Our route from the ferry terminal took us through neighbourhoods of coloured kerbstones and painted gable-ends. The red, white and blue, the Protestant Red Hands of Ulster, the St George’s Crosses, the initials UVF gave way to depictions of Bobby Sands, men in black balaclavas and the Ulster, Munster, Connaught and Leinster flags. Shane was in a ferment about driving through a Nationalist area in a vehicle not just with British licence plates, but also one with a broad orange stripe down the side.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Shane said. ‘We’ll get killed.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ I said.
‘What? What!?’ he screeched. ‘What the fuck do you know? You English cunt!’
In the van on the way up to Holyhead, Shane had pointed out that the colours of my lumberjack shirt were those of the Union Jack. I hadn’t given much thought to it when I’d got dressed that morning. It was one of only two shirts I had. The other was white.
‘And your accent,’ he had said.
‘What about my accent?’
‘What you mean what about your accent!?’ Shane said. ‘The squaddies, in Belfast – the occupying force – are all guys from fucking Yorkshire and Lancashire. They hear an accent like yours in – in West Belfast – you’re fucking well dead!’
‘They’ll kneecap you down an alleyway,’ Spider said.
Darryl nosed the van through the security checkpoint of the Europa Hotel, according to Andrew the most bombed hotel in Europe. The concrete and glass frontage was severe, angled into a shallow chevron. The hotel was surrounded by razor-wire.
The following day we had an interview and photo shoot for an English music paper in the Crown Liquor Saloon opposite the hotel.
‘Just keep your fucking voice down,’ Shane said to me as we left the security gate and crossed the road. ‘If anyone asks you what religion you are,’ Shane said, ‘well – just don’t talk to anybody.’
The Crown was an oppressively Victorian gin palace with stained-glass windows, a tiled floor and a moulded ceiling the colour of blood. After the interview we fell into talking with a couple of men who wanted to know who we were, what we were famous for. So much had Shane’s protectiveness got to me that I dreaded them asking about me. I kept my mouth shut and made sure to keep my coat closed up to my neck for fear they would see the red, white and blue of my shirt. Whatever social adeptness I thought I had, deserted me.
We showed up at the Ulster Hall around the time we’d been told to and mustered our gear in the centre of the floor of the auditorium. The hall was huge, with a balustraded balcony, huge windows and chandeliers. Behind the stage towered the ranks of pipes of an organ. We sat around waiting for our turn to go up onto the stage to do our sound check while Costello did his. We disdained his prerogative as the headliner, the time he took over his sound check commensurate with his sense of self-importance.
I’d been taken to see Costello at the Nashville Rooms on Cromwell Road in London in 1977. When he came out onto the stage, the pigeon-toed testy nerd in Buddy Holly glasses, wearing jeans with deep turn-ups, turned into an apoplectic scourge – agitated, impatient, spleenful. His veins swelled at his temples and a ridge formed down the centre of his forehead.
At his sound check at the Ulster Hall, Costello looked like just another guy in blazer, jeans and specs making a living. We scoffed at his puffery when he went back to his hotel after he’d finished.
When it came to our sound check, we were confused as to how it was all supposed to work. There was a chaos of cables and boxes and activity. Space seemed reluctantly to be made for us. Darryl wheeled out our gear and arranged it around the stage, liaising with whomever of Costello’s crew he could get to lend a hand. We got our instruments out and then stood around waiting to be told what to do. The feeling that we were a nuisance was made worse by the implicit requirement to be grateful to Costello for bringing us on the road in the first place, and to his crew for bringing our gear on the truck.
Despite all the gigs he’d done, Shane had never come to understand that the guy behind the desk in the wings controlled the sound on stage. Shane directed all his requirements to the front-of-house engineer in his barriered pen in the auditorium. He was a fat, balding guy with a red face whom everybody called the Bishop.
‘Don’t talk to me!’ the Bishop laughed from the desk, inviting his crew to laugh at us too. ‘Talk to your guy!’ he shouted. He waded out of his enclosure crying out ‘Dinner!’ and wafted his crew towards backstage, leaving only a guy called Flakey to look after us. Flakey was our guy and we drank up his kindness as he nodded us through our instrument checks from his desk.
Wearing our cherished duster coats, we strode out onto the stage in front of half an acre of faces, upturned at the front but thinning out abruptly the further away they stretched from the stage lights. We crashed through our short set. The half-hour we had been allotted hurtled past, strewn with such crises as Jem snagging on the introduction to ‘Boys from the County Hell’, my left hand failing to keep up with the rhythm of ‘Dingle Regatta’ on the accordion buttons. The hall boomed with reverberation. Spider bent a beer tray in half against his head. As the end of the chorus of ‘Streams of Whiskey’ came up we all stepped back from the line of microphones as one, to play the instrumental section. And then it was over and we went back to our dressing room, laughing. We wrenched off our duster coats, complained about how little beer there was to drink and went out to find a pub.
*
The next show was in Galway. Darryl drove with his arm resting confidently in the open window, his hair blown by the wind, occasionally swapping hands to pat the passenger seat next to him to confirm that he had everything he needed – tapes, papers, maps, fags. Jem sat with the Office on the seat next to him. The Office was a Crawford’s shortbread tin. It contained a notebook, a pencil, receipts and all the money we had – a meagre float from Stiff Records as tour support, to which we would add the £50 a night we were being paid to play on Costello’s tour. Shane sat looking devoutly out of the window at the Irish countryside. Overgrown yellow-flecked hedges crowded lush fields. An estuary, still as a mirror, reflected reed banks and swans. Plaits of ivy strangled stands of twisted oaks.
We drove through towns with such names as Gubaveeney, Corraquigly, Sheskinacurry, Drumshanbo, Ballinaboy, Knocknafushoga, Cloonsheeva. Andrew repeated them in his liquid basso profundo as the van passed the signs. Without disdain of my ignorance, Shane told me about the Anglicisation of Ireland, dating from the earliest plantations in the 1500s, and the renaming of villages. At best, he told me, the Irish place names were translated into English. Failing translation, they swapped syllable for syllable, phoneme for phoneme, Gaelic for English. If the conglomerations of surds and diphthongs stumped them, or if they just felt like it, they gave the town a new name altogether.
I was ashamed to know so little. My upbringing seemed to doom me never to know enough. I had been a dunce at history at school. In the rubble of my comprehension of English history stood a pillar maintaining that Oliver Cromwell had single-handedly invented parliamentary government by means of vanquishing the foppish and florid, and above all Catholic, Charles I. Before forty-eight hours had elapsed in the minivan in Shane’s company – and in Spider’s and Darryl’s, neither of whom was a slouch when it came to history – I discovered Cromwell to be a murderer who laid waste to a town called Drogheda in 1649, killing 3,500 of its inhabitants, before going on to do the same in Wexford. I hadn’t known about this other side of the Lord Protector. My oblivion seemed tantamount to condonement. Privately, I claimed immunity from my inherited responsibility for Cromwell’s binge-killing by the fact that, when I came across his death mask on a trip to Warwick Castle when I was fourteen, I thought he looked like a shithead.
When we got to Galway we were told that one of our flight cases had been left in Belfast. Costello’s crew had brought instead a case belonging to the Ulster Orchestra. It was full of woodwind. The Attractions lent us some of their equipment – a bass fo
r Cait and one of Costello’s acoustic guitars for Shane. The Attractions didn’t have a banjo. The crew offered Jem a turquoise electric guitar from Costello’s collection. During the gig, if he didn’t know the chords, Jem turned the volume off and strummed away as if he did.
Each day we listened to Darryl’s tape, over and over. We never tired of hearing the Jolly Beggarmen, the Dubliners and the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. They sang hearty songs, which were full of appetite, thirst and lust and which generally ended up in a fight. Though beer and whiskey flew, noses got broken and gobs belted, though shillelagh law became all the rage, nobody really got hurt. In ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, the corpse even came back to life.
We listened to reels and jigs and slides, played for the most part by the Bothy Band whose melodies hurtled round in a seemingly endless train of notes. The uilleann pipes, flute, fiddle and whistle locked together, though now and again one would brim over the others with a brief line of harmony. Against the acoustic guitar which slung the rhythm forward, the bucolic and Arcadian sound of the flute brought to mind a country of fields and tilth and hills and livestock. When the uilleann pipes struck up, the sound conjured flights of waterfowl, rushes, water and clouds. The bouzouki fanned the fen with an almost Mediterranean wind. The fiddle struck in and superimposed imagery that was American, hoisting up shameless harmonies.
The Bothy Band meshed with our van journey as we passed lakes and rising fell-flanks. The landscape was rough, overgrown and brutal. Spider lifted his face and crowed to the ceiling of the van.
On our way to Dublin we sang along with the Dubliners.
And we’re all off to Dublin in the green, in the green
Where the helmets glisten in the sun
Where the bayonets flash and the rifles crash
To the rattle of a Thompson gun.
We drove down O’Connell Street on our way to our hotel on Ormond Quay. Shane pointed out the bullet holes in the fluted columns in front of the Post Office, from the Easter Rising in 1916.
‘Oifig an Phoist,’ Andrew said in stentorian tones.
‘Oi’m figgan poissed too!’ Spider said.
At the National Stadium, the corridor and dressing rooms were hushed. Costello, we were told, had come down with laryngitis and was going to pull the gig. We rolled our eyes ceilingward and shrank into our dressing room – a cubicle with a heater up on the wall – to wait and see what was going to happen next.
Shane had been complaining about his throat. We never let him pull out of a gig. It became a regular occurrence to see him buckling over in the dressing room, coughing explosively in an effort to hawk up whatever the obstruction was. Increasingly, he resorted to jets of Chloraseptic which he would get as close to his vocal cords as possible by craning his head forward to the nozzle. He extended his neck as if to protect his filthy clothes. After thumbing the doings down, he doubled over, retching and gagging. When he’d finished and wiped his nose the length of his forearm, blinking and teary, he looked woundedly across at us, as if the victim of an affront. We implored him to rest his voice, but it was never long before he started up shouting with Spider, trading outrages, braying with laughter, before we went up on stage.
In the end, when word came that Costello had changed his mind and the gig was going to go ahead, we derided him for his capriciousness.
We left the fields and abundant hedgerows of Ireland for the combed stubble of English hayfields. We stopped at roadside pubs and off-licences and loaded up with beer and whiskey. I sat with my knees up on the back of the seat in front. The open window of the minivan blew tears into my eyes. The autumn sunlight shone across the fields, gilding the hedgerows and the trees. I clutched a bottle of duty-free Powers by the neck, tasting the fields and peat-water in it. We hooted at the ructions at Tim Finnegan’s wake. We hollered at the braiding of the pipes and the fiddle and the flute. We huzzahed when Andrew had learnt the words to the Clancy Brothers’ and Tommy Makem’s ‘Courtin’ in the Kitchen’, singing, in his tremulous bass voice, chin down, Adam’s apple low:
Come single belle and beau
Unto me now pay attention
Don’t ever fall in love
For it’s the Devil’s own invention
There were a couple of occasions which threatened us with expulsion from the tour. Fed up with the Bishop’s ill-treatment, we ambushed him in a corridor on his way to catering and backed him up against the wall. I was scared we might have overdone it. He was tiny. His belligerence evaporated. His cries of ‘Dinner!’ ended.
In St Austell, on his way back from the beach, Jem filled the pockets of his duster coat with sand. He cut a tiny hole in each pocket to let it trickle out while he was playing. He had hoped to leave two tidy mounds to mark where he had been standing. After the usual commotion of the changeover between our set and Costello’s, Steve Nieve, the Attractions’ keyboard player, was furious to find the sand had gritted his organ pedals.
It was a couple of weeks before Guy Fawkes Night that we spent the morning drinking Centenary and Bismarck port in Yates’s Wine Lodge in Nottingham. Spider and I bought a bottle each for the drive. By the time we got to the University, we’d loaded up with Brock’s bangers from a newsagent’s and I was villainously drunk. Spider and I sowed the bangers about the room. After threats of expulsion, at the Hammersmith Palais we eventually came clean to the promoters about the scorch-marks we left behind. We had to shell out £40 from the Crawford’s shortbread tin.
It became obvious that there was something going on between Cait and Costello. She had started to call Costello ‘Brian’ when they passed one another backstage or if they should come across one another in catering. In return, he had begun to call her ‘Beryl’.
It had made us laugh to give ourselves the names of characters from ‘The Bash Street Kids’ in The Beano. Jem was Biffo the Bear, Spider Roger the Dodger. I was Lord Snooty. Shane was Plug. We had chosen Minnie the Minx for Cait, but Elvis’s choice of Beryl – from Beryl the Peril, a character in The Topper – was the one she wanted to stick.
‘Who the fuck is Brian?’ we asked. Cait giggled girlishly and covered her mouth. ‘He’s Brian – the snail!’ she said. ‘From The Magic Roundabout! He’s all cute and defenceless and everything.’
Underlying the banality, there was a needfulness about her which looked like it wouldn’t tolerate mockery.
A hazard in the glancing flirtation between Brian and Beryl came with the arrival of Bebe Buell, model and Playmate, with whom Costello, separated from his wife, had been having what had been described in the papers as a ‘tempestuous’ affair. She showed up at the Apollo in Oxford. I came in from the minibus after Costello’s show, to see Buell and Costello in the hotel bar. They were sitting on stools on the far side of the room away from the rest of the Attractions and crew. Costello was in his suit, leaning with one arm on the bar. She wore a knitted beret. There was an atmosphere of exclusivity and implicit danger about the place.
The following day at Portsmouth Guildhall, a change seemed to have come over Cait. Displaced from Elvis’s court, she rejoined us, wanting to be one of the boys again and full of an exile’s self-righteousness. Up in our dressing room after the gig, she began to hurl empties out of the window. They exploded on the ground where Costello’s crew was loading out. When we heard the sound of boots stamping up the stairs and loud shouts, Cait knocked off the bottom of a bottle of wine against the wall. She brandished what was left by the neck and waited for whoever was coming up the stairs. Before they got to our dressing room, Andrew managed to wrestle the broken bottle from her and hid it behind his back.
A couple of roadies and a driver appeared puffing and indignant in the doorway. We faced them down with a unanimous and impregnable denial that we knew what the fuck they were talking about.
The wheel of Costello and Cait’s relationship soon recovered from the poked stick of Bebe Buell’s appearance. I came across Brian and Beryl in the lobby of the hotel in Leeds before going out to the Universit
y for our show. The two of them sat in intimately uncomfortable positions, knees, thighs, elbows, shoulders touching, a notebook open somehow on Costello’s lap. When I sat in the armchair opposite, Costello looked across at me, lofting the quizzical eyebrows above his heavy-rimmed glasses framing tired but serene eyes.
Between Leeds and Newcastle we had a day off. We took our time setting out. It was already the afternoon by the time we pulled up for lunch at the Three Horse Shoes in Boroughbridge and filed into the pinched front parlour for beer and steak and kidney pie.
By the time we left, it was dark and we were drunk. We bought carry-out for the drive to Newcastle. The pints seemed to have loosened Andrew’s face and cast his eyebrows adrift. Shane hobbled to the sliding door.
Once we were on our way, on a whim, Darryl ducked off the A1 and into the North Yorkshire Moors. Through the windows, but for the headlights frosting the road ahead, the sections of dry-stone wall and the verge of heath, it was pitch dark.
In the van in the blackness, Shane muttered something about feeling shit.
‘You drink too much!’ Andrew shouted, laughing at the back of Shane’s head. ‘If you gave up drinking! Or at least moderated it a bit!’
Shane sat with his arms folded across his stomach, his face turned to the window.
The month of touring had been hard on all of us but harder on Shane. We hadn’t slept much, sometimes three to a room, in bed-and-breakfasts. We’d all been drinking a lot, staying out. The hours Shane kept, though, were yet more adrift. Though the tour production laid on catering, we were lucky to get any food. Shane hardly seemed to eat anything but kaolin and morphine, which formed a crust around his mouth and caked the front of his coat. Every day Shane brought a bag clanking with bottles onto the minivan.
Here Comes Everybody Page 11