After Sydney and Byron Bay, on the way up the Gold Coast, new developments were beginning to spring up with such names as Koala Town, Dream World and Industrial Paradise. At the far end of the sweep of coast, between the almost acrobatic branches of the Norfolk pines ranged along the edge of the cliff, stood the hazy pilings of the high-rises of Surfers Paradise.
P.V. couldn’t tolerate the heat. The further north we went on our way to Brisbane, the more tropical the weather became. Miserable from the humidity, he sat in the minibus, his hair lank, his upper lip beaded with perspiration. Now and again he let out a great sigh and elaborately rubbed his face.
Frank joked about his drinking. On the Pacific Motorway, we stopped at a roadside fruit stand. P.V. stumped back to the van with a plastic bag full of papayas.
‘You have to have it,’ Frank said, mimicking a phrase we heard a lot from P.V. ‘Papaya daiquiris in P.V.’s room when we get to Brisbane.’
From Brisbane, we went to New Zealand, an Eden with livid green hills and beaches of black sand. Spider greeted us at every opportunity with ‘Kia ora, bro!’ From the fans he met after the gigs, he learnt whole phrases in Maori. Walking around Auckland, alert to such a mellifluous language preponderant with vowels, I was elated to come across a Maori word I could bring to Spider. It was printed on a wall behind a block of flats. I started mouthing the word TOWAWAYAREA in order to be able to repeat it accurately, when I realised my mistake.
On the drive down to Wellington we pulled over at Pukerua Beach and gawped at the barrelling of a seal among the orange tendrils of bladderwrack heaving in an inlet, as it swam up to us, curious, its wet-whiskered snout breaking the water and its mournful, liquid eyes staring up. From Christchurch, we took the train to Dunedin. Rhododendrons grew so close to the railway line that now and again a branch would thwack the windows.
*
When we got back to England in the second week in February our tour of the Antipodes seemed a keel-upwards, anomalous interlude full of wonderments. When our ship righted itself, it brought us up in the middle of an English winter and time to go back to work.
Though while we were away ‘Fairytale of New York’ had slipped to No. 10 in the charts and had vanished from the top twenty altogether by the time we got home, If I Should Fall from Grace with God had been released and had gone in at No. 3. We went on tour in support of it. In the third week of February, we met, as usual, for Shane’s convenience, in the Boot on Cromer Street before climbing onto the tour bus.
We were by now more than familiar with the circuit: the upholstered well of the dressing room at the University of East Anglia; the panelling and parquet of the De Montfort Hall in Leicester; the balconies and bar of the City Hall in Newcastle; the bulb-lined, theatrical mirrors at the Playhouse in Edinburgh; the treacherous aluminium staircase to the stage at Leeds University refectory; the cosily carpeted living room at the Apollo in Manchester; the freezing parlour at the Royal Court in Liverpool; the fibre-carpeting at Rock City, Nottingham; the metal gantries and modern wooden stairways at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge; the befuddling, corporate corridors at the Brighton Centre.
Frank had put together a tour programme, with individual photographs from the photo session for the cover of If I Should Fall from Grace with God. The booklet included the lyrics, a scrapbook page of photos from recent tours and a couple of pages written by our biographer, Ann Scanlon, in the style of racing form. Frank had devoted the first page to the rejected album cover of repeated reproductions of our faces as James Joyce’s.
The arrival of MacColl in Edinburgh to sing ‘Fairytale of New York’ – a week into the tour and a couple of months adrift of the Christmas season – lifted the tour up and carried it down the country, to a week-long residency at the Town and Country in Kentish Town.
At the beginning of the day I stepped out of the glare of the spring sunshine into the darkness of the auditorium, out of the rumbling of the traffic on Highgate Road into the serial concussion of Scully sound-checking the drum kit. The stage was a black-painted plywood expanse framed at the front by the line of monitor wedges and microphones and at the back by ranks of amps and risers draped in black. Backstage the corridors smelled of disinfectant. The dressing rooms were empty but for the drinks coolers, cheese plates and bowls of fruit on layered napkins on the counters beneath the mirrors, and the now obligatory pineapple.
The gigs at the Town and Country were frenziedly kaleidoscopic. MacColl stepped out in a green blouse closed by a choker, her earrings swinging, and an abundance of red hair, which on St Patrick’s Day was swept up in a large green bow. In ‘Fairytale of New York’, Shane and Kirsty’s shuffling left a meandering track in the confetti snow which blew down from the lighting trusses. At the end of ‘Turkish Song of the Damned’, she hooked Spider by the arm, to hurl each other around. At the end of ‘Fiesta’, she was merciless with the Silly String.
At the end of each set, dressed as if against a chill in a black leather jacket, polo neck undervest and shirt, Lynval Golding from the Specials performed ‘A Message to You, Rudy’. On a couple of nights, Strummer came out to perform ‘London Calling’ and ‘I Fought the Law’ – black shirt, black jeans, bolo tie and a clump of wilted shamrock dangling from his breast pocket.
At the end of each night, the auditorium was loud with the clatter of the clean-up crew shunting banks of beer tins and plastic glasses across the floor with huge brooms. The stage was strewn with fake snow. Silly String hung in festoons from the microphones, if they were still standing. Backstage, the dressing rooms smelled of booze and cigarette smoke. The coolers gaped empty. There was cheese and fruit everywhere and the pineapple smashed to pulp in the corner.
By the end of the week we had filmed the video for the next single, ‘If I Should Fall from Grace with God’, concurrently with filming the shows from St Patrick’s Day to the end of the week for a documentary, including interviews. In between, we crammed in a recording session with Steve Earle for a song called ‘Johnny Come Lately’ on his third album, Copperhead Road.
*
For a year, Shane had been going out with a girl called Victoria. She had dark hair, green eyes and protrusive incisors. There was a distracted but watchful air about her. She had introduced herself to me in the Devonshire Arms as Victoria Cross – a joke I didn’t get, but one which for months afterwards rendered me incapable of acknowledging that her surname was in fact Clarke. The joy she seemed to take over the joke reminded me of the discomfiture I experienced from girls at school. I took to regarding her with a certain wariness.
She started to accompany us on tour. One night, in France, we had just had dinner in a restaurant next to the venue. I happened to be sitting opposite Shane and Victoria at one of the long trestle tables. I was tired and laid my head on my forearms on top of the table. I could hear Shane sniggering but tried to put it out of my mind.
‘Should I, really?’ I heard Victoria say. I didn’t know what they were doing but it didn’t surprise me when water started to trickle in my hair and down the side of my face. I raised my head up to see Victoria setting a jug of water back down on the table.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I said.
‘He told me to!’ she said with a defiant pout. Her presumption astounded me. I found myself preferring to accord Shane the right to pour water over my head than what I took to be this hanger-on.
*
During Philip’s hospitalisation the previous February, Frank, Shane and Terry had each had a cameo in a Comic Strip Presents . . . production called Eat the Rich. Adrian Edmondson, one of the members of The Comic Strip, agreed to direct our next video, for ‘Fiesta’, for release in July. In the second week in April we travelled to Barcelona to shoot it.
The locations were a dusty colonial plaza, a restaurant outside the city with blinding-white tablecloths and an awning entwined with vines, and lastly the hallucinatory roof of Gaudí’s Casa Batlló in the centre of Barcelona.
The morning of the shoot on t
he roof of the Casa Batlló, before going on to the location, I went in a car with Shane to a radio interview. I sat in front. Shane sat in the back with an assistant from the local publicity company.
On stage we came across with nineteenth-century lawlessness. Off stage we were civil to a fault. Shane, too, when it suited his purpose, was a stickler for etiquette. This morning, though, he complained petulantly and at length about the earliness of the hour, interrogating the driver about how long it was going to take to get to the radio station, questioning the necessity of the interview.
The assistant reiterated the prior commitment with the radio station. Shane started to bellow, leaning forward to the driver. I turned towards him.
‘I bet you were spoilt as a child,’ I said.
No sooner had I said it than Shane’s forearm clamped across my throat and his knuckles bored into my cheekbone.
‘You cunt!’ he yelled with his face against my ear and his foul breath in my nose. ‘You cunt! You cunt!’
As I fought to free myself from his headlock, the memory came rushing back to me of my first conversation with Shane on the evening of my audition for the Nips. He had described, if I had understood him properly, a childhood which, as much as it had been unusual, had also sometimes been difficult.
For the rest of the drive, I rebuked myself for the times I had succumbed to the temptation of disparaging his lyrics as products of a puerile fascination with horror and degradation, goaded by self-loathing and harried by the ineluctability of pain and death. Though I was sure he would have been the last to admit it, behind them all, I sensed Shane’s prayers for some sort of respite. I should have reminded myself of the anxiety I knew he lived with daily. It was something I should have known since my first visits to his flat on Cromer Street.
The Casa Batlló was fitful with mosaics, swirling staircases, tiled light-wells and ranks of rib-like arches. Up on the roof the ridgeline soared and plummeted like a spine of a dragon. The chimneys veered up out of the craze of mosaic, banded with stars and topped with candlesnuffer spires. With the exception of Philip who had ordered ahead a blue knickerbocker suit with a swirly design, we were kitted out in dark suits. We waited for Shane.
He appeared at the doorway onto the roof in a matador outfit of tights, tassels and gaiters – and a chaquetilla with epaulettes of bronze thread and covered in dark stars. He stopped, took one look at the jackets and ties we were wearing and started screaming to be dressed like everyone else. Frank stepped across to calm him, but he was beside himself. Edmondson – a quiet, assured man with thinning blond hair which the wind blew about – waved someone to go and help.
A while later, Shane returned in shades, a dark suit, white shirt and red cummerbund but in no less a state of agitation. Though it was yet early afternoon and we hadn’t started, I wanted the day to be over and done with. Shane frightened me, not so much on account of my remark earlier in the day, but because he seemed to be losing his mind.
Edmondson assembled us in a line against an undulating wall at the rear of the roof. We mimed to the backing track blasting through a couple of wedges on the tiled floor. Spider pretended to empty his lungs into a trombone. Jem and Joey Cashman, who was now a permanent member of Frank’s management team, blew into saxophones. Philip ducked and weaved. Andrew did some sort of soft-shoe shuffle round the solitary snare drum. I hoisted the accordion. Shane strode up and down gesticulating as the camera followed him on a dolly. I loathed the exaggeration to which the camera required us to commit, particularly in view of the precarious state of mind Shane seemed to be in.
I happened to be histrionically bending over my accordion when Shane grabbed my hair and thrust my head down until the ground was inches from my face. I tried to lift up my head, but his arm was bolt-stiff. I managed to twist myself out of his grasp and resurface. With his other arm he pretended to brandish an estoque, as if I were the bull and he the matador. For the sake of the camera I carried on the ridiculous disporting though I was careful to put some distance between Shane and myself.
After the shot I went up to Edmondson.
‘Yes sir!’ he said. He half-turned to me from another matter, his thin hair snatched by a gust.
‘I’d like you not to use that shot in the actual video,’ I said.
‘Sorry?’ he said.
‘The shot we did,’ I said. ‘I’d like you not to use it in the actual video.’
‘Really?’ he said. ‘Seemed good to me.’
Edmondson and I stood together for a moment in the wind.
The headlock in the car that morning and the episode up on the roof of the Casa Batlló had been the first time Shane had assaulted me. For the rest of the spring, I kept him at a distance.
*
In the third week in April, we went to Thames Television’s Euston Road studios to perform on a programme called Friday Night Live, hosted by Ben Elton. He had been the invisible journalist for London Weekend Television’s South of Watford in the March of 1984. Now he ran the show in front of the camera. We set up on a stage between large, pink fibreglass hands with our feet swathed in a layer of dry ice.
A couple of months before, in January, after a six-week appeal hearing, Lord Lane had upheld the conviction of the Birmingham Six, in prison since 1975 for the Birmingham pub bombings. We made it known that we would be performing ‘The Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six’ to close the show. The camera rehearsal went without comment. We were in the middle of the song on the live broadcast when the producers cut to commercial. Rather than having simply gone over time, it seemed Thames Television had been cowed by the political climate engendered by the Thatcher government. As early as 1985 Thatcher had used the words ‘the oxygen of publicity’. Already, moves were afoot to restrict the media’s coverage of acts of terrorism, which obviously included our performance on Friday Night Live.
*
We played throughout Europe and Scandinavia, from the snow and smoked fish of Norway to the rain and Hackfleisch of Germany. The warming Mediterranean brought carafes of vino tinto and fried squid. The cacophony of Rome brought grilled aubergines and penne all’arrabbiata.
In Germany we had had news that, in May, we would be embarking on our third tour of North America, this time starting off on the West Coast. As promised, I had written to Strummer’s American girlfriend – a letter each from Sydney and Rome.
When I got home from Italy there was an envelope with a Los Angeles postmark in the hall. The letter inside contained a beautiful description of the gun-metal surface of the roads and the clear skies after the rain, together with an alluring one of herself sitting on what she called a ‘chaise lounge’. I loved her canny self-deprecation as she described herself in a short black dress and wearing lipstick having come in from an audition where she’d waited an hour or two in a corridor with girls identically dressed. It was as if to say that though there might be hundreds like, of her there was only one.
Twenty-Seven
I was anxious to meet my bi-coastal correspondent, she of the ‘chaise lounge’ in Los Angeles, she of the wisteria-draped top-floor apartment in the West Village. I struggled to remember what she looked like, but could only come up with a memory of blonde hair and Nordic beauty.
The John Anson Ford Theater was in the open air, set into the hillside. The auditorium was made of concrete, the stage framed by a pair of towers with trees receding up the hill behind, luridly orange, then red, then green in the stage lighting.
After the show, Danielle von Zerneck came to the dressing room. She was lovely, and more so now that she was by herself, without Strummer, backstage, and to meet me. Hardly covertly I refamiliarised myself with her near-as-damn-it symmetrical features, her bangs, blonde hair and strabismus. The tiny blue dot on her left eyelid was where she’d been stabbed with a pencil when she was at school.
If Danielle typified the Hollywood ingénue, my yen for a blonde American actress typified the English rock-and-roll musician. I hadn’t considered myself to be so predictabl
e, but when I thought about Heather, my blonde American performance artist friend, and the other dalliances I had had on the road, all at least ten years younger than I was and all blonde, it was clear I had resorted to type.
I wasn’t alone. Shane, while not quite sloughing off the skin of the poet-drunk, was now taking on the traits of a rock-and-roll prima donna, as I had seen on the roof of the Casa Batlló. Frank, from the outset, when he had turned up at the Windsor Castle in Camden in his blue blazer, faded jeans and loafers, had typified the rock-and-roll manager. In Charlie McLennan, with his Mick Ronson coiffure and skintight jeans and his presumption of indestructibility, we had the quintessential rock-and-roll roadie. Most of the rest of the band seemed immune from such predetermination.
Resorting to type too, Danielle and I ended up at the Hyatt on Sunset – the rock-and-roll hotel in Hollywood – in Spider’s room. P.V. had already gone to bed and we needed somewhere to go. Spider lounged next to Danielle on his bed. His arm lolled over her shoulders. He started to complain about the bothersomeness of sharing rooms on the road and had asked could he come back to Danielle’s apartment with her, when I got up.
‘Can I have a quick word with you?’ I said to Danielle. ‘Outside?’
‘Sure,’ she said. We went out into the corridor. I closed Spider’s door behind me.
‘Have you anything in there you need?’ I said.
‘No,’ she said.
‘You want to go somewhere else?’ I said.
‘You want to come to my place?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
Her apartment was a ten-minute drive down the hill from Sunset Boulevard. The windows were covered with wrought-iron bars. The living room was dark. Neither of us switched on the lights. She walked across to her record player and put on a Thelonious Monk record. When she stepped into my arms to dance to ‘Crepuscule with Nellie’, she led us both out of the resort of type.
Here Comes Everybody Page 29
