The Thrill of It All

by Joseph O'Connor

  Down on

  Saint

  Mark’s

  Place

  And there’s midnight in the smile

  Of the poets in the shadows by the park.

  Ghetto Juliets go roamin with the Romeos from Queens

  Making out beneath the doorways in the dark.

  And the ghost of Johnny Thunders drifts from 8th Street to the porch

  Of the shuttered Turkish bathhouse round the corner.

  And he’s starin’ at the ruins of what was once St Bridget’s church.

  He was born in New York City, feels a foreigner.

  For it’s Christmastime is blowin down on Avenue B and Fourth,

  All the fire escapes are draped in fairy light.

  It’s the worst time of the year to be alone, a poorboy thinks,

  On a carousel of hurt and thirsty night.

  Menorahs in the windows on Elizabeth and Prince,

  For it’s Hanukkah from Harlem to the Bronx.

  There’s a twelve-branch candelabrum done in neon on Times Square

  Where a saxophone deliriously honks.

  Down on Saint

  Mark’s Place

  There’s a crooked aspen tree

  By a clam bar only closes in December.

  For the owner, so they whisper,

  Goes to Cuba for New Year’s.

  There’s a love affair he can’t bear to remember.

  And a tumbleweed of tinsel blows through Tompkins in the snow

  Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye are smokin’ schemes.

  Don’t go.

  Don’t go.

  Don’t go.

  Don’t go.

  I see you in the snowdrift of my dreams, my love.

  I see you in the snowdrift of my dreams.

  And just as they finish singing, I’ve looked out the window. We’re up top of Vicar Street, I can see everything clear as day. And the things I can’t see, I’m imagining.

  Liffey in the distance, the city, the bridges. Tourist boat pulling down the river in this beautiful sunshine. I’m giving a squinnie. Just settling the head.

  And right at that moment, I’ve looked down at the street. You know what I seen?

  People.

  They’re crossing from the car park. Dozens, then more. Parents with kids, couples, gangs of mates. Trezzie’s come over. Then Rob. Then the Prof.

  No one says nothing.

  The billies be coming.

  I’m looking at them people. Gonna give ’em the best I got. You’re with me, you’re with me. You ain’t, then you ain’t.

  I’ve an idea what’s gonna happen. And I’m gutted for Trez. Meant a lot to her, the show, all three of us together – but there’s punters downstairs and I can’t live someone else’s life. But I’m fucked if I won’t live my own.

  I’m South-London Irish. Never back down. Make it tough as you want, I’m London. Play the gig every time. End of story. I’m the people tunnelled the Tube, mate. You got nothing to scare me. We fucking scared Dickens. We’re a nightmare.

  Only one thing I ever learned and I learned it from music. Own the show. Or the show owns you.

  You ain’t up to the fight? So, toddle on home.

  M’say boom shacka lacka. Let’s dancehall.

  The fizz starts to boil in you. Waiting around makes it worse. You pace, drink water, tune your instrument again, gape at your watch, go out to the bathroom, run your mind over the lyrics, hum them at the mirror, and wonder if the cyclone roiling slowly through your body is going to cripple what’s left of your mojo. In the old days, the fizz could literally make me throw up. That night, in Dublin, it was impish and mean. I was shaking like a foal with the staggers.

  Camille did ‘The Ship Song’ and ‘Sugar in My Bowl’. Geldof did ‘Joey’s on the Street Again’ with a low, cutting menace, like an old bluesman you don’t want to mess with. Philip Chevron did ‘Faithful Departed’ and ‘Thousands Are Sailing’. By now I was getting the fizz like Samson got a haircut. There’s a point up to which you can use it as emotional fuel. If you manage to throw yourself over it, you can ride it Harleywise into a gig and keep rolling. But the kickstart I needed wasn’t there.

  I stood in the backstage, looking out at the crowd, or the darkness where the crowd must be. Every time they roared, I heard a 747 lifting off. My shirt was so drenched I had to change it. Chevron finished his turn. They howled. Strobes raged. Declan O’Rourke and the Imelda May Band were up next, but I couldn’t stay where I was. Too much. I went up to the roof alone and lit the only j I had. Maybe it would help. Maybe not.

  Wicklow’s mountains in the distance. The day’s last light. A plane crossing sky. Many seagulls. My phone chirped a couple of times – Jimmy down in the car park having lost his ticket, Michelle over in Montauk wishing me luck. Now and again a thunder-roll of applause came rumbling up through the floors below. I was trying to put together what to say to Seán and Trez. Twenty minutes to go. Fifteen. Twelve. Suddenly Seán was beside me.

  ‘There’s some flunts want to see you downstairs. Nine hundred musical illiterates. Will I tell ’em you ain’t available?’

  I said nothing.

  He took the j from me and sucked it. Gazed across at the rooftops.

  ‘Camille was pukkah.’

  ‘Brill.’

  ‘Loved Geldof.’

  ‘Epic.’

  ‘Chevron was mint.’

  ‘The best.’

  ‘Rob, I know what you’re gonna tell me. Don’t beat yourself up. I’ve a session guy ready. We’re covered.’

  ‘Where’s Trez?’

  ‘Having a blow-dry. Says it calms her down.’

  ‘A blow-dry?’

  ‘Yeah. You want one yourself?’

  ‘I don’t have a lot worth drying.’

  ‘Know what I always say? When I feel a bit fizzy?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Drumming ain’t nothing but dancing sitting down.’

  ‘I’m not up to it, Seán.’

  ‘Understood.’ He nodded. ‘Can’t, then you can’t. Ask you one fave?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Split. Don’t stick around. I’ll say it to Trez.’

  ‘Listen. I’m not up to it. So I’ll need you to cover.’

  ‘. . . How so?’

  ‘Get the Prof-guy to sink me as low as he can in the mix. Drop ‘Wildflowers’ and ‘Ash’. I don’t want to sing. Thirty-minute set, we bugger off out. One encore with Molly. And home. That’s my best.’

  He pondered. ‘Okay. Was sure you was off.’

  ‘I should be,’ I said.

  ‘So what’s stopping you?’

  ‘I don’t want to let Trez down on the night of her gig. Get through the sodding thing, then it’s over.’

  ‘. . . Do what?’

  ‘I know it means a lot to her. Playing this gig.’

  ‘Trez don’t need no gig, Rob. Don’t be soft. She’s Trez.’

  ‘Then why are we here?’

  ‘Ain’t it obvious?’

  ‘No.’

  It’s possible he turned away from me, but I don’t remember that. What I remember is the words. I’ll never forget them.

  ‘For you . . . That’s the reason . . . She wanted to give you back music.’

  By the time I was able to look at him again, my face was covered with tears.

  ‘People love you, mate,’ he said. ‘Honoured to be here. I say we go down and blow the doors off. Give ’em the goods. Anyone don’t like it, there’s a night bus.’

  Backstage, Trez was waiting in a black and red Von Fürstenberg, tuning up her Fender P bass. I tried talking, but she wouldn’t have it, and I was glad because I couldn’t speak. ‘Sex-bomb,’ she told me, dusting off my shoulders and fixing my collar upright. ‘Get your Strummer on, baby. And pout.’ One of the videographer’s seven screens was showing the opening ceremony of the Olympics in London. Fran and his band weren’t announced but were suddenly playing. He looked trim, like a middleweight, hair
dyed black. His musicians were all women, half my age, if that. Alto sax, tubular bells, drummer, bassist and DJ. Nobody sang, which surprised me. He moved around the stage like someone who didn’t wish to be seen, often turning his back or lowering his head. The piece was strange and beautiful, full of arabesques and flamenco samples. He was wearing black jeans, black mandarin jacket, dark glasses: a man who wants to disappear while you watch. A roadie handed me a can of Coke and helped me don the guitar. It felt heavy, too big. Trez nudged me. On the screen, Fran had removed his jacket and was playing the synth. You now saw he was wearing a white soccer shirt with orange and navy trim. Few would have recognised it but Seán and I did. Luton Town FC, early eighties. Shoulder-swaying, nodding, he turned from the camera. Printed on the back were a number and a name. The shot moved in closer.

  1

  R. Goulding

  Our stage manager came. It was time.

  Someone had put together a back-projection of our early career: grainy footage of our shockheaded selves on Ireland’s Late Late Show as kids, on Letterman, on Conan, at Glastonbury and the Albert Hall, with old publicity-shots segueing in and out of each other and slow-mo images of me arriving at Vicar Street that morning. It took me aback to have been filmed. I wasn’t crazy about the fact. But the stage manager said the punters would need something to look at while the orchestra was getting on. Cellists and trumpeters passed me, raising bawls from the house as they made a quick way through torchlight to their risers.

  We agreed before going on that we wouldn’t be talking. No valedictions, acknowledgements or salutes. We’d be musicians making a sound and refusing to explain it. The Past wants you to talk to him, mention him from the stage? Not tonight. He ain’t on the guest list.

  I heard them chanting my name. Seán said, ‘Let them chant.’ Trez called for a bottle of water. She looked anxious and beautiful and I kissed her shaking hands. Seán drummed his sticks at the air.

  Geldof shambled on as the house lights got killed. The roar from the audience made me choke. He waited for it to die, then smiled and muttered ‘ah fuck off’. They laughed – the indescribability of a thousand people laughing – as he slid a cool hand in his pocket.

  ‘Here’s an old song by Shakespeare. Trez and Seán asked me to read it. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god. Would you please welcome home – Robbie Goulding.’

  Coronas of strobe, a flicker-storm of flashbulbs, the impossible constellation of iPhones on video-record, their dim blue Milky Way. Trez led me by the right hand, Seán by my left. We bowed at the front of the stage. The cellos and double basses were chopping out a march. The fat brass blasted, loud enough to strip the gilt off the walls. Seán clambered up on to his riser and hit the drums like he meant it. I was weeping as I plugged in. Someone threw me a flower. Trez slouched to the rifle-mic, left hand on her hip, and started into ‘Insulting Your Mother’.

  I was wearing the ’72 Telecaster thighs-low, down at my zipper like a punk. That’s a guitar you need to get on top of, a monster and a chomper, otherwise you’re riding Ahab’s whale through a tornado of screeching feedback that’ll blow out your spine at the volume I’m talking about. We were AEONS too loud. Brontosaurs were charging. But what the hey, you want Pete Townshend, I got him. Seán smashed at the snares and I gave it full windmill, toeing at my pedals to ramp up the fuzzbox and the shamelessly tasteless wah-wah. And I milked that naughty tremolo, zipped the plectrum down the strings. There’s a time and a place for discretion.

  I saw my daughter in the backstage, Jimmy behind her. Molly shot me a sullen glower. She looked gorgeous, like Shay.

  Jimmy mouthed five words, the ancient motto of clan Goulding.

  KICK.

  THEM.

  UP.

  THE.

  HOLE.

  Trez pointed a hand at me. The crowd, oh the crowd.

  I hit the hardest E-7th in the history of Dublin city.

  Loud enough to wake the monkeys in the zoo.

  The way a song ends can be the feature that makes it. The crescendo and impossibly long chord that finishes ‘A Day in the Life’. The voodoo fade-out on ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. And I’d love to give you an ending the story deserves. Yes, it’s possible for a private jet to do the London–Dublin run in an hour. I’ve pictured Fran arriving with his minders just in time for the encore, strolling on coolly to the screams without a word, plugging in a Rickenbacker and letting rip. But that didn’t happen. Never mind. I’d have liked to do Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ with him, on two acoustic guitars. Maybe ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’. For auld lang syne. But I did it with Trez and Molly instead, and they tore that playhouse down. When we ran out of stuff we’d rehearsed, we did ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘Rebel Rebel’, then ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’ and ‘No Feelings’.

  The high point, for me, was seeing Molly play lead on my Strat. She Slashed and Marred and Raitted and Blackmored. At one point I had the uneasy feeling she was about to Hendrix and smash it through Seán’s kit, the sort of act you feel is dramatically pleasing when young. But, as I warned her backstage, that’s the only trust fund she’s ever likely to have. She’s a sensible woman, like her mother.

  We called Michelle after the show. It was gorgeous to hear her. Molly and I sang the Beatles song bearing her name down the line to Long Island, perhaps a first in transatlantic history. Then Molly went drinking with the Prof (huh?) and some of the roadies (WHAT?) and I talked a while more with Michelle. The east Tennessean accent is one for which I have a weakness. Down a phone line, in particular, it’s what my ex’s grand-uncle, a handsome Louisianan divorce-attorney, used to call ‘one killin’ thang’.

  Jimmy said the gig had been too loud and not always in tune, on both of which scores he was right. I was hoping he’d call me a daisy but he didn’t. He stole the soaps, comb and shower cap from his room in the Jury’s Inn down the street and a preposterous amount of swag from the buffet. Next morning we returned to Luton and sat in the living room at 57 Rutherford Road playing WWE Wrestling on his Xbox. Annoyingly, he beat me. Every single time. He has taken to wearing trainers, which is quite the arresting sight, and he jogs, or sort of jogs, up to Lidl every morning, where he enjoys the range of invigorations you’d expect: complaining to the manager, defaming the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, and eating the boiled sweets he thinks I don’t know about, when the doctor has commanded him not to. The persistence of many civil and political liberties in Britain, of legal, individual and socioeconomic rights, the non-beheading of rude people, the freedom of the press, and the existence of the European Union in any form at all, are matters Jimmy finds baffling. In essence, he would like to jail every human currently living on this planet, he to hold the only key. His friend, Mrs Simmons, would be one of few exceptions. Sixty-eight next month, she captains Luton’s widely feared crown green bowling team, as the late Mr Simmons once did. I’ve warned Jimmy that I won’t tolerate misbehaviour in a Christian home, that he mustn’t make the mistake of treating it like a hotel, that Mrs Simmons is relatively young and impressionable. Occasionally I ramp on the immersion system when I drop around to visit. It drives him stark bonkers mental, which is good for his fitness. One night I’ll turn the latchkey and creep into that house and he’ll hurl himself from a wardrobe and attack me. He’s going to Lourdes with a party of retired zookeepers in March ‘for the fun’. No word in that sentence is a misprint.

  As for Fran and myself, put it this way: we’ve talked. ‘Quarrelled’ is more accurate, but at least we’ve done it face to face. What is hardest to forgive is how funny he can be about the things we thought mattered, some of which did. He’s asked me to play on his next album, Live in Hanoi, I think because he wanted to gift me the inestimable pleasure of telling him to sod right off. Maybe I’ll tag along. Hard to turn down. He calls me late at night, pretending to be Bono, of whom he’s a cruelly
accurate mimic. Indeed, this led to an embarrassing encounter, when the actual Bono was kind enough to phone with gentlemanly wishes for my health. My reply – get knotted, you lip-glossed old slapper – took a little in the way of explanation.

  If soon you happen to be in London with an evening to kill, I play the Bridge pub in Stockwell every other Tuesday night. Acoustic. Nothing fancy. Couple of mates might sit in, but usually it’s me on my own. You pay what you want. No cover charge. I wouldn’t call it a residency, just a gig I’ve been doing. I’ve six more left before I leave.

  I’m writing this on a barge in the Grand Union Canal. Anyone wants to rent, it’s available. I’m wintering in Montauk. Well, you never can tell. We’re taking things gently. Who knows?

  Acknowledgements

  I thank my editor Geoff Mulligan and everyone at Harvill Secker and at Vintage, Fran Barrie, Beth Humphries, Bethan Jones, James Jones who designed the cover of this book, Declan Heeney, my literary agent Carole Blake and screenwriting/playwriting agent Conrad Williams at Blake Friedmann Literary Agency, London, also Jewerl Ross at Silent R Management, Los Angeles. I thank Peter Aiken and his colleagues at Aiken Promotions, Mike Adamson and his team at the 02 in Dublin, and the extraordinary musicians with whom I have been blessed to work in recent years. It’s a pleasure to acknowledge a special debt of gratitude to Philip King, and to Robbie Overson and Sonny Condell. I thank my endlessly supportive sister Dr Éimear O’Connor and all members of the O’Connor, Suiter and Casey families, Ciaran Byrne at Cauldron Studios in Dublin, and Moya Doherty and John McColgan. For his gentle encouragement and immense skill I thank the maestro Brian Byrne. I thank my former Creative Writing students at Baruch College, Manhattan, especially Dave Feldman of the New York punk band Wyldlife, and Mary Williams and Giselle Lugo, for discussions about music lyrics and storytelling. The late Philip Chevron, to whom this novel is dedicated, was a deeply gifted songwriter and a man of remarkable grace. Robbie Goulding is a fictional character (as are all members of the Ships), and his opinions, dislikes and enthusiasms are entirely his own, but his profound gratitude for Philip’s songs, and for those of the great Patti Smith, are shared by multitudes whose lives that music touched. I will always be one of that number. I thank Cliona Hegarty, Jane Alger at Dublin City Libraries, Ellen McCourt, Loretta Brennan-Glucksman and my kindly and welcoming new colleagues at the University of Limerick, especially Don Barry, Tom Lodge, Meg Harper and Sarah Moore. Above all I thank my favourite songwriter and performer, James O’Connor, my favourite rock drummer, Marcus O’Connor, and Anne-Marie Casey who deserves a Gershwin love song, a shimmering, gorgeous classic.