Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?

by Tim Bradford

  11.30 am

  The Dublin Viking Experience and Feast. Ah, well, I just couldn’t resist. Plus I was curious to see what the Flying-Jacketed Soothsayer thought of it – alas, he is nowhere to be seen. The entrance is via a gift shop. I go into a very dark lecture theatre. A film is showing about the Vikings, narrated by that deep-voiced bloke who did the public information films in the seventies. There are only two others there. Then a real-life Viking appears on the bow of a ship, and starts shouting at us, telling us to row. It starts to get windy and spray is flying about. Someone offstage has just thrown a bucket of water over me. The little Viking (because he is very little – looks like a schoolboy bass player from a Deep Purple tribute band) carries on ranting as the ‘ship’ begins to move up and down. Then we dock at Dublin harbour and get out. The ferocious Viking is even smaller up close. He also seems quite shy. Maybe it is his first time. Or perhaps he is just disconcerted to only have three people on the tour. His speech is tailored for children and he doesn’t seem to be able to ad lib. Yeeeesssssss. Eeerrrrrrrm. Weeelllllllll. Errrrrrm. Yeeeeeeees. I can’t imagine that the Vikings would have been very successful with this line of unassertive communication.

  Celtic chieftain: What do you want from us, oh fearless Viking?

  Viking: Yeeeees. Errrrrrm. Weeellllll. Yeessssss.

  Celtic chieftain: Bloody wimp. Let’s kill the bastards lads!

  He asks where we are from. The couple say that they are from Lincoln.

  ‘Yeeeees. Errrrm. And where is that?’

  ‘In Lincolnshire. England.’

  ‘What about you?’ the Viking says to me.

  ‘I’m from Market Rasen.’

  ‘And where is that?’

  ‘In Lincolnshire as well.’

  We are an advance force from another Viking area, the Kingdom of Mercia.

  ‘Do you know Peter Rhodes?’ the bloke asks me.

  ‘Yeah – I got my hi-fi system off him back in the early eighties.’ (The one that should have been my driving lessons.)

  ‘He’s a bit of a character, isn’t he? Is he related to the bloke who used to have the leather shop there?’

  The all-powerful Viking warrior is feeling a bit left out at this point and tries to win us back into his make-believe Norse world by being more Vikingy,5 but he’s already lost us. He points out this and that in the facsimile Viking town of Dublin in which we are standing – like how they made houses or ground corn – and meanwhile our conversation is all, ‘Do you know that pub on the hill in Lincoln?’, ‘Have you ever played that old Lincolnshire game Spin the Weasel?’ and, ‘Have you been to …’ etc. We are introduced to some miserable Celtic bird called Maeve who shows us round her house. You can tell by the look in her eye that she thinks this job is demeaning and that she’s a proper actress and should be working with Liam Neeson or Gabriel Byrne rather than trying to impress three poxy tourists from the East Midlands of England. Then a camp skinhead Celtic priest appears and starts shouting at us.

  12.30 pm

  I stand on the Ha’penny Bridge overlooking the Liffey. On the Irish Times website you can look at one of the Dublin bridges every two minutes. Ineffably sad, just pedestrians and cars. The river is gentle and more like a canal when compared to something like the Thames in the centre of London. The sounds all around are of drills and sanders, of never-ending building and reconstruction work. I decide to head back again through Temple Bar. In the little alleyway a septuagenarian harmonica player does ‘Danny Boy’ amidst the hubbub of voices. He’s way off the tune, but I throw some pennies into his scruffy hat. I just stroll – past the Tailor of Taste, Dunstan’s carpet shop, Eddie Rocket’s. Two Aussie girls with pierced everything stop me and ask if I’d like to buy their environmental magazine. I chat for a while then they ask whereabouts in their own country I am from. Miraculously, they make the sale.

  I go into a pub full of skinheads with a big picture window and, while slowly sipping a Guinness, watch people walking about outside (it’s a similar feeling to sitting and staring at a slow-moving river). A man with a large bunch of sunflowers stops and stares back at me. A dispatch rider waits at the traffic lights and whistles happily. An old man in a silver puffa jacket staggers slowly past, talking to himself. Then a hand touches my shoulder as a woman’s voice says, ‘Are you Mary O’Mannion?’ I turn around slightly, to give her a quick flash of oversized chin and five days’ growth and she stands rooted to the spot. ‘Oh … sorry.’ A group of lads nearby laughs then put their faces back down to their pints with serious expressions when I look at them. Hmm. It dawns on me that not having had your hair cut for a year can cause problems. There’s me thinking I now look like a Viking warrior and someone thinks I’m a blonde Irishwoman.

  I wonder, though, if Mary O’Mannion is a celebrity of some kind. Although Ireland is roughly the same size as England, it has only about a tenth of the population. So those who do become famous are quickly household names. There are two different categories of celebrity Irish person – Past-it Musicians and Populist Politicians.

  Past-it Musicians

  The most famous past-it musicians are Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and that other one, the drummer, whose name I can never remember but who looks normal – like the sort of bloke you’d meet down the pub. Back in 1980 when U2’s first album, Boy, first came out, loads of my friends were into U2 and played them incessantly round at their houses. That’s what we’d do for entertainment. We’d invite mates round, make them instant coffee and play them our latest records in the hope of increasing our social standing (or something) and to get feedback on the chick-seducing qualities of various albums (‘Tim, I feel that Ornette Coleman is not going to get you anywhere with Helen Butterworth’).

  U2 sounded a bit overeager and pompous – I didn’t like Bono’s faux-operatic vocal style nor the Edge’s histrionic guitar sound. The rhythm section was good, though. Their songs seemed to really pump and chug along. Bono and The Edge have become part of the Irish Celtocracy, mercurial wizards with idiosyncratic glasses, street hairstyles and amusing clothes. Adam Clayton, as an Englishman, is a kind of Lord of the Blow-ins. Which leaves the drummer whose name I can’t remember. He doesn’t seem to have changed much. My favourite Past-it Musician.

  Populist Politician

  One of Ireland’s most successful cash crops of recent years has been the Populist Politician. Charles Haughey. He’s an interesting fellow. Everyone seems to know he’s a chancer, yet it goes with the territory. A modern version of some mythical wily old Celtic chieftain. Even though old strains die out, new ones appear to take their place – Dessie O’Malley, Bertie Ahern. However, my favourite is Proinsias De Rossa, simply because of his name.

  1 pm

  I go to a Chinese restaurant, where there is a buffet – all you can eat for £9.99. The dining room is decorated in pink-flocked wallpaper with pictures of lions, and is empty except for two blokes discussing house prices over a pot of Chinese tea. I have a bowl of soup then pile my plate high. The thing is, you never really want to have a second helping. I’m staring at the over-cooked noodles, trying to force myself to slurp them into my mouth, as the two blokes chatter on about mortgages and interest rates. Going back down the pink staircase, I feel like I’m coming out of an MSG-flavoured womb, being reborn, and there are lots of black and white pictures of famous Irish people who have eaten in the restaurant, none of whom I recognise, except for Eamonn Andrews. Eamonn smiles down in his big-chinned way and says, ‘Good luck!’

  2.10 pm

  An old man stares at the near-naked mannequins in a clothes shop window. He smells like he’s just pissed himself.

  2.20 pm

  I wander into a little history bookshop crammed with goodies about the Civil War, Independence, Irish factionalism, local Dublin history, some antique books, run by a very dapper middle-aged gent in a dark suit, whose eyes follow me around the shop in the way Hawkeye Marwood used to do when we’d muck about in his sweetshop aged seven or eight holding 2p
and trying to decide what to have. ‘Get yer hands off them midget gems,’ he’d snarl. And that was him on a good day. ‘Passing trade’ – that was his motto.

  I sniff around for a while looking eggheadish. Another customer enters – high excitement – in the brown cords, rumpled jacket and straggly haired uniform of a university lecturer. He wants some obscure textbook about Wolfe Tone – the early years, and Darksuit seems to think he is a better catch than me, hovering around him like a shy debutante with his hands held together. They get into a discussion of contemporary accounts of the ‘Rising’ of 1798 and Darksuit nearly manages to tempt the customer with the juicy morsel of a pamphlet of Fenian poetry. But then Lecturer says he’ll take the phone number down and ring again in a few weeks, to see if anything has turned up. The cad! That’s the sort of behaviour fourteen-year-old boys display at discos – Oh yerr, give us yer number love, I’ll phone yer, honest.

  I eventually buy a reference book entitled Jack B. Yeats – His Watercolours, Drawings and Pastels. Jack B. is my favourite Yeats of the Yeats brothers (sounds like a late-seventies country combo). Former Liverpool defender Ron Yeats is my favourite Yeats of all time. The atmosphere of learning and dry-as-dust academia is slightly suffocating and it’s nice to get outside again. I wander around in the fresh air for a while flicking through my new book and looking at the pictures.

  3 pm

  For a minute or so I follow the greeny-brown and excited chatter of two Spanish girls, elegant and birdlike (them not me), walking up O’Connell Street in long black coats, nice hair clips, shiny shoes. I press the button at the pedestrian crossing – the device makes a beep-beep-beep sound like a hospital life-support machine (well, the ones on the telly, at any rate) or something from Star Trek. The drizzle comes down again and mixes with the sweet smell of car fumes. A group of old men watch transfixed as a Kit-Kat lorry is unloaded. Two newspaper sellers, like something from a Hulton Picture Library shot from the twenties – a bloke with a big beard and a skinny bloke, both in flat caps – sit in a doorway with a pile of Evening Heralds in front of them, shouting ‘Eeeerenaarrrrugh’. A traffic warden with a big nose and a moustache sniffs the air, in the way of a hungry ferret, for illegally parked vehicles. Why is it that people in uniform in Ireland always look as though they’ve stepped straight out of another, much older, era?

  3.30 pm

  Ah, I’m such a tourist. Down on the river again it feels like Paris – a babble of different accents, German, Italian, Japanese, American, Scandinavian. Many – the Scandinavian and German ones especially – are skinny blonde girls in jeans staggering under huge backpacks, like brightly covered snails in the afternoon rain. But there are also lots of gaunt, pinched, knackered looking folk chainsmoking away, for whom life looks to be a struggle rather than a pleasant Eurotourist excursion – locals still hoping for the Dublin economic juggernaut to pick them up. Fat lads with ’taches and baseball caps on back to front stand in doorways waiting for their evening bus. A group of Dutch or Belgian tourists waddle down the pavement in tracksuits and cameras, the men with beards, the women all sporting northern-European-style Attack Breasts.

  4 pm

  I go to another bookshop, the Flying Pig. Lots and lots of great second-hand books there and cartoons on the wall, a couple by Tom Matthews the Irish Times cartoonist. I pick a few old books, including a first edition copy of The King of the Tinkers by Patricia Lynch, then go up to the counter where two burly, sort of hard-looking lads with fuzzy goatee beards – slightly overweight old punks at a guess – are filling up space.

  Me: Hi. I was wondering, have you got a book called The Last Mandrax Butterfly?

  Burlyboy 1: The Last Mandrax Butterfly? Have we got that?

  Burlyboy 2: Have we? I don’t know. What’s it about?

  Me: It’s about blow-ins in West Cork.

  Burlyboy 1: Blow-ins? What are they now?

  Me: (earnest expression) Well, Some villages in the west Cork area are completely inhabited by English and German hippies who run art galleries and have alternative lifestyles and stuff like that.

  Burlyboy 2: English!?… and Germans!? Living in West Cork? No!

  Burlyboy 1: Are there a lot of English in West Cork then?

  Me: Er, erm, well, I think so yes.

  Burlyboy 1: Oooh, no-one told me.

  Burlyboy 2: Who told you there were Germans in West Cork? I’ve never heard anything like it.

  Me: Ummm …

  Burlyboy 1: Is it good then, this book?

  Me: I, er, don’t know. That’s why I’d like to read it.

  Burlyboy 2: Well we haven’t got it.

  Burlyboy 1: But we’ll have to go down to West Cork to check up on all those Germans!

  I buy my books and leave.

  5 pm

  The buskers on Grafton Street appear to have been given pitches according to their musical style. First drummers, a few skinny student types with wispy beards and Traveller clothing getting a funky circular rhythm going. People stand around tapping their feet, a few sway, two middle-aged women wiggle their lovely big backsides. Next one along, about twenty-five yards, a sincere-looking young guy belts out Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, then further along a red-haired fellah with a full beard sings nasally ballads on his own, then a skinny black guy playing some unheard-of reggae number and finally a forty-something bloke with long hair and flying V guitar gives it the full-on Hendrix thrash. Like anglers, they seem to stick to the pitch they are given. This stops any of the busking battles which often take place in other cities, particularly when the musicians are not only moving about but playing similar styles of ‘busk’ (‘I’m John Lennon!’ ‘Ooh, no, it’s me, it’s me!’). Dublin Corporation should be applauded – or rather their Metropolitan Busking Coordinator should. London Transport Police take note.

  6 pm

  I go to a taxi rank to get a cab to Wickham Park. The driver is a podgy snub-nosed guy with a big smile.

  ‘Is this my cab?’

  ‘No it isn’t ha ha ha yes it is really I’m only joking. You’ll have guessed,’ he says, turning to look at me, ‘that I’m a bit of a joker. I like to have a bit of a laugh with people.’

  ‘Uhuh,’ I say.

  ‘Are you Australian?’

  ‘No, I am not.’

  ‘Ha ha, anyway, there was this old couple telling me they wanted to go to the Sheraton Hotel and I said all serious like oh no I’m sorry that burned down a couple of days ago and you should have seen their faces ha ha and I go ha ha only joking it didn’t really burn down it was a joke.’

  ‘Did they laugh?’

  ‘Well the old fellah did a bit but she obviously hadn’t got much of a sense of humour because she never said a word after that the whole journey. Another trick I have is to flash me lights and point at people’s wheels – other cabbies, like – or at the back of their cars. Watch this.’

  He drives at speed up to the back of a cab that’s carrying two passengers and flashes his lights. The other cab slows down and pulls into the left-hand lane. Snubnose then points at the back of the cab. The other cab slows down, and Snubnose sticks his thumb up and grins. The other cabby shakes his fist in cartoon fashion and goes Grrrr.

  ‘Ha ha ha ha HA!!’

  Oh fucking hell, I think.

  ‘You gotta have a sense of humour in this life or you’ve had it,’ he continues, then goes quiet. Ah, lovely. This lasts for quite a while. We drive through suburbs that seem just like London. So many similarities. Eventually the silence is too much for him. He turns on the radio and the DJ is advertising a concert by the recently-reformed eighties funk-pop band ABC.

  ‘I fancy going to that,’ says Snubnose. ‘They’re my favourite band – I love all them New Romantics: Human League and Duran Duran. How did that song go’ (sings in high-pitched voice), ‘Tears something or other?’

  ‘Are not enough,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘“Tears Are Not Enough”. That was ABC’s first single.’r />
  ‘Yeah,’ he says excitedly. ‘Teeeeeaaaaaars are not enough. tears are not enough. Ah, great single that. There’s this bar in town where they do karaoke and I love to go along and do all the New Romantic hits.’

  ‘Have you ever been in a band?’ I ask.

  ‘Ah that’s me one regret on life,’ he says. ‘Oi wish oi wish I had been in a band. Ah, I’ve got it (sings) Blue print that says that the boy meets girl. Whispers girl meets boy. Yeah.’

  We are nearly there. I give him a few directions, pay him and open the door.

  ‘Dere ya go! Hey, your shoelace is undone!’

  ‘What?’ I say, looking down.

  ‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha ONLY JOKING MATE! By the way, I think you should stick with the Australian thing. Goes down better here. See yer.’ And with a roar of the motor, the funniest man on the planet is gone from my life forever.

  7.30 pm

  Back in Dundrum, me, Deidre Mac and Seamus the Lodger watch a nondescript football match on TV. I chat to Seamus the Lodger about, er, football. We get on quite well in a classic blokeish dysfunctional better-not-say-too-much sort of way, although it does seem our relationship has been freeze dried, so we can only talk about, er, football. Seamus’s room is a shrine to Roy Keane, one of the major gods in the Celtic sporting pantheon. Strangely (or should I say worryingly), Seamus is probably my best male friend in Dublin. And we only grunt at each other about twice a year.