She had to get up for a flight to New York the following morning. I had her apartment to myself. The band wasn’t due to leave for Dallas for the next date of the tour until the following day. I didn’t much want to go back to the hotel and attempt to make light of the taunts that were sure to come my way that I had bedded Joe Strummer’s girlfriend behind his back, nor had I much stomach for any encounter with Spider. I sat in Danielle’s kitchen, content with the thought that I would be seeing her again at the end of the tour when we finished up at Roseland Ballroom in New York City.
*
The South in June was stultifying with heat. I had brought my baggy, cream-coloured linen, country vicar’s suit. It wasn’t much use. After the show in Dallas we threw open all the windows in the dilapidated dressing room. No wind came through them. A distant thunderstorm crackled, but even as it exploded overhead half an hour later and passed on its way, the air remained just as still and just as oppressive. I watched Andrew panting with his head hanging between his shoulders. His dripping hair darkened the dusty floorboards between his feet. P.V. came in and looked down at Andrew.
‘It’s too hot for man nor beast,’ he said.
In Austin we played in the middle of the afternoon, at a venue which was half-inside, half-outside. The auditorium was a rectangle of dust divided down the middle into blazing sunlight and sweltering shade. Halfway through our set, all the lights in the trusses above us went out. It made little difference in the daylight. I looked out to where P.V. should have been standing at his lighting desk under his corrugated roof. We were told afterwards that he had fainted from the heat.
‘But that’s not why the lights went out,’ Frank said. P.V. had been sweating so much that his desk had shorted. To drain the desk they had had to remove the top and pour P.V.’s perspiration out.
It was just as hot in New Orleans. The stage at Tipitina’s was cramped, the dressing rooms airless. On a day off we lounged round the pool. In the evening, I found myself having dinner with Frank and Terry. We ate outside. The evening was warm and scented with jasmine. As we sat down to dinner, Frank gestured to his new suit. It was a linen suit the same colour as mine, but tailored and with what looked like suede gun-patches on it.
‘Linen,’ he said. ‘In this weather, you have to have linen.’ He lounged in the wicker chair with the air of a plantation owner.
‘James,’ he said despairingly, gesturing at my suit. My suit was rumpled and a size too big for me. Terry had taken to calling it my Kowloon Ferry suit. It made me feel literary. I put Frank’s disparagement of it down to his sheepishness over the amount of disposable income he earned from our touring, combined with not having immediately realised how like mine his new suit was.
Though it hadn’t been long since we had renegotiated Frank’s commission to fifteen per cent of gross, there were yet eight of us in the band to be paid from the net income from touring. We had a crew of five, sometimes six. Four of them – Charlie, Scully, P.V. and D.J. – were paid on a permanent basis whether we were working or not. Our accountant, a blunt, frowning Manchester man called Anthony Addis, went through our accounts with us after each tour. For some time now, Frank’s salary had exceeded our individual incomes from touring. We had lately signed a contract with WEA, but, still, money always seemed to be tight.
We drove in a yellow Silver Eagle with the head sign ‘No One You Know’, from Birmingham and Atlanta up through the Midwest – Cincinnati, St Louis, Chicago, Detroit – and into Canada. The venues ranged from the casting shed of a blast-furnace plant amid pipes and gantries and ore-bridges and furnaces, to a club by the river from the back door of which we could see the Gateway to the West, rising over the Missouri. The closer I got to New York and the end of the tour, the more excited I became about my reunion with Danielle.
When we got to Boston the day before travelling down to New York, I rang Danielle at the number she had given me and described the lingering loyalty I had to my New York girlfriend Heather.
‘But I want to be with you,’ I said. ‘Do you want to be with me?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
I had loved Heather’s company in New York whenever I had arrived in the city. I had enjoyed the ranging letters she had written to me on mismatched stationery and crammed into an envelope. I was in debt to Heather for her catalysis of the end of my relationship with Debsey. The evening we got to the city, I went to see her at her apartment.
‘That’s okay,’ Heather said. ‘If you’re in love with her.’
‘I don’t know if I am,’ I said.
‘It’s okay anyway,’ she said.
For two nights the Pogues played the Roseland Ballroom. It was an enormous place reminiscent of the Hammersmith Palais with its stage situated on one of the long sides of the hall and its dowdy gold-painted balcony.
The days before the gigs, I spent in Danielle’s company. She took me zigzagging through Manhattan, reading the flashing WALK and DON’T WALK signs ahead of the traffic lights changing colour. New York traffic seemed to part before her. I bobbed in her wake.
After the first night at Roseland she hailed a cab with the voice of a carney barker and when it tried to drive off with her, leaving me on the sidewalk, she held the door open, preventing it going any further. She filled the interior of the cab with invective.
On my last day before going home to London – other than Danielle’s outing to a deli in the neighbourhood for bagels, cream cheese, red onions and lox – we spent the day in bed. Even as the daylight started to fade, I knew the day hadn’t been wasted. I left her to meet up with the Pogues’ transport to JFK airport. Danielle and I made no plans to see one another again.
Festivals in Europe and Scandinavia – Roskilde, Oslo, Milan, Lorelei, Annecy, Lorient, Madrid – took up the rest of the summer. At the end of July, for the last and most nerve-racking gig, Jem and I turned up with our instruments to play a handful of songs for Ella Finer – nearly five years old – and her nursery schoolmates in Coram’s Fields.
Danielle and I continued to write to one another. In August she rang me, to invite me to an island in the Caribbean. We spent ten days on St Martin. A ceiling fan wafted the scents of hibiscus and the morning rain through our palm-fronded villa by the ocean. In September the Pogues were due to start rehearsals for the next record. When Danielle and I parted company at JFK airport, I waited until I had rounded the corner of the corridor to the plane, before I gave myself to uncontrollable weeping.
*
The summer of 1988 had already been touted as the ‘Second Summer of Love’. England was febrile with acid house, raves, Ecstasy and LSD. Darryl rediscovered an appetite for dance music that was gluttonous. He would give a couple of us lifts to rehearsal in his Volkswagen and treat us to mixes he’d come across, fresh from clubs as far apart as Ibiza and Birmingham. He extolled the virtues of the Roland TR-808 above all other drum-machines, and dropped names like Frankie Knuckles and Paul Oakenfold.
Not only was acid house all the rage in London, but Jem was concerned that I should know that jazz was too. He ushered me in the direction of artists like Courtney Pine and Wynton Marsalis, along with the usual suspects, the Charlies Mingus and Parker. Jem’s keenness for jazz was urbane. Darryl’s enthusiasm for house music was irrepressible.
In homage to the psychedelic, 1960s flavour of the ‘Second Summer of Love’, we took to wearing patterned shirts. On our festival tour that summer, Jem seemed to have been on a mission to uncover as many shirts with crazed patterns as he could. He had found a shop in Milan airport. Whenever we passed through, Jem was sure to pick out something brightly coloured, mosaic, dense with addled geometry. Darryl favoured T-shirts more in keeping with the youthful demographic of the country’s rave culture. Though I was persuaded, in the odd photo shoot and on stage, to put on something fittingly riotous, I clung to my white shirt and my suit.
We started a couple of weeks’ rehearsal at the end of September. Jem had written a handful of songs. There was a jazz instrum
ental he and I had played a few times in dressing rooms on the road in Germany – he on saxophone, myself on accordion. It was vaguely blues-based, but angular and with unapologetic flattened notes. He’d written a Cajun-country-rockabilly song called ‘Train of Love’ with a hurtling succession of chord changes in it and which modulated precipitately, flinging me into a bewildering realm of black keys on the accordion. He brought forward a song inspired by our tour of Australia, with minimal chord changes and full of drones, which Terry was going to sing. Lastly, there was a love song, in 6/8 time, with a melody full of longing, in the style, and following pretty much the parameters, of ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’.
Philip had written a song inspired by the legend of Lorelei, one of the rock-bound Rhine maidens who lured passing navigators to their doom. Philip had always had a Wagnerian bent which turned on the pivot of desire and loss, love and death. His song, ‘Lorelei’, was no exception. A guitar jangled against a Phil Spector beat.
The songwriter who kept the flag flying for Irish music was Terry. He came to rehearsal with a song whose lyrics swore vengeance on Oliver Cromwell. We submitted it to a ska backbeat. The other song he brought in was a galloping one about the alcoholic antics of a band he used to be in. The tune was so complicated to play and the jig rhythm so unswerving that we had no other option but to play it straight.
I yearned so much for what I hoped would be the superiority of Shane’s songs that when he came to rehearsal it was a struggle to prevent myself lavishing praise on all of them.
At first hearing, ‘London You’re a Lady’ and ‘White City’ were luminous with ancient melodies. The middle eight of ‘London You’re a Lady’ was from the turn of the seventeenth century – a section from ‘Planxty Fanny Power’ by the harpist Turlough O’Carolan. The melody for ‘White City’ was the tune of a traditional song called the ‘Curragh of Kildare’. The chord sequences of both songs were majestic.
The lyrics were another matter. The writing in ‘London You’re a Lady’ didn’t seem so sure of itself. The personification of London as a prostrate whore was as lurid as a penny dreadful. ‘White City’, which Shane had written about the demolition of the West London greyhound-racing track, seemed to be the counterpart to ‘Bottle of Smoke’ – from If I Should Fall from Grace with God – but for dogs.
A couple of other songs he had written were scant of melody. They were formulaic, encrusted in rock idiom and dependent on extended sequences of improvisation. The song called ‘USA’ was morbidly oriented around the heroin imagery of Dr John’s ‘I Walk on Gilded Splinters’. Shane sang it in a humbug American accent. The pedestrian and vaguely magisterial chorus of ‘It’s the same wherever you go’ saddened me. The chorus of the other song, lifted from Lead Belly, was ‘In those old cotton fields back home’. Things didn’t look good.
In rehearsal I found myself indulging in a technique I had come to resort to when I felt uninspired, which was to rock the bass-end of my accordion back and forth, holding down the chords. The effect was moody and atmospheric, but it was an indication not only of how little real cause there was for an accordion to be played at all, but how dull the song was.
To my relief, Shane had written an unrepentant soul song called ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah’, heavy with onbeat. The song was even further distant from what I knew Frank was concerned should be the Pogues’ brand. Ironically, its novelty made it an instant candidate for release as a single.
I loved to play the song. It reminded me of my days as a soul guitarist. I made my accordion a Hammond B3, painted glissandi up and down the keyboard with my thumbnail, stabbed out soul figures full of minor sevenths and blue notes.
We found time at RAK at the beginning of October to record ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah’ with Lillywhite. Shane wanted strings. Fiachra Trench brought an orchestra to the studio. Shane described an ascending scale which would climb through the chorus like the boys’ choir on the Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. Fiachra pointed out that the end of the scale as it rose up through the chords would end up clashing. The boys’ choir on ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ jumped a third, up to the tonic at the end of the scale to avoid the same problem. I sided with the Rolling Stones and our orchestral arranger. I doubted Shane’s capabilities. Shane tapped impatiently on the ledge of the mixing desk in a show of restraint before his patience wore out.
‘Of course it’s going to clash!’ he cried. ‘That’s the whole point!’
Trench went back to his orchestra leader to make adjustments to the score. When it came to a run-through against the backing track, the strings rose in inexorable steps one after the other. Instead of the jarring crash I expected, though, the prow of Shane’s line cleaved cleanly through the chords.
*
Danielle came to visit me in London for my thirty-fourth birthday. After renting a room in Hampstead for eighteen months, I had just moved into a flat near Great Ormond Street Hospital. We went around buying things for the flat as if we were newly-weds. She organised a birthday party for me in a room above a pub in Farringdon. Debsey came to it. I saw her talking to Danielle.
‘Well,’ Debsey said to me afterwards, ‘I wanted to be able to complain how bloody predictable she is. But I can’t really.’
A couple of days later, Danielle had gone back to Los Angeles. I was bound for Japan.
*
There was a gloomy desperation about Andrew on the flight to Tokyo. As short as the tour was going to be, it had been difficult to leave his lifetime companion, Deborah. For some time they had been trying to have a baby. The latest ordeal had been an ectopic pregnancy which had needed emergency treatment. To leave her during her convalescence made him miserable.
Tokyo was a monochrome confusion of aerial walkways, expressways and overpasses choked with black or white cars. Men in white helmets and facemasks, grey overalls and cloven footwear pruned the leafless trees down to knuckles. The only colour seemed to be the purple of ornamental kale in the flower-beds beneath the trees.
By nightfall, however, driving to our first gig in Ariake, the city had exploded into a conflagration of neon. Hoardings rippled, cascaded, flickered and flared. Beneath them swirled complicated currents and crosscurrents of people. In the middle of them, men in yellow overalls frantically waved luminous sticks.
Shane sometimes liked to change the set round at the last minute and without warning. Arms on his knees, stabbing with a marker, wiping his nose with a forearm, impatiently cuffing the paper, he would scribble over the set list we’d been happy with for a couple of weeks at least. We would swap looks over the top of his head, preparing for conflict.
For the Japanese audience, Shane wanted to do a melody by a jazz saxophonist called Pharoah Sanders. The piece was called ‘Japan’. None of us had heard it before. We buckled under Shane’s growing petulance and unpredictability and agreed to learn it.
One of my study courses at college had been ‘Introduction to Psychology’. We studied human cortical processes when confronted by the Boring Figure – the image of the provocatively turned cheek and ear of a young woman flipping to represent the nose and eye of an old crone – and the Rubin Vase – the classic figure/ground, ground/figure dichotomy. Like the Rubin Vase and the Boring Figure, a stable perception was never reachable as to whether Shane was a genius or a fucking idiot.
With the customary stops and starts, misunderstandings and misconceptions, ‘Japan’ turned out to be a simple pentatonic melody which we could do nothing else with, but play it round a few times.
The suddenness, ferocity and brevity of the Japanese audience’s applause took me by surprise. So did the expectant silence which followed, as they waited for us to play again. It happened song after song. If the time or key signature changed, a collective shriek went up. Other than that, at the end of each song, the applause vanished as precipitately as it had erupted.
Pharoah Sanders’s tune was met with the same forbidding silence. With childlike ceremony we built it up
from its initial iteration on the mandolin, adding instruments as we went. At the end of the piece Shane stepped up to the microphone to balance wordless chanting on the top of the foundations we’d made, like a capstone, wobbly as it was. His vocalisations were delivered with a boyish solemnity and conjured up an Indian pow-wow.
*
A couple of weeks after our return to England, after a few dates in the Eissporthallen of West Germany, we were depressed – but at the same time flattered – to play the vast and belittling venues of the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow, the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham and the Leisure Centre in Brighton. The tour bus crept through their subterranean concrete galleries. We bleated in echoing corridors, lost. When we found them, the stages were hanging in black and of a scale worthy of William Wyler. They were erected in a huge expanse of cement, with railings and cables, flight cases and forklifts. At sound check, heater-fans roared like jet-turbines. At show time, once we had been led through the labyrinth backstage, an audience murmured darkly beyond the sable draperies hanging from the trusses. In Glasgow, it felt like desertion not to play at our stamping ground, Barrowland.
It was a relief to turn up for sound check at the Royal Ulster Hall, familiar from our tour with Costello four years before – until men from security, accompanied by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, came to tell us that a bomb warning had been called in and that we had to vacate the building.
The RUC performed a sweep. Though they came to tell us that they’d found nothing, Frank asked us if we wanted to cancel the gig. We said no.
My family were justifiably worried about the danger I had put myself into.
Here Comes Everybody Page 30
