When the tour was finished I flew back to Los Angeles with Danielle who had accompanied us. The rest of the band went home.
Word had come during the recording of Peace and Love that Bob Dylan wanted us to open for him for six shows at the beginning of September on the Californian leg of his so-called Never Ending Tour – starting at the Greek Theater in Berkeley and ending at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. The recognition by such a laureate was thrilling, but the pairing seemed late in coming. Frank saw it as a vindication of Shane’s stature as a songwriter. If Shane did, none of us were aware.
In the third week of August, we reconvened for a handful of shows in Ireland. Shane had just returned from Thailand. At Leisureland in Galway, in a flocculent white flat-cap, he stared blindly and for long periods out at the audience, not knowing what to do. He became lost in the middle of songs.
We had become adept at responding quickly if he should augment a verse or simply excise a peculiarity of the arrangement. When we heard him start singing the words to a chorus over what should have been an instrumental section, or sometimes the words of another song altogether, a tremor radiated out from the centre mike through all of us. Terry stepped forward into what he hoped was Shane’s peripheral vision. He exaggerated his height in an attempt to bring to Shane’s attention that he was singing the wrong song. Darryl pulled his face into an angry grimace. His instinct was to step forward too, but standing right behind Shane, he knew it was futile. Instead he swung his bass from side to side as if to sweep away all the wrong words Shane was singing. Beyond Darryl, Jem’s mouth would adopt a resolute pucker, accompanied by raised eyebrows and eyes full of misery. Spider quivered, ramrod straight, his whistle clenched in his fist, looking at Shane in disbelief. Philip would look from Terry to me and back to Terry to try to get a fix on where we were supposed to be in the song. On his drum riser, Shane’s fuck-ups darkened Andrew’s eyes with fury. His arms seemed to hurl the sticks against the drum skins and the cymbals. He stared balefully at the back of Shane’s head, beyond which, on the Saturday night at Reading Festival in August – a week before flying over to San Francisco for the first date of our tour opening for Dylan – fifteen thousand people receded into the twilight past the scaffolding above the mixing desk, towards a dim horizon of tents and the line of trees.
*
I flew to Los Angeles ahead of the beginning of our tour. Danielle and I made our way to Berkeley. On the day of the first show we drove up through lawns lush with grass and dense with trees to the amphitheatre, the concrete stage dwarfed by three walls of half-columns.
When the rest of the band arrived from the hotel, Shane was not among them. He had been too drunk, I was told, to be allowed on the plane. Not only that, but Charlie McLennan had also been debarred from getting on the plane at Heathrow. Charlie’s signature was required to release our equipment from customs. As a consequence, we had neither singer nor gear.
We set about distributing the three-quarter-hour set between those who could sing, as we had done in Malmö nearly four years before. Again, Spider volunteered to sing most of the songs. Andrew would take ‘Cotton Fields’ and ‘Star of the County Down’, which we had recorded during the making of Peace and Love. Terry sang the couple of songs he’d written, ‘The Gartloney Rats’ and ‘Young Ned of the Hill’, and Philip, ‘If I Should Fall from Grace with God’ and ‘Lorelei’. We borrowed a couple of guitars from somewhere. Dylan’s backing band lent us their drum kit. A friend of Terry’s was sent to scour Marin County for instruments.
I played a guitar belonging to Dylan’s crew for three songs until Terry’s friend appeared in one of the doorways at the side of the stage with an accordion.
It wasn’t until after Labor Day that Charlie showed up with our equipment. Shane, it seemed, could not be persuaded to travel out with him and had stayed at home.
Backstage at the next gig opening for Dylan, at the Starlight Bowl in San Diego, Frank teased Dylan’s crew about the charm stones each of them wore hanging on thongs round their necks.
‘Yeah,’ one of them said. ‘We got charm stones. We’ve also got a singer. You got a singer? I don’t see you wearing any charm stones.’
As we left our dressing room to go on stage, their singer was leaning against the wall outside his dressing room with a foot tucked behind him. His hands were in the pockets of a grey hoodie, the hood pulled up over his head. As I passed him on my way up the stairs to the stage, I took in his aquiline profile, papery face and wiry stubble. He met no one’s eyes as we filed past.
Most nights after our set, I went into the audience to watch Dylan play. I struggled to recognise the songs. It was only when the unmistakable choruses of such songs as ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ or ‘Positively 4th Street’ managed to break free from the otherwise arcane arrangements that I knew what I was listening to.
At the Pacific Amphitheater in Costa Mesa, he sang a Van Morrison song, ‘One Irish Rover’. The lyrics were addressed to someone far away, lost at sea. I couldn’t help but think he’d chosen it for Shane, who remained resolutely in London.
Again, the heat of an American summer was intolerable – daylong and without relief. Day after day the sun beat down.
P.V. suffered worst. He complained all the time, not just about the heat but about the Puccini arias we had taken to listening to in the Econoline. He grumbled about the ‘screeching’, sank down into his seat at the back of the van and covered his head with his unseasonable leather jacket.
There had always been an air of the indoors about P.V. He had never been a person who cleaned up nicely, but we had noticed how much worse he was starting to look. Gradually, over the course of the tour, a jaundiced pallor had replaced his mottled and usually stubbly complexion. I would come across him backstage with his face in his hands or sitting with his back up against the wall cradling his head in his arms. I put his malaise down to the heat and road-fatigue. The crew’s schedule was more punishing than ours, with early mornings and long days. That he drank a lot was common knowledge, though I hadn’t seen much evidence in all the months I had shared a room with him.
By the time we arrived in Costa Mesa for the penultimate show on the Dylan tour, the yellowness of P.V.’s face had spread into the whites of his eyes and he was immobile from lethargy.
The weekend of the last date at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, P.V. suffered a gastric attack of such violence that it dashed the walls of the bathroom in the hotel with blood and excrement. He was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
Now I realised what the source was of the vapour which had filled the rooms I had shared with him on the road. It wasn’t so much the drink on his breath, nor a leaky bottle in his luggage. It was the smell of acetone coming from him. I was embarrassed at my naïvety.
When the tour supporting Dylan was finished, we had no other option but to leave him behind and go on to Phoenix where our own tour was going to continue and where we grimly expected to be reunited with Shane.
Shane turned up in Dallas. When he showed up backstage before the gig, there was no confrontation, no demand that he explain his absence. We welcomed him back in the dressing room as if he had returned from a day out. We went about the business of our sound check with an enclosed, self-preserving earnestness. It was hardly intended to punish him, merely to show him how little his absence had affected us.
That night we found ourselves standing out in the car park of the hotel in our nightwear. A burning cigarette in Shane’s room had set off the fire alarm.
Our tour took us through the South and up into the Midwest. We were on our way to a gig at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor when Shane insisted we stop at a bar. We indulged him as we always had. Since turning up from England there was a mardiness about him which brooked no contradiction. The bar was a small lilac-coloured room with louvred shades. It was the middle of the afternoon and we were the only people in there. Shane made a great clatter with the stool which had been set against the bar with its legs on the
other side of the foot rail. When Shane was eventually settled, the Hispanic barman came across.
‘What’ll it be, sir?’ he said.
‘Lo’i’lan’icetea,’ Shane said. The barman set a paper napkin in front of his customer.
‘Sorry, sir?’
‘Lo’i’lan’icetea!’ Shane shouted. ‘Lo’i’lan’icetea! Lo’i’lan’-ICED-TEA!’ We helped the hapless barman to understand he wanted a Long Island Iced Tea.
‘Dago cunt!’ Shane said, as the guy went down the bar. Either he didn’t understand or chose not to.
‘Shut it!’ Spider beseeched.
‘Dago cunt,’ Shane said. ‘He’s a fucking dago cunt.’
I watched the barman make the Long Island Iced Tea. It was basically the same as a Black Zombie but with the substitution of triple sec for pastis. After the third or fourth, we managed to prise him out of the bar and get him back onto the bus. After the gig, he was so drunk that four of us had to carry him from the dressing room. We grunted with his dead weight across a car park. As we heaved him up the steps and onto the bus, he looked up at us and cackled as if the whole thing was a joke. We threw him onto the plastic leather sofa in the back lounge.
*
A week after the end of the tour, on the presentation of Danielle’s Certificate of Approval to Marry, I picked up my and Danielle’s marriage licence from the Faculty Office at Westminster Abbey.
For the weekend of our wedding, a striped tangerine-coloured marquee had been erected in the gardens of the rectory. All bed-and-breakfast accommodation in the locality had been taken up by Americans, the Pogues’ entourage from London and my family from the north of England – and Twiggy, whom the von Zernecks knew. Jem was my best man. He took me, hung over from the rehearsal dinner the night before, to a café in Evesham for breakfast. I loved Jem and was grateful for his solicitude, and for a glass of champagne along with the bacon, eggs and black pudding in the Crown Tea Rooms on Bridge Street.
As I stood with Jem at the chancel-rail, Julie my soon-to-be mother-in-law came down the aisle to touch my arm with unsuppressed excitement. She was wearing an elaborately embroidered dress in creamy white and a cartwheel hat. When she’d gone to her pew, my uncle John came up.
‘Tha’ll not be living in a shoebox in t’middle of t’road then,’ he said and went away.
At the exchange of vows, Danielle fought briefly with the vicar in order to say her vows without the impediment of her veil. At the reception, children tugged at the tails of my morning suit as Danielle and I cut the cake. Among them were Jem and Marcia’s daughters, Kitty, now four, and Ella, two days away from turning six, along with Strummer’s two daughters, Jazz and Lola. They had come with their mum, Gaby. Strummer himself was on tour with The Latino Rockabilly War, an hour down the M5 in Bristol. When Danielle and I had fed each other cake, Philip took his place on the stage with the swing band to sing ‘Summer Wind’, which since our ten days on St Martin had become our song.
The speeches had been made. Darryl had won £42 in the sweep as to how long the groom’s speech would be. My aunt had threaded her way through the tables and chairs to sit and give me the one piece of advice which had sustained her in her thirty-year marriage to my uncle. My dad had finally had a dance with Twiggy. I had persuaded Rick Trevan to get out of the Bentley parked outside the rectory which he was convulsing with prolonged pressure on the accelerator pedal.
A watchful hush followed the procession of Shane and Victoria as they made their way between the backs of the rented chairs, towards where the rest of the Pogues were sitting. Shane was oblivious to the stir he caused. Victoria seemed at pains to deny it. I was annoyed at the shift in the centre of gravity. I was chuffed, though, that he had shown up at all.
He came over to my table with a gift for Danielle and me.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. He and Victoria had been to a few villages of the same name. There were four others – in Surrey, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire and Kent. ‘I didn’t go to the one in Kent,’ he said.
He dropped his wedding present on the table. It was wrapped in maroon tissue paper. It obviously contained a record.
‘Open it now if you like,’ he said.
It was a bootleg of the Buzzcocks. With it was a stack of stills from the video of ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah’ which had been laminated into place mats. For the most part they were pictures of himself in demented attitudes of imperiousness wearing a coolie hat.
I tried, but couldn’t persuade myself that there was no significance in his choosing stills from a video shoot I had not taken part in. Everything Shane did was imbued with significance. I was glum at the prospect that someone was eventually going to have to figure out what he was trying to tell all of us, as he continued to lurch into decline.
Twenty-Nine
When I got back from honeymoon, in November 1989, we managed to get through a two-and-a-half-week tour of sports halls and ice-hockey stadiums in Germany. Most nights Shane delayed our going on stage. He sat morose and intractable on a bench in the echoing locker room backstage, or gave himself to apoplexy over some petty concern, often enough the position of a particular song in the set list. His obduracy exhausted our supply of tactics. By the end of the tour we had beseeched, bartered and bellowed. In a couple of cases we had left him staring at the rubberised floor of the changing room and gone on stage without him. Spider took hold of the centre microphone with such a fever that it could have been Shane’s neck. He spat out the lyrics into it with such violence that it could have been Shane’s face.
In December, the now obligatory Christmas tour was cancelled in favour of what we hoped would be the restorative project of recording demos for a further record. We met at a studio off Highgate Road.
Jem brought in a couple of songs, both of them spleenful. One was called ‘Bastard Landlord’ and was about Marcia’s mum’s situation in rented accommodation and the hiking up of her rent. The other one was called ‘The Wake of the Medusa’ – a haggardly lit cautionary tale on the theme of theft, full of howling wind, lightning and empty caskets. I wondered if it was about Frank.
The material of Shane’s we worked on included an instrumental called ‘Lust for Vomit’ and a song tentatively entitled ‘Mexican Funeral in Paris’. They were nothing more than sketches. There was a pastiche of Van Morrison, which Shane had dedicated to Victoria.
Three songs stuck out: a heroin-inspired meditation on Thailand called ‘Summer in Siam’ and a couple of tenderly elegiac songs, both harking back to Shane’s youth in London. One of them was called ‘Five Green Queens and Jean’. The other was called ‘NW3’, the melody of which was beautiful and made us nostalgic for the days when everything was in front of us.
We took Christmas off before our second tour of Australia. The holiday only deepened Shane’s detachment, which, by the time we met again in Perth, had turned into isolation.
In Perth, Shane performed for only a fraction of the show. We were lucky if he managed to get all the way through any of the songs. I saw Spider turning at his microphone, sneering with loathing as Shane lurched, confused, through the songs. Shane staggered away from the microphone and towards the side of the stage where he slumped onto a chair next to Charlie McLennan’s chest of drawers. Without missing a beat Spider stepped across to the centre microphone to take up the singing. Playing suddenly became untrammelled. Spider’s voice might have lacked the sonority of Shane’s but at least he knew all the words. In spite of that, once Shane had gone, our performance felt empty, lightweight, lacking in substance.
As with our last tour of Australia, Vivian Lees was the promoter. We all liked him and regretted the condition in which we had brought Shane back to the Antipodes. When we came off stage, Lees’s face was glazed over.
Frank strode into the dressing room. He pushed Shane away from where he was bungling the opening of a bottle of wine. Frank stood inches away from his face.
‘You think you can do what you fucking want and fuck everyone else?’
Frank shouted. ‘You want to go to fucking Thailand? Go to fucking Thailand! Well, I’ve got one last card, right? I can make fucking sure you never get in that fucking country. I know two princes, right, associated with the fucking Thai royal fucking family, right, and I can make fucking sure you never get into fucking Thailand. All it takes is one phone call and you’re fucked as far as going to Thailand. You and Thailand? That’s fucking history, right? You’re fucking history, man.’
‘History Man?’ Spider said. ‘Didn’t Malcolm Bradbury write that?’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Frank said. ‘Not helpful.’
By the time we had done the first couple of gigs, Lees had started to clap pointedly as we filed off stage. Backstage we sat in various attitudes of glumness, our forearms on our knees, staring at the floor. Spider strutted up and down the dressing room repeating the word ‘fuck’ to himself.
In Canberra it was raining. Frank was eager to let us know that the Irish Ambassador to Australia would be coming to the gig.
‘Would he be after bringing a couple o’ sticks o’ gelignite and an owld alarum clock?’ Spider said.
‘When are you going to fucking grow up?’ Frank said.
Again, Shane only managed to get through a part of the set. Spider took over his microphone, cutting short Shane’s increasingly wrathful helplessness. When we came off stage, to our relief, Shane was gone.
The dressing room was a corner of the auditorium-bar screened off by black felt curtains. Exhausted, Spider sat hunched with his elbows on his knees, pressing his face into a towel. The heads of a couple of lads appeared above the curtain rail. They waved a slopping brown flagon around. They had crew cuts, slimy with sweat. A camera flashed.
‘’ERE WE GO! ’ERE WE GO! ’ERE WE GO!’ one of them sang to the now chronically iterated tune of ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’. More and more heads appeared above the rail. We all sat staring at the concrete floor.
Here Comes Everybody Page 32
