On Merseyside, say, and in certain boroughs of London, we’d be handsomely remunerated for appearing on a bill that even Ho Chi Minh might have found a bit unnerving. For all that, in many of England’s less assertively Marxist towns – Bath, for example, or Leamington Spa – you tended to keep your Irishness muffled, lest it result in a burning crucifix. Seán was useful in this regard, since he spoke in the tones of south London. Not ideally what one would want to hear in the Nell Gwynn tearooms, but better than perceived bombers such as Fran or me. A dose of blarneying invective from that gentleman’s mouth and the smelling salts or the West Midlands Crime Squad might have to be summoned, and where would we all be then.
We returned home to the flat late one summery night in a state of nearly catatonic exhaustion. We’d driven the 400 miles down from Aberdeen in one go, a gruelling and sullen nine hours. My diary tells me it was Sunday, 27th May. We’d racked up eleven dates, and while the gigs had gone okay, we were sick of the road and sick of the songs and heartily sick of each other. There was never decent food or anywhere to shower. It was an eternity of peanuts and rinsing your pits in a sink and trying to get paid and taking less than you were promised and sniffing a facecloth before using it. The almost total lack of physical privacy was irksome to us boys; for Trez who complained least it was hardest. Being the only young woman in any group of young men is a trial, and the privations of touring made things worse. More than that, the little squabbles that attend close bodily proximity were starting to curdle and fester. The rows grew bad. We’d go at it like boiling water. Trez could be crabby as her final exams approached, Fran quite impossible, contumelious and fault-finding and unendingly negative, an embittered Reverend Mother whom the novices dread. A nimbus of suppressed rage seemed to glow from his face and you feared what would now be termed his mood swings. He was off the Shanghai Sally again but the worldview of people fighting addiction remains insular, even when the anaesthetic gets abandoned. I know what I’m talking about. I point no finger. The least capable musician, I loved the group most. The others had options I hadn’t, and that scared me to false glee. I feared they would sack me soon.
Drink was helping me develop strategies to parlay my dread into a cheeriness they must have found exhausting. As for Seán, he had a girl in London he didn’t like missing. With Seán, there was always a girl. Inability to stick the sight of your colleagues is the reason most groups break up in the end, not that we knew at the time. But we did know, I think, that we couldn’t go on as we were. It was notable that on any occasion when we returned to the flat all together, we’d each of us head immediately into a bedroom alone and, short of an earthquake, stay there.
This, I supposed, was what would happen on such a night. Trez lit a cigarette off the toaster, gathered her notes and retired without comment to the bath. Her finals were to start next morning and she was hoping for a scholarship. But life on the road doesn’t marry well with study. There was a sense that a junction was fast approaching. I could see she was worried and down.
I put together a pear crumble and got a simple pesto going, because I knew that she liked it and I wanted to give her a treat. A spider was scuttling in the sink but I spared it a watery demise. Let the ugly flunt live. Who cared? I imagined myself seen through his numerous eyes, a kaleidoscope of failure and geekery. Bills had arrived in our absence and I opened one or two. Among the mail was a statement from the outfit we’d hired to put around our cassette. It announced that we’d sold 141 copies in total. You might think it would be a consolation that there were 141 fools willing to buy the fruit of your labours in a country of sixty million. But I personally had bought 11, so there were only 130. At a push, you could have squeezed our entire British fanbase into Jimmy and Alice’s house. I murdered the spider. His death didn’t help. Violence never does, so they say.
Fran came into the kitchen with a shocked and haggard look. He asked if I would listen to the answering machine. Control freak that he was, he insisted the flat’s only telephone be kept in his bedroom, lest any of us use it to escape. He’d listened to the message himself. But he wanted someone else to hear it. He was naked but for his underpants, which were surprisingly conservative. Away with him I trudged, too weary to be alarmed.
Into that cavern of taffeta and lace and non-returned library books and poppers and fag ash and wet-wipes and lipsticks, a realm where the daylight was never permitted to enter, came a ray of Wirral-born sunshine. Any music-lover of my age would have recognised the voice, which pretended to be sardonic and just about succeeded. I’d heard it under blankets in the bedroom at home, and as I wept with my back to the runway lights of Luton Airport, counting up years, or smoking out the window, wondering why the Christ of lies had murdered my sister and if she could hear it too.
‘Evening, it’s John Peel here at Radio 1. Just to say I got your cassette. Excellent stuff. Playing a couple of tracks on the programme tomorrow night. Thought you’d like to know. Be in touch.’
Fran was at the sewing machine. I sat down slowly beside him. He was weeping. I held him. We cried.
Eleven
IN JUNE ’84, with our cassette getting noticed and the group about to record a session for Peel, Fran told us he’d been unhappy and was quitting. We were in a boat on the Serpentine when he gave us the news. The paddle back to shore was quiet.
He wouldn’t be persuaded, was taking himself to Dublin, a city where he claimed to have friends. Seán and Trez did their best. I gave it everything I had. Thinking him desirous of flattery, as was sometimes the case, I flannelled and pleaded and blandished. Then fearing something was wrong with him, I worried. There was no need, he told me. He simply had to go. The London of his heart was not the city we were living in, and the group had ‘made things worse’. He didn’t want to be a professional, dreaded the thought of compromise. I’d always reckoned this a pose. Now he swore he was serious. Fame was an enemy. He was off.
‘Fame?’ This was slightly premature. A two-paragraph review in the NME doesn’t lead to the paparazzi rummaging through your bins. But his mind was made up. It didn’t matter what we thought. Elvis was leaving the building.
I could say I was surprised, and I imagine I did, but that would be a little disingenuous. There’d been moments of memorable adventure, yet things had been uneasy for some time. On stage or in the studio, we were carefree enough, but playing music is the sex life of being in a group, the pleasure and intimate companionship, the young lovers’ way of talking. Other dimensions of the affair were not what they might be. We’d become a bit married, which can happen in a band.
It was also a problem that Trez’s intentions were unclear. She adored playing live but the grim-faced truant officer of her academic career was always beckoning sternly from the wings. She was cleverer than all of us put together, which Fran, also clever, tried very hard to like but failed to. And it must have felt odd to him, as it did to me and the twins, that the group was being subsidised to such an extent by his money, which had dwindled to the last four grand. I managed to get an occasional morning with a removal company that paid cash off the books. Seán chipped in, too, whenever he had it, but neither of us could afford much more than a bag of groceries or booze. Trez earned a little by proof-reading for a publisher, but you don’t make the rent by proof-reading. British citizens, she, Fran and Seán were entitled to draw various benefits, but they didn’t regard themselves as ‘available for work’, which you had to be in order to claim. Fran sometimes ‘signed on’, and for a while so did I, but the authorities gave me grief because I was still a registered full-time student and told me I’d have to stop. Stopping gave Fran power, and that was uncomfortable too. Every time you bought a set of guitar strings, you’d be aware of who was paying. It stung. I don’t know why.
I have to place on record how gentlemanly he was about the subject when he decided to go, refusing to accept whatever by then remained of the only inheritance he could ever hope to receive. We were to think of it as a loan. It could be repa
id when we had it. Trez, who could be witchy in the acuity of her insights, used to say it was his way of continuing to control us through indebtedness. His attitude discomfited her and always had. She’d go hungry rather than accept it, and that had caused its own problems. It was her view that inexplicable generosity outside of a family, and sometimes inside one, can be a form of establishing jurisdiction. At the time, I regarded this outlook as harsh and misanthropic. Later, I came to feel she was not quite right but also not quite wrong. Every band likes to think it is creating its own pictures, but often there is a figure, not necessarily one of the group, who is using its members as paint. Trez wasn’t someone you told what to do, by words or by silences either.
The night came when we planned to see Fran off at Euston station for the ferry-train to Holyhead, but he never turned up at the concourse pub, as all four of us knew he wouldn’t. A postcard depicting Robert Johnson arrived from Dublin a couple of days later. ‘Goin’ wake up in the mornin’. I believe I’ll dust my broom. Good luck. Keep at it. Your number one fan. Thanks for some lovely times.’
We missed him. Who wouldn’t? Fran was our captain. And it was obvious we were a lesser group without him. There’s a moment while you’re writing a song when you get hopelessly lost, when your confidence melts like snow off a rope, and you gape about the room seeking any sort of milestone. For me – I think for all of us – the signpost was Fran. He’d know what to say, whether the thing was worth saving. He’d come up with the chord that might pull it from the ashes. Trez would know the chord was called ‘F-sharp half-diminished’. Her knowledge was astounding and so was her grace. But Fran was the one who could feel a way towards it, knowing nothing of the name and feeling no need to baptise. He’d lean over the piano and vamp out four notes and you’d feel the dying song start to breathe. Seán used to say Fran was like the sculptor who knows his David is somewhere in the slab. But that wasn’t quite right. Fran was blind. He’d know something was in there, if something actually was, and he’d make you keep chiselling as long as you could, or as long as you were interested, which isn’t always the same thing. He could write in any of our voices, better than we could ourselves. And he’d know when a song should be abandoned as a lost cause. He was ruthless about that, and he’d hurt you by his tactlessness, but he’d always, always be right. It’s hard to love anyone who is always right, but we did. We got more work done after he left, but it was high level mediocre. We were punctual and organised. The flat was a lot tidier. Fewer arguments happened. So what?
Onward we paddled, Franless and brave, through the hot, loud nights of our schooling. In a way, his absence was so good for us that it was almost a presence. Being a quarter of a quartet means there are places to hide onstage: not many, but you learn where they are. A member of a trio has no such nooks, especially if the instruments are guitar, drums and cello, an uncommon enough line-up for a rock band. And we were gigging in the kind of pub where they’d never seen a cello, except maybe in the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special. You’ll find it surprising to be told that Trez, a future Rolling Stone Musician of the Year, was in those days so doubtful of her abilities on the bass guitar that she’d only play it at the sound-check, if there was one. We’d shuffle on in the Hangman’s Arms or the Bride and Hammer, Leighton Buzzard, to a tsunami of indifference or hostility. The cello she could afford at the time was a respectable old dear but a few dusty years past retirement. It took an age to tune up in the back room but the moment it inhaled lager or encountered the flashing lights of a pinball machine, it wilted like a quiff in a sauna. Trez would retune. And we’d wait.
Men with rat’s-tail hair, girls with Lugers for eyes. Stares as inviting as last night’s condom. Individuals you could imagine having piercings through their toes. Pockmarked, human dartboards. A single attempt at harmony or any sort of nuance, a lyric not directly about fighting or sex, and you’d better have a spit-proof umbrella. The only option was to blast them, and we learned to blast them good. Our thinking was akin to that of one of the era’s standing army of non-sexist socialist comedians, Ben Elton, who often remarked in interviews that he’d developed his rapid-fire style of onstage delivery so as not to give the hecklers a chance to mock his spangled jacket or, presumably, his non-sexist socialism. We played fast, loud, tight as a gnat’s arse, said little, got off quick, hid the instruments. But I’d have stress-nightmares the night before a gig, where I was naked in a crowd. I’d be about to go on in some vast auditorium of hayseeds with the neck of my banjo apparently made of rubber, and no set-list. Whenever that happened, I drank.
Summer continued. We were skint. It will surprise the reader to learn that London in the middle 1980s, era of slobbering yuppiedom, was still a city you could be poor in. It wasn’t like London now, where the unfortunate beggars must ask if you can spare them seven pounds for a panini. Big Maggie made ‘United Kingdom’ a savagely ironic phrase and the legacy of the greed she fostered is the Second Great Depression, but it took New Labour’s touchy-feely ferment of Chardonnay Stalinism to cleanse the greatest metropolis in the world of non-millionaires. Our needs were few enough. Food wasn’t expensive. At the Friday market on Queensway I could get reasonably fresh vegetables for almost nothing. I’d an understanding with the Italian butcher on Praed Street. Not by any means the cuts you’d be offered in Soho’s finest eateries, but if you knew a little of cooking, even a basic tomato and garlic sauce, you could make something nourishing and filling. The Iraqi fishmonger on Paddington station would give you a quart of prawns or a whiting and parsley stock for two quid if you pitched up as he was closing. It’s not hard to bake bread and there’s pleasantness in doing so. You feel – I don’t know – a little blessedness and rightness in making something for your friends to eat. The warm aroma of a loaf coming out of an oven is perhaps not that far from a song. There was a public swimming pool near us, Porchester Baths, where for 20 pence you could have a hot shower and put yourself together and even rinse your smalls if no one was looking, which a lot of the time no one was. They had a basketball court where Trez and I would often shoot hoops or play a little one-on-one. We were clean, fed and happy, and liked living together in the flat, which we managed to make a home.
The idea of, say, starting a pension or ever owning a property wasn’t so much as the faintest blip on the radar. Perhaps privately so for Seán, but he never spoke of such things. If in your own case it was different, then I salute your prudence, from the ghost estate of my own inadequacy. We’d have decried such notions, had they ever been raised. Alas for blithe youth and the cost of its liberties. It didn’t click with me that today’s mortgage-feeding wage slave is tomorrow’s carefree oldster banging his balls around the golf course.
As the Peel session approached, we started feeling anxious. Seán was despatched to Dublin to see if Fran would talk, but returned a week later saying it was pointless. Our founding father had ‘given up music’ and was ‘writing a novel’. He planned to go to Nicaragua on the coffee-picking brigades and in the meantime was working on a construction site to support himself. The image of him hefting blocks and swinging a pick was vivid. You hoped he wouldn’t attempt it in his hot-pants.
In August, now resigned to remaining a trio, we went into the BBC to record the session. Things didn’t go the way we’d expected. It was an uneasy day, for several reasons. Trez received her finals results that morning and they were good enough to drop a bomb. She’d been offered a scholarship for postgraduate work at NYU, to start in October or November. Having lost Fran so recently, we might now lose Trez. Since Seán was still at the point of not considering himself a full-time member of the band, that would leave me alone in the water.
Peelie wasn’t about, and while it was foolish to have imagined he might be, his absence rather took us aback. Seán was having difficulty, a bad tendonitis in his left hand. Trez was off her game, too loud. We’d agreed that she would take all lead vocals for the day – a sore throat was irking me – and she was more than competent at th
at. But she knew she couldn’t match the singer whose glories had scored us this opportunity. Neither could I. No one could. Christ, even Fran wasn’t as good as Fran some days. There’d be those accidental moments when he’d sing you through the roof. Without him, we felt anodyne and overly slick, like actors impersonating a rock band in a West End musical. As for me, I’d fallen out of love with my usual guitar, a ’72 Rickenbacker that had cost Fran two grand, a beauty with bullet truss rod and three-bolt neckplate, but we weren’t seeing eye to eye. I borrowed an instrument left in Peel’s studio from that morning’s session, a custom-green, quilted-maple Telecaster, but whatever way I amped it the treble was harsh, and I dealt with the problem by persisting too long in trying to solve it when I should have crawled back to my baby and begged forgiveness. I don’t know. It was one of those days that never gets going. We put down three tracks of our own, then ‘Groovin’ With Mr Bloe’ by Cool Heat, Trez doing the harmonica solo on fiddle. The engineer complimented us. We complimented each other. But we knew we’d fallen short and the realisation was crushing. By the time we got back to the flat I was hoping the session would never be broadcast – as indeed it never was. It’s a cold feeling to know you gave only a hundred per cent. That isn’t enough. Not in music.
With the last of Fran’s money, we pressed up 600 copies of a song of his, ‘Glimmertwin Buddy’, with a thing of my own called ‘Ash’ on the backside. It sank like the Titanic only without the attendant publicity, selling 47 copies and receiving no media mention that I know of, except in the photocopied in-house newsletter for employees at Whipsnade Zoo, which pronounced it ‘a smashing achievement by young people’. I’ve long had my suspicions as to who penned that anonymous review.
The Thrill of It All Page 16