The Thrill of It All

by Joseph O'Connor

  It was at this point that the lobster-faced old fraud called Fate took a hand. The Karma Police were at work. Trez got a call from Robert Elms, a journalist she knew. He told us, in some amazement, that the peerless Philip Chevron, leading light of the Radiators, had heard our cassette and was interested in working with us. I was convinced this was a piss-take, probably got up by Fran, but it turned out to be the unbelievable truth. To us, Philip Chevron was God’s representative on Earth, the greatest thing to happen to popular music since Cromwell outlawed Morris Dancing. He came to our flat and seated himself on our bean-bag. When he went, I remained awake to the dawn. He left a couple of albums he wanted us to listen to, including a spellbinding thing called This is Madness by the Last Poets, but his presence shot out my lights. The man who wrote ‘Kitty Ricketts’ stood in our kitchen. I handed him a cup of tea. And a biscuit.

  We had nothing to offer except our continued adoration, but we agreed, with gulping gratitude and no small disbelief, that we’d spend a couple of days in the studio together when next he was in London. It was in Greenwich, that studio, and it cost 900 quid plus VAT for eight hours – the sum was paid by Philip, peace ever be upon him. On the day, I was badly hungover and also suffering from bronchitis, for which I downed a veritable smorgasbord of medicines, not all of them legal or wise. So I’m unable to tell you much of The Great One at work. I seem to remember a conversation about possibly Marvin Gaye? And a checker-board shirt Mr Chevron was wearing? We recorded four songs: two efforts of my own, then a strong thing by Fran called ‘Dreaming in Red’ before making a further stab at the Rats’ number ‘Living in an Island’, reggaefying it a bit more than we’d done on the cassette and sticking in barking guitar like the Kinks. I thought we’d made a hames of it, but the Chevvy mixed it beautifully. And the fact that he liked it pleased us. You can be pleased by realisation that you’ve not been a gobshite. You turn the accident into a decision.

  I spent the rest of that week in bed, buzzed on cough syrup, downing strong, sweet tea, the latter a favourite curative of Trez for any of life’s woes. To my bronchitis, worsened by smoking, was added a double-ear infection. I had never known physical pain so crippling. The twins conversed frequently about the session and the pleasure it gave them, playing me cuts we’d apparently made, which I couldn’t recall. Chevron phoned at some point, to say an independent label he knew, Johnny Too-Bad Records, wanted to sign us immediately and release ‘Living’. The infection now entered my lungs and I got double pneumonia, with shaking chills, chattering teeth and a fever of 102, in the end causing my admittance to hospital for five days. I celebrated my induction into contractual rock and roll by having Trez, Seán and the white Rasta from Johnny Too-Bad toast me with a bottle of Asti Spumante they’d bought in a garage on the Bayswater Road, while I sweated out the last of my illness. I wish I could remember more.

  Things started speeding up. ‘Living’ came out on a Tuesday, was played by Janice Long on her Radio 1 programme every night that week, and the phone we had in the flat only because British Telecom hadn’t got around to disconnecting it started ringing like Quasimodo’s bells. We entered the chart at 98, between Alphaville’s ‘Big in Japan’ and Depeche Mode’s ‘Master and Servant’, both of which were on the way down. Somewhere folded among my books I still have the three-line review from Melody Maker: ‘Luton’s vaunted Ships in the Night blend a wicked melody with the chilli-hot skank of the Caribbean. It doesn’t quite work, yet it actually does. Sting, be afraid. They’re coming for you, rudeboy.’

  More journalists called. U2’s management got in touch to offer us five support dates in the north of England. Larry Gogan on RTE Radio interviewed Trez. The following week we were at 87, a position that disappointed me a little. Having spent many hours neurotically disliking our version of the song, hearing every fault and foible, every misconstrued bit of instrumentation that even Chevron’s skill couldn’t conceal, I’d convinced myself that the public, for whatever unfathomable reason, would be in the mood to buy it. It’s one of the most maddening hurts of the artistic life, that the outcome you’d have been prepared to hail as a triumph seven days ago is now the slap in the face of your hopes. We wrote appreciatively to Janice Long. She played us again. The new chart was released on the Sunday afternoon and we were floating at 87 once more. Around us were Feargal Sharkey’s ‘Listen to Your Father’ and Lionel Richie’s ‘Penny Lover’. It was obvious that both were heading one way. Elvis Presley was at 72, a club remix of ‘Suspicious Minds’. I will always be a loyal and loving subject of the King, but to have a person who is actually dead be doing better than you in the charts is not without emotional complication.

  Astoundingly, giving no notice, Fran came back. Trez and I returned from the gym on a rainy Monday morning to find him stood outside the flat with a suitcase. ‘I had to get out. Couldn’t stand the stupidity any longer.’ He looked fantastic, bright of eye, was clearly off the gear. On Janice Long’s show that Tuesday night, he appeared as special guest. He was witty, mercurial, flirty and elusive. ‘Would you say you’re battling demons?’ Janice gamely asked. ‘“Battling”, no. Though it’s such a gorgeous word. Perhaps lightly shooing them away with a fan.’ The next day, we got a call from BBC 1. I thought my heart would burst.

  If you’re a music-lover of my era, Top of the Pops was your childhood salvation. It’s hard to get across just how little popular music featured on the telly in the 1970s. The idea of round-the-clock videos, or downloadable albums, was the stuff of science fiction. Without TOTP, you starved. You’d anticipate with religious yearning its arrival on the screen in your living room. Thursday was the night on which it was broadcast in those years, and you dreamed of that arrival, organised your life around its approach, endured the purgatory of Monday, the agony of Tuesday, the asphyxiated and soul-murdering midlands of Wednesday, for the glitterballed, hip-wiggling Newfoundland. The opening theme’s reenactment of Led Zeppelin’s pile-driver ‘Whole Lotta Love’ riff meant your teachers were wrong about everything they’d ever believed. Your pimply little existence was not a prison of loneliness but a passport to a world of tight codpieces. Alice Cooper might materialise, strangling an anaconda with his thighs. Strange boys dressed as ladies would pout in thick slap. Pan’s People would butt-shake and groove. Top of the Pops was where you smouldered to be. To have someone from their office speak to me over the telephone in our little flat of shadows – impossible, wonderful life! They were introducing a new segment, ‘the breakout’ section, in which a record in the lower realms of the charts would be featured. Perhaps we might be interested in appearing this week? I guess you’d call it English understatement.

  FROM FRAN’S FINAL INTERVIEW

  For me, it was music. Not even the music itself. Because a lot of it, you know, in the mid seventies, it was shite. But looking at Top of the Pops you got glimpses of yourself. That’s how I’d put it. Like a mirror. There’s a black guy in Showaddywaddy playing the drums. Romeo Challenger from Antigua. And that’s his real name. And you felt, okay, they ain’t the New York Dolls. But here’s a black man who lives in Leicester playing the drums. And he’s nobody’s minstrel. You know? Errol Brown from Hot Chocolate, a Jamaican-born frontman and he’s having these massive hits. Because you never saw a Caribbean person on English telly back then. Totally unreal, the portrayal of England. And then the gender thing, too, it was like every band had a guy who came on like a girl. Mud. Slade. Sparks, Sweet. Playful. You know? They smuggled it in. So, to me Top of the Pops was a political show. You watched it to be reminded you weren’t alone. That’s why there’s music. Right there.

  I will never forget the day of the recording. The BBC sent a car, and we traversed the couple of miles across slate-grey west London feeling godly and excited and terrified. Arriving at Television Centre in White City, I felt I might weep. To the bemusement of the security guards, Fran solemnly knelt pope-style and kissed the very steps on which Bowie and Bolan had walked. Young women with clipboards were waiting for us. (
Clipboards! For us!) We were shown into dressing rooms that had our names on the doors, and fruit bowls and bottles of beer. Would we care to take a shower? Had we names for the guest list? If the end of the world had been announced for later that afternoon, I wouldn’t have minded too much.

  Ian Dury was on the show that day. Should I write that out again? IAN DURY came in to say hello, joshed around, uttered kindnesses, signed autographs, wished us luck, went away. The reggae band UB40 conversed with us about Delroy Wilson. Status Quo let us borrow their anti-dandruff shampoo. (‘You washed your hair in Francis Rossi’s Head-n-Shoulders?’ my brother later gasped. ‘You jammy little undeserving BASTARD.’) At two o’clock we were led out to take a look at the studio, a room far smaller and somehow lower than you’d long envisioned, with cameramen and coolsters with walkie-talkies hurrying smoothly about the floor and lining up shots and fades. ‘You’re the Ships?’ a young woman asked. I could only nod that we were, following her pointed finger up the steps she was indicating and on to a small square stage. Where would we like to stand? Would Fran be moving around? (Er, yes.) What colours would we be wearing, had we questions? And it was Trez, of all people, who dashed the cold water. You’ll have heard it said many times that at the last minute we refused to mime. To this day, people still congratulate me for the courage of our stance. But that isn’t in fact what happened.

  Trez was not in the studio, being at that moment in Aldergrove Airport, Belfast. A seminar at Queen’s University had brought her to that city for a couple of days. We’d agreed she would taxi directly from Heathrow to the BBC. We paced. We worried. Then the message arrived. The most reliable and sensible person on the face of God’s earth had managed to miss the flight.

  Seán advised calm, as was his wont. All was not lost. She was coming, he said. Mustn’t panic. We suggested to the BBC that we wait for her, and play live. The Assistant Director flipped into kindliness mode. Top of the Pops wasn’t a live show.

  The air seemed slowly to drain from my head. I felt as though I was leaking sand. It was conceded that from time to time a Premier League band might be invited to play live. The Style Council, perhaps. Duran Duran. But this wasn’t the show’s normal practice, as everyone knew. It was expensive and time-consuming to get something like that set up. To be honest, it wasn’t even what the viewers wanted. Your Top of the Pops audience was interested in seeing a band on the screen. They wanted the sound to be perfect, the way it was on the record, and obviously you couldn’t guarantee perfection if you shot the performance live, particularly when the group were newcomers. In that case, Fran asked, could we be shot as a trio? The producer was summoned to the floor.

  Danny Saint-John or maybe Jonty Saint-Dan, denim of jacket, leather of filofax, with the goatee, perm and blow-dried suavity of a person who has been on many strategic breakout sessions. He looked like the bearded man in The Joy of Sex but a little less joyous and a little less sexual, lightly coloured in by tan crayon. You could see he was busy but he could not have been more amiable. What seemed to be the pwoblem, he pleasantly enquired, shaking our hands and clapping our shoulders and generally getting down with the kids. He spoke like a comedian impersonating an Etonian Classics Professor cum Spitfire pilot, even though he was only about thirty. ‘Hmm,’ he kept saying, as Seán and I went through our difficulty. ‘Quite. How unfawtunate. But time is wawther shawt.’ By now, Fran was speechless, a rare enough thing. He stood there in the full-length ruched Zandra Rhodes evening gown he’d rented specially for the occasion, reaching down from time to time to cup his balls through the silk. Dan nodded a lot and sucked the arm of his spectacles. Quite. Quite. One understood how we felt. But we couldn’t perfawm as a twio.

  ‘We can, Dan! We can! Dan, we can! Can’t we, Dan?’ Pleading like seagulls for the scraps from a trawler, we followed as he began walking away. We didn’t actually say, ‘We’re desperate, Dan.’ But I think he must have known all the same.

  ‘Musicians’ Union wules,’ Dan pointed out sadly. ‘There’s a cellist on the wecord, so we need one on the stage.’

  ‘But we haven’t got a cellist,’ I said. Because we hadn’t.

  ‘In that case,’ Dan said, ‘Yaw fucked.’

  Out we were cast, encouraged by Security. Alison Moyet got our slot, a woman with a powerful and truly exquisite voice but I can never hear it without screaming in self-hatred. Her appropriately named single ‘All Cried Out’ went to number 8 the following week, our record label dropped us, Fran got hepatitis. Drunk on seven pints of panic, we made the idiotic mistake of covering up Trez’s accidental non-appearance by claiming in an interview for the London Evening Standard that we’d ‘refused to mime on principle’. Jimmy once told me that a squid will gnaw off its own limbs if bored. I could gnaw off my own with shame.

  Over the course of the subsequent month it was made known to us by the very winds of the night that no tentacle of the British music industry would ever touch us again. We were the imbeciles who had blown an appearance on Top of the Pops by declining to move our mouths to a beat. Who did we think we were? Bruce sodding Springsteen? Lighting would not strike twice.

  Frantic, we put out an EP ourselves. Talking in Bed did the decent thing by dying. I feel it’s important to state that throughout these days of guilt and horror, the person showing greatest gentleness to Trez was Fran. If I raged and accused, he would insist on my silence. When I fought with her, he demanded I stop. Her own brother spewed torrents of ridicule and hurt. Fran never did. He stood loyal.

  Freud says there are no accidents. Perhaps he’s correct.

  Sans Fran who was still recuperating, we did the five shows opening for U2, but they were by no means enjoyable occasions. Providing music to which an audience is finding seats isn’t easy. I can’t blame them. They were there to see a group fast becoming the biggest in the world, not a troupe of baboons that had wrecked their own chances. Also, there was a ghost on the road.

  Trez told us she was accepting the NYU scholarship. We could find another cellist; London had many. Pointing out that she’d always been straight with us about study coming first – well, somehow that made things worse. I begged her not to go. She said she was going. Immediately following our last show with U2, we drove all night down the motorway from Birmingham to Heathrow. It took us seven hours because something was wrong with the car. We breakfasted sullenly. Everything was broken. Trez became the only person in history to run away from the circus and join school. Right to the moment when she walked through the gates, I was convinced she’d change her mind. She didn’t.

  My diary goes blank. I was drinking like a fiend. But I can tell you that ten days after our cellist’s departure, Seán, Fran and I locked up the flat that was my first adult home and took an Air India flight to Newark. We each of us went as a mail courier, which meant our flights cost almost nothing, but you could take no luggage at all, except for one bottle of water. So we arrived at Trez’s student accommodation without even our guitars, malodorous, unshaven and hungry. ‘We missed you,’ we happily said. Imagine her surprise and delight.

  ‘At least you’re out of London,’ Jimmy told me down the phone. ‘New York is like Luton. Just bigger.’

  Twelve

  TREZ HAD A room in an NYU block, but it was the size of a monk’s cell, with a narrow single bed, a rudimentary desk, and a cupboard of meagre capacity. Her dresses were hangered on a pole that was bracketed to the ceiling, and her other clothes were folded into piles, giving the room something of the ambience of a very small laundry, perhaps in a story for children. One flapped one’s way in, through the skirts and the shirts. One moved a shoebox of pants to sit down. On the bed lay her cello, as though recovering from the crossing, unimpressed by the colonials’ ways. The books Trez was already amassing were stacked in turrets about the floor, increasing her knowledge while decreasing the space in which scholarly talk might be had. Overnight guests were not permitted by the authorities, and if a Nelsonian eye was sometimes turned on the realities of student l
ife, that wasn’t a room in which four adult humans could live without someone being obliged to notice. Seán had enough cash to get bunks for the three of us in an all-male hostel near the Bowery. There, we resided a week. When the readies ran out, we had no other option than to spend a night or two al fresco. I couldn’t call it ‘sleeping rough’ because I never once slept. It was more ‘sitting rough until dawn’. Like characters from Henry James, we had an address in Washington Square Park. In our case, third bush near the syringe-pile.

  November ’84 in New York saw relatively mild weather. Still, the outdoor life can be unnerving. Fran seemed unfazed by nights beneath the stars but Seán and I were uneasy, knowing little of the city except that its nocturnal armies were worth being afraid of. We owned nothing of any value, yet the night-people couldn’t be expected to know this. Some of them were gentle enough, but many truly frightening. We saw that we’d need to do something. So we did.

  Trez introduced us to a person she had met in an East Village bar. He looked like a man who had once been overweight but was now almost skeletally thin. Saggy, wet-eyed, drug-fucked, loose, like one of those celebrities you see in the tabloids now and again whose fat has been sucked out by machine. His name need not concern us. He was a gentleman of the streets. Agreeable, philosophical, an artist of sorts – is there anyone in the East Village who is not an artist of sorts? – he understood we had a problem but we were not to despair. A solution might be found if we could see our way clear to helping out an old soldier with a buck. ‘May ye die in Ireland,’ he added softly, ‘as Yeats once said.’ I’m fairly certain that was Bing Crosby but I didn’t press the point. We gave him ten dollars. He gave us an address.