The Thrill of It All

by Joseph O'Connor

  KC: You’re not in touch at all.

  RG: We haven’t been, no.

  KC: When was the last time?

  RG: That we talked? God, I dunno. Years ago now. We were in court at the time. There you go.

  KC: There was a whisper in the press that he might turn up on stage with you guys tonight? I should say to the listeners, you’re gigging this evening in Dublin.

  RG: No, Fran won’t be along. I wouldn’t want to mislead anyone. Anyway he’s playing over in London tonight, at the opening of the Olympics. Which I’m probably not supposed to say. I’m sure it’s a secret.

  KC: That’s amazing, I didn’t know that. He hasn’t gigged in so long?

  RG: No, he hasn’t. There you go. Guess he couldn’t resist the Queen.

  KC: So it’s yourself, Trez and Seán.

  RG: Three bad pennies, that’s it.

  KC: And it’s a family affair too. Your daughter’s dropping in? Molly by name?

  RG: If she makes it over from Glasgow. Which is –

  KC: Because I thought she –

  RG: Yeah she lives in the States with her mum, but her flight got diverted coming over from Kennedy last night. Molly’s a nifty guitarist herself; we do ‘Where’s Me Jumper?’ by the Sultans of Ping as a party piece and we cooked up this plan that we’d do it tonight at the show for the laugh. We’ve been rehearsing on Skype the last few weeks. So everyone say a prayer she finds herself a flight over.

  KC: And there’s some incredible special guests. I’m just looking at the line-up here –

  RG: Yeah, unfortunately we can’t mention names but we can promise some surprises.

  KC: We took the liberty of phoning around to their managements over the last hour or two when we knew you were coming in, and we’re cleared to reveal the names, there’s no problem. If you like?

  RG: Oh that’s . . . thanks. You’re sure?

  KC: All checked out. Fire away.

  RG: Well, we’ve Philip Chevron from the Pogues, Camille O’Sullivan, Bob Geldof. You can imagine how knocked out we feel to have people like that along. Imelda May, Declan O’Rourke, the writer Colum McCann. Brian Byrne is conducting ten musicians from the RTE Concert Orchestra for us too, so that’s –

  KC: A Golden Globe nominee.

  RG: Trez is thrilled to have Brian. Brilliant composer, arranger, pianist. It’s amazing to think someone so talented was into our stuff as a kid. Because you never think anyone is listening when you’re just starting out. He knows more about our stuff than I do.

  KC: It must be wonderful to be making music again with Trez and Seán.

  RG: It’s strange, being honest. Not used to it yet. It’s Trez’s evening, really. She twisted the old thumbscrews. But good, yeah. Great to see them both. They came over, when was it, a fortnight ago, and we’ve been trying to rehearse. Catching up on old times. Like a get-together. Johnny still plays a bit, but Trez not so much. I mean there’s songs we didn’t even remember what key they’re in any more. If we ever knew. [Laughs.]

  KC: Well, give them both our love. And you’re working on a book, Rob?

  RG: How we met, got going, where the bodies are buried, all that. A couple of war stories people won’t have heard before. My daughter’s actually helping me put the whole thing together.

  KC: People know you’ve had your battles down the years with a certain problem. You had dark enough moments.

  RG: Sure did.

  KC: But they’re over.

  RG: Well, nothing’s ever over. You deal with it, I guess. I’m just one of those people who can’t take a drink. One’s too many and ten’s not enough. So you just, you know – accept it.

  KC: Okay, let’s –

  RG: The worst thing, as you’d understand, being a mum yourself. The hardest thing is when you’re a parent – you let people down. Your wife. Your daughter. That shouldn’t have happened. Because there’s a feeling you’re abandoning –

  RG becomes emotional. Seven seconds of silence.

  KC: I can see it’s – take a . . .

  RG: . . . Sorry . . . I don’t –

  KC: There’s water there. Beside you. You okay?

  RG: Yeah. I’m good . . . Sorry, Kathy . . . Funny old day.

  KC: Would you rather . . .?

  RG: No, I’m cool now, honest. Carry on. I’m sound.

  KC: Tell you what, I need to squeeze in a commercial break, so we’ll take that now, back in a sec.

  [The programme goes to break. The transcript resumes.]

  KC: Welcome back, we’re here with Robbie Goulding formerly of that fine band the Ships. Texts and emails coming by the dozen. If I went a bit far, Rob – I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.

  RG: No problem, you’re grand. Just a ghost or two caught me.

  KC: We got you to select a song, maybe one of your own from the Ships, but you’ve chosen something else. Tell us why?

  RG: It’s Joe Brown from the concert in memory of George Harrison. My late mum had a soft spot for George. So I’ll play it for her – Alice Blake, Spanish Point, County Clare and Luton. Little thing called ‘I’ll See You In My Dreams’.

  KC: Can I ask to shake your hand? Thanks, Rob. For everything. God bless you, and the family. Okay? You’re a star.

  RG: Thanks again, Kathy. Great seeing you.

  After a late lunch, which I couldn’t eat, Seán and I taxied down together to the rehearsal studio, a clean, bright cube in a cobbled backstreet behind the O2. Usually it was frequented by dancers, so there were full-length mirrors on the walls.

  A fortnight of basing ourselves there had grubbied the place up a bit. Pizza boxes, coils of flexes, flight cases, empty cans, jars of jelly beans Seán bought in the duty-free at LAX, mic stands, amp cabinets, booms. We’d a notion of using a double bass on ‘Wildflowers’, so we’d hired one in. It was leaning on its side, near the piano stool in the corner, dustsheet over its shoulders. A gracious old lady in her lovely mantilla, forgiving the noisy invaders.

  Seán sat down at the kit, which was smaller than his own, and started rolling very gently on the snare. It pleased me to see him playing. He closed his eyes and brushed. I watched for a while. Light came into the room.

  He nodded for me to get my guitar, but I didn’t feel up to the guitar right then. Instead I went to the piano, an instrument I hadn’t touched in years, and started into an old progression I’d sometimes used back in the day, D-major, G, E-minor, A-7th, then repeat the G and the A and bring it slowly on home, a gorgeous, simple sequence used in the Welsh chapel song ‘All Through the Night’. There’s a reason those chapel tunes last.

  I sat at the piano and played old, sweet chords and closed my eyes for a while. I found myself on Denmark Street near London’s Soho, a stretch long haunted by songwriters. Past a drinking den, a piano showroom, the 12 Bar Club, then a window full of saxophones – it always raises the heart – into an alley so narrow I could touch both walls simultaneously, before descending a rickety staircase, past a photographer’s premises, into a basement that reeks of patchouli and mothballs. Through the curtain is a second-hand musical instruments shop called Heavyweight Sounds. That’s where the chords chose to bring me.

  It was good seeing it again. Shay was at the counter. And then I saw Trez was there, too. Talking about the mandolins and the beautiful guitars. Maple, rosewood, pau ferro, ebony. She took a Dobro from the shelf, shredded a sexy little blues lick, like something from Bonnie Raitt or Tony Joe White. I don’t deceive or try to mystify when I tell you I heard that solo, that I glimpsed the wild smile it caused Shay. If you’re a lover of music, you’ll know what I mean. People call it a way of remembering, but that doesn’t come close. It’s a ticket to ride right back.

  Dangerous, that drug. To be handled with care. But sometimes you open old doors.

  Molly walked into my head, her inscrutable grey eyes. A fight we once had in the café beneath St Martin-in-the-Fields, the church near Trafalgar Square. The Christmas she turned fifteen. A boy back at home. She was grow
n and she missed him, there was trouble at school. Up she came from the music, resentment smouldering from the cigarette she insisted on smoking despite my asking her not to, not here. I told her I was in a band as a kid, that she mustn’t be too serious with this boy. Love can wait. Have friends. They’re a family. Always around when you need them.

  – Dad, I had a fucking family. Before you fucked it all up.

  Hurtling through the crowds on the Charing Cross Road. Christmastime in London. She was gone. A cop outside the Hippodrome. Drunks in Leicester Square. Some fool recognised me from the old days and wanted a photograph. Onward, scared, through boys masked as hags, past the buskers of Chinatown, the peepshows of Soho, past the rundown guitar stores I’d shown to my child, and now here she was, in Denmark Street, alone, weeping in her fingerless mittens. And we didn’t say a word but clung in the drizzle as the songwriters’ ghosts walked by.

  There’s a street performer works Oxford Street, blowing car-sized bubbles. Molly used to find them entrancing. She’d follow them down the pavement, hypnotised, hands out. ‘They’re songs,’ she once told me. And I knew what she meant. A song wraps you up, has a membrane you can see through, and it changes the view and the light. I went into A-minor, looked out at the storm clouds. Night we supported Dylan. Mad. Entirely mad. But a tune has a way of collapsing time, the way you feel when you open an old schoolbook found in an attic and inhale the lost rain of its pages. His face in a mirror backstage at the Carlton Theatre, Los Angeles, five o’clock shadow, the hooded, owlish eyes, and a rasped ‘How you minstrel boys doin’?’ Fran shaking his hand. Trez touching his guitar. Like a dream you didn’t know you were having. He murmurs of Sonny Terry, Bukka White, Mama Thornton. He’s asking if you know the Louvain Brothers’ ‘Satan is Real’, if you ever bin to Clarksdale, Mississippi. Musk arising from his clothes. The glitter of his diamond earring. Can’t you see him? I could. He walked out of a song, like the kiss of a long-gone lover. Watching from the wings as he stood alone in the spotlight for his encore, the rage in his howl and the audience howling back. His limo the size of a bus outside the stage door in the rainstorm, steam rising from the purring black hood. Trez weeping. We met him. It couldn’t have happened. Seán, strong arm around her shoulder. And the strangest thing – in the memory, Molly is there too, although she wasn’t yet born. Impossible.

  We kept at the tune. Steady, four-four, an occasional little fill, nothing tricksy. Someone came in and went out, a roadie I guess. I didn’t even look. Just played. A black Baby Grand, scratched and beaten, pedals bust, but sinking fingers into its keys sent a murmur of yes right through you, the way some old pianos will. Play the saddest blues ever written on an instrument like that, the audience will be uplifted all the same. ‘Pianos remember everything,’ Trez used to say. Somewhere in the recollection of ebony and teak, there’s a whole lotta shakin’ goin on.

  Five minutes? Ten? Couldn’t tell you. Don’t know. That’s the way it can go, playing music. Everything opens and everything closes and the things that don’t matter flow away. I heard her before I saw her. A stream of violin like glittered smoke. She was standing there, by the door, fiddle beneath her chin.

  Sunglasses. Raincoat. Gauloise in mouth. She’s forty-nine this Christmas, looks seventeen when she plays. Trilby with a feather, bangles, many rings, dirty black docs, Pussy Riot T-shirt. Draws her bow across the strings, walks across to her brother, plucks a pizzicato that makes you want to shout at the roof for sheer joy, murmurs ‘yeah’, then shoots you a wink. She’s up on her tiptoes as she hits the high A, like a superhero lifting off in a story.

  Coaxes you towards something turns out to be Tom Waits’s ‘Downtown Train’ and you go into that song for a while. It’s like walking the aisles of a glorious old church, looking at its windows, like being stained glass. Sarah Sherlock is playing violin.

  TREZ

  . . . Sorry . . . I was lost a second . . . Thinking of a song . . . What did you ask me again? . . . I’m fine, just . . . you know . . . He comes into my mind . . . Tom Waits’s ‘Downtown Train’ . . . Strange when that happens . . . I’ll be grand.

  . . . No I’d have got to the rehearsal room about two-thirty or three. I won’t lie, Rob looked pretty terrible that day. Drained. Bleached out. He’d lost a bit of weight. You’d never in your life hear a word of self-pity from Rob, he’d be keeping up this front of bad jokes and all the rest, but we knew he hadn’t been sleeping. His dad was up the walls about him. It was a thing about Rob that he joked when he was anxious. He wouldn’t want you to think he was down, didn’t want to go there at all. He’d have felt a responsibility to how you felt yourself. He didn’t realise you were able to see through the act. He was a hard enough guy to talk to in any authentic way. And I guess I felt bad because the gig was my idea.

  There was a lot of hassle going on. He was expecting Molly from New York but there’d been a problem with the flight. He was kind of invested in her being there, but she hadn’t arrived by three o’clock. It was nobody’s fault, the plane got delayed, and I guess . . . how to put it . . . I mean, Rob would never guilt-trip anyone, least of all Molly . . . But he was really looking forward to doing a number with her as an encore. I kind of knew it was the only reason he wanted to play the show. And it looked like that wouldn’t be happening.

  It was weird – I had the feeling he was going to do a runner. I’d say it was fifty–fifty. On the edge.

  He kept logging on to the box office to check the seating plan . . . as though he was hoping the place would be empty and we’d have to cancel. I don’t know why I felt it but I was certain he’d split. Say nothing, just go. You’re in a band with someone all those years, you get to know him pretty well. Even his silences. And that was the feeling I had.

  Yeah, we jammed for a while in the rehearsal space, just John-John, Rob and me. And it was beautiful seeing him play. Really good. Because obviously we’d been fairly rusty over the fortnight rehearsing. People tell you it’s like riding a bicycle, you never forget – but that’s rubbish, you actually do. John-John came up with the idea that we’d play our set with a couple of good young musicians, you know, like a backstop, to keep us covered. He’d asked around and got Darrel Higham, Imelda May’s guitarist, and Tanya O’Callaghan on bass and then Aoife Ní Bhriain on fiddles, frighteningly talented kids, best I ever heard. The standard’s so high now. Not like the old days. But Robbie wouldn’t agree. Didn’t want to ‘cheat’, so he said. But actually I think it was his way of making the gig harder. It was me, him and John-John, or nothing. That upped the bar big-time. And he knew what he was doing. Trying to make it impossible for himself.

  He did a couple of things on the piano, then picked up my guitar. One of those old National Steels, a big, tough brute from the 1940s. I bought it years ago in Austin, never could get with it. You’d want the hands of a murderer to play it. Scrapper Blackwell used to play one. But an amazing thing about Rob, for such a gentle guy, he could master a National Steel. Fantastic hands. So we messed about like that for twenty minutes, and then John-John got out the set-list. We talked it over a while, moved a few numbers around. We started rehearsing ‘Wildflowers’. Yeah. You know that song? I’d written new lyrics. ‘Wildflowers 2012.’ Let’s see if I have it. It’s got a little private meaning between Robbie and me. Little joke between mates. Gimme a tick. I wrote it in Paris, when I went over to see him that time. Scribbled it out on a menu and stuck it in his pocket so he’d find it when he went back to the hotel. We had a lovely day together, catching up, talking family. Flirting a bit. Like you’d do with an old mate. There’s a way of reading the lyric-sheet that only Rob would understand. Little leg-pull hidden in there.

  [Now singing.]

  Feelin so lovely.

  Extremely beguiled

  Callin your phone

  Kissin numbers you dialled

  Off in the night

  Folks are driving their cars

  Fantasies warming

  Round flickery stars

&
nbsp; O babe see I missed ya

  But babe you ain’t you

  Encore, une fois?

  Ring me soon.

  Till you do.

  And I played electric bass. Just with Seán on the tom. Bluesy, you know? Seemed to work. You can see Robbie’s into it. Focused. Playing good. The whole fortnight we’re rehearsing, his mind’s somewhere else. But now, here he comes. Your fingers are crossed. It’s like watching a ship slowly pulling up towards the quay. You’re saying ‘Come on, babe. Throw me the rope. I’ll catch. But you gotta throw.’

  The feeling in the room, with me, Seán and Rob – it’s nice. You know? It’s cool. He’s settling, you can see it. Head in the game. Talking harmonies and bridges. Maybe we’ll do ‘Island’. The anxiety’s going. He looks like a kid.

  Then the Fran thing happens.

  And Vesuvius.

  It’s all kicked off. Like you knew it always would.

  We should have talked about it more. In hindsight. You know?

  Do you mind if we stop a few minutes?

  MOLLY

  Yeah, my flight landed in Dublin and I called Dad from the plane. You can tell he’s in a mood. Bad moment.

  Something’s going on. He doesn’t want to say. But you know from his voice. Can’t hide it. I’m, ‘Dad, what’s up? Spit it out. What’s the matter?’ I hear Seán in the background and he’s shouting at someone. My cell cuts dead. Weak signal.

  I’m walking down to Customs when Dad calls me back. Out of his mind with anger.

  He’s in the rehearsal room with Trez and Seán when this courier company calls. They’ve a delivery. Urgent. Can he tell them where he’s at? So he gives them the address and thirty minutes later they show up. Dad’s one of those Irish guys who takes a long time to tell you a story? You know, doing all the voices? Drives me nuts.

  This oblong cardboard box. Maybe six feet long? A packing case, you know. And he opens it. Inside, packed in Styrofoam shells and all swathed up in bubble-wrap, there’s his ’55 Strat . . . The one he got in Umanov’s all those years ago. First guitar he ever bought. Beautiful thing. And this envelope taped to the neck. From Fran.