Here Comes Everybody

by James Fearnley

  ‘Awright?’ he said.

  Nine

  In July I had to move from Mornington Crescent. SCH gave me a top-floor flat in a Victorian dwelling between the bottom of Royal College Street and the Hospital for Tropical Diseases. An arched entryway led into a courtyard. A curtain here and there blew out through an open window in the heat. My new flat was dark and cramped. A small kitchen overlooked the central courtyard.

  Debsey’s family helped me move in. Her dad drove us round to the house belonging to a couple in Crouch End who were selling a bed for £40. Her mum took me up to the PDSA in Islington to look for furniture. Debsey came to help me paint the flat.

  It had been over a year since the successes of Captain Sensible’s ‘Happy Talk’ and ‘Wot!’ The following autumn Dolly Mixture had provided backing vocals for Sensible’s less successful second solo record, The Power of Love. On their own label, Debsey, Rachel and Hester had released a retrospective double album of all their demos. The LPs, called Demonstration Tapes, came in a white cardboard sleeve. One afternoon on the floor of her parents’ living room, I had helped Debsey stamp and number a pile of them and handed them to her to sign. The double album included the last single the group had released – a wistful, rose-tinted, valedictory single called ‘Remember This’.

  On a promotional trip to Europe that summer, in the Belgian harbour town of Ostend, Sensible and Dolly Mixture’s guitarist Rachel started a relationship. It broke the once steadfast triangle of the three girls’ friendship.

  Debsey wanted pink for the bedroom of my new flat.

  ‘I’m going to want something to lift my mood in the mornings’, Debsey said, adding, ‘if I’m going to be staying with you.’

  It was a warm day at the end of August that Jem, Shane, Cait, Spider, Andrew and I went up to the studio Justin Ward had built in his flat – in reality the spare room, carpeted from floor to ceiling. It was the second time, in fact, that we had been to his studio. A couple of weeks after our first gig at the Pindar of Wakefield, we had gone up to his flat in Stanley Buildings to record ‘Streams of Whiskey’, ‘Poor Paddy on the Railway’ and Eric Bogle’s ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’, but had come away with a cassette tape with half the stereo missing. We knew we could give a good account of the rehearsing we’d been doing, the songs we’d been playing out live, and besides, we now had Andrew playing drums.

  Spider came up with an instrumental called ‘The Repeal of the Licensing Laws’. ‘Connemara Let’s Go’ had been inspired by the Cretan music Shane had played to me when I had dropped in on him at his flat after the Nips had collapsed. It had only two chords, C and A minor, under a nullifyingly repetitive loop of melody.

  ‘Greenland Whale Fisheries’ was our version of a traditional sea shanty. It opened with a tune Jem had been learning from a teach-yourself book on bluegrass banjo. In the middle, released by a ‘Yaaaah!’ from Shane, Jem reiterated the melody, with Andrew welting the drums and Cait pounding on her bass.

  We knew what we were doing. The effort we had put into rehearsing showed. We had a drummer who was judicious, and spare, restricted as he was to standing up to play just a snare and his cocktail drum.

  When we had first started, though he practised and practised, Jem’s playing had seemed rigid and free of dynamic, as he learnt by rote the patterns his fingers had to form to accomplish his boomalackas, bum-ditties, clawhammers, drop thumbs, or whatever he was working on. Now, his playing was unflinchingly precise. The semiquavers of the banjo and the accordion synchronised. Where Spider’s whistle-playing had been erratic and dislocated, it was now more or less crisp and focused.

  Though Shane’s guitar-playing resisted improvement, his singing was without match. After a false start or two – a bout of lavish phlegm-evacuation or an attack of the necessity to light a cigarette and draw lungfuls of smoke from it – Shane planted his huge feet on the ground, drove his hands into his pockets, closed his eyes, opened his mouth and sang out.

  On a break we went up to the roof. We stood leaning on the ledge by the rusted railings in the lee of the teetering chimney pots, the pointing loosened and crumbling, to look down on the rear of St Pancras Station: the arching roof, the glinting rails which twisted and crossed one another through stands of willowherb and between mounds of iodine-coloured cinder, piles of insulators and rusting track, the concrete sheds with all the windows put out. I loved London and loved being part of something that was so much a part of the city.

  We thought we needed backing vocals. I had been a boy chorister. I tried to come up with harmonies, but the songs ran so fast that the melodies escaped me. I couldn’t keep up. What harmonies I managed to come up with only made the songs sound overwrought. We argued round the table in Justin’s kitchen.

  ‘Harmony vocals are what are expected,’ Jem said. ‘I think we should just drop the whole thing.’

  The only backing vocals that worked were unison voices. Spider and Shane took them up on ‘Greenland Whale Fisheries’ and in the horror-stricken antiphony on ‘Connemara Let’s Go’, with Jem throwing in ‘down in the ground where the dead men go’ in the cycle of choruses. Cait braved a harmony on ‘Streams of Whiskey’, but her voice wandered, lost, behind everyone else’s. We said nothing. Behind the pretence of assisting Justin at his desk, I hid my embarrassment at my Manchester accent.

  In the pub, Shane started tapping on the surface of one of the tables with the bottom of his pint glass of snakebite.

  ‘Spider should sing,’ he said.

  ‘You’re the front man,’ we said.

  ‘I’m not the front man!’ Shane screeched. He turned his glass round and round on the table, staring at it.

  ‘It was never about me being the front man! I always wanted him to be the front man!’ he said, pointing at Spider. ‘He’s better-looking than me, for one thing. I never wanted to be the singer. We were always supposed to not just have the one singer! It was always supposed to be all of us singing.’

  ‘But you’re the singer.’

  His eyes grew wide with disbelief that we didn’t understand.

  ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘Jem could sing something! And Cait!’

  Cait had been singing lead vocals with a group our roadie and soundman Darryl had put together with his friend Dave Scott, called Pride Of The Cross. I’d seen them a couple of times at the Pindar of Wakefield. The congruity of Cait’s voice to songs like Peggy Lee’s ‘Don’t Smoke in Bed’ and ‘Is That All There Is?’ was astonishing.

  ‘Andrew’s got a beautiful voice,’ Spider said.

  ‘Yeah!’ Shane said, slapping the tabletop with his hands. ‘Andrew!’

  For the sake of Shane’s emotional even keel and hoping that in time he would come round, we acquiesced. We distributed songs between us. A couple of them became part of the set, as we went from the Hope and Anchor in Islington, to the Bull and Gate in Kentish Town, to the Greyhound on Fulham Palace Road.

  Jem, as Country Jem Finer, sang ‘Me and Bobby McGee’.

  Buhsted fladdin baddon rewj, wadin furrer train,

  Feelin nurly faded as mah jeens.

  We gave Cait the Velvet Underground’s ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, and Shane came up with Crystal Gayle’s ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue’. She sang both songs beautifully in her Marilyn Monroe voice. She towered at the microphone, her dyed-black, backcombed hair falling over half her face.

  Spider occasionally sang ‘Hot Dogs with Everything’, a song of Shane’s the Nips used to play. He continued to trade vocals with Shane on ‘Connemara Let’s Go’. Despite Andrew’s deep, rich, bass voice and the fact that he sang blues in his other group, a song was never chosen for Andrew to sing.

  For me, Shane chose ‘The Green Green Grass of Home’. The only version I knew was Tom Jones’s. Because my dad liked such singers as Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Matt Monro and Tony Christie, I took the song for maggoty nostalgia and not one that dealt with the last hours of a prisoner on death row, nor did I recognise that Shane
was trying to make a point about guilt and penitence, that death is never distant and that life is not what you think. I had no idea what it was really about, but turned up at a sound check at the Hope and Anchor knowing that he was going to ask me to sing it.

  ‘James!’ Shane shouted when the time came.

  I came up to the microphone with my accordion. The song started with up-down strumming from Shane, arpeggios from Jem, Cait picking out fifths on the bass, tom-tom and side stick from Andrew, a chord on the accordion. I put my mouth to the microphone.

  The ohld hohm town lukes the sehm

  As Ah step down frum the trehn

  All of a sudden the room was full of my voice, the Manchester accent, full of the way I didn’t actually understand the song.

  ‘Nah. Nah. Nah. Nah,’ Shane said, shaking his head, walking across to the centre microphone as if he thought I would not want to step away from it. ‘This isn’t a good idea.’

  *

  When I had first signed on for social security, I had not provided any details of the dividends from my shares in the family construction company, so, when I got a letter from the DHSS, informing me of a visit from one of its agents, in terror of proceedings, I signed off.

  Though my rent was low, what was left of the last half-yearly dividend was not enough to live on until the next payment. The money from Pogue Mahone’s gigs was a pittance. I took myself to Tottenham Court Road tube station, Oxford Circus and the long corridor to the museums at South Kensington, to busk. I performed songs I could play both the melody and the bass buttons for on the accordion: ‘Lily Marlene’, ‘The Third Man Theme’, ‘Around the World in 80 Days’, ‘The Spell’ waltz from Sleeping Beauty, the theme from Limelight.

  A guy came up to me at a bend in the corridor at Tottenham Court Road.

  ‘Can ye play “The Sash”?’ he said. He had an accent from Northern Ireland. I didn’t know what ‘The Sash’ was. I laughed. ‘Play “The Sash”!’ he said again. ‘Go on, play the fucking Sash!’ He stood in front of me waving his arms about.

  ‘Sure I’m an Ulster Orangeman, from Erin’s isle I came,’ he sang. ‘Go on!’ he said. ‘Play it!’

  I wanted him to go away. The only Irish tune I’d learnt both the bass buttons and the melody for was ‘Peggy Gordon’. We’d been doing it at gigs. I played him that.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he said and walked off.

  At the end of my pitches, I’d pack up, go back to the flat and count out my money. The way I was living, going out most nights, no longer getting social security, what I earned from busking wasn’t enough.

  Shane got wind of the home visit from the DHSS. He cackled at my setback and the idea of moral laxity on my part.

  ‘You cunt!’ he said.

  I had expected Jem to disapprove both of my comparative affluence and of the moral hypocrisy of dole-dodging. Instead, he offered to put it to the couple whose house he was painting that he needed help with the job. He would let me know. He said nothing about his own impecuniousness and the fact that in a matter of weeks he and Marcia would have another mouth to feed.

  Within a few days he invited me to come and work with him. Though he couldn’t tell me how long the job was going to last, his employers seemed to have plenty of money and changed their minds all the time about what it was they wanted done. The wage would be £40 a week, cash. It was about as much as I ever earned on any job. After inveigling me onto the books at SCH, this was the second time Jem had bailed me out.

  We spent the rest of the year working together, first at the bay-fronted house of Jem’s friends in Drayton Park, followed by a Victorian terraced house in Barnsbury belonging to another of what seemed to be Jem’s patrons. Our employers provided all the materials – brushes, rollers, paint, sandpaper, everything – and left us in the house by ourselves. They seldom came back before we had cleaned up our brushes and gone home.

  We painted as well as we could. No one seemed too bothered by the fact that we weren’t painters, nor that by the end of the week there wasn’t much to show for the hours we put in.

  As we went back and forth from the roller tray to our section of wall, or bent towards our respective window or door frame or stood out on the back patio with our cups of tea, Jem and I talked. We were bemused by what seemed the timeliness of what Pogue Mahone was doing. The release in 1982 of Dexys Midnight Runners’ Too-Rye-Ay seemed to have spawned all manner of bands across London playing with acoustic instruments – violins, banjos and accordions. There were skiffle bands playing home-made music with tea-chest basses, washboards and zob sticks. There were country bands with western shirts, bolo ties, cowboy hats and beehives playing upright basses and acoustic guitars. There were amalgams of the two in the form of bands like the Boothill Foot-Tappers, Hackney Five-O and the Shillelagh Sisters – not to mention the Skiff Skats for whom John Hasler now played washboard, and the Men They Couldn’t Hang, whose name we gave them and for whom Shanne Bradley played bass. Though we scorned the banality of what was going on in the charts, we liked the pentatonic expansiveness of Big Country’s ‘In a Big Country’, which had been released in May.

  We talked about music – chords and modes, scales, tunings. We talked about what we could do – gigs, the music we could play, the way we could play it. We talked about making an album, recording and releasing it ourselves.

  When we’d finished talking, we went back to our jobs and listened to the radio. In September, Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’ was at No. 1 in the charts. I told Jem about Jon Moss and me listening to Culture Club’s demo-tape in his car in the street outside my flat in Mornington Crescent.

  ‘You were meant for better things,’ Jem said.

  When Marcia’s pregnancy came to term, Jem left me to work by myself. On the 9th October 1983 – my twenty-ninth birthday – Marcia gave birth to a daughter, Ella Jean, at Middlesex Hospital. Marcia had issued an edict that there were to be no visitors. I bought flowers in Fitzrovia and turned up in the maternity ward. To see the tiny thing in her Perspex bassinet, I wondered what on earth we were all doing.

  *

  Pogue Mahone were playing gigs every week, radiating from our home turf of the Pindar of Wakefield, to the Irish Centre in Kentish Town, the Empire Rooms on Tottenham Court Road, the Wag Club, the Bull and Gate in Kentish Town, Dingwalls, the Hope and Anchor, and at the end of November, an acoustic gig crammed into the corner of a room near Charing Cross Road as part of the London Film Festival. We never wrote out a set list. Without warning, Shane’s crotchetiness would drive him to shelve whatever song he took a dislike to. At the Sir George Robey at Finsbury Park we argued wantonly between songs. Cait kicked beer glasses across the stage. Jem’s face, usually mild with equanimity, became distorted with fury. The crowd in front of us, packed to the bar at the back, pounded the stage. I saw a guy open his hand on the shards of a beer glass in front of him, oblivious to what he was doing. We could do little but wait for Shane to start the next song.

  *

  We took up meeting on a more or less regular basis at the Pindar of Wakefield. We talked about recording. We thought the format of an EP best suited for what we were doing. Shane said he had someone to produce it, a guy called Philip Chevron whom he knew, who worked at Rock On records in Camden. Chevron came to meet us at the Pindar. He was a diminutive guy with pink, pocked cheeks. A spume of sand-coloured hair tumbled on the top of his head. He had a tapering face, a narrow mouth with a slight twist in it and a fleshy, almost conical nose. He looked entrepreneurial in a camel overcoat. He nodded at what we had to say and touched his lips with a crooked knuckle.

  In the end, it was Stan Brennan, Shane’s boss at Rocks Off records on Hanway Street, who took us to Elephant Recording Studios in Wapping to record, not an EP but ‘The Dark Streets of London’, backed by ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’.

  Elephant Studios were on Wapping High Street, in the basement of one of the warehouses. It was a dingy and airless place with hessian wall-covering and an uneven f
loor with fibre carpeting. We were greeted by Graham Sharpe, the studio owner, who went around in a corduroy flat cap and a cravat and seemed never to leave the place. He had a cot in the office. He seemed to be in a chronic state of surprise to encounter anyone at all on the premises.

  In spite of recording ‘The Dark Streets of London’ as a single with Stan Brennan, we spent a Sunday towards the end of February shooting a video of the version of ‘Streams of Whiskey’ we had recorded at Justin Ward’s living-room studio. One of us knew a director who lived nearby. He was called Richard Elgard but went under the name of Video Rick. In the week, we storyboarded in the Pakenham Arms. The production – a camera, cassette player, ourselves and our instruments – started out at the bin dump at the far end of the courtyard in Whidborne Buildings, followed by a drained stretch of Regent’s Canal up York Way where we set up a couple of deckchairs on a reeking beach of detritus. Jem and Shane, in a pastiche of Wham!’s ‘Club Tropicana’, stripped down to blue boxer shorts and red Y-fronts and mimed to a verse, each with a glass of cider, the bottle balanced between them in the chaos of lumber and rubbish in the freezing cold.

  A couple of days later, after a sound check at the Wag Club on Wardour Street, I went up to Debsey’s parents’ flat on Liverpool Road to kill some time before our gig at eleven. The family was watching the television. Debsey’s mum peered occasionally over the top of her bifocals from her students’ homework. Debsey’s dad leant uncomfortably in his armchair, a stiff leg thrust out. We thought Debsey’s young sister had gone to bed. The door opened. We all looked behind us. Caroline sometimes walked in her sleep. Debsey’s mum got up to guide her back upstairs.