Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?

by Tim Bradford

  The light was going down, reflecting warmth against the scaffolding on the Harrod’s Depository. Or ‘Harrods Suppository’, as one of my friends used to call it in all innocence, the same friend who thought that West Ham played at Hammersmith. Which, when you think about it, isn’t so strange. Seeing the shell of a motor made me decide that I should check the battery on the little Corsa. I didn’t want it to go flat again. It would soon be going on a journey.

  * * *

  1 Eric Heiden, say. Not Wilf Thingy, the plucky English bloke.

  2 In a more recent, deadline-challenging development, Fernando’s greasy spoon business has been bought out and is now another Italian restaurant.

  3 A while later I was writing up the notes to this chapter on the same train and a modernist tramp sat down next to me, smelling of BO, roast kidney and special brew, and fags, his purple jeans darkened with recently squirted urine. Was I inadvertently attracting the tramps while writing about them?

  4 In my mid teens I spent day after day reading my favourite authors, Jack Kerouac and George Orwell. I loved Down and Out in Paris and London but there was also something slightly warped about it, the sordid voyeuristic slumming of a middle-class bloke with too much time on his hands. Incidentally, how do you know if you’re a tramp? Is it genetic, mapped out generations before? One of my ancestors used to head off from his Buckinghamshire village home at regular periods to pubs and clubs in the Midlands to play the squeeze box and the spoons. My great grandmother’s family in Yorkshire were horse people, which was apparently a euphemism for gypsy stock. I’d seen a photo of her father, looking tall and strong with a big black Victorian moustache. I imagined him looking proud on horseback.

  6 Historically speaking, the Irish village in Hammersmith, at least in the nineteenth century, was actually about half a mile to the north-west at Brook Green.

  7 As well as the Irish centre there’s a thriving busker scene in west London, usually situated in the subway at the top of Fulham Palace Road. The best of them is known simply by his unofficial stage name Bloke with Organ in a Wheelchair. He’s a fat old fellow with grey hair and glasses; a more recent addition to the scene. He rests his organ on a stand and plays Irish classics, usually with a tinny drum machine diddling away in the background. One of his better numbers is ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’, which goes something like this: Bum bh bum phh daao daaaoooo daooo daoaooo daooo daoo daooo Bum bh bum phh daao daaaoooo daooo daoaooo daooo daoo daooo Bum bh bum phh daao daaaoooodaooo daoaooo daooo daoo daooo. tinkle dee dee deeeeeeeeeee’. I once saw him stand up and pack all his stuff away and for a second I was outraged that I’d given him money not because of the music but because of his disability but then I thought it serves me right, transport is a big problem in London when you’re getting to gigs.

  8 Finnegans Wake is the James Joyce book that nobody has read. Ulysses is also the James Joyce book that nobody has read, but everyone claims they have (that’s why it is now the Citizen Kane of novels, up there at the number one spot in recent lists of the best novels of the century). Finnegans Wake was Joyce’s last book, his mangled and messianic attempt to reinvent the language and structure of the novel and piss people off at the same time (he was probably much more successful at the latter). Of course, I don’t really know what I’m talking about, not having read it.

  IRISH MYTHS & LEGENDS 2

  Hey, Mister, Got any Tayto?

  Most Irish pubs worth their salt and vinegar will serve Tayto, the Irish potato crisps. To the untrained palate (i.e. mine) they taste exactly the same as any other kind of crisp. But to the rootless Irish person drifting round the world dreaming of home, they are a beautiful and rare foodstuff which transports the eater on a mystical journey back to Erin’s wild shores. People buy boxloads of the stuff saying they are addicted to them. They’re dry, slightly greasy and very cheese and oniony. But you don’t understand, says the fat person stuffing their face with crisps. Lots of Irish food is special like that, particularly if it’s hard to come by. Here’s a brief selection:

  Superquinn Sausages

  You’ve got to try some Superquinn sausages, I was told. I sat down to my fry-up with these little fried rabbit droppings at the side of the plate. Mmmm, these fried rabbit droppings look delicious. But where are the Superquinn sausages? Hey, those are the Superquinn sausages. Ah, stop messing.

  Irish Butter

  Irish people abroad will drive around a new city for days looking for Irish butter. I mean, butter is butter. It all tastes the same to me. But they like their traditional Irish butter – like Kerrygold. Kerrygold was actually created by Heinz magnate Tony O’Reilly for the Irish Dairy Board in the mid-sixties. But if you mention this to an Irish person, it’s as if you have criticised Michael Collins or the drummer out of u2. Kerrygold is simply a recent brand with an invented fictional heritage, like the crap beer you get in many new Irish pubs. Hey, managed to get a dig in at crap Irish pubs again there. The proofreader’s obviously not concentrating.

  Ring Cheese

  In the long-gone days when I played rugby, the concept of ‘ring cheese’ would have been enough to send me into paroxysms of mirth before collapsing on the floor in a soggy puddle of giggles (at least I hope that’s giggles and not the product of the ‘cream cracker game’ – oh, never mind). Ring is an Irish speaking area in Waterford. Cheese is a dairy product made from milk and – but you probably know that already.

  Chocolate Kimberleys

  Ordinary Kimberley biscuits are, apparently, disgusting and taste like cardboard. But you’ve got to taste Chocolate Kimberleys. They’re simply heaven. You’re supposed to leave them in the fridge for a while. Mmmmmm. It’ll be an experience you’ll never forget. It’s a biscuit thing with marshmallow in, a bit like Wagon Wheel but not as tasty or big.

  Red Lemonade

  Lemons are yellow but lemonade is red, at least in Ireland. White lemonade, or to be more precise, see-through, is for amateurs. Real drinkers take red lemonade with their tipple. Is it like Lucozade or Tizer? I asked in all innocence. Don’t be silly. It’s lemonade made with special red lemons. Right. But it’s not really red, it’s orange.

  VIKING TOWN

  Dublin

  Visions of Beer and Loathing on the Road to Holyhead

  Hammersmith to Dublin

  As usual I had left everything until the last minute. This was fine with me – in a way I was happier like that because it didn’t give me too much time to cock things up. When other people were involved, however, it became more of a problem.1 I had only mentioned to Terry a couple of days earlier that I was definitely heading off at this time. He’s usually pretty spontaneous, but this was short notice even for him. I’d spoken to him earlier in the day and he said he’d call some time in the evening if he’d managed to get it all together. I smelled disaster already (it smells sweet and sickly like treacle pudding except it’s also as dry as chalk on a blackboard). Why couldn’t I organise anything properly? Terry would most likely be in a pub doing the crossword and thinking subconsciously about Ireland. That was something, I suppose. I sat in the little box room at the end of the flat and stared down at The Car, waiting for the phone to ring.

  I had had strange fears that either mine or Terry’s short-term memory tanks would give out and one of us would forget about the trip. The thing was, Terry and I had one thing in common, a dramatically deficient short-term memory system. We could both recall events which took place in the sixties, news broadcasts, the colour of the sky on a spring morning, what the three-year-old girl next door wore at her birthday party, where we were when we first heard ‘Yellow Submarine’, the Radio Times with Philip Madoc as an Indian warrior in Last of the Mohicans on the cover, how we felt when we could count to ten, Thunderbirds, Captain Fantastic and Mrs Black, the metallic and salty taste of Knorr soup, the lavender-water smell of great grandparents’ houses, recurring dreams of flying and five-year-old girlfriends.

  But ask us what we did yesterday or where we put that thing w
e were holding five minutes earlier, you know, the thing, and we were lost. We both had our theories about this. I felt that there was a little tank where the short-term memories were left to ferment for a while into long-term memories, after which they would progress to the much larger long-term memory tank. Our short-term memory tanks were just too small for the amount of sensory data we experienced in our frenzied lives, so it all got pushed into the long-term memory tank, which could not be accessed for at least eighteen months. The fantastic thing was that we’d be going on a trip together which neither of us would remember for a year and a half. The thing was, Terry and I had one thing in common, a dramatically deficient short-term memory system.

  Tim’s short- and long-term memory-tank system

  Terry’s theory (I think – my memory’s not great) was that we both drank far too much, and this destroyed the synapses responsible for short-term memory. The high of drinking mirrored the positivity of childhood. This similar mood allowed us to access memories that normal people might have forgotten.

  Terry’s short-term memory system:

  Terry is Neal Cassady and I am Jack Kerouac. He’s full of energy and madness and I sort of write it all down. Or maybe I am David Cassidy and Terry is Jackanory, always telling crazy stories and appearing every evening at about 5 o’clock. Actually, this On the Road analogy is a bit crap, because although Kerouac did all the writing, it was Cassady who did the driving. Kerouac never drove. Ever. He bummed lifts. Either in cars or on freight trains. Terry can’t drive either. Though he claims he has been able to since the age of six – he just doesn’t have a licence.

  Me and Terry in the car would take over some little community in the west of Ireland and terrorise the locals – annoy ‘cops’ and flirt with chicks in roadside tourist gift shops, just like those lads in Easy Rider. We were bohemians, outlaws, outcasts, in the grand tradition of mad partnerships:

  • Kerouac and Cassady

  • Hunter S. Thompson and his lawyer

  • Fonda and Hopper

  • Boswell and Johnson

  • Bob Hope and Bing Crosby

  • Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis

  • Abbott and Costello

  • John Noakes and Peter Purves

  • Sandy Gall and Reginald Bosanquet

  • Pippin and Tog

  • Tony Blair and Gordon Brown

  Using telepathy and ‘special’ mind powers to make Terry ring:

  Deep breaths, Tim. Get comfortable. Put your memory tanks onto ‘timer’ mode (Economy 7 will do).

  Ring ring ring ring ring. Terry Terry Terry Terry Terry.

  If Terry doesn’t ring

  The leprechaun will sing

  Ring ring ring Terry ring

  I make a decision to take the singing leprechaun (that I’d bought on the Swansea – Cork ferry) with me if Terry doesn’t show:

  If Terry didn’t show I had already had the thought that I might take my little green fabric friend with me. (He has the voice of a very squeaky Irish jockey and sings the hits of the day, particularly at Christmas. Well, no, actually, all he sings is ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’.) My singing leprechaun comments on the action now and then but can’t influence it. If I’m doing something wrong, or he wants to say ‘no’ he’ll sing ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ (possibly recorded by the wheelchair synth player of Fulham Palace Road) when I press his belly. If he’s feeling happy and positive, the singing leprechaun stays quiet. I think. I can never be sure. The singing leprechaun would be Jack Kerouac and I would have to be Neal Cassady, which meant a hell of a lot more work for me. I went out to pack the car. I must have been out for no more than ten minutes but when I got back there was a message on the answer machine from Terry.

  The message on my answer machine from Terry:

  ‘Hello hello. Yeah, er, hi Tim, it’s Terry. Er, I’m afraid I’m going to have to be really boring and middle-aged and blow you out this weekend. Yeah, er, I’m just feeling really knackered at the moment. Sorry mate. Speak to you when you get back. Erm, give us a bell sometime if you get a chance cheers bye.’

  Terry had phoned from some pub in the centre of town. Which meant I couldn’t ring him back to try and get him to change his mind. The singing leprechaun looked up at me with searching eyes. I pressed his little tummy and he sang me a beautiful version of that old Irish song. I collected the rest of my stuff, turned off the heating and went out to the car.

  One o’clock in the morning and it was just me, the car and the cold inky-orange streets of West London – incredibly, I’d managed to get to the top of Fulham Palace Road without running over a tramp or one of those pale but high-spirited late-night youngsters who sometimes hang around outside twenty-four-hour shops shouting at each other in cod-Jamaican accents and looking as though they’ve recently overdosed on casual sportswear.

  Feeling just a little hypnotised by the enthusiastic purr of the Corsa’s 1.4L engine, I shifted up and down gears with all the grace of a bull elephant doing needlestitch, then coasted up through an almost deserted and ghostly Shepherd’s Bush to the roundabout, then up the A40. Hammersmith is a gateway in and out of London: big roads take you west, the tube and the A4 take you into town. It’s good for country boys like me who don’t know where the hell they want to be – in the city or out in the sticks. I paused for a moment to change down into second, then a manoeuvre so simple even a little kid in a pedal car could do it – get onto that motorway and head for Wales. But not me – God knows what I was playing at but I soon realised I was heading back into town towards the West End and the City. Wrong direction again. The Singing Leprechaun in the passenger seat said nothing as I came off at the next slip road at Royal Oak station, did a U-turn near some claustrophobic-looking Georgian townhouses then back out onto the road underneath the A40. Is it left or right? Left or fucking right? ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’, sang the Singing Leprechaun, which I took to mean a left. I had another three hundred miles to go along the A40, M6 and loads of other Ms and As. I knew I was bound to get lost now and again and didn’t really care, but if I fucked up like this every three or four miles I wouldn’t make it to the ferry for at least another couple of days.

  I’ve never liked driving much. Not in cities anyway. I’ve never really trusted myself with all that metal and glass. When I was seventeen my parents give me a choice of driving lessons or a record player for my birthday. To have a car was a passport to success in Lincolnshire, particularly with women. The more sought-after girls lived out in the back of beyond, the daughters of farmers or village schoolmasters. By choosing not to drive I was also choosing the town girls (or, in reality, choosing no sex), choosing fresh air, choosing two feet, choosing music.2 While some of my friends got into wing mirrors, exhausts, turbo brum-brum camshaft wheelie gauges etc., I was into free jazz, new-wave pop, electro and Northern industrial music. In a way it was still an attempt at pulling – a girl would come round and I’d leave my Teardrop Explodes French import EP, Ornette Coleman Atlantic albums, or Cabaret Voltaire and Afrika Bambaata twelve-inch singles somewhere obvious for her to see (like on the front doorstep, or perched on the toilet bowl). A not very successful technique, naturally. Perhaps I should have hung them from the ceiling.

  If there was a party somewhere out in the sticks you had to befriend a gang which had a designated driver. Gangs were like little tribes and were made up of different character types who had specific roles to play. You’d have the son of a respected teacher or lawyer who might know some of the local cops and sweet-talk them. You’d have a hard nut in case your gang was challenged by another gang (particularly from another town) – he was a sort of champion. You’d have a good-looking babe magnet who would lure the females or act as a frontman when the gang went hunting as a pack. You’d have a leader, the charismatic brains, a talker and ideas man who would say let’s go here, let’s go there. You’d have a hippy drop-out alternative culture kind of guy who would be the comedy character. And finally, and most importantly, you’d
have a driver. The driver was a monklike figure who had eschewed the pleasures of alcohol in return for approval amongst a group who otherwise might not have given him the time of day. It was a social transaction. The driver got camaraderie and social acceptance. The gang got someone to ferry them from village pub to town pub to party to nightclub. There was a small group I knew who would occasionally let me hang around on the periphery and smile inanely at their antics, who had a driver known simply as ‘Driver’. We’d all be completely plastered and he’d just drive, with a big happy grin on his face. I never understood it. Never got inside his head. Perhaps I never really worked out the rural vibe. It exists in Ireland too, that need and importance to have a car (like horses would have been to my great grandmother’s people). If you’re out in the country and you don’t have a car you’re fucked. Or, in the case of trying to get off with the daughters of village schoolteachers, not fucked.

  I adjusted the mirror, got into cruise mode, got comfortable. A straight run, give or take a few confusing motorway exits in the West Midlands. Undeterred by my dysfunctional directional sense, I put some lachrymose alternative country sounds onto the stereo and turned up the volume as much as I could without the dashboard vibrating out of its position and the car falling to pieces. First up, ‘Windfall’, by Son Volt, ‘Houses on the Hill’ by Whiskeytown, ‘Snow Don’t Fall’ by Townes Van Zandt, ‘Oh Sister’ by Dylan. I got a tingly feeling at the romanticism of it all, until I remembered I was still inside the M25. As the car rumbled out of west London towards Hanger Lane, then through the tunnel as though escaping from some concrete nightmare and out onto the motorway and freedom, the harmonies got richer (‘Both feet on the floor, two hands on the wheel, let the wind take your troubles away’).