The Thrill of It All

by Joseph O'Connor

  Bit slow on the uptake when he had a few beers down, mind. Tells me one night – playing pool in the Northern – ‘I thought yourself and Trez was identical twins, you know, before we met.’ I said ‘How the fuck could a boy and a girl be identical, mate?’ He’s pondered a sec. ‘Oh yeah.’

  And Mugsy, she was great. When you’re twins, things is different. Music in a family, well it makes life sweet. Little squabble, you play music. Christmas night, you play music. It’s a way of having a conversation without having to talk. I say to my kids, that’s the thing about music. It’s there when you need it, like a mate you can trust. Mightn’t reckon you need it now, but the tough day comes. Music’s give me everything. I love it.

  The problem was Fran. See, I couldn’t understand him. He’d be using these expressions, like a slang of his own. Not being funny, but you wouldn’t have a monkey’s what he was on about half the time. He’d be yakking about the news or an article he’s read in the paper and you’re scratching your head, looking on. Frannie was one of them kids, his brain went faster than his mouth. If he couldn’t put his finger on a word, he’d just make it up. And then sometimes he’s come up with a word, just for privacy, or naughtiness. See, music again. Look at rap. Like a personal slang. ‘One up’ was G-major, ‘two up’ was D. Robbie’d write them down. Like a translator. He’d collect them. But me, I wouldn’t have a breeze what the two donuts was on about. Off they’d go again. Speaking Frannish.

  FROM ROBBIE’S DIARY, APRIL 1983

  The following usages have been noted in the speech of subject Francis Xavier Mulvey.

  Handball, Starman, Stoutheart, Spatchcock, My decent sombrero, Good Morning Nurse: salutations connoting approval/affection.

  Snow White and the Seven Dwarves: the Governing Academic Council of Stanton Polytechnic and Agricultural College.

  Gropecunt Lane: the Department of English Literature at Stanton Polytechnic and Agricultural College, particularly the corridor where that Department is located.

  Flunt-monkey: a roué or satyr. A mercurial libertine. A person given over to the appetites, e.g. Lemmy from Motörhead, Charles Haughey, former Taoiseach of Ireland.

  The Cat in the Hat: His Holiness, Pope John Paul II.

  Thing One and Thing Two: Daryl Hall and John Oates.

  Cruella de Vil: the Prime Minister of this country.

  Pangziety: the alternating current of sadness and rage that one feels when abandoned by a sweetheart or the Labour Party.

  Claptonistically: adverb describing winces, gurnings and other facial emotings while lost in a long guitar-solo, eyes closed.

  Big Jean from Accounts: satirical term for any large, jolly person overly keen to ‘fit in’. Fran’s name for Father O’Reilly, the chaplain.

  Zippy and Bungle: Jimmy and Alice.

  Glimmertwin: a blood brother, an ally, a lifelong friend. From ‘The Glimmer Twins’, collective nom de guerre of M’luds Jagger and Richards.

  Woollyback: (1) unfair term for rural dweller. (2) any Irish-born student of Agricultural Science at this college. See also Hedge-Biffer, Bog-Wasp, Slurryist, Uddermensch, Mad Pat, the latter not a person’s name but an unruly condition: ‘The night Celtic beat Borussia Mönchengladbach, he went Mad Pat altogether. We couldn’t get him down off the roof.’

  Popocatépetl: an active volcano in Mexico. Also an onomatopoeic sound uttered by Fran during rehearsal to illustrate to drummer what he should be playing.

  Catweazle: a man or woman of frightening, cross-eyed or unkempt appearance, e.g. the Professor of Industrial and Organisational Psychology. The collective noun is ‘a whinny’.

  Raspberry Rippled: pleasantly drunk. See also, Hornswoggled, Baw-faced, ‘Up for the Match’: very dangerously and offensively drunk.

  Shishkebabble: late night drunken conversation occurring in takeaway.

  Faggiography: the art of persuading strangers to give you cigarettes. Faggiology is the study of this.

  The Brothers Grim: Lynyrd Skynyrd.

  Happy Jack: a song by the Who. Also the name of Fran’s favourite plant.

  Crazy Phil’s Mobile Disco: insulting term for excessively cheerful person. ‘I’ve never liked that Mary. Always ‘up for the craic’. She’s a bit Crazy-Phil’s-Mobile-Disco’.

  Sex-mechanic: a seducer, a jade, a promiscuous person.

  New Balls Please: expression indicating desire to change subject of conversation.

  Shirley: name inflicted on drummer by Fran.

  Mother Shipton/That twat: vice versa.

  This planet is home to few persons that I love more than Seán Sherlock, the most loyal and empathetic of comrades you could ever hope to meet. Aged nineteen, he was already more quietly wise than your granddad. Decency informed his every act. What image could encapsulate a prince such as this? If in the realms of a Kafkaesque nightmare you were arrested for some horror you didn’t commit, and your torturers made the mistake of allowing one telephone call before they sparked up the batteries, Seán’s would be the number to dial. He’d know what to do. I have never seen him panic. Even as a teenager, he was a person so solid that addressing him was like talking to a flagpole in a parka. You wanted to salute him, God’s truth.

  Here was a boy with his act together so utterly that he didn’t have to point it out by telling you. A fellow earning wages. A man. With a girlfriend. He’d paid for his own drum lessons by doing handyman jobs around his council estate after school. He understood drills. He’d built people’s bookshelves. He never knew his father but shrugged it off when you asked him. ‘We was lucky to have a mum and a gran.’ At sixteen, he had what amounted to a part-time business, a wedding-band he managed from the public telephone box near his home. He would tell you that one of his ambitions was to buy the council house in which his mother and grandmother lived, so they wouldn’t have to worry (a thing he achieved at the age of twenty-two). How deeply I disliked and begrudged him. He pretends not to believe me, but it’s the shameful truth. I feared and coveted and fumed. This is what happens when emulousness goes mad. Why had I not been born Seán?

  I begrudged the debonair bowling shirts, the neatly pressed worsted suit – the only one he owned but it always looked new – with its three-button jacket and the double pleats in the pants, and the Northern Soul crests on the cufflinks. When he eulogised Martha Reeves or Geno Washington and the Ram Jams, he assumed you had the faintest idea of the highs he was on, and this I deeply resented. He scoffs when I tell him, always thinks I’m joking, but if an unfrightening method of murder had revealed itself to me at the time, I might have been tempted to ice him.

  He’d arrive into rehearsal, bring coffees, bump fists with us, make pleasant and inclusive remarks, somehow get the decrepit electric radiator going, and sit at the kit with all the infuriating cheeriness of Santa-In-His-Little-Drum-Shop. No suggestion was too preposterous for him to call it what it was, no key-change too jarring, no lyric too pretentious. Songs whose recollection make me blush to the earlobes, he would praise as possessing ‘the suede’. But that was Seán. He wouldn’t even know he was lying. Having put in twelve hours in the service of his uncle, he gave the steadying geniality of his evenings to his sister’s friends, with the talent he’d been honing for eight years. Through all of it, he’d insist he wasn’t in the group but was merely helping out until ‘a proper drummer’ came along. What is to be done with a person such as this? Van Diemen’s Land would be too easy and too close.

  Trez was the most naturally gifted musician I’d ever have the honour to know, a 24-carat prodigy, playing since she was five. Fran would unfurl over time into an artist so unique that he may have gone on to rewrite the rules of his medium. But Seán Sherlock, and no one else, turned us into a band, eight to the bar, the hard way. Here was a boy who could chop time into beautiful slivers, turn rhythms upside down, careen them inside out, while the thudding, insistent stomp of his matchless right foot bashed out a vicious bass-beat. You could argue that Everett Morton was smoother and faster, but I’d give yo
u the argument back. There will never be another drummer like Seán’s god, Ginger Baker, but even in that hungry and feverishly exciting era, on a fourth-hand kit, in a stinking basement, with some trio of Crass-loving punks waiting to slink in when your session was finished, elbowing you out of the way, finishing your butt-ends, Seán could coax thunderstorms from a Roland drum that would stand you in drop-dead awe. We thanked him, Fran and I, by abusing his ears with our sonic pollution, and by laughing at him when he and his sister had left the room. He was then, and is still, a person of private kindnesses, but he’d equipped himself with a ridiculous tough-guy image which meant you weren’t permitted to mention them. At the risk of his displeasure, one truth must be noted. When, some years later, my drinking wrecked my marriage, the mercy that kept Seán and Trez Sherlock in my life, through anguish, destruction and bitterest failure, was the only reason I surfaced. I never said any of this to Seán at the time. But I think he knew. I hope so.

  TREZ

  . . . And then our first actual gig would have been what, in the Student Union Common Room for end of exams, June ’83. It was a fundraiser for the Nicaragua Solidarity Society. We were pretty well rehearsed. We weren’t too bad . . . The main act was a crowd called Thatcher on Acid, heavy, heavy punk, I loved them . . . From Somerset . . . God, who else, let me think. It’s so long ago now . . . We hadn’t a name at the time. We’d gone through about five thousand possibilities. The Changelings. The Inklings. The Tatterdemalions. The Hair. Seriously – John-John wanted to call us ‘The Hair’, I think because the Who were called that when they started . . .

  FROM ROBBIE’S DIARY

  The Phlogistonics, the Brittlestars, the High Numbers, the Stress-Dreams, the Milliners, the Blockers, the Cloudberries, the Modest Proposals, Shoolbred Works, Stockwood a go-go, the Loggerheads, the Borstal Boys, the Lost Causes, Desolate Shade, the Stone of the Heart, Daydream Farouche, the Takeaways, the Pangur Bawns, the Pretty Young Things, Herol Graham and the Bombers, John Banville’s Chinese Orchestra.

  TREZ

  . . . And I’m fairly sure it was Robbie came up with ‘The Thrill’. After that Roxy Music song ‘The Thrill of It All’. Yeah. I bumped into him in town on the afternoon of the gig and he ran it by me as a suggestion because we needed a name by tonight. So I said fair enough and the lads didn’t object. So that’s what happened. Last-minute baptism. The lads, being lads, always felt your name really mattered, but I didn’t. Like, ‘The Beatles’ is a God-awful name for a band, when you think. And ‘Bob Dylan’ sounds like a guy who sells second-hand furniture. A name’s only a name. I mean ‘The Doors’? That’s a band?

  But the boys loved making their lists and having arguments about them. It was kind of a big dick competition for a while, who’d come up with the name, be the daddy. I suggested we call ourselves the Handbags or the Big Girls’ Blouses, just for badness. Or maybe the Tool-belts. Dear boys.

  It was end of exams so the audience was fairly hammered. The room had these granite slabs on the floor and bare concrete walls – like a toilet cistern, the echo. Really bad. The stage was made of tables. It wasn’t the Fillmore East . . . But they gave us a proper sound-check, well, as proper as it gets. They’d hired in an actual PA system, even a couple of disco lights. We were on first, we played all covers, maybe for half an hour. I’d say there were thirty people . . . Al Green’s ‘Take Me to the River’, then ‘Dear Prudence’, the Siouxsie and the Banshees version, a couple of Iggy Pop things. The Monkees’ ‘Stepping Stone’. Patsy’s ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’. Robbie was a bit nervous. I remember he wore his guitar very high on his chest, like Gerry Marsden from the Pacemakers used to do, so he could see the fretboard when it came time for a solo. The cool thing at the time was guitar around your knees. But fair play, he put substance over style. [Laughs] John-John was mad keen to do ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’ by Slade just for badness, so we did. It’s actually a fun song to do, especially when the audience are stocious and most of them are your mates. It was amazing to see people dancing and punching the air. Wow . . . There’s nothing like playing music and seeing people dance. We did a couple of Patti Smith things, ‘Redondo Beach’ and ‘Dancing Barefoot’. Funny, Fran was the most nervous of us, which you’d never have imagined. He was dressed like, I don’t know . . . miniskirt and leggings. Poor baby was sweating, so his mascara ran. A couple of numbers in and he looked like a bisexual panda. This mob of pissed Aggies arrived and started giving him grief, but that was when he got into his mojo. The more they slagged him off, the better he got. That’s Fran . . . One of them gozzed at him, which was a thing you’d see at a gig back then. Disgusting I know, but that’s the way it was. And I remember Fran saying in this beautiful camp voice: ‘Darling, you proved you’ve a head full of snot. Well done!’ And everyone was in the palm of his hand from then on. Even the Aggies started bopping.

  It’s compulsory for every band to say their first gig was a disaster, but ours actually wasn’t. I’d say we were competent. No Thatcher on Acid or anything, don’t be getting me wrong . . . [laughs] . . . But we certainly didn’t disgrace ourselves. We were thrilled. What was sweet was that Rob’s dad and mum pitched up with his brother Shay. They were dead proud of Robbie. You could see it. He was chuffed. And my mam came along and my aunties and the neighbours. It was actually a lovely night, a very nice memory. They all went off for a drink and we stayed for the other bands and the disco.

  Funny, I remember there were these two miners from Durham or somewhere. There was all this stuff at the time saying the NUM might have to go on strike. Some American, MacGregor, had been hired to start closing down the pits. I took an interest in it because my uncle Stephen was a big trade unionist. He was a steward in the Merchant Navy, then he joined the Communist Party when he left. And there weren’t many lifelong Communists born in Dublin. Interesting man, Stephen. Self-educated, left school at thirteen. But that’s another story. I think these lads were in the college for a Labour Party meeting or something, you know, to make a speech. And they got dragged along to the Common Room after. Well, they got a fair bit of attention, not just because of what they were saying but how they looked. We’d this dense image of miners as kind of grimy and put-upon. Little ferrety fellows in overalls. You know, with lamps. But this pair were massive hunks of about twenty-five, incredibly handsome, with necks thicker than their heads and muscles the size of mountains. They looked like they should’ve been in the Human League.

  It was a lovely occasion. Our first proper gig. And let’s face it, it’s not every night you cop off with a miner. Which certain people did. I’m not saying which ones. Pardon my blush. Where were we?

  FROM FRAN’S FIRST INTERVIEW,

  WHAT’S ON IN LUTON, AUGUST 1983

  . . . We’ve been gigging over the summer but not much. Just pubs now and again, like the Castle . . . We’ve played the Brewery Tap a few times . . . Do you know it? . . . On Park Street . . . There’s all this nonsense about how we’re an Irish band . . . We’re so much more. Sarah-Thérèse, our bassist, is actually French . . . Robert, our guitarist, has an interesting history. Really, music saved him. I can’t say any more. A guy that age in prison, it isn’t going to be easy when he’s sensitive and pretty. . . . You ask what’s the reason our group is establishing a reputation? Oh I assume because not everyone in this town has a cowpat for a brain . . . We’re going in for this City Limits magazine Battle of the Bands Competition in October and I expect we’ll win that. And then we’ll move to London. Brian Eno wants to produce us. But we’re looking at options. Got a light? Ta. Got a fag?

  FROM CITY LIMITS

  Scumbag Picasso + Handmade Chairs + the SKAlligators + the Suburbans + Busted Flush + the Barbed + the Sacred Hearts + Gauloise de Beauvoir + the Anti-Dance Men + the Brainstems + Remember the Porter + Clusterfuck + the Ships in the Night + Outdoor Jacks + Death + Vorsprung Diphtheria.

  The Earl’s Arms, St Albans, ‘Battle of the Bands’ Beds Herts and Bucks heats, October 1983.

  . . . Seven
th-placed Luton outfit, the Ships in the Night, lived down to expectations, serving a pungent, viscous sludge of leftover Bowie with lumps of folkish gristle and pepperings of whiteboy reggae (yawn), under a coagulating skin of faux Moddery. Num! Num! Nope. Their version of Goebel Reeves/Woody Guthrie’s ‘Go To Sleep, You Weary Hobo’ made you do just that. Frontperson Francis Mulvey is not unable to, er, sing but spent most of his time haranguing an audience that could scarcely contain its indifference and sluttishly blowing on his nail varnish. Tasty work from Sarah Sherlock on cello and five-string Hardanger Norwegian fiddle (no, we didn’t know either) meshed with less accomplished strummings from Bobby [sic] Goulding on guitar. (Yikes! Tune it, young jedi. Might help.) Solid drumming from looker Seán Sherlock did its best to underpin the effort. But nothing you haven’t heard, oh, forty million times before, apart from the little you wouldn’t want to hear again. They used to be called ‘The Thrill’, but there’s naught to thrill here. File under Going Nowhere Fast.

  Eight

  DOWN THE YEARS, I’d see Fran spin lurid fabrications on the subject of how we raised the cash to make a demo. We did not ‘sell our blood by the pint’ (NME) or ‘win the South Yorkshire State Lottery’ (Oregon Post). As for his claim that he, Seán and I ‘worked as gigolos in the posh areas of Luton’ (Daily Telegraph) – I being especially popular because of my skills at something the men of Bedfordshire were reluctant to undertake – I’ve probably established that I wouldn’t have been very successful on the game. Any restless hausfrau admitting me to her bungalow while hubby was away on the golf links would have been likelier to offer me a cup-a-soup than to lead me upstairs while wriggling out of her tights. Oliver Twist went to London to make his fortune. Ours was made before we got there.