When we arrived in Kenmare we dumped our luggage in the Irish cottages we were staying in and went into town for a drink. Such was Shane’s notoriety that in the first bar we went into a gathering drew up. When we attempted to find somewhere more quiet, the crowd clustered round Shane and shuffled up the street with him, bombarding him with questions. His presence on the high street seemed to verge on the messianic. I wondered for his sanity.
On the Friday afternoon we played elbow to elbow on a stage made of pallets and breeze blocks in the dowdy gymnasium behind a convent. The place was crowded and airless, with people rammed up against the edge of the stage, their faces pink and swollen from the heat. A girl of perhaps ten wormed her way to sit by my feet. Sweat dropped from my nose and cylinders of ash from the ubiquitous cigarette between my lips onto the wood and close to the hem of her dress. On the Saturday night, we played at the more conventional venue of the Riversdale House Hotel.
The festival inundated the gaudily painted market town. The bars spilled out onto the streets. The sun blazed. Everywhere were shining sun-reddened faces and shoulders. Pubs erupted in clapping and clamour. I looked in at the Park Hotel. It was jammed to the point of immobility, the cram extending up the stairs. I got a glimpse of a coterie of fiddle players, a bodhrán player and a guitarist all sitting in wheel-back chairs in the corner of the thronged lounge. A saintly-looking man with flaxen hair and a beard and a tatty scarf round his neck played a beaten-up button accordion. They filled the bar and the stairwell with hurtling lines of music. Except for a hushed hubbub and the odd clink of a glass in the bar and a huzzah here and there as a reel swivelled into a hornpipe, all were silent.
Costello flew from England with mixes of the record. We listened to them in a caravan parked out in the field behind the Irish cottages where we hung out during the day, in the sunshine, playing instruments. I loved the record, from the opening mandolin notes of ‘The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn’, the low, solitary drone and plaintive round of ‘The Old Main Drag’, the quivering vibrato of Andrew’s harmonica at the beginning of ‘Dirty Old Town’, the yearning, tremulous wails of the uilleann pipes, to the chiming slashes of the autoharp and the rending of vocal cords on ‘The Wild Cats of Kilkenny’. I was exhilarated by how accomplished the record sounded, despite the puerility of the sounds of hammer-priming, gunshots and ricochets which now volleyed through ‘Jesse James’. Costello had brought in a cornet player called Dick Cuthell who had lacquered over the accordion solo in ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ with an instrumental break suggestive of a funeral in New Orleans, replete with blue notes and unctuous with portato.
In the foreground of the record – guttural, sonorous, nasal and, despite the scarcity of his teeth, precise – stood Shane’s almost indomitable voice.
The Bank Holiday not yet over, Monday morning we were up early to catch the ferry back to England. At the beginning of the week we were at BBC Television Centre to record ‘Sally MacLennane’ for The Old Grey Whistle Test. The ramshackle gigs at the festival in Kenmare aside – where the sound had been crashing and chaotic – it was more or less our first proper iteration with Philip as guitar player. Sad as I was to lose the twelve-string, now that Shane had been relieved of it, we sounded better than we had in months.
*
‘Dirty Old Town’ was due for release at the beginning of July, a month in advance of the launch of Rum Sodomy and the Lash. The video we made for it was a cheap affair. We stood on a plywood surface in a facility somewhere in London. They closed the doors, set the lights and filled the sound stage with smoke.
There was a gamin brutality about Andrew in his leather jacket, his hand quivering over the harmonica. Cait had had a new haircut – a reddened crest tapering down to her slender neck which disappeared into a starched Windsor collar and tie. Philip had had a duster coat made for himself, similar to the ones we had worn on our tour supporting Costello. He jutted his underlip and frowned out into the imaginary audience. I played the mandolin with a strap over one shoulder. The camera going back and forth made me nervous. I kept my head down. I missed the grandeur and the curiosity-factor of my accordion. I tried to compensate by exaggerating the attack of my plectrum against the strings. Spider stamped his heel. The pulses sent shocks up his body. Shane thrust his hands into the pockets of a new, single-buttoned, dove-grey suit. He closed his eyes, tilted his head back and pulled his top lip into a sneer.
By the end of the afternoon we were done. The only external shot was a cut-away to Henry Benagh and Tommy Keane positioned like buskers, in a backlit brick ginnel in Camden.
*
Jem wanted to write songs. He had already collaborated with Shane on the instrumental ‘The Wildcats of Kilkenny’, though the extent of their collaboration seemed to be the juxtaposition of tunes they had written independently of one another under a common title. During our tour in Scandinavia, amid the exigencies of new parenthood, Jem had written an instrumental – an homage to Ennio Morricone – for the B-side of ‘Dirty Old Town’.
We were not yet teenagers when Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly were released. Morricone’s soundtracks – the whips, whistles, chanting, trumpets and electric guitar – were embedded in all of us, not least in Jem.
His instrumental conjured up a sedimentary landscape. The melodies in it were ethereal and itinerant. The last tune – played on the electric guitar – seemed at first encumbered by a phrasing which sounded just weird, but was typical of Jem’s skewed approach to writing melody lines.
A week or so after our taping of The Old Grey Whistle Test, we went to a studio in South London to record it, with Philip producing. We threw everything at it – entitled, by the end of the session, ‘A Pistol for Paddy Garcia’. Out came a thing called the vibraslap – a wooden box with a slot in it, against which a sprung wooden ball vibrated. With a bottleneck, I plucked a note of deflation before a repeat of the main melody. I loved to whistle. A job I’d had on one of Fearnley & Sons Ltd’s building sites, being the boss’s son, was to push a broom pointlessly round the finished empty flats, where my whistling reverberated through the rooms. I had a new accordion, a Paolo Soprani, made in Castelfidardo, the Cremona of accordions I was told. It was large, heavy and black. Its three reeds were lush with musette but there were plenty of switches, one of which selected a single reed, perfect for the dissonance of the countermelody. Lastly, in the studio, there was a set of tubular bells, which we used to underpin the halting electric guitar melody and which brought the instrumental to a close with an ecclesiastical chime.
I was glad to work without Shane in the studio. His absence was a relief from the constant irresolution and second-guessing he provoked in all of us, which culminated more often than not in entrenchment and indignation. His opinions were cruel, unmitigated by courtesy. I didn’t miss his bluntness. The fact that the recording was just a B-side and that Shane had nothing to do with it, however, deprived our work of importance, reluctant as I was to concede it.
The writer of the A-sides of the singles we had released so far had been Shane. Because royalties on the sales of singles were based on both A- and B-sides, the criteria for the choice of song for the B-sides were usually in the service of redressing the balance. Our first single with Stiff Records, ‘The Boys from the County Hell’, had been backed by Spider’s ‘Repeal of the Licensing Laws’. Spider’s writing of ‘Repeal of the Licensing Laws’, he said, had spontaneously come to him of an afternoon, and we joked that he was unlikely to write anything else.
Because traditional songs were in the public domain, the publishing royalties were shared by all of us. The traditional songs ‘Muirshin Durkin’ and ‘Whiskey You’re the Devil’ had been chosen for the 7" and 12" releases of ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’. Equally, ‘Sally MacLennane’ had been backed by the traditional ‘The Leaving of Liverpool’ and ‘The Wild Rover’, which we had recorded at the end of a day at Elephant, in the manner of the Jolly Beggarm
en, accompanied by an acoustic guitar and clinking bottles.
The attempt at equity in the choice of B-sides was honourable enough but it was a token gesture. The fact was that unless you wrote a song, you weren’t likely ever to earn much from the making of records. My talent lay in playing – the accordion, the guitar, mandolin, anything I could lay my hands on – and, with Jem, wresting from Shane the songs he came to rehearsal with.
For the 12" release of ‘Dirty Old Town’, another B-side needed recording. We went up to a demo studio on Balls Pond Road called the Red House, to record the traditional song ‘The Parting Glass’. It was a song Shane was fond of and as close to an apologia as I was likely to hear.
Of all the money e’er I had,
I spent it in good company.
And all the harm I’ve ever done,
Alas! it was to none but me.
We had had little opportunity to rehearse the song and just a couple of days to record and mix it. Because Philip had so far produced all the B-sides of the singles since Red Roses for Me, we volunteered him to produce this one. I had the feeling that it would be the last time I would play the guitar on anything the Pogues would record. I made the most of the opportunity.
At the summer solstice we drove down to Somerset for the Glastonbury Festival. It was a beautiful afternoon. The summer had come early. From the yawning mouth of the stage, I gazed out at the thousands that crusted the vale. Banners on twisted sticks and drifting smoke measured out the remoteness of the blue and pink sunlit wash of people.
A week later, at a festival at Cheltenham racecourse, we were on the same bill as Captain Sensible and Dolly Mixture. I had been wondering when Debsey and I were going to intersect on the road as musicians. When we met, however, Sensible was bluff with punk seniority, and volatile with it. For Debsey’s sake I wanted to find his antics funny. The jockeys’ weighing room under the stands had been given over to artists’ hospitality. A weighing scale with a chair stood in the middle of the wood floor. When he started to jump up and down on them, Jem lost his temper. In the end, Sensible withdrew, cuffing the air in indignation and spitting oaths behind him. It saddened me that Sensible seemed to exact such loyalty from Debsey.
*
We had an album cover ready for Rum Sodomy and the Lash. Théodore Géricault’s enormous canvas, Le Radeau de la Méduse, concerns the catastrophe of the French naval frigate the Méduse which ran aground on a sandbank off the coast of West Africa in 1816. After ensuring the safety of dignitaries in lifeboats, the captain cast adrift 150 of his crew on a makeshift raft. All but fifteen of them perished. It was nearly two weeks before they were rescued. By that time the survivors had not only endured hunger, thirst and disease, but cannibalism too.
The picture depicts the survivors’ first sighting of a rescue ship on the horizon. Men in the background are attempting to signal, some of them with rags. The raft is strewn with corpses. It is a painting which reveals mankind at the extremity of the human predicament – truly Eine Reise ans Ende des Verstandes, as the tag line for Das Boot read.
It had been Marcia’s idea to use the painting and to replace six of the heads in it with ours. A photographer came to rehearsal to take the headshots to use as models. In the final rendition, Shane’s head – wearing shades – replaced that of the crew member in the centre of the canvas. My head replaced that of the painter Eugène Delacroix, who had apparently been the model for the figure in the foreground, my arm draped over Spider’s lifeless body. Jem’s head replaced that of the man alerting the occupants of the raft to the distant rescue ship.
Stiff Records’ publicity department ran rampant with the maritime theme. For the photograph session for the back of the album cover and the paper sleeve, we dressed up in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naval uniforms. We had cocked hats. We wore twill breeches with knee buttons and tailcoats, full dress and undress coats heavy with metal thread epaulettes and gilt brass buttons, with two-point and three-point pocket flaps weighed down by gold lace. Jem wore an eye-patch. I pulled one arm out of my tailcoat and pinned the empty sleeve to my chest. For further photographs in our naval costumes, we were taken from the photographer’s studio and out on a boat into the chill wind blowing up the Thames, across to the Traitors’ Gate set into the embankment under the Tower of London.
Between the painting of our heads in Le Radeau de la Méduse and the photo session for the rear of the album cover, Philip had officially been inducted into the group.
On the 30th July, the piratical theme reached its apotheosis with the launch party for the record. It took place on HMS Belfast – an early venue for Spandau Ballet. We donned our Nelson-era costumes, invited the press and a slew of friends, acquaintances and others, played a short set on the upper deck under a marquee, and then got drunk. At some point in the evening, a journalist fell into the Thames from a landing stage.
For the rest of the summer we went out playing festivals. In the first week of July we performed at an outdoor festival in Battersea Park which went under the title ‘Jobs for a Change’, staged in protest against Margaret Thatcher’s plans for the abolition of the Greater London Council. The previous year there had been fifty thousand on the South Bank. This year, it was so popular that people climbed up into the trees to see. They swelled against the rickety barriers. I watched the yellow-jacketed bouncers brace against the surge. Halfway through our set I happened to catch sight of a black object turning slowly in the sky, seemingly floating above the trees. I watched it for a moment or two as it twirled there, bereft of coordinates, until it suddenly dipped from its zenith and headed straight towards me. There followed a crack of metal against the front of my accordion and I looked down to see a can of Guinness spinning on the stage spewing out tan foam over the plywood.
Backstage in the hum of the generators, amid the barriers and the Portakabins and in the damp wind blowing off the Thames, Frank introduced us to Kirsty MacColl and her husband Steve Lillywhite. We were familiar with Steve Lillywhite’s name from his work with Peter Gabriel, Big Country, XTC, Simple Minds and U2. He had green eyes, a smile full of teeth and brown hair which the wind blew over his forehead.
Kirsty, in my mind, was already a kind of national treasure by virtue of the string of records she’d made in the past few years: ‘They Don’t Know’, ‘There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis’ and Billy Bragg’s ‘A New England’. Her autumnal tresses of hair, one of them pinned up against her temple, fell over her shoulders. She had a beautiful face and a brassiness about her that was infectious. We all loved her.
To end the summer we flew to play at the Vienna Folk Festival, all of us looking forward to being on the same bill as the Dubliners whom we regarded as patriarchs.
On the bus to Freudenau Racecourse, Jem announced he was going to smash the mandolin up.
‘It’s a piece of shit mandolin,’ he said. ‘If anything, it’ll force me to get a decent one.’
The stage looked out across the park towards long wrought-iron balconies and the imperial pavilion with its corroded copper dome and spire.
At the end of ‘Muirshin Durkin’, as promised, and with typical detachment, Jem unslung the mandolin and swung it by the neck in an arc over his head. The body splintered, the side panels came apart and the front burst off. With the strings barely holding the pieces together, Jem dragged it up and sundered what remained on the stage. He finished it off with a couple of foot-stamps.
The dispassion with which he demolished such an instrument as a mandolin, in front of a couple of thousand at a folk festival of all places, made us laugh.
Afterwards, in the crowded bar of the pavilion we met the Dubliners – older men, hirsute, portly, moist of consonant. There was an air about them simultaneously of the sea and the suburbs. There was an instant acknowledgement of brotherhood between us. We thrust hands into hands and shook our greetings.
Sixteen
Frank’s connections had already provided us with a guitarist in Philip Chevron
, and, in Paul Scully, a front-of-house engineer. Towards the end of the summer, in the dressing room at De Montfort Hall in Leicester, Frank introduced us to a guy called David Jordan who was going to take over as our monitor-engineer. Jordan had worked on the Specials’ first album, coincidentally produced by Costello. He was a youthful-looking guy with a kind of Billy Fury wave of sandy hair. He was broad-chested and wore a leather flight jacket. He had travelled down from Whitehaven where he had been in rehab from heroin addiction. There was a cautious, almost defensive air about him.
At the beginning of September, Frank introduced us to a guy called Paul Verner. Frank had known P.V., as he was known, for a few years, through various Dublin bands. Latterly he had been the lighting engineer for the Boomtown Rats. After Live Aid and Bob Geldof’s ascension to world renown, the Boomtown Rats as a band seemed likely to be wound up. P.V. came to work for us. He was a compact, habitually bowed man with watery blue eyes and a mane of tatty hair. There was a heedfulness about him and a sensitivity to slight.
The previous May, on an afternoon off at the Cibeal Cincise in Kenmare, before meeting both D.J. and P.V., Frank had brought a guy across to where we were sitting in the field behind the Irish cottages. The guy was called Terry Woods. We said hello and that was it. We went back to playing our instruments in the sunshine. The encounter had been brief and seemingly inconsequential. It left me with nothing other than an image of curls and the sensation of aplomb.
At the end of August Frank brought Woods to a rehearsal, which took place for some reason at the Boston Arms in Tufnell Park. We had set up on the stage in the club upstairs. A foil fringe curtain provided a bizarre festivity. Woods came in with a curiously shaped instrument case. He had a head of corkscrew hair and sea-blue eyes, the sensitivity of which belied the vague pugnacity of his face. His nose looked to have been broken at least once.
Here Comes Everybody Page 16