The rationale for recording at a residential studio in the Welsh countryside echoed the one behind a season at a sanatorium as a cure for tuberculosis. In order to reconstitute Shane as either a functioning artist or a human being or both, I wondered if it was Frank’s strategy to provide plentiful amounts of fresh air and good nutrition. On the other hand, Frank’s intention might well have been to imprison him out in the Welsh Marches in order to get a record out of him before it all went to shit.
As far as sanatoria went there was plenty of food. Every evening a covey of cooks clattered and clanged in the kitchen and served up roasts, mounds of stew and bologneses on a long wooden table, with vegetarian versions of each. As far as sanatoria went there was plenty of fresh air. On many an afternoon throughout June and July and into August we took ourselves on walks through the hayfields, along Offa’s Dyke, or along the river into Monmouth, to village fêtes and jumble sales, or on outings to Symonds Yat. The weather was unremittingly clement. What other similarities there were between Rockfield Studios and, say, the Berghof at Davos-Platz ended with the lack of altitude and, after the first couple of weeks, with the absence of the one person Frank might have thought would benefit the most from the seclusion or the incarceration.
There had been a problem about who was going to produce. The lacklustre success of Peace and Love had emptied our dance-card. Steve Lillywhite had declined. At the last minute Strummer stepped up. He skidded to a halt in the courtyard in his green Morris Minor.
I hadn’t seen him since our week at the Town and Country in March 1988. In the meantime, he had made a couple of records: a soundtrack for an independent film and his own album, Earthquake Weather. He had been on tour with his group The Latino Rockabilly War which featured guitarist Zander Schloss, who had played Karl in Straight to Hell. Strummer had had a small part in Jim Jarmusch’s film Mystery Train, and, in the last couple of months, an even smaller one in a film by Aki Kaurismäki called I Hired a Contract Killer. I had spoken to him once, in February 1989. I had answered the phone to him as he was clearing out of the studio on Sunset Boulevard after recording Earthquake Weather. He had wanted to talk to Danielle. He climbed out of his Morris Minor wearing a bent cowboy hat tilted back on his head. We greeted one another civilly.
As we recorded, Strummer made copious and minuscule notes in a hard-backed notebook, with drawings of the positions of the microphones and the angles of the wooden acoustic vanes in the drum room. A line from one of Shane’s songs, ‘Hell’s Ditch’, appealed to him so much that he scrawled it in huge letters on a banner and posted it on the beam over the veranda:
NAKED HOWLING FREEDOM!
Before showing up at Rockfield, Shane had been, as we expected, to Thailand. What guide vocals he managed to accomplish in the first couple of weeks were slurred and indistinct. We recorded as much as we could with him, before he slipped the snare and disappeared to London.
The songs he left behind dwelled on imprisonment. The song ‘Hell’s Ditch’ was set in a Spanish prison, with chains, bunks, buggery and execution. A version of Culture’s ‘I’m Alone in the Wilderness’, which featured Spider singing the chorus, was a rap by Shane about pindown, a method of punishment similar to lockdown in prisons but used on children. Its practice in a Staffordshire children’s home had recently been the subject of a public inquiry.
Unsurprisingly too, a lot of the songs he left behind no longer dealt with Shane’s idea of Shangri-La, Big Rock Candy Mountain or Tír na nÓg as a place to aspire to – as ‘Streams of Whiskey’ had. Now he seemed preoccupied with Paradises Lost and Gardens of Eden he had been cast out from. Shane’s fall, as a Catholic, echoed the original Fall. Now, though, more than ever, the lyrics he was writing were haunted by regret or yearning for abnegation. ‘Five Green Queens and Jean’ described a time when, to Shane, poker dice and a bin bag were all that mattered. A tender song, it reminded me of Eeyore’s happiness with the gifts of a popped green balloon and an empty honey jar which Pooh and Piglet brought to Eeyore’s Gloomy Place on his birthday.
‘Summer in Siam’ stood at the core of Shane’s desire to be done with everything. It was a meditation on the nullification of self. ‘House of the Gods’ – with an introduction ironically lifted straight from ‘You Still Believe in Me’ from the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds – contained lyrics which were unmistakably directed towards us: he had finally found a place we could never reach, a place where no mongrels preach.
‘Sunnyside of the Street’ seemed to explain that the drunkenness which prevented Shane from boarding the plane for San Francisco, for the West Coast leg of our tour opening for Bob Dylan, had in fact been sheer recalcitrance. He had wanted to stay right there, on the sunny side of the street. Later in the song, as I came to understand what it meant, a line gave me the chills. He sang that he would not be reconstructed. It was then that I knew we were going to lose him, if we hadn’t already.
Shane had also written a song called ‘Sayonara’. The message was obvious.
For the first couple of weeks I had been billeted with Darryl above the room with the television in it. It was noisy with the World Cup. It was apt that the BBC should have chosen the aria ‘Nessun Dorma’ for their coverage of the Italian World Cup. It meant ‘none shall sleep’. When Shane had gone back to London and it had become apparent that he had little interest in returning to Wales, I took the room Charlie had set aside for him – a quiet suite above a storage room. It had a south-facing window overlooking a hayfield. Each morning I watched a troop of foxes skulk between the hay bales.
The recording went on without Shane. Terry had a couple of songs and an instrumental. Jem’s song ‘The Wake of the Medusa’ took its inspiration from Géricault’s painting Le Radeau de la Méduse. The song seemed to illustrate the correlations between our predicament and that of the victims on the raft, substituting Frank for Viscount de Chaumereys, the captain of the Méduse, and ourselves for the hapless crew members cast adrift.
We carried on with the recording – Terry’s and Jem’s songs, a song Strummer had written for Kaurismäki’s film, overdubs and even a jam or two – as we waited for Shane to return. The World Cup ended. We travelled to Reggio Emilia in Italy to play a couple of communist festivals without Shane. When we got back Strummer and our engineer Paul Cobbold – a Hereford guy with vaguely seafaring features: a prominent nose and windswept blond hair – worked on our overdubs and repairs in turn. Jem went around the buildings with a DAT recorder, hitting old bits of farm machinery he came across. Spider fell in with a local band called the Monmouth Pumas. In the late afternoon a beaten-up old van would skid into the courtyard throwing up dust. Spider would fall out of it cackling with drink. Andrew seemed to spend his time off hiking. For the most part I lingered in the control room, listening and suggesting overdubs. I put myself forward to play a thumb piano on ‘Summer in Siam’, an electric sitar on ‘House of the Gods’, Spanish guitar on ‘Lorca’s Novena’, Stratocaster on ‘Rainbow Man’, handclaps on ‘The Wake of the Medusa’, piano wherever I could. I wished I’d come up with Andrew’s idea to mike up the engine of Strummer’s Morris Minor for the beginning of the instrumental section in ‘Rain Street’.
The day Shane was due to come back to record vocals there was a palpable air of expectancy around the studios. When Charlie McLennan’s car crunched across the gravel in the courtyard I was sitting on the sofa in the control room, listening back. I heard the sound of the car doors. If it had not been Shane, I would have gone out to greet them. I was scared of seeing him, weary of the complexity of what should have been ordinary social congress with him. I stayed put, my forearms on my knees, my head down.
I became aware of Shane’s latticed shoes in my field of vision. When I saw the bottom of a dove-grey pair of trousers with a more or less sharp crease in them I remembered the grey suit he had always worn when he meant business – during the rehearsals for ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’ and ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’ and for the video of ‘Dirty Old Town’. My he
art rose. I looked up at him standing next to me in the control room. I took in the suit, the rings on his brown fingers, his black shirt – until I got to his head.
It dithered senescently on his neck in an attitude that was simultaneously sheepish and judgemental, nominally guilty about his absence but demanding to know what we had been doing while he had been away. He was smoking a cigarette. Through the wreaths of smoke which escaped through his nostrils, his eyes were incapable of focusing and his lids were heavy. Strummer swivelled in his producer’s chair and greeted him robustly. Shane let out a cackle that was supposed to have been ironic. I wanted to leave the control room but didn’t want my departure to come across as too much of a gesture of disappointment, anger or of my feeling of doom.
Strummer and Paul Cobbold set about painstakingly recording Shane’s vocals. I relieved myself of the compulsion always to be down in the studio and spent the afternoons up in my room, playing my guitar or writing, and then taking a walk along the river.
Cobbold and Strummer’s job wasn’t easy. It was standard practice to compile multiple vocal tracks. Once they had got a handful of takes they let Shane go in order to piece together a master track of such bits as they could use. Charlie whisked Shane away to London. I happened to go down to the control room one afternoon to find Cobbold in the process of copying a t consonant from elsewhere on the vocal track, to insert it where it was needed. He did it over and over again, until it sounded as natural as he could make it. Once he’d finished, he moved on to another one.
At the end of August, we finished the record and went our separate ways for the rest of the summer. I packed my things into a hired car and drove back to London. A couple of days later I was back in Los Angeles. Soon after, I was horrified to hear that on a seaside holiday with her family, Frank’s fourteen-year-old daughter Shannon had dived into shallow water and broken her neck.
We released two singles from Hell’s Ditch – ‘Summer in Siam’ and ‘Sunnyside of the Street’. The former gave rise to a regrettable video, which was cluttered with as many stereotypical images of Thailand as my prejudices were. Along with the dancers with small temples on their heads, an enormous Buddha and vaguely underage girls in hot pants, was the addition of kick-boxing. Shane, wearing a beard reminiscent of Rolf Harris, made a hackneyed attempt at bringing his recorded vocal performance to life. The rest of us looked miserable. ‘Summer in Siam’ reached the upper sixties in the charts. ‘Sunnyside of the Street’ made no showing at all.
At the end of September we started a five-week tour of England – playing many of the same halls we had when we had opened for Elvis Costello in 1984. Although P.V. had resumed working for us and was to be seen regularly at Rockfield, his condition was precarious. When we came off the stage at Glasgow Barrowland, before the customary encores, he had already left his lighting desk and had come to the dressing room. His face was leeched of colour and his mouth fixed into a senile smile. By the time we had to go back on stage, he had collapsed in the dressing-room doorway. We were forced to step over him on our way to the stairs. As we did, he looked up at us, seeming both to recognise us and not to know who we were at all. It was the last time I saw him alive.
In November and December, with Kirsty MacColl, we toured a succession of ice-stadiums and civic centres, and otherwise suffered a sleet-lashed and freezing Germany.
Andrew let us know that Deborah, his childhood sweetheart and lifetime companion, was four months pregnant. Bearing in mind Deborah’s ectopic pregnancy two years before, it hadn’t been a particularly calm passage to parenthood. Andrew’s pride and abashment when he made his announcement made me adore him, though I feared for him and Deborah – as I had for Jem and Marcia when they were expecting a baby in 1982 – embarking on parenthood in circumstances that were more or less hostile.
*
On an unseasonably sunny afternoon between Hanover and Offenbach, Jem and I were sitting by ourselves in the back of the bus, on either side of the lounge, each at our own table, when Jem leant across the aisle towards me, holding what turned out to be the management contract, with his thumb on a particular clause.
‘Read that,’ he said. ‘Does it mean what I think it means?’
The clause seemed to indicate that we would be entitled to terminate our contract with Frank, if, after six months of the expiry of our recording agreement, we had not signed a new one. On the delivery of Hell’s Ditch in September, we had fulfilled our contract with Warner’s. Jem reckoned that, if Frank had not come up with another record deal, we could let him go by the end of March. We swore each other to secrecy and strove to see out the remainder of the six months.
The bitterness of our decision to let Frank go turned all our stomachs when, in the second week of December, after our tour of Germany, we performed a benefit show for Frank’s daughter at the Electric Ballroom in Camden with Kirsty MacColl and Joe Strummer. After spending several months at Stoke Mandeville Hospital Spinal Injuries Unit, Shannon had come home, with the prognosis that she would never walk again.
The year turned. Duly, in March, at a meeting at Frank’s office on Kentish Town Road, we let Frank go. Hill 16 Ltd’s office had always been cluttered. Frank and Joey’s desks were strewn with papers. Our silver records leant against the wall. The windows were filthy. A plastic extractor propeller set into one of them whizzed whenever the door opened. Plastic pots of noodles stood on the ledges. Down the corridor was a filthy bathroom where they used the hot-water geyser to make tea. The meeting was excruciating. Frank’s usually swift and steely blue eyes suddenly turned inward. I was relieved to part company with him, and relieved that Jem had volunteered to give Frank the bad news.
After that, but for a couple of shows in France which Frank had set up for the second week in March, we had nothing to do – for months. We had asked Joey Cashman to take over from Frank, as caretaker-manager, to be paid a share of the tour profits rather than the percentage of gross, the means by which Frank had steadily let erode whatever good feeling we had had towards him.
The only work we had coming up was a handful of festivals, spread haphazardly throughout the summer, starting off at the Fleadh in Finsbury Park in June and culminating at the end of August in the WOMAD festival in Yokohama. Despite Shane’s condition, we looked forward to the weekend jaunts in Europe, out in the open air, among our peers. We were excited, too, to return to Japan.
Up until then, I had the entire months of April and May with which to do what I wanted. With Danielle away on location, I packed a couple of changes of clothes and my typewriter in a holdall and took the train up to the Yorkshire Dales to write for a week, before taking the train again, down to a writers’ retreat in Devon. As Debsey and I had, when we had spent time up at my parents’ cottage, I checked in to see what developments there might be with the Pogues at the public telephone box up the road. I didn’t expect any. The summer in the Yorkshire Dales was beautiful. The fields were layered in luscious sheets of sedge, cranesbill and buttercups. Meadowsweet crowded the dry-stone walls. Greenfinches danced over the hedges.
On a trip up to the phone box, Jem answered the phone and told me the news that Deborah Korner was dead. She had given birth to a son, Daniel, and five days later, at home, while taking a shower, had suffered an aortic aneurysm.
The funeral took place at Golders Green Crematorium. I took the train to London, changed into the one suit I kept at the flat and went up to the crematorium. All of us had made the trip to the memorial service, but Shane.
Predictably, halfway through, a heavy door on the far side of the chapel grated open and Shane came in assisted by Charlie McLennan. Shane was wearing a pinstripe suit, dark glasses and had slicked his hair back. He let Charlie guide him to an empty pew.
A wake took place at the house of a friend of Deborah and Andrew’s in Hackney. At the end of the night I held their barely two-week-old son in my arms, asleep, his head in my cupped hand. I walked with the little thing around their living room, wondering how Andrew was
going to be able to cope.
Back in Los Angeles, not two weeks later, the phone rang.
‘You need to come home,’ my sister-in-law said. My mother had suffered a subarachnoid haemorrhage and had descended into a coma. That night, with Danielle, I flew back to England. The following morning, my two brothers and my father, grim in a car coat, greeted us at the foot of the escalator at Manchester airport. My mum had died during my flight over. They took me to the funeral home where, at the sight of my mum in the coffin, her mouth slightly open, her teeth biting her bottom lip, it was as if my legs had been cut from under me.
*
At the end of the month, that the first gig of our career with Joey Cashman should have been Leeds University seemed a bitter joke. For time immemorial now, it seemed to have been the first gig of every damn tour of the United Kingdom we had ever done. We had grown to hate the place: the cramped and dingy corridors, the crashing acoustics and the stage built of scaffolding. After the sound check, Terry lost his footing at the top of the aluminium steps from the stage and, cradling his mandolin, rataplanned down to the bottom, causing him to limp through the next couple of gigs. It was not a good start.
Every alternate weekend for the rest of the summer we travelled out to play a festival – in Switzerland, Spain, Denmark, Italy. There were welcome distractions from the darkening abyss into which Shane was inexorably being sucked – alpine tarns and the low-eaved farmhouses above Lake Konstanz, the shaded arcades in Turin, a gleaming slice of Lake Geneva between the mountains, the medieval brickwork of Pamplona – but each of the festivals seemed a reiteration of Le Radeau de la Méduse, with the stage as the raft. Echoing the canvas, a couple of us continued to wave. I continued to show off – hoisting the accordion into the air, bending, hunching, stamping – in a wanton effort to distract the audience and myself from Shane’s perdition.
Here Comes Everybody Page 34
