!’ Spider said. ‘It’s Christmas in the middle of the summer! The water in the plughole goes round the other way! We’re two years ahead in Neighbours and two years behind with Eastenders!’
Even the moon was upside down. Andrew and I spent a day on Bondi Beach. It was a beach like any other but patrolled by people in kepis and mirrored shades with fluorescent frames. Their noses were luminous with zinc oxide. Andrew and I alternated between the sea and the sand until the sun went down. We bought a bottle of champagne at a bottle shop on the Parade and clambered in the dark along the rocks under the headland out to Mackenzies Point. We found an uncomfortable shelf in the sandstone, opened the champagne and with our backs to the rock gazed out over the ocean. Time slowed down in Andrew’s company. There was little cause for words. We passed the bottle between us.
‘The Southern Cross,’ Andrew said, pointing up at the constellation in the sky. ‘I’ve never seen that before.’ There was a pause. ‘Look at the moon,’ he said. We stood up, bent over and looked at it between our legs to see it the way we were used to.
As soon as we had set foot in Australia, three weeks into 1988, we were agog with the country. Everywhere we looked there was some new wonderment: a church covered in its entirety in livid green ivy; the seagulls endlessly circling the red-and-white spoke of a communications pylon; a giant ‘Mr Moon’ face flanked by the vaguely Moorish towers at the entry gates to Luna Park in Melbourne. There were gum trees and galah birds, bottle-brush trees and bull-roarers, clap sticks and cane-toads.
Our arrival in Australia coincided with the bicentennial celebrations of the landing of the First Fleet in Sydney Harbour in 1788, bringing the first European settlers to New South Wales and marking the beginning of convict transportation to the Antipodes. Required reading was Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, which described the degradations of the convict ships and the devastation of the Aboriginal culture upon the arrival of the settlers.
We drew poetic comparisons between the barbarities of penal transportation and our own seemingly relentless voyaging in conditions we weren’t ashamed of thinking were cramped, and for weeks at a time, if not the three months it would have taken an actual convict ship to make the journey from Portsmouth to Fremantle in the 1700s. We never forgot our visit to U-boat 96 at the studios of Bayerischer Rundfunk in 1985. We drew romantic parallels between our particular narrative and that of every last damn mariner there ever was – convict, fortune-seeker and explorer alike. We had all read Moby-Dick. Every aspect of seafaring fascinated us.
Ever since our playing ‘Greenland Whale Fisheries’ in the earliest days of the Pogues, we had been haunted and inspired by the ocean, the ships that sailed on it, the creatures that lived under it, the hopes it built up, the misery it inflicted. In nineteen hundred and eighty-two, in October the fifth day, we had hoisted our colours to the top of the mast, as in ‘Greenland Whale Fisheries’. As in ‘Muirshin Durkin’, we had been bound away across the foam to seek our fortunes, and not just in America. We were the brave boys, again of ‘Greenland Whale Fisheries’. As in ‘Sea Shanty’, there never were wilder bastards than us on the sea.
We were outraged by the scant regard in which the Aborigines were held. Spider, as sympathetic as Strummer to the downtrodden and the disenfranchised, went about in a T-shirt that read: ‘Rock for Land Rights’. It hadn’t been long since Australian Aborigines had been able to claim rights to their own land. One of the Australian roadies spotted Spider’s T-shirt.
‘Land rights?’ I heard the roadie say. ‘Two bob a flagon.’
Spider brought backstage a large Aboriginal flag – a yellow disc on a horizontally divided field of black and red – to hang as a backdrop. The yellow, Spider said, represented the sun, the red the earth, and the black the Aboriginal people of Australia. Halfway through our set, word came that the flag was the
wrong way up. Spider was stricken at the possibility that hanging the flag upside down meant we were taking the piss and that we intended the opposite of what the symbol signified. His inadvertent betrayal of the Aborigines horrified Spider.
I had family in Australia. My aunt and uncle had emigrated in 1956 to settle in Adelaide, where they grew a sizeable family and a building construction empire that made them comfortably rich. The Evinses came out in no small number to welcome us from the aeroplane at Adelaide airport. I spent an evening round the barbie, where we bogged in on tucker and stubbies. I was open-mouthed at the privileges enjoyed by the European culture and the extent to which it seemed to be a stranger both to racial and sexual equality.
Our tour promoter was a guy called Vivian Lees. Lees was a mild-mannered man and softly spoken. He came everywhere with us and even drove one of the minibuses. It was rare for a tour promoter to be so ubiquitous. His delight to have us on tour in Australia was palpable.
On a day off in Melbourne, Lees took us up to Hanging Rock, where we picked our way through eucalyptus trees and the eruptions of what we were told was volcanic solvsbergite. The mounds were riddled with holes large enough to put your head through. Philip had recovered from his ulcer but was fragile. He strained almost geriatrically, pushing down on his knees to get himself up onto one of the rocks. A terrain more complicated than a pavement or pub floor tended to baffle Shane nowadays, but he clambered up the rocks with the rest of us.
On a large pitted slab away from the trees, away from the others, I came upon a view over the Bush. It was the largest uninterrupted plain I had ever seen. Scrub and dry grass stretched for miles all around to a horizon which faded into the rim of the vast dome of blue sky. With such a view in front of me, on the other side of the world, in the middle of nowhere, it was as though we had all been set adrift and there was just the subtlest, sketchiest of networks holding us all together.
Here Comes Everybody Page 28
