Seán opened the door of the studio. Tony limped away. He stood unhappily on the landing for a moment, then Trez followed him out with icy calm. One hand clutching the belt of his baggies and the other clutching his bobble-hat, she swung him once – twice – thrice – then down the stairs he was thrown, with a strange and terrible quietness, culminating in a faint, sad ‘merde’.
Trez returned to her chair and picked up the bass guitar. Seán closed the door and sat down. Somehow, in the fuss, the metronome set itself off.
‘That went well,’ Fran said.
And you won’t believe that over the next nineteen minutes we wrote the first draft of a song many people would love, ‘St Mark’s Place’. But we did. That night, Trez and I went down to the Moon Under Water, and we sat there sipping green tea, and scribbling. She’d write out one line. I’d offer the next. We remained there till three in the morning. She’d give me a lyric. I’d give her one back. It’s maybe the best song that I ever had a hand in and we never got it right at the time.
Over the months, it was redrafted. It was always too long. Eric disliked the arrangement and we didn’t do it live. Through all that remained of our career, we never once played it on stage. But somehow, that song found a life. Included on our debut album in an orchestration we didn’t like, it nevertheless began to get played on radio here and there. A DJ in Ontario, Canada, featured it a lot, as did our old pal, Janice Long, back in London. It’s been covered a few times. But the reason I loved it was private.
To see those two names in the same brackets was something.
(Sarah-Thérèse Sherlock, James Robert Goulding.)
The closest we ever came. That comma.
Fourteen
IN EARLY SUMMER of ’85, we got a helpful write-up in Village Voice and it was syndicated pretty widely around the East Coast and Midwest. Eric had sent us out on the road at the time, and we played seventy gigs in three months. We’d finished recording the album, but he wasn’t content with the mix. In truth, we weren’t either. His thinking was to fish around for the right producer, ‘maybe a European, let me sit with it a while’. In the meantime we should get out of the studio and return to building a base. He felt it wasn’t good for any band to stop playing live. Off we went again.
For me, it was the best tour we’d ever do. The venues were right – 500-seaters, established clubs – and by now we knew the songs in every tiny nuance, so we were able to focus on the playing. Publicity was handled well. Full houses became the norm. Proper sound-checks, professional crew, basic but comfortable hotels. Also, there was an impetus to life on the road. The album was coming. These punters might buy it. We worked hard all that summer, ate sensibly, cut the booze, in part because Trez as an expectant mother was living even more healthily than usual, but also because it was time. Fran rationed himself to a single quiet smoke or two every evening and seemed not exactly happier but grounded and accepting. Amazingly, he took up the habit of jogging. A boy habitually reluctant to arise from his sheets before noon was suddenly up with the linnet. And the tour included the most memorable visual image of my entire career. In Detroit, we were booked to play an outdoor festival, but monsoon-like rain began just before we went on. The field emptied in thirty seconds as punters hurried to their cars, which were parked in tidy ranks in a meadow behind the stage. The promoter insisted the show proceed. Fran suggested we tear down the backdrop and face out towards the car park. After no small debate, this was reluctantly permitted. We played to seven hundred cars, in the teeming downpour. Instead of applauding at the conclusion of every number, touchingly they flashed their headlights.
TREZ
Being pregnant on the road isn’t a bundle of daisies. In one way I didn’t mind. Because it gives you a distraction. But yeah, very tiring. I wouldn’t do it now. Certainly wouldn’t advise it, but you know, I was young. I suppose, to be honest, I saw it as goodbye. See, I’d made up my mind I was quitting the band. Going home to mum. All that. So I guess, have a last bit of adventure before going. And the boys were really supportive, I have to say that. We’d be going through these books of babies’ names on the tour bus. Yeah. A good laugh. Really was. Fran was amazingly fascinated by everything to do with it. Asking me every question, you know, about pregnancy. He was actually very kind. People didn’t see that side of Fran. He knew it was hard, you know, with no partner. The night I told him I’d like him to be godfather . . . he burst into tears . . . I’m welling up now, just thinking about it again . . . Sorry . . . And Rob wrote me the gentlest note before our gig in Seattle. ‘Dear Trez. We all love you. You’ll never be alone. Don’t be scared. You’re the greatest. I mean it.’ What can you do? Yeah, I had a little weep. Because you’re happy about the baby, she’s the greatest thing ever happened. But you’re saying goodbye to a part of your life. And that’s why I went on the tour. Not many musicians retire before their album comes out . . . [Laughs] . . . I did everything the wrong way around.
Major producers were approached for the album but nobody bit. In the end, Fran remixed it himself, with the aid of a good engineer, Jimmy Reilly, who’d worked with Talking Heads. It was good of Eric to allow this, but we’d wasted much time and I felt he was losing interest. Suddenly it was Fall. The record still wasn’t ready. Eric felt we couldn’t release in December because the stores would be stuffed with the big names and ‘all that tinsel would choke us’. He slated it for January. There were other things on our minds. The end of the band in its current incarnation was approaching. The sadness of autumn was sharper that year. Central Park seemed a mournful cathedral.
In late October, eight months pregnant, Trez finished her MA and returned to England. It was the last week the airline would allow her to fly. Eric and Maria drove us to JFK to wish her farewell. Many a tear fell that night. She permitted us the hope that she’d return to us eventually, maybe in a year, if the band still existed, but we knew she was being kind, trying to let us down lightly. She didn’t quite say we’d still be good friends. Perhaps even this was in doubt.
We auditioned new bassists but my heart wasn’t in it. New York is always plentifully supplied with dazzling musicians, but I didn’t want to be dazzled or even impressed. Dispiritedness was unleashing a strange neurosis. I found myself hoping nobody skilled would turn up for a try-out, that every candidate would be a dud. Such was the madness. In the end, we took on the wonderful Stuart King, a laconic, witty Chicagoan and a wizard of the bass, but after a fortnight he had to go, for the undefeatable reason that whatever way you regarded him, he wasn’t Trez.
There was also the difficulty that we were sitting on our hands. Somewhere along the way we had lost the teenager’s useful ability to contentedly do nothing but sit in a room. Without Trez, we became a bit hag-ridden by the idea that we were getting away with it. The songs seemed mediocre. Playing the Moon was little better than busking. And it worried me deeply that we still hadn’t toured enough, a concern Eric could do little to allay. Usually he’d want a band on the road for two years before putting out an album. We all of us knew it. He wouldn’t tell us lies. Eric would reassure you in any way that didn’t involve dishonesty, which was an unusual approach in the music business. But there were other approaches than relentless touring to try. His plan was college radio, local stations, start small. Every college town in North America had a music station whose listenership was discerning, and every station had a rock show on which new material might get played. College radio had openness, wasn’t run by the play-listers. It might work. We’d need luck, whatever happened. ‘I wouldn’t go putting a down-payment on your mansion,’ he said. ‘But maybe it’s a start. Let’s see.’
He and I began to fight a bit. I felt we should put out a single. ‘Usually, sure, but there’s nothing ready to go. A single that tanks could kill us stone dead. Be patient, Rob. Okay? This is worth getting right.’ We’d ended up somewhere, but it wasn’t the destination I’d wanted. It’s a kvetch you see now and again in the artistic type, and in everyone who sleeps odd
hours. There’s a sense you’ve entered the wrong door, found yourself in the dark and learned to call it light because you have to.
You read sometimes that a group fell apart because of ‘musical differences’ or a couple had to separate owing to ‘irreconcilable problems’. With us, I often think it was the other way around. We only got together out of the desire to convince each other of something. I don’t mean to be glib. That’s really how it seemed. The differences were the glue and the grit. Listening to the album – then and even later – was an unhappy experience, at least for me. Fran’s production was tooled and slick, in many ways admirable. But there were moments when it seemed at war with itself. It had chilli from the blues, salsa spice from reggae, a sprinkle of lemongrass and a wine-glass of Guinness, but the whole had been drizzled with a mid-Atlantic nothingness. Any juice we’d ever possessed was squeezed out.
To me, making the record came to feel like an end, not a beginning. Trez was gone. Eric was busy at the label. He was a fair-minded man, but no business person wants to haemorrhage money. I felt he’d print up the album in order to satisfy decency but release us from our contract when we failed to make a mark. Worse, there was the prospect that he might ‘sell us on’, unload us to another label where we’d have to start again. Gentlemanly as he was, he didn’t fear tough decisions. No New Yorker does.
A fire at the Moon closed the place, supposedly for a fortnight, but in the event it never reopened. By December, Seán, Fran and I were no longer living together and we’d pretty much stopped hanging out. I don’t know how you define the break-up of a group. But by certain definitions, that had happened.
I came home for Christmas, played my brother a cassette of the album. He did a touching job of pretending to like it. Since I didn’t like it myself, we had nothing to say. Mum thought it ‘brilliant’, of course. It was good seeing Trez, besotted with the baby, a big-eyed, adorable black-haired girl, Elisabetta. We took her out in the stroller, got ice cream, talked. Trez told me she was happy. I believed her. A small incident comes back to me now, of that Christmas Eve walking Luton. In grey St George’s Square, where Fran and I first busked, a drunk shuffled over and begged the price of a coffee. You could see he half recognised Trez, and he asked ‘Are you someone?’ She replied ‘No, I’m not. I’m no one at all’. The calm joy in her voice as she said those words. Music was over, she told me.
On Boxing Day morning, I awoke from a nightmare. I’ve no words to describe the sensation other than to say what it was: a literally physical sense of impending danger. I’m not superstitious, and I don’t believe in spooks. But I knew with strange certainty that someone I loved was in peril. It was 7 a.m. The house was asleep. Three thousand miles across the Atlantic, as I sank a vodka in Alice’s kitchen, Fran was walking towards death.
There’s a section of Lower Manhattan that looks like an Eastern European city: the vast 13th Street electrical substation, 1970s public housing – and it was Fran’s habit to walk there late at night. He’d make his eventual way to the banks of the East River, where there was a long-abandoned basketball court, vandalised, chained up. Don’t ask me why he liked it. I couldn’t begin to tell you. But sitting in the wrecked bleachers, smoking a joint, looking out at the waterfront lights of Brooklyn in the distance was a thing he often did during our months in the East Village. He’d tell you he found solace in ‘closeness to the ghosts’, that the desolation of that place gave perspective. You didn’t pay him much heed. He always loved ruins. Byron on silence and heroin.
Christmas night, spaced on whiskey and his trouble of old, he tottered woozily along towards his dreamland kingdom of rusted gantries, when fate arose to greet him.
A young woman, he later told me, was being bothered by an ‘auld lecher’, a scrote of perhaps sixty who’d had too much to drink and felt the world owed him a Yuletide grope. Fran intervened on her behalf, as was his nature. He could be a bully and a coward, and his default mode was selfishness. But as is sometimes the case with those who were beaten as children, bullying was something he despised with a white-hot fury, and he’d take any risk in its defeat.
Fran was a tough kid, let no one believe otherwise. I’ve seen the CC footage of what happened that night. He walked up to the man and the girl, swung a fist, dropped back, and then hit the guy again, in the chest. Maybe the second punch was too much, perhaps even the first. A threat might have been enough. I don’t know. A knife, a handgun, was something you saw in New York at the time. He must have had his reasons for going in hard. But soon after the young woman fled, the situation turned worse.
The oldster got a punch in, knocking Fran down, then pulled a bicycle chain from his pocket and got swinging. A lot of damage can be done with a weapon like that, particularly when the victim’s on the ground. Fran took a beating. To think of it appals me. Even now, I don’t know how he managed to clamber to his feet but somehow he did, and the fight went on. He was bleeding, gashes in his face, and had lost several teeth, but they got into it again, all the ugliness – the old guy bit him – when two men who claimed to be off-duty soldiers came on the scene. Like Fran, they were badly drunk.
Assuming the old guy had been attacked by a mugger, an assumption the old groper did much to stoke up, they set upon Fran and kicked him almost senseless before throwing him into the river. He was only rescued when the girl he’d saved, watching from her towerblock window, called her brothers and 911. She was a Nicaraguan called Eneyda Martinez and you could say she saved Fran’s life. But in fact she witnessed the last moments of the sweet boy I knew. For many years afterwards, I could never look at the East River. I felt it was where the spirit of my friend had died, and that something of my own had died there as a result. Foolish. But that’s what I felt.
Sober, you don’t want to spend time in that river. Drunk, stoned, in freezing darkness, losing blood, with four cracked ribs and a punctured lung, your chances are statistically zero. He’d lost consciousness by the time they found him and fished him out, the situation worsening when they sped him over to St Vincent’s. His heart stopped for twenty seconds in the elevator to Intensive Care. They told me later that his eyes never closed.
Eric called me at eight that morning. I’d better get back to New York right now. He wanted to know Fran’s religion; a minister might have to be summoned. Jimmy drove me to Heathrow, chain-smoking, frightened. Somehow, the ghost of my sister was in that car, with the ghost of a boy from Vietnam.
Seán was at the hospital. Fran was out of surgery. They’d shaved his head to get at a scalp wound; his jaw and lower face were bandaged. He was jocular at first, in a weird, intense way, his left foot in one of those modern plaster-cast boots, the rest of him in serious traction. He said he was embarrassed to be seen wearing the paper hospital gown. ‘Don’t you hate the fukken colour? It makes me look sick.’
If there was a moment when things began changing – well, there were a lot of those moments – it was what happened to Fran that night. Seán went to call Trez. Fran and I talked. He asked about Jimmy and Alice. How was Shay getting on? Had I pictures of Trez’s baby? Oh, I didn’t? Silly flunt. Suddenly he started to weep.
I’d seen him weep before, but not like this. I tried to hold his hand but he motioned me away, beckoned for a glass of water, which I got. A minute or two passed and he seemed more collected. And then he said something strange.
He told me he was ‘glad’ about the way the attack had ended, ‘relieved’ the two thugs arrived when they did, ‘thankful’ he’d been thrown in the river. How could anyone be glad? What did he mean? I’ll always remember the words and the chilling calm with which he said them. ‘I’d have slit his throat slowly. I mean it. That rapist. I’d have made him fukken beg before killing him.’
A violence such as this doesn’t come from out of nothing. Fran could be cutting, sarcastic and thoughtless, but I had never heard him express the kind of savagery he felt towards that sexual aggressor. Gates opened in the silence. Fran looked away. There was little need to s
ay more, and he didn’t. Nor did I. But I saw in those words, and in his looking away, that his childhood was even more terrible than I’d known. He was drying his eyes. But I couldn’t stop crying. Not only for love. For my blindness.
They let him out by the end of the first week of January. He recuperated at Eric and Maria’s. He was on sedatives, reading novels, never touching a guitar. He spoke to Maria of returning to college, of giving up music. It was around now that he began talking of going to Vietnam. Eric said he’d arrange it, would accompany him if he wished. He had contacts in the Peace Corps. They’d be able to help. Visas were applied for and inoculations endured, but, as things turned out, neither would be needed. It’s been noted that God has a mischievous sense of humour. Mysterious ways, indeed.
In this murkiest of times, our record was released. Eric titled it Five Flights Up after an Elizabeth Bishop poem Fran liked, and it debuted at 97, climbed quickly to 61. We got airplay we’d never dreamed of. College radio went nuts. Reviews were strong but early sales were sluggish. Then came the Sunday morning in February when we were five-star reviewed in the New York Times. You rarely have a day when you know your life is about to shift gears, but that Sunday was one of those.
STRONG DEBUT IS LYRICAL, SLEEK
. . . Mr Mulvey’s voice is an instrument of remarkable beauty but it also has blowtorch intensity. Add to this the jagged lyricism of a young Irish poet, his unusually structured but highly persuasive songwriting, and the sizzle soon starts to glow. “I mean business,” he sings on Devil It Down, the punk-reggae-tinged track that opens the album, as dynamite opens a safe. “Don’t make no mistake. Start running.”. . .The theme is recapitulated on Flag of Convenience, a slice of neurotic tongue-in-cheek brilliance . . . Banks of shimmering choral guitar meet stabs of pouty brass, while the fiery violin of Sarah-Thérèse Sherlock adds gorgeous cinematic tonalities. Classically trained Ms Sherlock proves adept on slinky bass and is credited as co-author on three of the twelve songs, the catchy Eleven City, Why Can’t You Forgive Me (For Loving You), and the less successful St Mark’s Place. Her brother Seán provides illegally thunderous drumming. Mr Sherlock, a former electrician’s apprentice, knows a thing or two about power. In this glum, benighted era of synthesizer percussion it is wonderful that his playing is defiantly acoustic . . . Five Flights Up is imperfect. That is its greatness. Perfection would be uninteresting to Mr Mulvey and his shipmates, one imagines. This is a flawed, occasionally elusive, sometimes maddening album, the most thrilling debut this reviewer has heard in fifteen years. If you have ever loved pop music, put this newspaper down. Go get this exhilarating record. Now.
The Thrill of It All Page 21