‘Punk?’
‘No.’
‘Funk?’
‘Not really.’
‘Soul?’
‘They’re Australian.’
‘Oh.’
Unable to figure out what the Oz-boys required, we were forced to admit that we lacked it.
Trez went to Dublin for a weekend and came back with a possibility. Her aunt had reminded her that a second cousin of the twins was studying at Leeds Poly and was Entertainments Officer there. Seán rang and asked if he could help. He said he’d stick us on the bill with a visiting Jamaican reggae act with the improbable name of Lady Di and Dark Star that was doing the college circuit at the time. Up the M1 we bussed that wintry weekend, through a storm that blackened the skies. Arriving late, the Ships in the Night went on at half past nine, without sound-check, cuppa, shower or refreshment, to a predominantly white audience out of its face on ganja and the excitement of higher learning. My tranquilliser of choice had a Russian name, Smirnoff, and I was perhaps over-thoroughly medicated. We didn’t play well. Not that it mattered, since nobody but the twins’ cousin was listening. Alas, ten minutes in, they started to. That was bad. When I remember the evening I’m reminded of a comic Victorian music-hall number that Jimmy used to sing when under the influence of happiness.
They made me a present
Of Mornington Crescent.
They threw it one brick at a time.
About Lady Di and Dark Star, I can tell almost nothing. I was pig-faced by the time they slouched on in a tornado of drums and thunking bass, Leeds Poly’s single strobe-light working hard to justify that week’s hire-purchase payment. Trez and I watched for a while, then betook ourselves out the back of the exam hall where among the coupling couples and pyramids of empty beer kegs we tanked a bottle of gin and had a little bop and did some but sadly not all the things boys and girls do. Laughed. Mocked. Danced again.
There was a moment when we realised we were looking in each other’s eyes. She blew her hair from her forehead and smiled.
‘Let’s get stoned,’ she said.
‘Sure,’ I replied.
From her pocket she pulled a little lump of Haile Selassie for which she’d paid a law student ten pounds.
‘Get that intya, Cynthia,’ she said.
‘Heavy-duty,’ I slurred. ‘They don’t muck about up north.’
Trez was not normally a devotee of the magical smoke. But I didn’t ask questions. Off we went. There was a little of the old electricity crackling in the air and perhaps she might cop off with me out of pity if sufficiently spaced – so I told myself. We passed the dutchie, inhaling in sibilant sucks. Even through the rainstorms of hard-liquor drunkenness, I thought it tasted unusual. But onward we toked, peering up at the stars and speaking of art and beauty. If Trez had a wild side, I wanted her to walk on it. And I’d stagger along beside her.
This was the life. This was rock and roll. Fools who toiled for the System would envy us. Them with their silly little mortgages. More gin? Okay. The time the wage slaves waste. And anyway, what is time? Another fukken . . . weapon . . . in their flaccid . . . ideology . . . Let’s roll up another. Course I’ve done this before, Rob . . . Hey, the car park is revolving! . . . I feel sick . . .
The ‘Moroccan Black’ turned out to be an Oxo Cube, a fact Fran established by the expert means of looking at it briefly before administering a tentative lick. This was shortly before the tarmac began rolling like a wave and I swam all the way to unconsciousness. I don’t know if you’ve ever smoked a product intended for the making of gravy. But I wouldn’t advise you to do so. Not only is there great and ineradicable shame, but your wee smells of casserole for a week.
The only good thing about that night was that it led quickly to more college gigs. Perhaps we weren’t as bad as we thought. Certainly, we offered the qualities most Ents officers wanted: cheapness and availability. Hatfield Poly was next to receive us. Then Aston University, and Manchester and Bangor. We started getting paid actual money; not very much, not enough, as Jimmy put it, to put herrings on the spuds, but sufficient to procure a bag of bottles for the bus down the motorway, and maybe a good pinch of that aromatic herb not purposed for a coq au vin.
Seán and Trez went home to Luton one Sunday and returned with his car, a ’71 Hillman Hunter he’d bought for three hundred nicker at a police auction. Enterprising and ambitious working-class boy, he’d figured that his career and his social life might be aided by having his own vehicle. He’d kept it every bit as clean as you can keep a rustbucket frequently employed for conveying leaky washing machines to the workshop. In London it became employed for conveying musicians. We were not as leaky, true, but we were noisy and ungrateful, like a carload of screeching chimps. Fran in high spirits did his amusing imitation of a tumble dryer on rapid-cycle containing ‘George Michael and a spanner’. Seán was a good sport about this and many other distractions, but there’s no doubt they added to his burdens. Our non-driverhood allowed us to drink, which we copiously did, while our chauffeur pretended to content himself with orange juice. But soon it became clear that the car, not being all that large, was unsuited as the band’s personal limo-cum-goodswagon.
‘I think we should get a horse-transporter.’
‘For the gear?’
‘For Fran.’
‘I will not be fucking transported,’ Fran replied, like a foul-mouthed Queen Victoria, if such a travesty could be imagined. Rich, from a fellow who by now was much of the time on another planet, a realm where the Horse loomed large.
To save money while on the road, we slept in the car, more precisely in the car-and-accompanying-transporter, ‘two up the front and two in the horsebox’. This was a phrase Fran enjoyed saying. It reminded him of the title of an educational videotape he’d purchased in King’s Cross with helpful subtitles from the original German. But the sleeping arrangements gave rise to difficulty. It was hard to know which two should go where. In all chivalry we felt that no woman could be asked to sleep in a horsebox. Thus Trez’s berth in the car was a given. But what to do, then, so proprieties would be observed? It seemed a bit much, even in rock and roll, to require adult siblings to sleep together. Seán must be accommodated down the back in the straw. But whither boy Fran and your scribe? Fran was no molester, don’t get the wrong idea. I never once saw him put the moves on anyone who didn’t want them put on. At the same time, he was what he was. Seán felt that a bisexual druggie with a porn habit and few early-morning inhibitions wasn’t necessarily an individual you’d want waking up beside your sister. Down the back Fran was sent, making a pillow of his fun-furs and a blanket of his unending complaints. This meant that I would be up front, on a reclined leatherette seat, fewer inches from Trez than were usual. We’d have a laugh before rolling over, a midnight tête-à-tête, and there was no one in the world more interesting to talk to. We’d listen to the radio for a while, or play poker, at which she usually beat me. She was a cruel and cunning poker player, utterly ruthless, but since we were playing for matchsticks or fags it didn’t really matter. I was fond of the little togetherness. We’d share a secret nightcap: a mug or two from the winebox we’d hidden from the lads. If she was working on an essay, she might read me an extract, or I’d read her a bit from the NME while she took off her make-up and modestly prepared to retire. But things could be difficult, particularly on sultrier nights when the removal of exterior clothing became necessary. One’s impeccable non-sexism could be put to the test. You’d find yourself praying for a blizzard so she’d have to sleep in a tracksuit and overcoat, but the gods of the weather were unkind.
After a couple of weeks, I couldn’t stand it any more. Well, I could. But it hurt to be trying. Her habit of muttering nocturnal endearments in the dream-drifts of sleep was coming between me and my rest. She’d enfold her precious limbs around one or more of my own. She’d be cuddling up, half undressed. Merciful reader, I was young and a male of our species. I needn’t go dwelling on details. Suffice to note tha
t Viagra is not targeted at twenty-year-old boys, since Eskimos don’t buy snow. In a state of flamboyant and ardent arousal, I awoke one sweltering morning on the outskirts of Hull, not a metropolis universally associated with epiphanies of the erotic, to the sight of a bared and purple nipple, her T-shirt having ridden up in the night. It’s hard to know what to do at a moment like that. One of the things I wanted to do was get out of the car. Thankfully, that’s what I did.
For a brief time thereafter, the permutation was three boys in the horsebox, another phrase Fran enjoyed saying. But this arrangement, too, proved problematic. Seán was a light sleeper, especially after a show. It’s a frequent complaint among musicians. Being on fire is a lot of fun, but you have to put yourself out. Depart a strobe-lit stage where you’ve made loud noises for a couple of hours and you won’t be nodding off soon over cocoa. Encouraged by all of us, Fran was trying to get himself off the poppy dust. As a result, he could be a little jittery by pyjama-time. His twitchings and rustlings and scratchings and burblings would drive Seán into paroxysms of hectoring. Pumped by the gig, nettled by Fran’s restlessness, cold, hungry, resenting the smell of horse-piss, he’d sit himself bolt-upright like the vengeful corpse in a horror flick and switch on his torch and start shouting. This led to him stomping from the horsebox, venting by moonlight, before trudging off resentfully to kip in a field or wherever else he might. His departure and its valedictory fanfare of obscenities left Fran and me alone and awake. Sometimes there was tequila, Fran’s favourite tipple at the time. Sometimes there was vodka, my own. He could get a bit flirtatious. He’d be giving you the Grin. Well, boys will be boys. Why deny it? Once or twice, we had an enjoyable meeting of mouths. I’ve no regrets. He was a sensational kisser. His persuasive skills, also, were extensive. But those occasions, fun as they were, mainly served to establish in my mind that the love daring to speak its name, indeed rarely shutting up about itself, was ultimately the one I was after. This being explained, he accepted in good heart. Fran would never take it personally that you weren’t in the mood. He’d have made a wonderful spouse.
Soon we ran out of colleges and began playing in pubs. Poole, Braintree, Slough (twice), Rottingdean, Staines, Shitterton, Gravesend. My diary confirms what I already know, that few of southern England’s offputtingly named towns were unvisited by the Ships in the Night. It is a country I love deeply, and I’ve lived there many years, but it’s easier to love England when you’re not seeing it from the back seat of a rustbucket or dreaming its dreams in a horsebox.
Pub audiences? Yes. I had better describe them. The dog-faced landlord and his slipper-wearing missus. The teds of the locality, in drainpipes and Brylcreem. The cider-fucked gloomies who’d only ventured on to the premises to tank up before going out burgling. The odd pubescent girl smuggled in by the barman intent on defloration down in the cellar, among the mousetraps and crates of pale ale. Glass-washers. Lunatics. Contestants at Pacman. The stripper who’d be on later. The grinning ‘old lag’. Spouse-haters, gallows-birds, wreckage on legs, lobotomies, dipsos, automatons. Men the colour of nicotine. Women with smoke-wreathed nostrils. Fiends of indeterminate gender shrieking at the Tom ’n’ Jerry pinball machine while slapping its day-glo flanks. Urinal-vommers, skinheads, the religiously disturbed. If I give you the impression that they had any interest in us at all, except possibly as food, I have failed.
Onward we apprenticed, up and down the motorways, through the violently cold March of ’84 in Albion, a kingdom of sleet and dismal little caffs and an acne of gorse on the hilltops. Cold chips for breakfast and baked beans for lunch, and bubble ’n’ squeak for to sup on. England does not have motels in the American sense, but if we happened to be in funds we’d put up at one of those small-town B and Bs where the sheets give electric shocks. A ‘toilet duck’ in the bathroom the only item of decoration. The landlady’s bra on the washing line. Slice of toast? Thirty pence. Microwaved soup. Pot Noodle as room-service menu.
Mostly we slept in the horsebox, which, in truth, was not so bad. Seán kitted it out with inflatable mattresses and sleeping bags designed for the Arctic. (‘I am going out,’ he’d intone, on departing for a pee. ‘I may be some time. Carry on.’) If you zipped two of them together and shared body heat with your colleague, and you didn’t mind the beating of rain on the roof or the whiskey-fumed befuddlements that passed as pillow talk, there was a sensation of consolatory fellow feeling, such as undergrounding Londoners are said to have known during the Blitz. When young, as previously noted, your stupidity is bomb-proof. But you can fall asleep anywhere. That’s the upside.
For all the privations, we were learning our trade. There was joy to be squeezed from the struggle. One night, at a gig in Stoke, Seán did a tiny thing out of boredom, reversing the snare pattern on the middle eight of Fran’s song ‘Mullarkey’, so the accent fell on the second beat, ska-style. The change was a lightning bolt, sudden and random, and the song burst out of itself like a fruit. To be young and in a band that is stumbling towards its own sound, messily, slowly, with all the infuriation of hope, is to realise what it feels like to be alive. When a gig went well, the fierce, besotted excitement would buzz through your blood till the dawn. Uplifting any audience, even a tiny crowd in a bar, is an addiction you’ll never get over. At Fran’s generous insistence, we started swapping lead vocals, the rest doing backing, even Seán. I always tell my daughter, I learned to sing by singing. Trez sang too, with presence and attack. Fran’s guitar-playing, meanwhile, was beginning to astound us. He’d wrench screams from a Strat, raise wails of plane-crash feedback, pull a Chuck Berry duckwalk if the mood was upon him, but if you wanted an anchoring shuffle-time chug he’d supply it with scrupulous discipline. He retuned my old Ephiphone to an open B-flat, in which he’d jangle away contentedly at the back of the stage, nodding us in turn towards the lead mic. Seán by now had taught me to drive, a thing I enjoyed and was good at. Those motorway nights I’ll remember all my life. Four kids in a scruffy car, facing into a rainstorm, punk on the radio and a hundred miles ahead. No drug comes close to that elation.
It was Seán who came up with the idea, probably through impatience, that we ‘release’ the demo ourselves. He’d shopped around and come up with a factory in Essex that would produce five thousand cassettes for three grand. We’d been playing the songs for a few months now, seeding them into our set of not overly known cover versions, like apologies into a conversation with a person you’re about to break it off with, and it had started to happen occasionally at the end of a night that a punter would ask if we had a tape for sale. Fran was reluctant but we won him over. Various titles were thrown around, many of them a bit pompous or defensively facetious. In the end we went for The Thrill of it All (And the Worry Afterwards), which had the advantage of being pompous and facetious. Trez and I condensed the ghastly four-and-a-half-page press release into ‘liner notes’. In the passport booth at Paddington station on the rainy Sunday morning of 8th April 1984, we took twenty pictures of the pair of us, Fran and Seán having refused to get out of their beds, and that became the cover photo. My daughter tells me that if you have a playable copy of that cassette today, it’s worth 900 quid on eBay, 7K if signed by Fran, eleven thousand if possessing the liner notes. I wish I’d stashed a box for my dotage.
Fran, having provided the subsidy that was keeping us alive, now decided its administration was beyond him. Every organisation is helmed by a leader who sometimes seems bizarrely opposed to it, and such was the case with the Ships. He had backslidden and was by now spending excessively on his favourite hobby. Entire villages in Afghanistan and rural Colombia were being funded by Fran’s enthusiasms. One imagined the ringing of bells when this week’s order arrived, and the cheerful folksong of goatherds. In the search for enlightenment, he could be recklessly experimental. He’d have snorted the ashes of martyred Joan of Arc if nothing more traditional were available. We said it must stop, and he promised it would, but up his nose or into his person by sundry other routes had
gone a truly astonishing sum. A meeting was convened to ‘elect’ a Chancellor of the Exchequer. Trez, obviously, was chosen. Confronted with the exigencies of keeping us a step from starvation, she responded with frightening zeal. Indeed, she was to prove a ruthless monetarist. ‘We will live within our means.’ ‘The books must be balanced.’ ‘The spending simply cannot continue.’ She disbursed to each of us on a Friday evening the sum she’d calculated as necessary to sustain an adult human for one calendar week, less 5 per cent. Following an incident in which Fran claimed not to have received his allowance (from what was in fact his own money) Trez tried to institute a system whereby we signed for our dough. At this we drew a line and italicised it with blasphemies. I’m not saying she was heartless, but she could be steely and purposeful. She had something of the Grocer’s Daughter.
Funny old time, the 1980s in England. I am fond of my adopted country’s palette of restful greys, but things got a bit black and white. The electorate, or part of it, had imposed on us as Prime Minister a union-crushing, self-avowed admirer of General Pinochet. But there were important cities being governed by designer-suited Trotskyites who named municipal playgrounds after Sandinistas. When the centre fails to hold, opportunism sprouts, and from it we weren’t immune. A flag of convenience can sometimes be useful. Three of us in the group realised that construing ourselves as a ‘left-wing Irish band’ – which, by some definitions, we were – might result in a little harvest of apologetic money and sympathetic embraces from the populace. After all, it was only proper to have a feeling for the motherland. (‘The what?’ Trez said, astonished.) A long time had passed since the Great Irish Famine. But boy, were we still upset about it.
At Irish festivals and Militant rallies the length and breadth of the kingdom, speaker after speaker excoriated England, her cruelties and extortions, her invasions and annexations, historical, contemporary and allegedly planned, her back-catalogue of pitiless tyrannies. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of raw material. If you played in a university attended by upper-middle-class students, the ante was that much higher. Jude and Willow would want you to bring your guitars but also your ideological firmness. Anything short of outright support for the Red Brigades or the immediate necklacing of Education Secretary Sir Keith Joseph and you were regarded as a bit of a splitter.
The Thrill of It All Page 15