We followed Jamie up one of the grey-carpeted ramps and out to a sunlit patio bounded by a parapet and wooden lattice. Up a couple of steps there were blinding-white tables, Dave Robinson and champagne.
Dave Robinson was a guy with a footballer’s haircut standing with his arms folded across his chest, in a blue blazer, white shirt and faded jeans. He had fleshy eyelids which shaded his eyes. We stood in the sunlight and listened as he, Jamie and Brennan reiterated how great the band was and how great the relationship with the record company was going to be. In return we let them know, in the language of in-jokes, barbs and bravado, that we weren’t to be fucked with.
Along with the drink, the occasion went to Cait’s head. She took the opportunity throughout the short meeting to blurt a series of infelicitous remarks which I was sure she intended to ironise the relationship between a record company and its artists. She alluded continually to such tropes as the biting of hands that fed and to selling out. I squirmed with embarrassment at her overfamiliarity with people we had just met and wished she’d shut up. It was to Shane, however, that Robinson and Brennan and Jamie referred. They knew it was Shane who defined the company spirit, the ethos. His sense of irony was iron-clad. He scorned everything, no matter what it was, and with a facility that was winning.
Afterwards, I walked round Chiswick in the soft summery wind looking at the houses and trees. I was not so drunk as to doubt my excitement to be in a band, my thrill at the prospect of making a record, and my impatience for a date to start.
*
It took us a couple of sessions at Elephant Studios, of a couple of weeks each time, to complete the record. We had already done the work in Rick Trevan’s back bedroom and in the course of nine months of regular gigs. The banjo and the accordion were inextricable, our arpeggios striving to link to Shane’s up-and-down strumming on his twelve-string and underpinned by the one-two, one-two of Andrew’s cocktail drum and snare. Andrew played with his shirtsleeves rolled up, his body stooped over the drums, his head bent back. Cait swung her bass. Spider’s leg snapped back and forth, his head tilted to the side, then he would draw the whistle to his mouth, his long fingers overdoing the notes, sliding and trilling. In the middle of the room stood Shane, tall, the microphone hoisted high, so high that he sang up and out with his eyes half-closed, his twelve-string guitar across him, welting it with downstrokes, gripping down on the chords with swollen knuckles.
When it came to recording the guide tracks, as we all played through the songs hoping to capture a decent bass and drum track, Shane thrashed along as best he could, but derailment was never distant. When it came to his re-recording the guitar in a booth, his metre was erratic and his grip less than sure. When the velocity of the songs cast Shane adrift or when his ham-handedness threatened to mar the ethereality of the accompaniment to ‘The Auld Triangle’, I played the guitar. I loved to play the guitar.
I loved to come up with overdubs too. I sawed at double-stops on the violin for the choruses of ‘Transmetropolitan’. A bottleneck provided a wolf-whistlish hook in the chorus of ‘The Boys from the County Hell’.
As the recording began to come to a close, we all piled in on overdubs. For the end of ‘The Battle of Brisbane’ we went out to a concrete stairwell and hurled a cymbal down it. To replicate the beer tray on ‘Waxie’s Dargle’, which sounded puny in the studio, we laid into an anvil we had got from somewhere. For good measure we took a microphone into the toilets to record the flush. On one of the last days of recording, Shane and I stood in one of the booths, he shaking a handful of goat-bells, I a string of hooves, for the clanking and clopping sounds at the beginning of ‘Connemara Let’s Go’, which Brennan, scorning its obtuseness, had renamed ‘Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go’.
The Pogues were good at screaming. At the end of ‘Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go’, the screams piled up on top of one another over the growing cacophony at the end of the song. Shane and Spider were no slouches when it came to blood-curdling screams. Shane howled until his eyes watered. A quiver shook Spider’s entire body when he voided his lungs. When Cait came up to the microphone though, Shane and Spider’s howls seemed to merely echo in the hills, where her screams vaulted the peaks, reaming the air, carrying with them, seemingly, every injustice visited on the Irish since the twelfth century, and more besides.
I paid no heed to Brennan’s admonishments about band members sitting in on the process of mixing. I went down to the studio every day, and took a place on the lumpy sofa in the control room behind the backs of the engineers, Nick Robbins and Craig Thompson, and Brennan. I thought that at least one of the band should come down to the studio to oversee the mixing of our first record. After Brennan’s production of the demo we made with him, I harboured a mild distrust of his abilities at the mixing desk. I didn’t have much else to do besides. Whenever I said anything, Brennan would lean backwards to address me over his shoulder and then return to hog the mixing desk.
We made ‘Transmetropolitan’ the first song on the record. Of all the songs, it was our mission statement. The brave and expository major couplets of the whistle and accordion melody built up to a fanfare, heralding what should have been the explosion of Shane’s voice into the verse.
I loved Shane’s kaleidoscopic lyrics – the street names, names of cafés, pubs, hostels. Valtaro’s was a café on Cartwright Gardens, round the corner from Leigh Street. Arlington House was a hostel round the corner from my block of flats in Camden and, at one time, Brendan Behan’s home. The Scottish Stores was a pub in the lee of King’s Cross Station. Mill Lane veered between Shoot Up Hill and West End Lane in West Hampstead.
‘What the fuck is so beautiful about Mill Lane?’ Spider said when we gathered on the lumpy sofa in the control room to listen back.
‘I live round the corner from Mill Lane,’ Andrew said. ‘It’s beautiful.’
It was a generous and degenerate song. It brought us all together, in our second-hand suits, lumberjack shirts, Fred Perrys, with our outdated instruments. It pressed us to march across London, following Shane, like the children following the Pied Piper out of Hamelin.
It was the same with ‘Streams of Whiskey’. It made me want to follow Shane wherever he went. Like no other song I’d ever heard it made me want to drink, and drink like Shane drank. I wanted to go down to the Chelsea too – wherever that pub was – and walk in on my feet, but leave there on my back. I loved the recklessness and the bitter joy of the song – a fantasy in which Shane put himself beyond everything, beyond control, beyond authority, and which situated him almost mythologically in a place that seemed to share coordinates with Big Rock Candy Mountain, Cockaigne and Tír na nÓg – or it placed him inescapably in hell and more irretrievably than anyone could know.
When the record was finished, we went to Rick Trevan’s flat in Whidborne Buildings to celebrate not just the completion of the record but also our tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland supporting Elvis Costello and the Attractions in the autumn. In the middle of recording there had been a rumour that Costello had seen us play at the Diorama in Regent’s Park. By the time the record was finished the offer was firm.
Brennan’s pride in the record was apparent in the way he tried to mute it. Sitting uncomfortably on the arm of one of the chairs with his hands clasped together, Brennan tried to give a celebratory recap of the project. It wasn’t long, though, before Shane and Spider and Cait had moved on and were laughing about something as they sat on the couch. Brennan leant down from his perch towards me. He’d had a couple of drinks.
‘You’re going to make serious dosh,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
I couldn’t prevent my head filling with images of Mediterranean villas, stately homes, compounds in Brentwood, runway-side seats in Bryant Park, boarding ladders at Cannes. I looked round at Rick Trevan’s flat, at the bare pillars, the grey, paint-splattered industrial carpet, the grubby beige material thrown over the couch, and at Shane and Spider and Cait sitting
on it. At that point Shane erupted at something Spider said, clasping his brown fingers to his forehead and twisting his face towards him. Spit bubbled in his nose and needed to be wiped with the back of his hand. Spider was slumped in the sofa, giggling into his chest.
‘You think?’ I said.
‘I know,’ Brennan said.
‘I dunno,’ I said.
‘You will,’ Brennan said. ‘You should start planning,’ he went on. ‘Some people buy a house. Some people invest.’ He looked at me expectantly.
‘I’d buy a narrow boat,’ I said.
‘Oh yes!’ Andrew said. ‘We’ll all want narrow boats!’
Brennan wiped his face and looked dolefully across at Shane.
*
Debsey and I went up to the Yorkshire Dales. In the Sixties, my parents had bought a grim, rain-lashed cottage on the other side of the M6 from Kendal. The week Debsey and I chose, it rained every day – and every day Debsey was obliged to make contact with Rachel and Hester, to see what was going on for Dolly Mixture in London.
There was no telephone in the cottage. We had to make the quarter-mile walk up the valley to the public telephone box. I stood on the road outside, opposite the dilapidated farm buildings, a ruined Saab in the mired courtyard, geese honking in a neighbouring field, waiting as Debsey pushed her money into the slot and a finger into her ear to get news from London.
After a while, she set the receiver on the cradle and pushed the door open. We trudged against the wind back down to the house. The slanting rain drifted in sheets up the valley, stinging our cheeks and burning our hands. It seemed bent on lashing her with the pointlessness of her hopes for her career. I pitied her for her musical vocation. Its unwillingness to cough up the slightest reward made her miserable. What must have made her more miserable was that, without much effort on my part, Pogue Mahone was reviving mine.
Though it had been Jem who had superintended the arrangements and signed the contract for our near-calamitous session for John Peel in April, the BBC contacted Brennan to arrange the payment of our fee. At the beginning of May the BBC called me at home to set up another session, this time for our shield-bearer Kid Jensen’s show. Despite my giving them Jem’s address and phone number, Jensen’s producer sent the contract to Brennan at Rocks Off records.
We thought Brennan was joking when he asked for ten per cent commission on the fee for both sessions when we met him in a pub on Wardour Street.
‘Fuck off out of it!’ Cait said. Shane stared, mute, while she set on Brennan with unmitigated venom. Jem, struggling to conceal his resentment, refused even the slightest cut of any of the money.
Brennan warned us of record companies’ and venues’ unwillingness to conduct negotiations with any band if it didn’t have a representative.
‘Go and get your own sessions,’ he said, and left the pub.
*
With the money coming in from gigs along with the advance from Stiff Records, we opened a bank account at the Royal Bank of Scotland in King’s Cross. I cycled down to the bank every Wednesday to pick up £900 in an envelope and then back up the pavement to our table in the Pindar of Wakefield where I handed out our £150 each. In the course of one of these meetings, the question came up as to what we were going to call our record. We looked at Shane. He tilted his head as if the answer was obvious.
‘Red Roses for Me,’ he said.
The following Wednesday when I came into the pub, Shane was sitting with his hand clapped to his face and staring with wildness in his eyes.
‘Yes!’ he hissed. ‘Yes! Yes!’
‘What?’ we all said.
‘Duster coats!’ Shane said. ‘Spider just come up with duster coats! From The Long Riders!’
We looked at him for a moment or two.
‘The L-o-n-g R-i-d-e-r-s!’ Shane repeated, stretching out the vowels as if we were deaf or stupid. As if pricked by remorse he added: ‘You know?’
The duster coats Spider and Shane were talking about were the long riding coats worn by the Keaches, Carradines and Guests, playing the Jameses, Youngers and Fords, in Walter Hill’s film about the James Gang. Those who had seen the film thought it was a good idea.
From the recording advance we had in the bank, we had a set of them made by a couple of girls Darryl knew. We went up to their workshop on York Way. The coats were of grey linen with a velvet collar and cuffs with a buttoned tab. They were close to floor-length and had a cantle pleat. The coats conjured up our walk down the road from Shane’s flat to our first gig at the Pindar of Wakefield, carrying our instruments, our shadows behind us spreading over the surface of the street.
While we tried them on, Shane and Spider traded quotes from the film. Spider cocked an imaginary six-shooter, sneered malevolently and emptied it in the direction of my chest.
‘ “You think about that,” ’ Spider said, in an exaggerated Missouri accent, ‘ “on your way to HAYELL!” ’
He blew the smoke from the barrel and reholstered.
Eleven
We had been trying to rouse Shane from his second-floor flat for easily half an hour. We’d touched together the wires sticking out of the frame of his front door. We’d shouted up. In the end I reached in through the railings of the Holy Cross Church, scooped up a handful of gravel and threw it across Shane’s windows. He snatched open the casement and stuck his head out.
‘ALL FUCKING RIGHT!’
Another half an hour later Shane came down swinging a filthy bag which clanked with bottles. We slid the door of the van open for him and made room.
‘All right?’ he said.
It was the last week of September. We were on our way to the first gig of our tour supporting Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Our first single with Stiff Records, ‘The Boys from the County Hell’, was about to come out, though we had had to stomach the record company’s insistence that we edit out half of Jem’s banjo introduction. We had our own merchandise: a T-shirt and a beer mat with a line from the song – ‘Lend me ten pounds and I’ll buy you a drink’ – on the back; a miniature bar mirror; a lacquered shillelagh.
*
The first gig was in Belfast. Our gear had gone ahead in one of Costello’s trucks. Darryl had rented a passenger van – a white Iveco Daily with, unaccountably, an orange stripe down the side. We had three hundred miles to drive to Holyhead to catch the ferry. Darryl was anxious about the time.
As we set off Darryl pushed a tape into the van’s machine. A banjo and an accordion warbling with musette tuning started to play a jig backed by clicking spoons and a country bass-line. Cait, as soon as she heard the introduction, knew what it was.
‘Brendan!’ she shouted.
I’m a páidín
From Tullabhadín
I didn’t know what a páidín was, nor where Tullabhadín might be found. The singer was a guy called Brendan Shine. I didn’t know anything about him either. From the ironic fuss Cait made about the song I supposed he might be the Irish counterpart to Rolf Harris. His phrasing was heavy with elaborate h’s before many of the syllables. All the a vowels were exaggeratedly flattened. The song was a kind of personal ad: Fifty-year-old man, called Dan, ‘with money and acres of land’, enjoys music and ‘the craic’, seeks ‘a honey’ with ‘a bit of money’.
In the past couple of years, I’d heard the word ‘craic’ a lot, the words ‘awful’ and ‘mighty’ as emphasis, and the substitution of ‘my’ by ‘me’, too. As I listened to the song, the phrase ‘sure I’m your man’ started to annoy the fuck out of me.
When it came to saying anything at all about the Irish, I hadn’t a leg to stand on. My experience of the Irish was scant. My English upbringing resulted in my regarding them as, at best, figures of fun or, at worst, in the climate of the Troubles, agents of death and destruction. The little experience of Irish people I had, had come from working on building sites with men my father called ‘navvies’, whom he dismissed as feckless, universally stupid and, more often than not, drunk. Otherwise, wh
at I knew about the Irish and Ireland had come mostly from books. At school I’d read Wilde, Shaw, Beckett and Yeats and had struggled with the fact that the former two weren’t English. On one of my visits to Shane’s flat on Cromer Street, he had lent me a couple of Flann O’Brien’s books, The Best of Myles and An Béal Bocht, and told me to read The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds.
In the books, the comical archetype of the Irish seemed only to confirm my father’s judgement of them, until I came to see that the butt of the joke was not actually the Irish themselves, but people like my dad who were too witless to get it.
‘That song degrades the Irish,’ I said when the song had finished, hoping to typify the sententious northerner to the same degree that Brendan Shine’s Dan typified the rural Irishman.
Spider honked in disbelief. Shane and Cait told me to fuck off. Jem simply sighed, ‘James.’
As hard as Darryl drove to make up for our late departure, when the ferry terminal at Holyhead came into view we saw, out beyond the grey rim of the Irish Sea, the mauve smudge of smoke from the stack of the ferry we were supposed to have been on. We said nothing about how we had had to wait outside Shane’s flat. Instead Darryl left us in the van and hurried across to the terminal. In fifteen minutes he was back with the news that we could use our Sealink tickets on a B&I ferry leaving in forty minutes.
I’d never been to Ireland before. I had never been on tour before. I went up on deck and leant on the rail to await the spasm of the screws starting. As the ferry cleared the breakwater and the lighthouse, salty hair-stiffening blasts gusted off the Irish Sea. In the stern, the Welsh coast narrowed to a dark thread, slubbed with hills.
In Belfast, helicopters floated clattering against the vivid bracken of the Black Mountain rising up beyond the fringes of the city. Armoured Land Rovers with louvred steel windows and mesh aprons crept through the streets. Security cameras craned from the corner of every building.
Here Comes Everybody Page 10