‘First and foremost,’ my dad said, ‘you should remember you’re just an entertainer.’
‘I play the songs that get written,’ I said.
*
When we had been in Paris, a journalist had offered me the use of a house she and a friend were fixing up on an island off the Beara peninsula on the south-west coast of Ireland. Danielle flew over from Los Angeles to meet my family. After Christmas, we flew to Cork airport, drove over the Ring of Kerry and took a local one-car ferry from Castletownbere to Bere Island. At the end of a slurried road a quarter of a mile from the jetty we let ourselves into a freezing and dilapidated hovel. In the kitchen stood a rickety table, a tiny pot-bellied stove and an upside-down boat. We spent four days making St Brigid crosses from the reeds that grew everywhere, washed our dishes in the hand-numbing stream which flowed past the house and huddled round the stove drinking vodka. By the end of our stay, we had decided to get married.
‘What are you thinking?’ Frank said. ‘Your wife-to-be lives six thousand miles away. You’re in a band that tours seventy-five per cent of the year.’
‘Congratulations would have been nice,’ I said.
‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘You’re fucking mad.’
*
We started work on the next record at RAK, with Steve Lillywhite, in February 1989. Shane arrived at the studio, took one step into the control room from the corridor and released the contents of his stomach into a wastepaper bin. He sat to the side of the room struggling to take us all in, a meek expression on his face.
We went through the backing tracks quickly enough. In ‘USA’, we made a voodoo soundscape, braided with freewheeling, Jefferson Airplane improvisations, haunted by the sounds of wah-wah pedals, helicopter rotors and an explosion which evoked Apocalypse Now. By exposing the dark side of the original ‘Summer of Love’, we were proud to have our finger on the cultural pulse. We recorded Jem’s jazz instrumental. It exploded into being with an Elvin Jones drum solo and blasted with alto, tenor and trombone solos, note-clusters stabbed on the piano, chords on the accordion straight from Mickey Baker’s Complete Course in Jazz Guitar. We added ska, highlife and Romani to our stock-in-trade. To join the welter of new influences and the heterogeneity of the new soundscape, Jem added the hurdy-gurdy which he had bought on mail order. On the strength of my abiding enthusiasm for Hungarian gypsy music, and because the banging of teaspoons on a mandolin lacked the range, I had bought a hammered dulcimer. We also brought spoils from our visit to Australia the previous February to the studio: clap sticks and a bull-roarer. Everything we had in our arsenal, we used and unsparingly.
The magic-marker ink on the genre divider in the record shops that read ‘World Music’ was hardly dry. At the beginning of our career, when we bashed out waltzes, reels, polkas, hornpipes on ridiculed instruments and went around in second-hand suits, we exuded such a timelessness that we could easily have been plucked from any decade since the 1900s. Now, wearing our influences on our sleeves, with our Antipodean souvenirs, in our kaleidoscopic shirts, we exuded such a timeliness that it mired us up to our necks in the Nineties.
There was one stowaway song on the record, a reminder of the terra firma from which we had banished ourselves and which some of us were happy to see recede into the mists. Though it started out with a signature Count Basie Big Band motif, ‘Boat Train’ was a rattling procession of verses – the words unmistakably, inimitably and unapologetically MacGowan’s. The song told of a journey by ferry and train from Ireland to London via Holyhead, narrated by the figure of Napper Tandy, an associate of Wolfe Tone in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. ‘Boat Train’ seemed to be from another, suddenly distant incarnation of the band.
Lillywhite had difficulty getting vocal performances from Shane. In Jem’s song ‘Misty Morning, Albert Bridge’, he slurred syllables and botched consonants. He attempted to inject enthusiasm into singing someone else’s lyrics by means of the now inevitable American accent and an intonation gravelly with fake emotion. ‘White City’ and ‘London You’re a Lady’ fared better, but Shane’s diction only served to highlight the platitude of the songs’ conceits, despite the daring of some of the imagery. Lillywhite tried different set-ups, from a booth in the studio, to sitting Shane in front of a music stand in the control room. One evening, as we were about to break for dinner, one of the engineers programmed a basic drumbeat, handed Shane a microphone with a large chamber of reverb on it and set a full spool of three-inch tape on record. We left to go and have dinner. When we got back, Shane was still at it, sitting in Lillywhite’s chair, chanting through the studio monitors, over and over, his face lit up with childish delight.
You’ve got to contact yourself
You’ve got to contact yourself
You’ve got to contact yourself
You’ve got to contact yourself
To compensate for the disengagement of Shane’s vocals on the album, we drafted in the other singers in the group – Philip for the most part, but also Andrew and Spider – to prop up Shane’s ailing voice which dangled like a wounded staff-officer from the shoulders of his adjutants. Andrew stepped up for ‘Cotton Fields’. He sang, like Shane, in an American accent and had been persuaded that an ‘uh-uh’ in the manner of Elvis Presley was a good idea. Spider gave good account of himself in ‘USA’. Philip’s tenor soared harmoniously in a couple of songs.
When Danielle had left to go back to Los Angeles, I would leave my new flat every morning to walk up past Coram’s Fields and around to Russell Square station to catch the tube up to St John’s Wood. As I turned the corner of Lansdowne Terrace into Bernard Street, repeatedly, more and more urgently as the recording proceeded, I found myself looking up into the sky into the west, where Danielle had gone, aching to be finished with this record and to be where she was.
Twenty-Eight
Andrew had become victim to cluster-headaches. They came without warning in volleys of regular and debilitating attacks. Without warning too, the episodes stopped, only to start again weeks or months later. Frequently we would find Andrew curled into a ball on the sofa in a darkened dressing room in pain.
Andrew petitioned to be granted a room to himself. We all wanted a room to ourselves, but the economics – the burden of Frank’s commission and the number of people in the band and in the crew – wouldn’t permit it. In Andrew’s case, though, we had no problem.
Philip moved in with Darryl. It wasn’t long before he had formed an attachment – as he had to both me and, after me, to Andrew – to this new roommate, and had become just as devout a fan of Nottingham Forest as Darryl was, if not more so. When they could, the pair of them travelled to see Forest play. On the 15th April 1989, a month after we had finished the album we had heavy-footedly entitled Peace and Love, Darryl and Philip went up to Sheffield to watch Nottingham Forest play Liverpool in the semi-final of the FA Cup at Hillsborough Stadium. A few minutes into the game, with fans spilling onto the pitch and police officers racing to form a cordon, the referee stopped the match. The weight of thousands of fans coming out of a tunnel at the rear had caused the compaction of those already on the terraces, squeezing them up against the fencing. Though many managed to escape by climbing or being pulled onto the grass, that day ninety-four people died from asphyxia.
The photographs of those gasping for breath behind the bars of the fence along the perimeter of the pitch were disturbing. When I saw them next, Darryl and Philip were wretched with horror from their experience. We dedicated the record to the memory of those who died in the disaster.
*
My and Danielle’s wedding was set for the beginning of October. It was going to take place in the Cotswold village where the von Zernecks’ cottage nestled in a crook in the no through road. The village couldn’t have been more picturesque. It consisted of mostly Cotswold stone houses – with names like Tumbledown Cottage and Rose Cottage. A thirteenth-century church stood on a rise next to a manor-house-turned-hotel, the leaded windows of which gazed
across patterned lawns, beds of impatiens, tennis courts and, beyond the inky copper beech at the end of the drive, the Vale of Evesham. Only jackdaws and the chimes of the church clock broke the silence – or an occasional RAF Harrier from Brize Norton which would come tilting over the wolds and rend the hush.
Danielle’s dad was the paradigm of a Hollywood producer – tanned to the colour of a hazelnut, a coppery hue to his thinning hair, an Errol Flynn moustache and predisposed to navy-blue blazers. Her mum had small, blue, vivacious eyes, girlishly short hair, the cut and colour of which were tastefully expensive. Her infatuation with rural England was manifest in her predilection for tweed flat-caps and sleeveless quilted jackets.
We had a wedding planner. The wedding was going to be lavish, with a marquee erected in the rectory garden. A bus would be laid on for those living in London. Since it was going to take place in October, there would be quiverfuls of umbrellas. Against the threat of ruffling the slightest feather in the village at the prospect of a rock-and-roll wedding bringing along with it drunken hordes of Irish, an invitation would go out to the last inhabitant. More than a significant contribution would be made to the Church Roof Fund.
*
Shane in the meantime had discovered Thailand. My familiarity with Thailand was tethered to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I and the picture of Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr on the sleeve of the soundtrack album – he in a crimson gold-braided pantaloon suit, foot up on a footstool, finger pointing skyward, she in a gigantic lilac crinoline at his feet. Otherwise my understanding of Thailand was restricted to a series of stereotypical images: the stiff, hindered choreography of tiny women with faces immobilised by smiles balancing miniature golden temples on their heads; rotting shantytowns made of laths, built on stilts in fetid estuaries crowded with filthy boats; thousands of square miles of sweating jungle in which labyrinthine ruins were hidden; lurid arcades crammed with child-prostitutes whose self-esteem was never likely to rise above that of a blow-up doll.
He returned to us extolling the benefits of Pattaya Beach. I couldn’t imagine him ever leaving his hotel room. He was smug with beatitude and had a childlike belief in the chubby benevolence which radiated from the huge, golden and ubiquitous Buddhas. He wanted us to believe that Thailand was Shangri-La, Cockaigne, Tír na nÓg. A glaze of mysticism twinkled in his eyes for a week or two, to be clouded once more by sullenness and resentment. He became irascible, unpredictable, rudderless and unmanageable.
At the end of May, we travelled to Portugal. Between shows in Lisbon and Oporto we were taken down to the banks of the River Douro for a photo shoot. We stood around a skiff that was beached on the shingle downstream from the latticework of the Arrabida Bridge and the jumble of buildings on the opposite bank. Shane was in a dark and precarious state. There was a piratical dishevelment about him, reinforced by the eye-patch he had taken to wearing. When it came to taking the photographs, he was intractable. He clambered up on board the skiff and screamed at the photographer, and screamed at us. We waited, ransom to his dementia.
He failed to show up at a photo session for the cover of our album in London. The Scala at King’s Cross had been rented for the day. The stage had been dressed with scores of church candles. The photographer and his assistant had set up their gear. We had all put on our best suits. In the end, dispirited, we pointlessly shot a roll or two and then went home.
On a night off in Madrid, a couple of weeks after our visit to Portugal, some of us were having dinner in the centre of town when we had word that Shane was wandering around the Barrio Salamanca with a samurai sword. The image of him staggering through the crowded, crepuscular streets, having obviously lost his mind, was appalling. I was thankful to be out of the clamour. We had become so inured that none of us interrupted our dinner.
The following day we arrived at San Sebastián airport at the same time as UB40, both bands on our way to play at the Velódromo Antonio Elorza. Discovering that our buses were parked next to one another, we agreed that, in exchange for Spider going on UB40’s bus, we would invite their singer Ali Campbell onto ours.
Campbell climbed on the bus and went straight to the back lounge to sit with Shane. He had a pugnacious face with narrow eyes, a wide mouth and prominent canines.
By the time I took a seat in the next row forward from the lounge, Campbell had already started up a confrontation with Shane. He sat opposite, leaning forward, forearms on his knees, hands clasped. Shane was sitting in what passed for a comfy chair with his legs stretched out, his head back, sunglasses on, and a bottle of gin between his knees.
Campbell goaded him about whether or not Shane meant what he said in his lyrics, if he was being true to his upbringing, if his money was where his mouth was when it came to Ireland. Campbell started to go on about how much money he made, about his hometown of Birmingham, about how he helped the community he came from. I pretended to take in the lush landscape and red roofs of the Spanish Basque Country as the bus drove the fifteen miles to San Sebastián, wishing that we hadn’t traded Spider for this brute. I would sooner have listened to Spider’s wittering than to Campbell’s aggressive apologia for his career, demanding from Shane a mutual account. Now and again, I looked back at the two of them. Campbell flicked the backs of his fingers against Shane’s knee at every point he made, as if he thought Shane might fall asleep. Campbell’s Birmingham accent made his brutality even uglier.
To begin with, Shane treated Campbell with the indifference he deserved, replying with noncommittal grunts and the occasional nod, preferring no doubt to have sat by himself with his drink and dozed off. Campbell’s prodding continued. At one time, Shane could have run rings round such a thug as Campbell, but he was down and the resources he once had seemed to have left him. I willed Shane to come back at Campbell and shut him up with a definitive coup de grâce but, to my dismay, he had nothing.
‘Shut up,’ I heard Shane moan. It had no effect.
I continued to listen, becoming more and more resentful of Campbell’s presence on our bus, more and more disheartened by Shane’s defencelessness.
A guttural and anguished sound issued from Shane – part-scream, part-whimper. It had the effect of intensifying my battered but abiding loyalty to Shane to such a pitch that I got up, knelt on my seat and leant on the seatback.
‘Hey!’ I said to Campbell. ‘That’s enough. Please leave him alone.’
Campbell stiffened and turned his pugilist’s face to me.
‘Shut the fuck up and sit down, fuck-face! What do you know about anything?’ he shouted. Confronted by such immediate and intemperate antagonism and knowing that to pursue anything with him at all would be pointless and could possibly make things worse for Shane, I sat back down in my seat, my forearms and shins prickling from adrenalin.
*
The release party for Peace and Love took place at the Boston Arms in Tufnell Park, the venue of our first rehearsal with Terry Woods. Mystifyingly, though the relentlessness of our touring schedule ebbed, Peace and Love climbed to No. 5 in the charts anyway. Throughout the summer, for weeks at a time, I was able to join my fiancée in California.
Los Angeles was a constant source of amazement to me. It was no longer a malevolently twinkling grid guarded by a thirty-foot cut-out of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Much of it turned out to be a vast suburb of family apartments and houses: Spanish colonial, English country, bungalows, craftsman; painted white, blue, puce, lilac; with roofs of pantile, wood shingle, asphalt. The trees – ficus, fir, palm and oak – never shed their leaves. Day after day, the sun shone without abatement. It was as if time never passed.
During my absence, the band shot the video for ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah’. Charlie McLennan stood in on accordion. I had not been able to afford to return from Los Angeles for it. The cost of the flights was punishing. I had locked horns with Jem about the band contributing half of the cost. I hoped to clinch my argument with the fact that Danielle and I were engaged to be married and had rented an apartmen
t in Los Angeles. I implored him to acknowledge that Los Angeles was now my home, not London, though Danielle and I kept the flat on Great Ormond Street. In the end, it was Frank who ushered through the arrangement to split my airfares.
The Pogues had no money. Frank’s commission was still fifteen per cent of gross. At a meeting with Anthony Addis after one of our tours, Terry complained in a voice piping with emotion about how difficult it had become to make ends meet.
‘Terry,’ Addis said in his flat Manchester accent. ‘As much as I hate to say this, you have to live within your means.’
‘I don’t have any means to live within!’ Terry replied.
*
After a series of festivals in Europe, in July we travelled to the United States to co-headline what was called a ‘shed tour’ – a tour of small amphitheatres, half-covered by a cantilevered roof. Our co-headliners were a band called the Violent Femmes. They were darlings of college radio and deemed to be our counterparts in the United States. The tour went without incident with the exception of the first gig in Chicago, when the stage filled with acrid smoke from the transformer Terry needed to power his amplifier, and, at the last show in Fairfax, Virginia, Shane being assisted from the stage after managing to sing just three songs.
While we were in New York we shot the video for our next single: Shane’s song ‘White City’. Such inertia had started to encroach that there was no storyboard or artistic conceit. We allowed a film crew to point their cameras at us while we soundchecked before a gig at Pier 84 on the Hudson River. Since first playing the song, in the instrumental breaks, Shane had taken up a shuffling sort of caper, away from the microphone, across the stage, jerkily pointing his fingers skyward at each step. It was as sophisticated as the video shoot got.
Here Comes Everybody Page 31
