His throat was already a chronic grievance. Now his guts were troubling him. His carriage had become careful and hunched in protection of his ailing stomach. On some days, his defenceless eyes stared out from the pallor of his face.
‘Oh, I do worry about him,’ my mother had said after our show in Manchester. ‘If I could only have him for a while, if I could have him home, and give him a good meal, and a bed, just for a while.’
Her eyes had filled with tears which she tried to blink away.
In the van, we all started to chide him.
‘No fucking wonder your voice’s shot and your stomach’s ruined.’
‘We worry about you!’ Spider shouted. ‘Can’t you see?’
‘Fuck off!’ Shane said.
‘Stop the bus!’ Jem yelled. ‘Stop the bus. I can’t stand this any more. It’s all just so fucking stupid. Let me off.’
‘We’re in the middle of the moors,’ Darryl said.
‘I don’t care!’ Jem said. ‘I’m getting off. Stop the fucking bus.’
Darryl drew up by the roadside. We remonstrated with Jem in the doorway, but he wrenched the sliding door closed behind him and disappeared.
A couple of moments later, Spider clambered down the bus and climbed out.
‘I’m getting off too!’ Spider said. He vanished into the darkness.
‘Oh fuck,’ Darryl said.
We sat there for a minute not knowing what to do. Shane sniffed and brought a bottle to his mouth. Darryl started up, drove down the road, rounded a corner and pulled in to the side a quarter of a mile further on. He shut down the engine. I got out.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to run off.’
The moor tops were barely visible under the night sky. There was an orange dinge above Middlesbrough beyond the horizon to the north. Until Darryl set the hazard lights going to let them both see where the van was, the separate masses of Andrew’s anger, Shane’s intransigence and Spider and Jem’s disappearances combined and intensified in the pitch dark until I thought my head would crack.
Spider came scrambling up the bank, out of breath. Ten minutes later, there was a knock on the side of the van. We slid the door open. Jem got in.
‘And in a tradition that was to become time-honoured,’ Spider said, ‘they rejoined the group.’ Shane wheezed with mirth. We drove the rest of the way to Newcastle in silence.
Though Costello was going on to play a couple of shows in London at the Dominion Theatre, our last gig of the tour was in Norwich at the University of East Anglia. After his shows in London Costello was going out on another tour of the British Isles, with T-Bone Burnett. After that, he was leaving for Europe. Cait was skittish.
She burst into our dressing room. She had a can of shaving foam and a razor. She wrenched the taps open at one of the basins and started to shave her head, upward from the nape of her neck and her ears.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Spider asked.
‘What’s it look like?’
When she’d finished, a crown of dark hair sprouted from a disc on the top of her head. The rest of her scalp was white, flecked here and there with pink foam and covered in nicks from the razor.
‘You’re not fucking going on stage looking like that,’ we said.
‘Why not?’ she said.
‘Because it looks fucking stupid,’ Shane said.
Someone threw her a towel to wrap her head with.
‘Really?’ she said.
‘Fuck yeah.’
‘Fuck yez all,’ she said. ‘You’re a bunch of cunts.’
She wrapped her head with the towel like a turban, her black hair sticking out of a hole in the top. When she had gone, a silence descended on the room.
‘Well,’ Spider said, ‘he’s not going to forget her in a hurry.’
After the show, the road manager came to invite us to Costello’s dressing room. There was an awkward air of festivity. Costello climbed up to play the piano which stood on the dais. Cait sat morose and sullen on the upholstered ledge with her head in the towel turban. We drank the Attractions’ beer and laughed. Then the Attractions and Costello had to head off. Their bus was waiting.
‘We should do something together,’ Costello said breezily as he made his way out of the room.
‘Yeah,’ we all said, but knew he didn’t mean it.
‘You’re all coming to the Dominion?’ he said, looking at us over the top of his Buddy Holly glasses. ‘You’re all on the list.’
We sat on the minibus waiting for Cait. When she was in, she sat with her coat about her, her knees up, her dark eyes staring sideways out of the window. Darryl pulled out of the car park. On the way back to London I nursed a half-bottle of Powers in my lap and watched the pulse of the motorway lights on the road through the windows.
It was around two in the morning as I walked up from where Darryl dropped us all off outside Shane’s flat, up Midland Road by the side of St Pancras Station and along the body repair shops in the arches under the railway, my bag over my shoulder. I clasped the front of my coat across my stomach against the cold. I had never been so tired, dulled by the sustained crush of other human beings, concussed by the confusion of their demands, blunted by the cycle of sleep, travel, sound check, show, sleep, travel, sound check, show. At the same time I was aware of the certainty, dense and hard, that the crucible of Darryl’s Iveco Daily had fused us all together and permanently, with the makings of the next record among the tracks on Darryl’s tape.
Twelve
In the Boot on Cromer Street, Jem leant on the table and started to draw a finger through the beer on the tabletop. He protruded his lips.
‘I’ve been meaning to say something,’ he said. He stared at his finger in the beer. We all looked at him. His eyes were wide and sad. His eyebrows lifted wrinkles into his forehead.
‘I can’t do this any more,’ he said.
‘Can’t do what?’ The thought that he was going to leave the band horrified me.
‘I can’t do this – this,’ he faltered. His eyes became so wide that his pupils floated free of his eyelids. ‘I can’t do – basically,’ he continued, ‘what I think a manager should be doing.’
During our tour with Costello it had befallen Jem to organise the itinerary, buy the ferry tickets, book hotels, settle bills, wrangle the money we were due from Costello’s production and try to balance our accounts. In the van, he would sit with his knees up against the back of the seat in front with the Office open in his lap, tapping his teeth with a pencil. At the end of each week, when we returned to London for Costello’s weekly residency at the Hammersmith Palais, Jem had gone round to Stiff Records to ask for more money.
To add to his tribulations, a couple of weeks after we had returned from the tour, he told us that Marcia was pregnant again. Their second baby was due in May.
He lifted his eyes to gaze forlornly at all of us. He complained that the responsibility he took for liaising with the record company, for decisions concerning where, when and for how much we played, anywhere, was too much for him. Stan Brennan had been right: increasingly the companies we attempted to do business with were reluctant to conduct negotiations with any one of us.
‘But it’s not just that,’ he said. ‘Eventually, eventually, it’s going to make me into your enemy. I’m not prepared to set myself up for that. I want to be a member of the band again.’
I was riven with guilt to think we had deserted him. The one gig I’d set up at the Ritzy in Brixton seemed a paltry contribution.
‘We need to get a manager,’ he said.
The prospect dismayed me. I trusted Jem with our affairs and I hated the idea of bringing anyone else into our adventure. The hiring of a manager – with all the imagery of briefcases, blazers and thinning hair – I feared would scuttle the story of our transition from disparate bunch of strangers into something more or less resembling a unit, with an identifiable ethos. But I felt so badly for Jem that I did not contest.
Shane
came up with a guy from Dublin called Frank Murray. Murray apparently had been Kirsty MacColl’s manager and had tour-managed Thin Lizzy. We arranged to meet him in the Windsor Castle on Parkway in Camden. It was early in the day and the place smelled of cigarettes and Brasso. We sat around with pints and waited.
When Murray came in he bore an unsurprising resemblance to Dave Robinson. As anticipated, he was wearing a blue sports coat, jeans and loafers. His hair was cut in a generic George Orwell style, but wavy. He sat down on one of the stools across from our table with his legs apart, elbows planted on each thigh, a twist of hair needing pushing back. He looked vulnerable despite the thinness of his mouth and the dark plush which shaded his jaw.
We were unruly a bit, to make an impression and because it was expected. We took the piss out of him too, to break the ice and to show him that we weren’t going to be walked over. He rebuffed our teasing by means of an airy outline of his capabilities, our expectations and the music business, then got up and left.
There wasn’t much to review, other than the guy himself and his offer to take us on for twenty per cent, for a trial period. It had hardly taken up any of our time at all. We had a manager and we hadn’t even to sign a contract.
The following week, we met him again in the Boot after a rehearsal to talk about the plans he had.
‘Just give me two years of your life,’ he said. ‘That’s all I ask. Just two years.’
I pictured us in a couple of years as an established musical entity enjoying deserved esteem, making records regularly. We would each be a musician of repute. We would each have side projects: record production, collaborations, film scores. I would be able to balance my musical and writing careers. I would be living in my own house, if not my own narrow boat.
Frank’s management company was called Hill 16 Ltd. Frank was proud of the name, so called after one of the terraces in Croke Park, the GAA stadium in Dublin. The story was that Hill 16 – originally a mound at the north end of the ground – got its name from the 1916 Easter Rising, the rubble from which had gone to build the terrace.
Up Kentish Town Road from Hill 16 Ltd’s offices was a pub called the Devonshire Arms. After the Pindar of Wakefield, and lately the Boot, the Dev as it was known started to become our watering hole.
Gigs began to come in. We played the Cricketers Arms near the Oval in London. We went up to Digbeth Civic Hall near Birmingham. We drove out in the minivan to the Labour Club in Newport, to play a gig in solidarity with the National Union of Mineworkers, the miners’ strike already in its ninth month.
On the 31st December we played at the ICA on the Mall, as part of Harp Lager’s ICA Rock Week. As the end of 1984 had been approaching I had made Debsey a card to welcome the New Year. It depicted a window opening up towards a blue sky, fluffy with clouds. I wanted it to come across as a statement of hope for the year to come. My career with the Pogues was taking off. Debsey’s seemed to have all but stalled.
Debsey’s last project with Hester and Rachel had been in April, around the time the Pogues had recorded our first session for John Peel. Dolly Mixture had spent a couple of weeks recording an EP at a home studio in Suffolk. It consisted mostly of instrumental parlour pieces, with Rachel playing the cello and Debsey the piano. The Fireside EP, as it was called, had been released a month or so before the Pogues went into the studio to record Red Roses for Me. Since then, Dolly Mixture had been away with Captain Sensible for scattershot television engagements in such places as Stratford, Bristol and Hull. At an appearance at Alton Towers Debsey found out that Sensible and Rachel were due to have a baby.
Debsey did not attend our New Year’s Eve show at the ICA. After the gig, I walked the three miles through the West End and up Rosebery Avenue to Islington to drop the card into her parents’ letter-box on Liverpool Road.
In the first week of the New Year, Frank flew us up to Newcastle for a live performance on the Tyne Tees Television music show The Tube, hosted by Paula Yates and Jools Holland – our first appearance on a bona fide pop programme. On the plane he gave us details of a tour he had booked of Ireland, with a couple of dates up north and one in Scotland, due to start at the beginning of February. After that he had plans for a couple of St Patrick’s Night shows in London, followed by our first tour of Europe and Scandinavia.
Not long after, I got a phone call from Jem. The weeks away from his family on the Costello tour had been hard on him, made plain by his flight from our minivan on the North Yorkshire Moors. Now Marcia was five months pregnant and Ella a baby of fifteen months. The advance from Stiff Records and the fees from the gigs we were doing were only bringing in £150 a week. It was probably more than any of us had ever earned, but hardly enough for a new family.
‘I haven’t spoken to anyone else about this,’ he said. ‘I wanted to talk to you first.’ His tone was so measured and gritty that my heart sank.
‘You all right?’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really.’ There was a long pause. ‘I really feel I have to leave the group.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said.
Without Jem’s nous the band would just collapse. None of us had the canniness to make the decisions that seemed to come so easily to Jem. None of us had his mental alacrity, his energy or his pertinacity when it came to dealing with Shane. None of us had the acumen or the moral stamina to deal with the likes of Dave Robinson and maybe Frank Murray.
It occurred to me that Jem might have rung me to challenge me to argue him down. I knew the approaching weeks of absence from his family would aggravate his circumstances at home. I was shamelessly indifferent to them and not afraid to imply that his defection would amount to a betrayal of what had become our brotherhood. I asked him not to quit.
‘And don’t get me wrong,’ I added, ‘but what the fuck else are you going to do?’
‘Let me talk to Marcia,’ he said in the end.
When Jem showed up at the next gig, neither of us referred to our conversation.
The gig was a return to the Cricketers Arms near the Oval cricket ground. Frank had set up a slew of interviews after the sound check, in advance of what was described in our fanzine as our ‘Irish mini-tour’ in February. Frank distributed us throughout the blue-panelled rooms and ushered in a journalist for each of us.
I admired the ease with which Shane both sent up and relished the process of self-publicising. Jem had a knack for synthesising and giving a context to what we were doing. Spider was mischievous, unpredictable, funny and personable.
It was rare that I was asked to do an interview. My eagerness to come up with something printable tended to produce ponderous and over-earnest commonplaces. Besides, I had little idea about our context – in Irish music, folk music or in pop music in general. I found it difficult to formulate an opinion about what we thought we were doing beyond the matter of playing music with people and trying to get on with them.
The first string of Frank’s gigs took us to Reading University, the Blue Note in Derby, Queen Margaret College Students’ Union in Glasgow and the Paradise Club in Preston, where no sooner had we started playing than the crowd swarmed the stage. In frustration, Andrew delivered a crack to someone’s head with his drumsticks.
In a couple of days we were back in London and Debsey finally moved out of her parents’ place, into a housing association property on Wharton Street round the corner from where Jem and Marcia lived. Debsey and Marcia had become firm friends. Part of me regretted her not moving in with me, but Debsey wanted her independence. Before we left for Ireland, I went to see her new room. Her window overlooked the street which rose from King’s Cross Road. A door from her kitchenette opened onto a small balcony over the front door. Debsey sat me on her bed and had me listen to the Smiths’ ‘How Soon Is Now?’ over and over while she ironed in the doorway.
Before our flight to Belfast for the Irish section of the tour Shane drank himself into a dither. Spooked by the door of the metal detector, he tried to shimmy his way round the side of it. The
security officer ushered him through. When the engines powered up and the plane thrust forward, Cait shrieked and pummelled the back of my seat with a volley of kicks.
From Belfast we drove across the Six Counties to Letterkenny. After our show in a local pub, a spotty kid came to sit next to me at the bar. His accent was hard to decipher and he was drunk. I was about to finish my pint of Smithwick’s and put the glass down empty as a signal that I was going to move on, but I ended up listening to him. He spoke more to the surface of the bar than to me. All his life, he said, he had been waiting for someone like Shane to come along.
‘He’s just like me,’ he said. ‘Well, not like me. People like me. The people who live here. Anywhere, really. Those other wankers. In bands, whatever bands. Don’t have the fucking time for them. They don’t have the time for people like us. But MacGowan, he’s like us. He’s a man of the people. It’s like he knows, you know? How’s he know about me? He’s clever, like. You got to be clever to write songs the way he does. But that clever that he knows about people like me? He’s the man. You know what I mean?’
After Letterkenny we drove two hundred miles to Carlow, a market town an hour south of Dublin. It was dark when we arrived and the streetlights cast a wintry yellow light on the drab parade of businesses and bars along Tullow Street. In the bar of the Royal Hotel I had a whiskey and red and watched an earwig crawl up one of the porcelain beer pumps. Before our show at the Ritz Ballroom we went to a bar called Archbald’s. It was raucous with our fans. A phalanx surrounded Shane and Spider and started to ply the two of them with questions. The determination and eagerness of the interrogation seemed focused on preventing Spider and Shane from making their excuses and peeling off. One after the other, lads jostled to get a question in before the others.
My attention was drawn to an argument on the other side of the bar. A guy wearing a leather jacket was quarrelling with another guy, pretty much dressed identically. The guy’s eyes were glassy and his face was contorted with drink as he fought to moderate his reactions by constant flicks of his head as if he were trying to dislodge the impulse to shunt his interlocutor to the wall and give him a pounding. The thought that he was likely to show up in our audience at the ballroom down the street made my heart sink.
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