Regular little rudie I was from ten or twelve [Laughs]. There’s pictures of me doing the moonstop the day I made me Confirmation, little porkpie hat, the works. I didn’t have no consciousness of the Irish thing at all. Well, I tell a lie, like I heard it, what with me mum and that. She come from Sallynoggin, in Dublin. Mary Sherlock. She’d be giving you earhole about the Four Green Fields. And she was a beautiful singer, don’t take me the wrong way. Mum won medals for singing, all the old Irish songs. ‘Wrap the Green Flag Round Me, Boys, to die were far more sweet.’ But it weren’t my thing, see. Well it ain’t when you’re a nipper. Stands to reason you wouldn’t go for the music your mum would be into . . . My mum had it hard. I’m not much of a one for the good old days. For a while she cleaned house for a nice family, Jakobovits, they was Ashkenazi Jews, and Mrs Jakobovits was very good to my mum, but then they moved. She was a cleaner in a light-bulb factory down Bexleyheath for a while; after that she worked in Lewisham Hospital, in the laundry. Your single mum didn’t get much help or understanding, not back then. There’d be remarks, all the rest of it. Kids can be toe-rags. She spoke with an Irish accent and they’d be taking the piss. She was tough, you know. But she idolised us. That’s truth. And she always had this thing – you’ll get your education, that’s that. Wouldn’t take no argument. You better not start one. Catch you bunking off school, she’d rip off your arm and beat you to death with it. [Laughs.] She’d say music’s well and fine but it ain’t no education. [Adopts ‘Irish’ accent.] ‘De music’s fer feckin chancers and rogues!’
Personally I don’t give a monkeys about politics, being honest. To me, they’re all the same. I don’t give ’em headroom. Kiss your arse till they’re elected, then tell you ‘kiss mine’. But it weren’t a stroll for Irish people in England my mum’s generation. You was a bit second-class. Not always. But they felt, you know what I mean, that the old place thrown ’em out and the new one only wanted ’em if they was prepared to be micks. Twats laughing at them in sitcoms. Like at black people, or Pakistanis. Funniest thing to do in your comedy sketch was stick in a foreign johnny. Fuzzy-wuzzies, darkies, Paddy on de dhrink. ‘Lawks, there’s a Nigerian moved in across the street! Says he’s a doctor! Hide the silverware!’ Black and White Minstrels on telly – swear to God. Look, it was what it was, and I’m glad it’s gone away. You’ll get ignorance everywhere. What you do is fix your own. Read a book. Look about. Grow up. The other bloke’s music, see it might be worth a listen. That Bob Marley single? You like it? What’s he saying? Try Nina Simone. Get informed. There’s history, geography, everything in music. See, it paints you a picture. Take a look.
But it was a different time in England, still stuck in the past. England’s mellower now. More chilled. All I’m saying, it weren’t a cakewalk for people like Mum. And then you had your Provos. It made things hard. Bombs up in Woolwich and Birmingham, all the rest. Mum’d be afraid to go to work. And ashamed. That’s truth. And I’m, ‘Mum, it ain’t us.’ But after a while, you stop bothering. Fucked if I’ll apologise for the stuff I didn’t do. None of this shit’s down to me.
But it ain’t that simple. Comes and bites you in the bum. There was a time when I was sixteen, I fancied going in the army. See the world. Learn a trade. I’ll have some of that. I go down the recruiting depot in Greenwich, tell the sergeant my name. He says ‘Your own lot won’t like you taking the Queen’s shilling.’ Me own lot? Who’s that, mate? You talking about the Mods?’
I literally don’t know what he’s on about. Then it clicks.
‘I’m London born and bred.’
‘Son, there’s London and London.’
Is he having a laugh? I’m looking in his face.
Never been in Ireland, support Charlton Athletic, Ray Davies in his Union Jack suit on me bedroom wall. I mean, listen to me voice, mate. I ain’t Brendan Behan.
He’s a nice old geezer, he ain’t being funny. But he’s gimme a piece of advice, which I’m very glad I took. He ain’t saying no, but go home and talk to your mum. And that was the end of the army. They missed the chance of Drummer Sherlock in the Royal Marines band. I’d have grooved ’em up good. There you go.
Seán was whipcrack handsome, with his sister’s huge eyes, a close-cropped, jaw-jutting Gary-Cooper-like fellow like you see on posters in old barbershop windows. You could imagine him as the Marine who kissed the girl in Times Square the night victory in Japan was announced. Although he was skinny in those days, you often pictured him as muscular, probably because he had none of a thin man’s birdy nervousness but tended to be silent in a room. He smoked roll-ups he seemed to form with one hand. He drank bourbon-and-Coke and owned a car. It had a hundred thousand miles on the clock and was rusty, with fag-burnt leatherette seats, but to be the possessor of an internal combustion engine of even basic functionality wasn’t a thing you encountered in our circle. Endearingly, Trez referred to him as ‘John-John’, a pet name from their childhood. He called her ‘Sis’ or ‘Mugsy’ or ‘Blags’. He spoke in what I later learned was a south London accent, though at the time I had it down as plain cockney.
In he strode to the audition room as though he were the owner, blowing kisses to the aged cleaning lady as she left. Yep, he’d been here before, had drummed in several bands, had even done a bit of recording. ‘All right, Robbie? How you doing, mate? Yeah, I bang the old skins. No Ginger Baker or nothing. Just an ’obby.’ Rendering his speech in bad phonetics reduces him, as that cheap literary tactic always does, so I’m not going to be doing it a lot. My point is that Seán spoke like the born Londoner he was. For some reason it added to his authority from the start. I can offer no explanation. He wowed us.
I’ve seen it written with scriptural authoritativeness that Seán and I ‘attended the same school’ and were ‘childhood friends’ as a result. But that isn’t so, and I don’t know how this nonsense got going. It occurs to me now that I don’t know where he went to school. He was like someone who never had: clever, articulate, uncomplicatedly good-natured and self-assured, entirely without the brokenness-dressed-as-gaiety you saw in kids my age. Trez had many of those qualities, too, and an irony all her own. But I’d never met anyone as disconcertingly likeable as Seán. I wasn’t quite sure how to handle him.
We talked history. He rated the Who, was a Small Faces completist. His heroes were Ray and Dave Davies. Yeah, the Stones were the nazz. Charlie-boy could drum. But Metal gave him a pain in the jacksie.
‘You’re not a poorpler?’ Fran asked.
‘A what?’
I translated: an admirer of Deep Purple.
‘Mean, Paicey’s an ace drummer. And Gillan on the vocals, he’ll scream down your house. Axe-man like Blackmore’s gonna bring you the fireworks. It’s just Metal ain’t my cup of tea. Like, nothing against it or nothing. Each to his own way of thinking.’
What he loved was a deadly drummer playing clean as a razor, ‘making a hard thing sound easy, that’s the gig’. There were technically greater drum performances than that of Al Jackson Junior on ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T & the MGs but this was Seán’s favourite. Fabulous track, really. More complex than you thought. ‘Fackin thing’s in chromatic minor with a fifth as tonic chord,’ he pointed out.
‘An open fifth, John-John,’ Trez said with an admonishing laugh.
‘Yeah, obviously. They know that, Sis.’
‘Amazing, the way you see it in the blues,’ Trez continued. ‘The open major tunings that the old black guys came up with. D modal, Joni Mitchell uses that a lot.’
‘And then your open G,’ Seán agreed, ‘D G D G B D, with the fifth string removed, which is pretty much all Keith Richards plays in. Sodding brilliant.’
Silence came down. I sensed Fran’s unease and my own. We enjoyed thinking of ourselves as ‘instinctive musicians’, a phrase that, whenever I see it now, makes me reach for a Taser-gun. If all you’re offering is instinct, close the door on your way out. I have instincts myself, as has every shitehawk in the world, and have spent much of
my life trying, and failing, to be rid of them. But back then, one saw matters differently, or pretended to, or something. Unquestioning believers in the myth of amateurism, false gospel of popular music since about 1956, Fran and I tended to assert quiet superiority to – even punchable pity for – anyone who knew what a treble clef was. By this means, we proved our idiocy. A-7th resolves to D, from Palestrina to dubstep, and it will continue to do so long after you’ve gone, because it’s been doing it a damn long time. It does that because people like it to do that, and what they like is presumably the point. If you think Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith weren’t aware of this, listen again. You wouldn’t permit a surgeon who boasted that she didn’t know a scalpel from a hacksaw to slice you open and whip out your kidney. Only in the arts do we see pig-ignorance as a qualification. It’s the worst form of snobbery I know.
But since Trez’s arrival into the scum-speckled swamp of our dilettantism, that well-documented pose had been harder to maintain. You did your best to maintain it, but you didn’t do so publicly, and any pose not publicly maintained becomes its evil twin, a hang-up. Now here came Seán too, wading through the morass of our complexes, like some lolloping St Bernard who didn’t realise he was saving you, impossible to dislike, although I tried to. He is to this day the only adult I’ve known who really can pull off a Paul-McCartney-style thumbs-up-with-cheeky-grin and not make you want to disembowel him. Well, Macca can do that, too, obviously.
Seán confirmed to us that he was working with his uncle in the town, mending washing machines, tumble driers, fridges, cookers, ‘all your basic white goods, also lawnmowers’. He found the repairs trade ‘all right’, enjoyed ‘the people side of it’, was aiming to have a van of his own on the road one day. If it didn’t happen, didn’t matter. He’d do something else. Maybe open a ‘Mod boutique’ or ‘a bakery’. He intended being his own boss – ‘see, that way, you survive. Know whose kids ain’t never hungry? The boss’s.’ The electrician’s qualification he was working towards at night school would always be a help. In the meantime, he had ‘a goal and beer money’. He wasn’t like us, he continued, smiling fondly. Music was just his way of passing the time. Some people drank, or played footie, or went to church, or were interested in politics. He drummed. Banging on drums was only ‘dancing sitting down’. You didn’t want to take it ‘too serious’.
At this point I plunged into the depths of my defensiveness and said Fran and I took things way serious. That was pukkah, Seán said. His sister was the same. He could see why she ‘thought so highly’ of us, he remarked, a statement that made me blush like an over-blurbed novel. Trez was also blushing, even harder. I don’t exaggerate when I tell you that up to that moment I suspected she regarded Fran and me as messers.
Well, Fran continued asking questions, but with a newer intensity, like a voter on a doorstep seeking the views of a candidate. A strange thing to do since Seán had expressed no interest in being elected. His only reason for being at the studio was to collect Trez and drive her home. But suddenly his manifesto was sought.
His position on the Specials? Strongly in favour.
His views on the Queen? He dug Freddie.
Where did he stand on Duran Duran?
‘Ard to say, really. On its throat?’
Fleetwoodmackery? Opposed.
Yes? No.
Andrew Ridgeley of Wham? The lesser of two evils.
Early Roxy Music? Magnificent beyond words.
Later Roxy Music? Hmm.
Status Quo? Again hmm. One really shouldn’t like them. And yet.
‘Fade to Grey’ by Visage? Vice versa.
‘Keep on Loving You’ by REO Speedwagon? Only in cases of capital murder, but the Geneva Convention should be consulted.
The Beat? Mighty sweet.
The Sweet? Very much.
Genesis? You ’avin’ a laugh?
‘Since you’re here,’ Fran said, ‘play us something if you would?’ I had rarely seen him address anyone with what appeared to be courtesy. Seeing it now made me scared.
‘What you reckon, Mugsy?’
‘Why not,’ she replied.
‘Won’t do no harm. Where’s Black Betty?’
‘Black Betty’ turned out be familial slang for Trez’s cello. My growing unease flared like dropsy. These people spoke in nicknames. Was this Walton’s sodding Mountain? I reached for my last cigarette.
What they played was a traditional planxty by the seventeenth-century harpist Turlough O’Carolan, a luminously gorgeous thing full of Italianate harmonies and strange swoops you weren’t expecting. He scarcely touched the snare or the ride with his brush but every time he did, it made a difference. Nodding with priestly gravitas, his shoulders swaying time, he’d give her a shy smile or glance up at the ceiling as though the bare light bulb was listening. You didn’t often get to hear a brother and sister performing music. To observe it was to know your limits. She would nod, he’d give a roll, she’d raise an eyebrow, he’d fill, and you understood you were looking at people with a closeness born of years, that there was something in the particular way he shimmered a cymbal that his sister was telling him to do. It was beautiful music and I hated every moment. The monster of envy was here.
I was young at the time but I realised one truth: no quartet can comprise two duumvirates. Fran and I had been engaged on something small of our own. Then had come Trez. Now her brother. What next? Granny Sherlock and her excellence on the banjo? I didn’t want to join the fucking Family von Trapp or have its London-Irish offshoot annex me. As Seán grinned and departed the room, accompanied by his sister, having wished us to ‘be lucky’ with a cheery bump of fists, I was already making up my mind that he wouldn’t do at all, but would one day make something like a very nice suicide counsellor whom the mums at the school gate secretly fancied.
Amazingly, it was Fran who demanded we enlist him. I was convinced he was joking. He was serious. Seán must join the group, if only on a temporary basis. ‘Any semi-sane bugger’ would agree that this was essential. In the Franningrad Soviet, there was only one Chairman, no matter the expedient pretence of democracy, and as happens in every dictatorship, personal or political, lunacy was imputed to naysayers. In addition, it was put to me that I was being ‘a fukken Wilbur’, Fran’s term for a person taking his relatively small sufferings far too seriously (from the names of the poet William Butler Yeats). Worse, I was a ‘Mimi’: one whose only conversational topic is himself (from the Beatles’ ‘I Me Mine’). Also, a ‘Wisty’, a person of hysterical and unmerited self-importance (Wystan Auden). Fran knew how to throw a low punch.
We began the kind of ding-dong you see in a bad soap, where we paced and furiously smoked and took seven kinds of umbrage, denouncing one another with competitive silences when violent words failed, as they do. What I resented was the way he was subtly changing our roles. I had always been Felix, he was meant to be Oscar, the pip-spitting, chain-smoking hammer of the respectable, the lush with his boots on the pouf. Suddenly the wretch was lecturing me that I was becoming ‘impossible’. This was Vesuvius accusing you of volatility. You didn’t happen across a musician like Seán every day, he pointed out, as though anyone with functional eardrums wouldn’t have realised this fact about four seconds after Seán started playing. ‘Guy knows his stuff, too. All I’m saying, Gimpy? He’d give us another arrow in the quiver.’
Well, that was where I lost it. The red mist beset me. I said I would give Fran an arrow, but not in his quiver, unless that word was new slang for the utmost and most previously unexplored (even by him) rafters of his satanic hole. Well, that isn’t how I put it. But I definitely said ‘hole’. Jimmy had started to influence my vocabulary.
‘It’s me or him,’ I said.
Fran gave a short laugh. ‘You’re wonderful when you’re angry.’
‘I mean it.’
‘Tell you what, we’ll have an arm-wrestle. Whoever wins chooses.’
‘Roll up your sleeves,’ I said.
Seve
n
SEÁN
YEAH, THEY ASKED me to join. Stands to reason. They had to. Funny though. Now you mention, I don’t never remembering them asking. Way I recall, the deal was I’d sit in till they found some other schlub. A week or two, a month. But that ain’t the way it went.
Quit the day job? No way. I’s happy as a trout. Well, I’d had enough of bands, see. Been in and out before. Wedding band, session work, bit of this, bit of that. I’d me eyes on the prize, love. Electrician. Imagine. Good solid trade and your money every week. The missus says I should’ve stuck at it. She’s right.
See, I didn’t take music serious. Music’s just a laugh. You’re doing nothing else, you’ll give it a go. And Fran was a piece of work. Like, imagine meeting Fran. I’m nineteen years old, here’s the Prince of sodding Denmark. Mouthy. In your face. But you couldn’t help loving him. He’s banging the piano-lid against the upright in rhythm. Limping like Richard the Third. Full of pig-iron, you know? Razor-boy meets Madame Mao. You ain’t likely to forget him, put it like that. You didn’t see his likes back in Lewisham.
I liked Rob from the off. Good boy. Always was. Sweet, low-key kid. Give you the shirt off his back. Not that you’d want it. No, he wasn’t no soul-boy. Absolutely not. He dressed like a geezer the Undertones chucked out for being too scruffy. But intelligent. Sharp. We was mates in a shake, we’d have a drink and a natter down the Great Northern, near the station. He’s gimme a lot of blather down the years, says he didn’t like me at the time. But that ain’t the way I remember, straight up. We never had no bother, it’s a little thing he does. Why? Ain’t no clue, love. He’s a pillock [Laughs.] Me and Robbie go back. Long time ago now. Nice kid he was. Good friend.
The Thrill of It All Page 10