Bloguemahone: Dispatches from The Tour
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Publication: Bloguemahone on www.pogues.com
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James Fearnley has been sending
tales, rumors, myths and innuendo from the 2005 &
2006 shows by The Pogues. Legends crumble,
recrimination follows. Thanks James for giving us this
peek behind the scenes.
Japan, 2005
Shane came into rehearsal ‘professionally
late’, as he wittily put it, with that gnashing
laugh he has, the first day of rehearsal. I think
he’d had to be woken up, in his flat. He
wasn’t as sartorial as I’ve seen him of
late, though he still has his brothel-creepers that I
became familiar with coming across on the dressing
room floor when we were on tour at Christmas, as he
felt the need to air his rather curious-looking feet
(and to air, with Joey, the top half of his body, at
least one evening, where were we? Newcastle I think).
He staggered in at four in the afternoon wearing a
tophat that looked as though someone had attempted to
contain a firework inside it.
 Rehearsals went
reasonably well. After so many years playing these
songs, recording them, putting them together,
rehearsing them, they’re – well,
internalized, now, part of our fabric somehow, in our
bones. I don’t think we actually needed the two
days we set aside for rehearsal – other to
remind ourselves whether or not there were three or
four verses before the break in Old Main Drag (on the
record, and I remember when Shane wrote the song and
we put it together in rehearsal, it was supposed to be
symmetrical with three before and three after the
break), and for Andrew to get used to the rather
springy skin on the bass drum of the rented (with a
finish that was almost gold lamé) drum kit, and
to remind ourselves of the chords to Thousands Are
Sailing, which have always been a problem for a
lot of us. As it turned out, when it came to the
festival at Stoke Park in Guildford, when Jem put on
the gunmetal-blue suit he last wore seven months ago
for the Christmas tour and went through the pockets,
he found the chord crib-sheet he’d used then,
so, at least he knew what to do.
The second day of rehearsals was as enfeeblingly hot
as the first day. We ran through the set a couple of
times, and, though we didn’t actually have time
for it at what’s known as
‘Guilfest’, I was amazed that we
hadn’t any trouble with Bottle of Smoke,
because that one caused the most problems last
Christmas: none of us could say at that time, with any
certainty, how the break, which Jem wrote, went. We
realized, from the live recording, that Terry was
playing one thing, me another, and Jem something else.
Last Christmas we spent a bit of time trying to
discover some concensus as to how the tune actually
went. This time, however, for some reason,
don’t know why, it was all there – maybe a bit
of contemporizing from Terry, because the dear boy
just can’t help it, but, in the heel of the
hunt, well, we just didn’t play it at Guilfest.
Perhaps in Japan.
I met the band bus coming down what’s normally
the cycle track across Stoke Park at Guilfest and
motioned it in through the artistes’ gate, to
make my way, don’t ask me why, to the guest
entrance. I had to come back to where I’d
guided the tour bus in and wait outside for ten
minutes in a face-off with a rather red-faced,
scottish (why are they always Scottish?) security
manager who wouldn’t believe me, until the tour
manager came (who’s Scottish too, hmm) to break
the deadlock. The band had a straighforward journey
down from London. That’s tour managers for you.
The Pogues have an exceedlingly good one, who’s
as executively functional as you can get and
intimately knows that there are more ways than one to
skin a cat. Wasn’t always the case with tour
managers. It is now.
So, we change into our suits – Jem into the
aforementioned, with the chord sheet in; Philip into
something suavely black; Darryl into a suit I’m
sure dates from my wedding; Terry into a charcoal
number, with his blue shirt tucked out, which
I’ve told him about, but will he listen?;
Spider, with a new, rather fetching, quasi-Steve
Marriot hair-cut (an opening came up, with Sarah,
nobody but whom he trusts to go near his hair), in a
light grey suit, and his shirt tucked out, but I can
handle that, for some reason; myself in the suit I
bought at a vintage clothing stall in Santa Monica
Civic Center and which has seen me through every gig
I’ve done, with the Low and Sweet Orchestra,
Cranky George, Pogues, since 1995. Shane obviously
hadn’t read the band-meeting minutes and went
on-stage in the t-shirt and black trousers I’d
seen him in last – the front of the trousers peppered
with cigarette burns (reminded me of the pub game I
played once, where you peel the tissue paper from the
silver foil of twenty Embassy, stick it over the top
of a pint glass, put a coin in the middle of it, and
then burn holes in it with cigarettes with the person
who makes the coin fall into the bottom of the glass
buying the next round).
Shane changed the set round at the last minute, which
might have put another band into a panic (although the
sound and lighting technicians don’t like it one
bit, for all the cues going to shit and everything).
I saw him scribbling over the set list in the
porta-dressing room, arms on his knees, stabbing at
the paper with a marker, wiping his nose with a
fore-arm, impatiently cuffing the paper. I left him
to it. We all left him to it. Doesn’t do to
come between the bowman and his target. As it turned
out, the first three songs were just the right sort of
songs to open the set with (although the
front-of-house sound-man might have wanted something
slow to get all the levels sorted out, but, hell, you
can’t come out in front of – how many?
Don’t know. Fifteen thousand maybe. Between
ten and fifteen. Difficult to tell, although the
heads stretched right back to the customary, almost
medieval-looking ring of tents at the very back -
potato places, shops, that sort of thing, though I
didn’t concentrate that much on what’s out
at the very back. Streams of Whiskey, then
If I Should Fall From Grace With God, then
Sally MacLennane. Those are hard work for an
accordion-player that wants to jump around at the
dramatic bits. My legs (and the knees of my trousers)
are ruined.
Shane brought with him onto the stage a large pitcher
of iced water and a wet towel, which he wore for some
of the time. He had a familiar old thing going on in
his head, for this gig: a recital, a disjointed
recital of half-remembered phrases that have passed
his way in his life, coming out in a sort of bebop of
verbalizing, starting out with some improbable
connection he’s made, and then just going off on
that. ‘It’s nice to play in Denmark
again!’ he said, whereupon, he’s off into
Hamlet, but runs dry because he can’t remember
the whole graveside soliloquy. Spider, however, came
to his rescue with something, I’m not sure, from
Henry the 4th (not sure which part), which he does
remember in its entirety, because Spider has a
photographic memory, but one of those panoramic
cameras, if you know what I mean. It’s great to
hear Shane go off into some verbal jazz territory,
like the character Ron Perlman plays in ‘The
Name Of The Rose’, and it’s great to hear
Spider spitting out Shakespeare. Doesn’t happen
a lot nowadays. In that way, it was like a
gig-of-old, the two of them playing off one another.
And, like a gig of old, was the way we played the rest
of the show – by the seat of our pants, with almost
bemused looks up from our instruments – or even not
bothering to look up at all – when Shane neglects a
cue, or rides off digging his stirrups into the flank
of one of the verses after an instrumental break in
Fiesta and would, at one time, have left us a
mess of limbs, scrabbling in the dust. Nowadays,
however, we’re cheek-by-jowl with his frothing
steed and heading it round toward the paddock, or
crashing into the barn, one of the two, with Spider
banging his head on – well, not the proper beer tray
it should have been, because a runner came back from
the shops, having been sent out for beer-trays, with a
catering pack of those silver-foil tv-dinner trays
which Spider left crumpled on the floor. At the end
of Fiesta, Jem went off into some penetrating
Coltrane territory.
I’m sure someone will have the set list. I
don’t have a copy, and I’m buggered if I
can remember how it went. We played Rainy Night In
Soho in a way I don’t remember ever playing
it – slow, much slower, and, I think, with a
refinement the song hasn’t had for a while. I
questioned Terry over the top of the piano if he
thought it was too slow, but managed to stop him going
over to try to get Andrew to speed it up a bit,
because that wouldn’t have done, and besides, I
was getting to like it slow like that. Shane forgot
how the verse after the break went, but let the crowd
remind him how it was, and with a fine sense of
etiquette almost, took their cue and started the verse
again, once he had it.
That’s all I have to say about Guilfest.
Afterwards I walked fucking miles through Guildford to
get a drink in a hotel bar with holes in both knees of
my suit.
Except – since the BBC Radio 2 vans were out the back,
I’m wondering if some of it, or maybe all, might
be available on the Radio 2 website. I listened to
Fiesta on the radio last night (Saturday) and
had a laugh at how we did it.
Shane’s got a new suit that’s said to have
the look, from a distance, of fish-skin. For me, it
looks to have come from an amateur dramatic
company’s stage curtain. He calls it his Bobby
Darin suit, and as we stood outside Terminal 1 at
Heathrow waiting for everyone to turn up – with the
exception of Terry, in the end, because his flight
from Dublin was sufficiently delayed to put him back a
day – Shane treated me to a performance of
Sailing, with feet-shuffles and swirling arm
movements. I feared he was going to go into a lavish
pirouette, as I’ve seen him do many a time in
the past, when he was surer on his pins, and found
myself interposing myself between him and the kerbside
in case he spun himself under the wheels an airport
bus. Anyway, he looked good, in the suit. I’m
thankful the groin-peppered black slacks he had in
Guildford are in the bin.
Fearful that someone of a shambling, erratic demeanour
might not be allowed onto an airplane (again), a
presentableness had been encouraged, to the point that
Joey (black leather flat cap, black shirt, black
pants) took him to one side and gave his face the
once-over with a concealer pencil. Sounds daft, I
know, but, well, it’s not easy opening for Bob
Dylan, as we did in 1989, without your front man.
Back to top
Oh, it’s a long flight to Tokyo – at the end of
which, Ross, collecting Shane and Joey from where they
were sitting, to facilitate their transition from the
plane to the arrival, was informed by a woman who had
been sitting close by, that she had ‘never been
so disgusted’ in her life.
Joey we had to leave behind at Narita (we’ve
left him behind before, but not quite so expediently -
on the trip from Munich to Zurich, as I remember,
whichever year that was, when the bus pulled into a
Raststätte for drinks and smokes for the drive
ahead, and no-one did a head count when we got back on
the bus – it was usually Joey, but I suppose we
thought he was in one of the bunks. It’s a
testament to Joey’s resourcefulness that, with
nothing but the shirt on his back, he got to the show
in Zurich not much behind us). The customs officers
at Narita, alert to something, had him spread his
belongings out along one of their tables. Well, we
had everybody on the bus, twiddling our fingers, and
Ross our tour manager sensed that we trusted to the
persistence of Joey’s resourcefulness when it
comes to getting himself from A to B. So, we drove
off without him.
It’s hot and humid and we’re constantly
being reminded – by what means, I wouldn’t know;
one or two of us must have read a paper or something,
thereafter the information sends a frisson through the
touring company, as things tend to do in such a small
community – that last week there was an earthquake and
that there’s a typhoon coming in, the front
edges of which have draped the cluttered jumble of
buildings and hoardings with drifting rain and the
clouds blurred the tops of the skyscrapers beyond what
I suppose must be Yoyogi Park, an eruption of greenery
in the middle of otherwise – when you go up to the
25th floor for breakfast and have the panorama of
Tokyo laid out before you, on both sides of the
breakfast place – a kind of rubble, after all.
DzM is staying with us in the hotel. It’s nice
to be able, finally, to put a face to the acronym.
(Except, it’s not strictly an acronym – as the
recent debate in Santa Monica, I think it was, about
putting the full titles of organizations and not just
their initials on official minutes and documents – has
let me know.)
Back to top
The rain’s started. Umbrellas, though, are in
plentiful supply and only 400 yen for a clear-plastic
one from the store on the mall underneath the hotel,
so I might venture out into the typhoon come
soundcheck time.
I came across Jem and his family on the 25th floor
this morning, looking down at the intersection in
front of the hotel, watching as the umbrellas beneath
drifted into a mass of pastel disks at the crosswalks,
to be released across the zebra-crossings, like
jellyfish, someone said.
Today is the first gig. It should be walking
distance. Well, I know it’s walking distance,
up through the cacophany – girls in the street,
bowing, handing out stuff (dunno, hankies, cards, bits
of paper, fliers) and the people walking by them,
seemingly having tuned everything going on around them
out, which I’m not capable of doing with the jet
lag I have; a guy with a bullhorn and a
must-be-a-name-for-it round his head, standing on a
box; another couple of guys waving banners about, in
front of a store of I don’t know what it is, but
a lot of it; trains going overhead because the hotel
seems to be melded with a railway station, a mall and
a vast department store, with corridors going this way
to turnstiles and that way to the stationery
department, one way to a network of bazaar of
foodstalls, another way to ticket windows; outside,
motorcycles weaving through the traffic; crashing,
whizzing sound of pachinko parlours; a continual
current of people that you’re always swimming
against, seems to me; bicycles cutting through
everyone on the sidewalks.), We could walk up to the
gig, but with all that to contend with, and the
ever-imminent typhoon, I know we’re not going to
walk.
It feels like a long time since we’ve played
here. I’m sort of looking forward to the
screams that go along with the songs we’ll do,
and then the deafening silence in between the songs,
which, being here on the other side of the world, is
pretty much in a 180 degree relation to what
we’re used to on the side of the world
we’ve just come from.
Terry gets in from the airport, all the colour drained
out of him and red-rimmed eyes. Says he’s going
straight to bed.
So, of course, we took the minibus up to Shibuya AX
through a kaleidoscope of pixelation, neon, plasma
hoardings, headlights, parking attendants’
wands, vending machines, kanji, katakana, hiragana
(‘meaningless squiggles’ someone said of
the menu in a restaurant some of us went to, last
night, or it might have been another night,
somebloodywhere in Shibuya – downstairs, tatami, shoes
off, eight squeezed around a table for four – having
to enlist the help of a Japanese guy who spoke
english, out to dinner with friends, and getting him
to order food for us because we hadn’t the first
inkling what anything meant).
Shibuya AX is a basically a blue and white painted box
dwarfed by a gently curving, concrete building with a
concave roofline that has something to do, in my head,
with a samurai’s helmet, hard by Yoyogi Park.
Shane didn’t show up for soundcheck, but
we’re used to that, and it’s become part
of the rhythm of a touring day. It’s fine. He
knows the words, and didn’t put a foot wrong in
Guildford and is a world away from the some of the
experiences we have had the course of some gigs in the
past – Seinajoki in Finland, in 1985, when we were
pin-cushioned by mosquitoes (I counted 33 lumps on one
leg alone) – springs to mind. I dunno: it feels as
though we’re better than we ever have been, at
the minute. Before, in the first phase of our career,
it would have worried me that Shane didn’t come
to soundcheck. I’d have thought something was
wrong about that. But now, it makes sense. It all
works better if he doesn’t show up.
So, we go around the instruments for Scully the
soundman and Aidan the monitor guy, and I suppose get
a feel for the place.
Word was that the rain was going to come on any time
now, the typhoon finally coming in and we have word
too that there are scores of people still queueing up
outside to get in, and once in, for t-shirts too, so
we hold off a bit before going on. The imminence of a
typhoon is kind of an added thrill, you know, that the
gig is an element of a wider cataclysm or some kind -
that sort of thing is called Pathetic Fallacy.
Anyway, there’s a welter of people, seems like,
once we get out on stage, and nothing like how I
remember playing for a Japanese audience. As I said,
it was always a matter of ear-shattering screaming at
the start of a song and rising to a sort of white
noise when an instrumental comes down the pike,
followed by a polite, expectant silence in between
songs, with maybe a mutter or two, but on Monday night
(was it? I’m all turned around) the tsunami of
noise in the ears carried on right through everything,
and crowd surfing on the tsunami too, and all the
breath squeezed out of the lungs of the people against
the crash barriers and the level of emotion such that
there were a couple of girls I spotted right at the
front who seemed to be releasing some fundamental
passion in tears, all lugubrious and beseeching and
there’s nothing you can do, but play for them
and shrive with them, if that’s the word for it.
Set list? Pretty much the same one we did at
Guildford, with Bottle of Smoke and something else
(which we hadn’t time for at Guilfest)
re-admitted. Again, it was like a Pogues gig of old -
with paunches, without hair, some waddling.
Can’t remember the details of it much (I’m
in Osaka while I write this, and, as is often the
case, transitions from one place to the next tend to
scrub clean my recollection of detail).
Back to top
Talking about transitions: so, we’re on the
train – rice paddies, blue ceramic roofs, a small
square grave-plot or two, My Neighbour Totoro trees,
Mount Fuji coming up on the right, lush hillsides
draped in what I want to call kudzu, box lunch with a
goggle-eyed samurai painted on the cover – and when
we’re coming into Osaka station there’s an
announcement in english comes over the speakers that
that’s what’s happening, and in plenty of
time too. So, we all get our things together, get up,
leave our seats, as you do. The train pulls in.
Trains don’t hang about in Japan: the doors
open, people get off, the doors close and
they’re gone. We get off, back into the heat on
the platform, and stand around waiting for direction,
overcome by that irresolution that sets in at moments
like this, and then Ross the tour manager stays the
train from going off. He’s stopping the train
from going off (I have a picture of Ross in my head,
with his hand stuck in the door, preventing it from
closing, and I’m beset by a low-grade,
admittedly, horror that we’re screwing up the
precious Japanese Rail timetable that the world speaks
so highly of) because ‘a member of our company
is missing’, he says, rather importantly, to
Ichico, our interpreter (or Ichico Park, as
she’s been dubbed).
Except, we spot the member of our company, well, two
members of our company further down the platform,
having fallen foul of the transition between being
inside the train and being outside of it, having
disembarked the train by the door at the other end of
the carriage to us, and both bent from the waist, over
their bags putting the accoutrements that they’d
had out on the train – disc player, carton of, what?
Devil Drink or something, so Shane said it was called
(a tall white carton that we all mistook for a carton
of milk, for a while, until ‘gin, vodka and
fucking sake’ – followed by his inimitable and
simile-defiant laugh, that, hey, I’m going to
have a go, sounds like someone opening a particularly
difficult sandwich container – came out of it into his
plastic glass in the dressing room), cigarettes,
lighters, raffia hat, book, sunglasses, empty bento
box with the goofy samurai on it – all in all their
doings – back into their bags, with their arses
pointed squarely in our direction, one arse on the top
of concertinaed black trousers, the other arse in a
purple, or red, or what colour is it? pair, the rather
theatrical sheen (fish-skin? sockeye salmon maybe, or
perch, which is kind of pertinent, you know, being in
the land of sashimi) worn off it in the last couple of
days and a cigarette burn hole at the hip (the hip?)
and having taken on a, what you might say,
sub-tropical patina. The move from train to platform,
platform to bus, bus to lobby, lobby to room, etc. can
be a challenge. Shane and Joey ‘Lost in
Transition’.
Well, of course, we’re only known from our
likenesses in the CD booklets, which, for the most
part, for the silvery coloured ‘Best
of...’, were taken in 1986 or something, so, in
the hotel in Osaka, some of us had to be pointed out
to some fans that had spent a part of the afternoon
waiting for us to show up. Gone are Terry’s
bedspring curls. Gone is Philip’s Apollonian
coif. Gone is my Cary Grant hair line (which is
actually being a bit on the fanciful side; my hairline
always had the tendency to veer toward Benjamin
Disraeli). So, what the fans see rising up the
escalator to check in are pates of peach fuzz.
So, we have a laugh about what we’re like now.
‘Angry Old Men,’ Shane says, and then that
laugh that sounds as though someone suddenly decides
to fry an egg. Jem, we agree, is the least changed -
just his hair turning to the colour of brushed
aluminium, in places, though Spider has preserved
well, with his fetching Steve Marriott coiffure,
because, as I mentioned earlier, Sarah, his regular,
had an appointment become free the week before last.
The fans were already confused as it was as to who was
who, I suppose, so they can be forgiven, I think, for
approaching Joey for an autograph, mistaking him for
Shane. Well, according to Flann O’Brien’s
theory of molecule exchange (according to which,
extended periods of bicycle-riding can explain the
occasional Irishman standing kerbside with one foot in
the road and the other up on the pavement), it
mightn’t be all that much of a stretch to put,
in some people’s eyes, Shane and Joey’s
similarity down to such a thing.
Mother Hall in Osaka – I’ve never been in
through the front doors. The minibus turns into a
pedestrian street full of clothing shops for the
restaurant trade, pottery, things wrapped neatly in
paper and wrapped around with green ribbon; no idea
what would be inside at all (the record company,
incidentally, had had delivered to each of our rooms,
the first night we were in Tokyo, such a box, and
Terry thought, ‘Ah, a pair of shoes. How
lovely!’ Once you got the cellophane wrapping
off, it turned out to be fruit) and a ton of people
about. Then it’s out of the van and through a
red-painted, thunderous pachinko/gaming parlour to the
lifts in the back of it, and lifts which, for the life
of me, I couldn’t figure out if they went up or
down.
For soundchecks, we run through things like
Thousands Are Sailing (which went awry in
Tokyo; I wasn’t listening – I was looking in the
right direction, which I try to do, and was actually
ready, physically, for Andrew’s count in, but
where my mind was, at the exact moment the count-in
came, don’t ask me: elsewhere, obviously.
Passed me by completely. And there were other false
starts: Darryl not knowing where to put his fingers -
I heard from Brad, the bass-player with the Cranky
George Trio, that, when you don’t know
what’s happening, when you thoroughly
don’t know the first thing where you are, you
‘go walking’ up the frets until something
sounds right, and then hang around there in the hope
that it’ll come back to you. In Darryl’s
case, it wasn’t so much walking, as turning
ankles, side-stepping, lurching into territory he was,
thank Christ, familiar with – Philip doing his
chackachacka at the beginning of White City in
the wrong place – oh, and plenty other instances
besides – must have been nervous or jet-lagged or
distracted or something) and Tuesday Morning
and Young Ned Of The Hill (the nuts of which we
have, but the bolts every now and again, just go
missing). We have to do those songs – the songs
Terry, Philip and Spider sing (although Spider could
sing any damn song you threw at him, because, as I
think I probably said earlier, he has a photographic
memory) because Shane might be said to have purified
his life of the contamination of soundchecks. Which
is fine (see the earlier entries).
Soundchecks nowadays, and mostly in the course of a
tour with crew bus and band bus and hotels and
whatnot, seem to be more or less a matter of – though
we last saw them the night before or, from time time,
that morning – delightful reunion with the crew and
the occasion to swap stories about what people did the
previous night, to give the instruments a go and if
there’s soup (which there hasn’t been in
Japan, just a couple of plastic trays of sushi that we
don’t know how long have been sitting there in
the heat) to be had, then the world spins true on its
axis.
On the serious side of soundcheck, we play more songs,
probably, than we need to and give the crew – Murray,
Jos, Aidan, Paul – the opportunity to impress us with
how capable and ubiquitous they are (Had Jos dried out
the accordion straps overnight, because of the
remainder of Shane’s ‘gin, vodka and
fucking sake’ that came my way as he walked
offstage over my body lying on the floor after
Fiesta? Answer: he had. What so-called beer
trays had Murray succeeded in conveying to the
Japanese runner would be suitable and safe for Spider
to bring into violent contact with this head? Answer:
dishes from the nearest cooking store in which you
could imagine a shallow lasagne, or a baked fish.
That sort of thing.)
Shane’s amazing at the minute. I was talking
with Spider and his partner Louise at breakfast in
Osaka, the morning after the show at Mother Hall,
about what a phenomenon it must be, to see such a
hewn-in-granite presence come out on stage, in his red
and black shirt (with a pattern that’s like one
of those designs that you have to cross your eyes to
get to go 3-D) and his damp slacks, with his gin and
tonic. He dispensed with both the mike stand (which
lay across one of the monitors for the entire show
after he’d wrenched the mike off it and kicked
it away) and his chair, which he had found useful when
we did the Christmas shows last year. He indicates
the whereabouts of heaven and hell in Rainy Night
in Soho, conducts us all in – what is it? -
Streams of Whisky or something, dunno,
can’t remember, goes off on his goofy,
finger-pointing walk around the stage in White
City, and Daltryfies his microphone at other
moments.
At Mother Hall, we have to wait a long time,
backstage, ready, in a corridor, while Staight to
Hell plays over the speakers and the tidal wave of
screams crashes onto the stage, to go on, while Shane
has a piss into a bucket. We can’t wait any
longer, so we go on, and I don’t particularly
want it to come across that it’s a matter of the
Grand Wizard’s minions coming on to potter about
with little jobs before he comes on himself, so I go
up to the microphone and say: ‘He’ll be
here in a minute. He’s just having a
piss.’ There seemed, shall we say, an edge to
his behaviour for the first couple of numbers after
that, but, hey, that’s to the good, I say (with
the exception of swinging his microphone around in
front of his monitors, and the resulting,
ear-scouring, nerve-burning squealing which
obliterates any other sound in the vicinity and which,
when it’s past, sort of lingers in your cerebral
cortex like an after-image).
The gig’s a good one. It’s always
rewarding to make Terry laugh with something
I’ve come across, from listening to Tom Waits,
actually, that I slotted into the slow part of Body of
an American, and the on-stage sound happens to be good
enough (must be something to do with the solid stage)
for me to go over to Darryl and Jem’s side of
the stage with impunity, and Andrew always comes up
with something – I don’t know, an unusual
punctuation of something that I haven’t heard
before that makes me look up and catch his eye. And
then Philip always says something apt and warming -
the verbal equivalent of hot chocolate or french onion
soup on a rainy night such as this – into the
microphone before Thousands Are Sailing,
something that’s welcoming and positive
(although, he did go up to the microphone somewhere on
this tour, to say: ‘We’re the
Pogues!’ – makes you want to look up to see if
you can catch anyone saying to themselves, ‘Oh,
shit, wrong place!’). The relationship between
Shane and Spider on stage, is as ribald and unseemly,
possibly, because I never quite catch what they say,
and as lightningly fast and as cackling and wheezing
as of old. It’s great to see. Terry rocks out,
bent over his cittern; Jem in his almost peacock suit,
feet at ten-to-two; Darryl mop-haired, jacket off,
dense check shirt, looking a little bit like
he’s got an afternoon off from the office.
We were talking about sweating. I come off stage with
my shirt sticking to me and have to sit and evaporate
for a bit, with a vodka and tomato juice. After the
show, Darryl has a saucer-sized disc of sweat in each
armpit. Philip, on the other hand, is about the
nearest thing to a lizard you’re going to come
across and can change his clothes without any concern
for perspiration and have his bags ready for the first
bus back to the hotel in maybe fifteen minutes.
Back to top
The bullet train up from Osaka back to Tokyo. Again
the rice fields, a view of the sea, red and white
painted pylons, a little white van trundling between
the paddies, a terraced grave yard and huge trees,
dense as anything, and then a level-as-slate expanse
of estuary with egrets drifting across it, and banks
of rushes.
Shane on the minibus, on the way to the hotel past the
emperor’s palace, sloping walls of polygonal
rock, moat, the dwarf spruce trees standing in their
own shadows. Shane’s giving out about the
advantages of trepanning, sitting sideways across the
seat, back to the window, hard by the sliding door,
elbows on his knees, twirling his sunglasses in one
hand, cigarette in another hand, unlit, lighter in his
fist, thumbing it alight, the flame launching out,
puts the cigarette in his mouth, nearly lights it,
wipes his streaming nose on the back of another one of
his hands, something else about the reliefs of
trepanning, followed by sudden-frying-egg laugh,
helicoptering sunglasses, thumbed lighter – he’s
like Siva. How many fucking hands he got?
Back to top
Nine in the morning and we’re already steaming
like dumplings in Tokyo. There’s still not a
lot of sleep to be had – most people waking up as
early as four-thirty and maybe as late as six.
Everyone’s got pink eyes and there’s a
perceptible lag time between stimulus (as in
‘How’s it going?’) and response (as
in ‘All right.’)
The bus drive to Fuji Rock Festival (which is nowhere
near Mount Fuji, as a over the past few days, a
dwindling number of us had assumed, but there still
one person remaining who evinced surprised that we had
to leave so early to get there, or to go by bus, or
actually return to Tokyo from Osaka at all, when we
had passed Mount Fuji on the train the day before; the
fact is, that the festival had once been near Mount
Fuji, but had since removed to a skiing resort up in
the mountains, and had taken its name there too) was a
long one. Slept as much of the way as we could, but
getting cooler and cooler on the way up – vertiginous
bridges, a long tunnel, kudzu, a couple farming an
allotment which had Joey drawing humourous comparisons
with the irish farming community, everything getting
ruraler and ruraler, until, on the far side of Yozawa
town, a great, big, bollocking, vaguely pink-coloured
hotel the size of an airport with a car park to match,
and beyond, what would be ski-slopes in a handful of
months, with cable cars strung up the hillsides.
Inside the hotel: ‘It’s like La Palma in
here,’ Darryl said, because there’s people
everywhere, a stupid, tiny, half-moon reception desk,
ten metres of trestle table on which Fuji Rock people
have set up their own artistes’ reception,
orange carpet throughout, lockers large enough for a
pair of skis off the reception area, long, long walk
to the lifts, deeper orange carpeting tiles in the
lift, with a half-smoked cigarette in the corner. The
room numbers are confusing because the number on the
key starts with what’s called the Annex number.
There are six annexes to this hotel. Everyone
congregates on the 6th floor, because we’re in
the 6th annex, not thinking that no hotel could
possibly have as many as a thousand rooms on one
floor. Took a bit of figuring out, and took a bit of
helping out, as Joey and Shane are discovered in some
eddy of befuddlement in one of the corridors on the
6th floor, and ecouraged to follow Jem’s wife,
Marcia, to the lifts to the floor number that
corresponds to the second number on their keys.
At seven thirty, following an afternoon of free choice
activities, there’s another long walk to another
skiing-specific gallery of rooms somewhere in the
bowels of the hotel, each of their glazed sliding
doors brown-papered over and each with the name of the
artiste it’s designated for – Coldplay, Foo
Fighters, Steel Pulse, Lisa Loeb, among them, and us.
I’m starving. We have meal tickets, but I
don’t know whereabouts in the hotel or the
festival grounds they have currency, and I’m
starving. So’s Andrew, who has the same
problem. I eat four bananas and an apple, which
barely takes the edge off it.
Jem’s suit is missing. He left it back in
Osaka, after which the Finer family and Marcia (sorry
- in joke) split from us at Tokyo railway station to
take the train up to the ski-resort. Jem and his
daughters, Ella and Kitty, were due to play on a stage
near the entrance to the festival this morning, as The
Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Ella singing, Jem guitar,
Kitty drums) at the very start of the festival. They
got rained off. Might try again tomorrow. We discuss
Jem’s options á propos the lack of his
suit: he could just go on stage as he is (trainers,
canvas slacks, check shirt); or in his underpants.
The least requirement – volubly supported by his
daughters – is that in no circumstance is he to go on
stage wearing those trainers. Andrew is of the
opinion that he should play the show naked. In the
end, the suit turns up. Jos had put it away safely
when they broke the stage in Osaka.
Bumpy ride in a bus through the festival site, music
coming at you from all angles, guys with wands holding
people back, lit up by the headlights as we go past,
vast blackness of trees, tents all over the place,
that sort of thing. Disorientating. A very damp
backstage area. There’s something palpably on
edge about everything, as if something’s going
to go off.
There’s a photographer in the tent, taking
photographs of Shane desperately trying to open a
bottle of wine. The desire to take a photograph, you
know, that photograph, sometimes obscures one’s
sense of, I don’t know, taste, or something.
There must be I don’t know – 100,000 people out
there. Steam starts to come off my head, I notice,
while I’m playing, when I get heated up, and my
shirt sticks to my back by the fourth song. A bug of
some kind comes to rest on the keyboard of my
accordion and there’s some simplicity about the
visit that I can’t brush it off. The first
three songs are a thundering mess of misbalanced
instruments in the monitors. Aidan is blinded by a
light at the far side of the stage from him, which
prevents him from picking up any of our frantic
signals to have this turned up, this turned down. It
doesn’t help to hand over a set list within
minutes of going on. Scully, out front, doesn’t
get a set list at all, but Shane, spookily omniscient,
announces each song.
Things settle down. Except I lose my footing in the
middle of something and fall on my back. Darryl and
Shane come over and pretend to put the boot in.
After the show, Joey, barechested as is his
predilection, is trying to make himself useful with
something on the stage and falls down the hole where
the cables go and there’s concern that he might
have broken a leg. He’s put in a chair in the
dressing room to get over his jitters at how close a
trip to the hospital might have been.
I’m shagged out. Someone called Pockets wants
to talk to me. He used to know Joe Strummer. There
are a lot of people who might be able to say that. I
go and sit in one of the busses with my eyes closed
because I haven’t anything left. I want my
dinner. I have my meal ticket. Where the hell do you
get dinner in this place?
When I get back to the hotel, there’s curried
shrimp and something else.
Up in my room, much later, after a couple of bottles
of hot sake, I bin the suit I’ve been wearing -
well, the knees were all gone and the flies have gone
to shit – and go to bed.
Back to top
Up early, wake up calls at 6.00am. We sleep on the
bus down the mountain. A couple of us have had
breakfast, which there some confusion about. Philip
reads ‘Saturday’ by Ian McEwan. Terry
sits up the front, because he can’t sit anywhere
else on a bus, and if you’re going to know
anything about him it’s that. Been that way for
years. Everyone’s up the back, sleeping, or
suddenly frying an egg.
We stop at a motorway restaurant, where you can get
cold green tea and fish on a stick, squid on a stick,
octopus on a stick and something on a stick that makes
Philip suck in his cheeks and throw it under the bus.
We make it to the airport by the skin of our teeth.
Long lines checking passports. Onto the plane.
I’ve specified an aisle seat, away from the
kitchens, away from the bogs. Two out of one
isn’t bad, but the seat’s so thoroughly,
slap-bang next to the bogs that it feels like the
travel agent’s taking the piss.
Back to top
Azkena, 2005
Stansted Airport is a nothing much more than a vast
tubular steel barn set in the middle of the – I
don’t know and I couldn’t be bothered
finding out, because I haven’t the first desire
to know where the place is – Cambridgeshire or
Essex or something countryside. It’s a hateful
place, with shirtless chavs strewn about the grass in
front of the drop-off lanes, sun-bathing. I get there
early. It’s open seating on EasyJet and I want
to be up the front of the plane, in order to get off
as soon as I can, once we get to Bilbao.
There’s no one else from the band there this
early, until I spot Craig the new tour manager. Ross,
the other one, who’se been looking after us
since the first reunion is in the States with Gavin
Rossdale. We’ve worked with Craig before, years
ago, when he worked for John Curd, a tour promoter.
Curd shortchanged us once, by one pound, for a gig we
did somewhere. Jem framed the pound note and hung it
on his wall. Craig is leaning against a pillar,
waiting for everyone to show up. We shake hands.
I hang out with Philip in the bazaar beyond security.
He’s dapper, in a tie (he likes the tie shops at
airports) white shirt and a suit that’s
inappropriate for the weather. (Paul, the
front-of-house soundman asks him, at some point over
the weekend: “Aren’t you dying in that
suit?”) The sobriety of the suit is somewhat
offset by a rather jaunty pair of black and white
striped socks. We talk about our holidays.
He’s been recording with the Radiators, in West
Meath. Cows came to visit on their way down to the
milking-shed, stopping on the other side of the studio
window to gawp in at Philip and the others.
We wander into the departure lounge in dribs and
drabs. There’s a confusion about gates. It
says one thing on boarding card and another on the
departures screens. Shane’s walking off in the
wrong direction. I encourage him in the direction of
Gate 19. It’s the first time we’ve met
since Japan. He gives me an overly elaborate Japanese
bow that I’m scared is going to deposit him on
the floor. I’m uncomfortable with his greeting
too, because it brings his face into the vicinity of
my genitals.
Shane’s got a new suit. He’s ditched the
one made out of theatre curtains, (seems like a few
suits have been ditched – mine in the waste bin
my room at the ski-ing hotel near Fuji Rock, and
someone else’s, can’t remember whose, in
the waste bin in his) in favour of a charcoal one. I
think he might have lost weight, though he’s had
a haircut, which makes him look thinner and younger
too. His hair however is unrelievedly black, sooty.
With the dark suit and the black hair, the whiteness
of his face looks almost detached and otherworldly.
He sits with Joey at the far end of the row of seats,
cackling.
On the plane, Philip and I sit more or less across the
aisle from one another, three or four rows from the
front. The downside of sitting at the front is that
pre-boarding means that families with children get on
first and take up the front seats. As the altitude
pops everyone’s ears and it’s difficult
for children to equalize the air-pressure in their
heads, the cabin is rent with children’s
screams. However, I am very taken with a family
sitting in the row in front of Philip, who actually
bother to engage their kid, the mother breastfeeding
her child when the plane takes off and as it begins to
descend. I want to say something to them, about how I
wish more parents had that kind of presence. When
children cry, there’s a reason. Beats me how
parents can’t figure that out.
If I never see an airport that’s designed on the
theme of aviation and wings and that sort of thing
again, it’ll be too soon. Bilbao Airport is all
streamlined and looks vaguely – in the baggage
hall leastways – like a film set from Dr No.
It’s an hour and a half from the airport to
Vitoria-Gasteiz, where the hotel is, and the festival.
It’s dark. I sit in between Andrew and Craig,
with Darryl up front by the driver. We talk about
bands and children and death, that sort of thing, and
about Devon too.
At the hotel, we all meet in the restaurant.
It’s late, but they’re going to keep the
restaurant open. There are snouts and trotters on the
menu. I order hake, which is a matter of a hairbrush
filled with bits of fish. Andrew goes at oxtail.
Shane comes in and it might be another attempt at an
elaborate greeting of people whom he hasn’t seen
for a bit (Terry and Paul Scully have flown in earlier
on that afternoon) that launches his vase of gin and
tonic onto the seat he was going to sit down on.
We talk about what Spanish we know. This is what
Andrew knows: ‘Quítese de sus
calzoncillos. Quisiera una muestra de sus
heces.’ which means, ‘Take off your
underpants. I would like a sample of your
stool.’ He learned it from the chapter “At
the doctor’s” in a phrasebook.
Back to top
There’s a whole day before the gig. After
breakfast, I go out of the hotel for a walk. Out
there it’s a matter of drab estate upon drab
estate interspersed with wasteground and building
sites. There’s a lot of building going on in
this part of Spain.
We have a soundcheck at one o’clock, with the
sun beating down on the stage. We do a version of
Rainy Night in Soho that we should be ashamed
of, but we aren’t, with Spider doing vocals like
a cross between Otis Redding and James Brown and a
Baptist churchman, lying full-length on the floor,
rolling around. We get a smattering of applause from
a handful of people near the beer-tent half way across
the carpark, or whatever it is, the festival site.
The afternoon I spend with Spider and Louise his
girlfriend in the old town, a ten minute taxi ride
away from the hotel. In the otherwise quiet,
siestified town, there’s a calle full of bars
spilling people out onto the street, which reminds me,
unpleasantly, of pretty much any summer bank holiday
in Tralee. Last year I found myself in Tralee at such
a time with my family. We drove six hours across the
country to the nearest ferry. Spider and Louise and I
sit down to lunch in the town square which
reverberates with churchbells every quarter of an
hour. We order gazpacho and are brought plates of
transparent meat. We don’t say anything.
Everyone collects outside the hotel for the busses to
take us to the festival site, where we are all going
to watch Television. If I hear another pun about
getting on the bus to go and watch television
I’m going to floor the whoever without
hesitation. We all want to see Television. One of
the best records I’ve ever heard is Marquee
Moon. So we all gather down the side of the stage,
behind the monitor desk our new monitor man’s
going to be using afterwards, and sit and watch and
laugh at the way Richard Lloyd screws up his face when
he plays the guitar.
Our gig’s good, I think. There’s a
smattering of new suits. It’s a warm night, and
the sun’s gone down, so there is sufficient
reason to have had Ian the lighting guy with us on the
plane yesterday. Andrew is distracted by a praying
mantis that has taken up residence on one of the
microphone clips that go on his tom-toms, and which
won’t be shaken off. Some of us gather round to
have a look. During the set, I throw a line here and
there for Terry to have a laugh at. Before
introducing Thousands are Sailing Philip
apologizes for not knowing a foreign language. Spider
shouts out, “The one you’re speaking
happens to be foreign!” Philip dedicates
Thousands are Sailing to the people of New
Orleans. I wince because I wish the song were
suddenly called something else.
Shane does a grand job of conducting us all, in
Broad Majestic Shannon – there’s
something agreeably Jacques Tati about the way he does
it – the gusto with which he goes about it,
belying the fact that he has no idea how it’s
really done, but knowing that, and knowing also that
he probably could, if he had to, if you know what I
mean.
Gerry the new monitor man – because our usual,
Aiden, was off working with someone else – is so
responsive to our demands on stage that, as well as
leaving me with a ringing in my ears after the show,
he lashes the stage with accordion, and, when asked to
bring it down a bit, withdraws the accordion so
completely it is as if it has never been invented.
There is a bit of confusion about encores. We think
we had to drop one, so we skip Sally Mac Lennane and
do Fiesta instead, only to go off with the crowd in
tumult and the stage a mess, to be told we have time
for one more. I don’t know. We could just
bugger off and leave it at that, but there’s a
level of keenness in the camp, that has us go back on
and do Sally MacLennane just for the hell of it.
I sit next to Shane on one of the minibusses on the
way back to the hotel and we’re full of
confidence, and puzzlement, and a lot more besides,
about how well these gigs over the summer have gone,
what a good time we’ve had, how well we’re
playing, how well Shane’s performing and
everything. We gather round the piano in the bar but
when the pianist is gone and I want to take over,
despite the early morning the following morning, I
find that he’s locked it up. I go to bed and
pack and everything and then go back downstairs to say
goodbye to everyone and hug everyone all round.
Back to top
When I get up in the morning, Shane and Andrew are
still sitting where I’d left them. I
don’t interrupt them, but get on my minibus to
Bilbao Airport, the start of the day, the end of which
will leave me in Los Angeles. On the flight to
Heathrow I happen to be sitting across the aisle from
the actress Una Stubbs. I spend not all of the flight
working out that there are five degrees of separation
between myself and her – Una Stubbs to Anthony
Booth (who played her husband on Til Death Us Do
Part), to Pat Phoenix (Elsie Tanner of Coronation
Street and Anthony Booth’s wife), to Doris Speed
(Annie Walker in Coronation Street) to my dad (who was
in an amateur dramatic company in the 50s and 60s with
Doris Speed) to me. I’ve only had three or four
hours’ sleep, that’s my excuse.
Back to top
U.K. & Ireland, 2005
Tuesday
There’s a Christmas tree leaning against the
wall by the front door to the rehearsal studios on
Brewery Road, as you go down through the Victorian
alley of brown-painted brick, with kerbs and stuff,
off the main road. The Christmas tree is all wrapped
up in that polythene net, and looks bit bent at the
top. It might have just been delivered. We’re
in Studio 5, which means you have to all the way
upstairs to ask where the Pogues are rehearsing, to be
sent all the way downstairs, past the Christmas tree,
and across the yard. The rehearsal place obviously
used to be a factory of some kind, because, in the
actual rehearsal room, off what you might call a
Hinterhof, there’s an axle under the ceiling
with belt-wheels to drive some machinery that’s
long gone. Terry’s already here, playing his
cittern, in his warm jacket and a fleece that zips up
to this throat and his bag leaning up against the
chair he’s sitting on. He looks as though he
just turned up, but then also looks as though
he’s always been there. Terry’s always
the first at rehearsal. We embrace, which is what
everyone does when we’ve not seen one another
for a long time, except, it doesn’t seem all
that long since Bilbao, somehow, and our re-reunion
lacks the air of strangeness and uncertainty, mixed
with a bit of dread, maybe, and nostalgic vertigo, I
suppose you might call it, which characterized the
first reunion in 2001, which I recall be have been a
matter of great trepidation. Now, we’re old
hands at the reunion game, it seems to me, and we
could almost get away with nodding a greeting
nowadays.
Philip’s not long after Terry. He’s got a
new phone, which I’m rather sad about. I rather
miss the old one, which had acquired such scuffs and
dents that one might see on a field-telephone, and
which last year was always going off on top of his
amp, sending those humming pulsing sounds through the
speakers, as it received, I don’t know, football
results maybe, or alerts about theatre openings, that
sort of thing, is my guess. This new phone takes
pictures, and I think you can watch telly on it. His
lack of familiarity with his new phone means that
occasionally you get unexpected phone calls from him,
to find that he’s hung up before you can answer.
And then enter, severally, Spider – in a pacing,
restless sort of way, often enough, with a phone that
makes chirping sounds in his pocket; Jem - who looks
more and more like a character out of a William Joyce
cartoon, the boffin uncle or something; Darryl in a
jacket buttoned up to his throat; Andrew – who
exudes a sort of bovine calm wherever he goes. Who am
I missing? Well, we don’t expect to be seeing
Shane. He’s in Morocco, or on his way back from
Morocco. It’s a mystery how he gets there
without help, since Joey had not accompanied him, so
we’re told. It’s a further mystery how he
gets back, but, we have wind of him from somewhere, a
system of communication that operates along the lines
of jungle drums. He’s instantly referred to as
“The Caliph” and it’s difficult not
to imagine him, for the time being, without a silk
turban and shoes that curl over at the toe.
We’re not going to see the Caliph until
tomorrow, when Katie Melua shows up, too, to rehearse
‘Fairy Tale of New York.’ We have no idea
about Katie Melua. I certainly don’t. I live
in a cultural bubble in the United States, well known
for its cultural hermeticism. None of the rest of us
have much idea about her either. We want to protect
Kirsty’s memory, that’s for sure.
Consequently, and prejudiciously, with the scant
information to hand, I find myself imagining a sultry,
predacious young woman with an agenda and records that
sell well and I know I’m not going to like her
on some level. But that’s tomorrow and
I’m not going to worry about it.
Well, we’ve been mindful of the set list needing
a bit of a transfusion: it’s been relatively
unchanged since 2001 and then, I have the
recollection, it was more or less based on an old
set-list we had from 1989, but while it’s not a
matter of its screaming and turning to ash in the
daylight, it’s felt that it could benefit from
sinking its fangs into the jugular of a couple of
relatively virgin songs from the canon, so to speak.
(The vampire metaphor comes to an end right here.) We
run through ‘Billy’s Bones’ which is
pretty straightforward – well, for most of us,
Darryl being the exception since he announces that
he’s never played the song before other than,
possibly, after Cait jumped ship from New York, beset
with the impulse to cleave herself to her
paramour’s side, you know, after she’d
been on the phone with him and a posse was sent out to
intercept her on the way to the airport. That
evening, back in – what was it? 1985 or
something? – Philip and Jem and I (was Philip in
the group then? I never know these things) ran
through the chords with him on the way down to
Philadelphia, or Washington, or some bloody place, and
if ‘Billy’s Bones’ was on the set
list, I wouldn’t know. In any case, whether or
not, regardful or regardless of all that,
there’s Darryl in the rehearsal place, today,
wincing in a crinkly, defenseless sort of way at the
swift passage of chord to chord, having not the first
inkling what do with each one as it goes past, and the
chords do come quickly and it’s the occasion of
some fun to watch his hands flap around the neck of
his bass like a hooked cod. And then, when
we’ve more or less got that one down, and taken
a moment or two to listen to it on the iPod (and to
wonder how the hell Shane’s going to get his
teeth into all the words, bearing in mind, as I
discover from the track itself, that it was recorded
almost line by line, since his voice at the end of one
line overlaps with his own voice at the beginning of
the next – bah, I don’t know) we move on
to ‘Sayonara,’ which is altogether a much more relaxed
affair and not much to worry about other than what we
call Andrew’s pressed roll on the snare drum
when Shane sings “motherfucker kiss the
ground”, and we soon have that. We have a go at
‘Waltzing Matilda’. We’ve done a
few versions of this over the years, with three
verses, or five, and it’s a long song that, in
rehearsal, with Shane not around, lacks the focus of
the words and the narrative and it just sounds
laborious and boring with no vocal, though Spider has
a go at putting it together in that regard, but still,
hoping against hope that it’ll actually be an
uplifting song to sing, despite the subject matter and
the story, it’s bit of a dirge and we sort of
give up with it. ‘Transmetropolitan’ we
have a go at too, and that turns out to be easy. And
then we have a desultory sort of go on ‘London
You’re A Lady’. Some of us agree that
it’s probably not one of Shane’s better
songs, lyrically. The melody is unbeatable, and the
arrangement and sentiments sound ones. We just think
he could have had another pass at the words,
that’s all. I mean, “your builders sane
but drunk!” There was a rhyme coming on, I
think. But it’s heartfelt, we’re sure of
that, and so we give it a go, but get lost when the
song turns to a minor thing, and then we have a rest
and start thinking of going home. I have found the
opportunity to listen to it again, without
distraction, and Shane sings it with such fire and
emotion that I’m able to forgive the facility of
– well, just that one rhyme, really.
The set seems to have started to want to almost
cellularly divide into London songs and those that
aren’t.
Wednesday
When I arrive, early – because it still feels as
though there’s a lot to do and not a lot of time
to do it in – there’s a guy crouched at
the foot of the Christmas tree by the back door with a
screwdriver, putting a plug on the Christmas lights,
which he hasn’t yet strung over the branches.
The tree’s still leaning in the corner. I
don’t remember seeing a bucket to stand it in.
We’re here early to run through a few things,
because in a couple of hours, Katie Melua’s
going to turn up to sing ‘Fairy Tale of New
York.’
We’ve got a documentary team filming us at the
moment: Nora Meyer and Tom Sheahan. Nora recently
directed a film about the contentious Bethnal Green
election, about Oona (Somebody) and George Galloway.
Before that, she directed a documentary about a
businessmen’s visit accompanied by the Israeli
Army. Tom’s the boom man. It’s weird
having a camera pointed at you all day, but soon get
used to it.
Andrew takes a moment this afternoon to remind Terry
of the Japanese hotelmaid’s question one
morning, after knocking on Terry’s hotel room
door and Terry opening it: “Flesh towers?”
So, we run through a few things, again. Jem’s
not around today. He’s got a family commitment,
followed by a presentation to make at the Science
Museum. At two o’clock, Katie Melua and her
team arrive. Her team includes manager, Mike Batt,
who has caesarian hair the colour of the inside of a
turnip. Mike Batt, to us, is the man responsible,
among other things, for ‘Remember You’re a
Womble.’ It’s hard to get that out of
one’s mind when one is reminded he’s in
the room. When he comes in, he reveals a certain
consternation about the fact that we have a
documentary film-making team, but soon demurs.
He’s a can-do sort of person, as well, as a
mayn’t-do sort of person, and has an air of
needing to make things happen around him, even if
it’s merely for the purpose of making sure
people know he’s around. Katie Melua is a
diminutive, spry, canny young girl with igneous eyes,
wearing a Peruvian hat with earflaps. She seems
altogether too young for us hoary old tars. Then,
Shane arrives and Mike Batt’s eminence is
suddenly and completely dispelled. Shane’s
wearing a coat that you might expect to find in the
theatre cupboard labeled “Dickens.”
It’s filthy and black and is redolent of
dripping alleyways and rat-runs and standpipes and
influenza epidemics and prison-ships. As I wrote
before, in the departure lounge at Stansted, on the
way to Bilbao, in September, he looked youthful, and
slenderer, with his hair newly done and dyed the
colour of soot. Now, after three months, the crown of
his head is sprouting hair that’s the colour of
cigarette-ash, pushing the chimney-flue colour before
it. But, he’s on time. I say,
“You’re on time!” He sits with a
heavy thump on the chair in front of the bass drum,
which is his sort of throne when it comes to
rehearsals, dropping his clanking bags next to him,
which stand for a sort of handheld pantechnicon, and
then, sort of taking in the room to see who’s
paying attention, a grin on his face, says, as if it
were a matter of principle of which I need reminding:
“I’m never on time.” And he means it
so thoroughly too, because it’s not followed by
that hissing, geothermal laugh he has, but a steady,
bay-blue stare from the stage to where I’m
making a cup of tea or something.
Thereafter is a sequence of awkwardnesses with Katie
Melua: where’s she going to stand, which
microphone is hers, is it loud enough, can she hear
what she wants to hear, does she want a cup of tea?
Chair? Music stand? We run through ‘Fairy Tale
of New York,’ and the bit “...the boys from
the NYPD choir are singing...,” after the waltz
reprise of the opening tune – well, it throws
everybody, and it took us a few goes around to get it
right ourselves before the vocalists arrive. We have
to submit the section to a bit of analysis with Katie
Melua, who evinces, now, a degree of spunkiness that
we all couldn’t see she had when she came into
the room: she doesn’t get flustered or anything,
nods, and commences again and gets it right.
Mike Batt wants to know about the dancing, since
we’re concentrating on the singing and not
bothering to play the outroduction. While some of us
stifle a guffaw, he steps to the front of the stage,
to bring the matter of dancing to Shane’s
attention. Shane verbally wafts him and his concern
away, saying that they’ll work it out,
“snot difficult or anything, comes naturally,
that sort of thing.” I don’t think, at
this point, that Shane actually knows who this person
is, because later, he sort of grabs the mike stand,
for emphasis, or in alarm, as if the sudden
realization unsteadies him, and shouts out:
“YOU’RE MIKE BATT! WHAT YOU DOIN’
’ERE?” It’s explained to him that
Mike Batt is Katie Melua’s manager. Such is
Shane’s graciousness with young women that
that’s all the explanation he needs. We move
on.
When we’ve gone through ‘Fairy Tale of New
York’ a few times, and Mike Batt’s
concerns regarding the dancing have been somewhat
allayed, since the pair of them – Katie Melua
and her Peruvian hat all but being absorbed in the
swirl of Shane’s dark cyclone, gathering speed
until someone has to move a microphone or two out of
the way in case they’re sucked into it and
hurled out of the top – in the afternoon, we
adjourn to Wood Lane to record the Jonathan Ross
Christmas Show. At some point I find myself playing
‘Cap’n Pugwash’ on the accordion.
It’s a tune I’ve always, always liked, to
the point I had a mobile phone that I programmed to
play it as a ringtone (the things you do in hotel
rooms!). When I’ve finished, someone laughs and
says, “Mike Batt wrote that. Didn’t you
know Mike Batt wrote that?” I’m stunned,
but skeptical. “Were you playing that for his
benefit?” “No,” I say. “Fuck
off,” says Shane, “it’s one of the
oldest tunes in the world.”
We get wind of a bit of BBC consternation about the
words ‘scumbag,’ ‘faggot,’ and
‘arse.’ It’s understood that they
want us to take those words out when it comes to
performing ‘Fairy Tale of New York’ on the
Jonathan Ross Show. We don’t think about it for
long and decide to tell them to fuck off, if they want
the song, they’re going to get all of it.
On the way down to Wood Lane in one of the vans,
I’m with Darryl and Andrew and Gerry the tour
manager. We have our suits. Gerry has his lap-top
open. Darryl’s on the phone. Darryl’s
guest-list somewhere is going to comprehensive.
Andrew tells us that last week he was on the phone
with a friend. “How’s it going?”
the friend asked. “It’s going all
right,” Andrew said. “We’re
re-issuing ‘Fairy Tale of New York.’
Someone’s writing a book about us.
Someone’s making a film about us.” Andrew
pauses, as he does – there’s a rhythm
about Andrew that it’s good to know about; long
pauses that sound as though he’s finished, but
the chances are, he hasn’t. “It’s
all very – ominous,” he said. The friend
says, “Well, I suppose it’s when they give
you a lifetime achievement award that you have to
worry.” The thing is, the Pogues are being
presented with just such a thing, in Dublin, by RTE,
on February 2nd.
Ricky Gervais is standing before a rank of lights
outside the glass doors into BBC Television Centre, in
a pin-stripe suit, laughing, the way he does, as if
someone is prodding him a tad too familiarly in the
stomach and he’s forced to politely step back.
Then, he clasps his hands together, and rubs them, in
a clerical sort of way, still laughing and bending,
stepping back and forth. His face is orange with TV
makeup.
We’re herded in through the doors, out of the
cold, through the lobby, and downstairs. The
Television Centre is not really as I remember it.
It’s a long time since I’ve been here
– for our Top of the Pops, maybe, with the
Dubliners (introduced at that time as the Dub Liners,
as if they were some hardass reggae outfit). Right
enough, it’s the same building, with the
circular passageways that tend to encourage you to
have no idea where you are and go a long way to
explain Dr Who, somehow, with their numbered doorways,
in a font I’m familiar with – Gill –
maybe, and their never-endingness. But now
there’s something New Labour about the place,
with flat screens and self-laudatory displays on the
walls, with photographs that are supposed to be ironic
of what I’m encouraged to consider contemporary
icons and the dressing rooms which look like any
designer-hotel lobby. It’s a veneer –
almost a lid – on the otherwise benevolent
aunty-feel of the place.
Our dressing room is next to a dancing troupe’s.
Gerry the tour manager pushes open the wrong door. We
get a glimpse of blonde, buff, bare-breasted women
with powdered, tawny skin, in turquoise g-strings and
peacock head-dresses. Gerry bows himself out. We
guffaw like schoolboys and go into our own dressing
room, which, as I’ve said, is very, well, Ian
Schrager – with those free-standing sinks with
just the one lever on them. There’s cubic
seating around and 70’s-type chairs. The
theatrical convention of the perimetric lightbulbs
round the mirrors given way to just the mirrors and
the lightbulbs refined out of existence, into glowing
frosted glass discs. Rather comfortingly,
there’s a tattered old ironing board in the
room.
They’ve brought us down here in plenty of time,
it’s obvious – we can have our suits
steamed, if any of us need that. Philip goes up to
make-up; it’s the first thing he does.
He’s known for it in the group. It’s as
if, were he to delay, he’d be testing the
seriousness of the offer of make up and they’d
retract it.
We do a soundcheck, because we’re playing live
on the Jonathan Ross Show. We ascend the stage. The
auditorium is scattered with technicians, many of them
with headphones. A camera-operator takes the time to
remove his face from his eye-piece and take a
photograph of Shane with his mobilephone. On the
orange couches in Ross’s kingdom on the other
side of the soundstage, Jools Holland swivels round to
look, as Shane shambles up onto the stage.
Holland’s face is a picture of wonder,
gape-mouthed, wide-eyed, rapt, staggered – all
those things. It’s touching to see that kind of
wonderment in someone’s face. Holland
can’t keep his eyes off Shane, until, as if
suddenly reminded that he actually knows Shane, he
gets up, comes across, to embrace him. The embrace
looks uncomfortable for Jools Holland, as
Shane’s up above him on the stage, and
Jools’s head is forced back. There’s a
back slap or two and Holland comes away looking as if
he’d just been to Santa’s grotto.
At the end of the run-through of ‘Fairy Tale of
New York’ (I get to play the white grand piano,
which I’m fearful someone’s going to
suggest Jools Holland play for the introduction to the
song, but no-one does) Shane takes Katie Melua into
his arms for the shuffling corkscrew of a dance while
we play the outroduction. I watch Katie Melua’s
feet trip to keep up, not subject to any rhythm but
Shane’s. Right at the end, Shane loses his
balance. Katie Melua tries to hold him steady, but
his centre of gravity has been removed elsewhere. She
lets go. Shane’s hips meet the monitors and his
face meets the hardwood floor of the stage on the far
side with a winceable crack. How he gets up, I
don’t know. I touch him on the arm and ask if
he’s all right.
“Yeah,” he says, a bit shaken.
“I’m all right.” And then gives me a
look that’s simultaneously touched and
indignant.
Some of us have dinner up in the BBC restaurant. It
used to be a canteen, I suppose, but now it’s a
restaurant; they have the computer-printed, laminated
signs on top of the counter to prove it. Still, I
love the journey there, up stairs, round the circular
corridors, down passageways, over the bridge –
it’s so like a hospital, and so like a hospital,
with the smell of boiled mince, or whatever it is,
intensifying as we get closer, that it exudes comfort
and care somehow, as if my childhood were emanating
from the walls. The food’s shit, of course and
Philip begs our pardon as he rests knife and fork each
side of the stuffed plaice with tomatoes and rice, to
push out of his mouth a pasty, pink ball of what looks
like one of those models of an antibody, with spines
sticking out of it and all.
Katie Melua and the ubiquitous Mike Batt show up for
their dinner too, but sit at another table. I want to
think that she’d prefer to sit with us and the
next thing I think is that Mike Batt is some rounder
von Rothbart holding Katie Melua as Odette under his
evil spell. Katie Melua looks lovely. She’s
been to make-up too and is wearing something darkly
sparkling – but her coiffure is so generically
what they do to women performers’ hair
(performeuses, I suppose) for televisual or celluloid
appearances – ringlets, and hastily done ones
too, slack and stiffened with spray. Everywhere you
go, from red carpet to royal variety performance to
maybe hospital wing openings – fucking ringlets.
We wait to go on in the ironing room over the corridor
from make up. Ricky Gervais is in there, sitting next
to someone on one of the chairs, watching the show
from the television on the wall, and actually
laughing, as if Jonathan Ross were funny.
We have to do ‘Fairy Tale of New York’
again, after the first take. There’s no mention
at all of the offending words ‘faggot,’
‘arse’ and ‘scumbag’ and we
wonder what all the fuss was about (except, later, on
Christmas Eve, when I happened to see the CD:UK thing
we did, I did happen to notice that the
sound-technician’s ducked the word
‘arse’ out of the mix). They say
something about camera-movements, or something, and, I
don’t know if I’m confusing this with our
appearance at CD:UK two days later, but I think they
chose this second take to turn off Shane’s
microphone, in order to prevent what he had to say,
which was something like “Happy Christmas. The
single’s on sale tomorrow,” (which,
bearing in mind that the Jonathan Ross Show airs on
the 22nd, is wrong, since Fairy Tale of New York is
being re-released on 19th December, still). Of
course, panic sets in that Shane’s mike is off,
because he has to sing the sodding song.
We play the song, and well. It’s lovely to play
the introduction, with Shane, on a decent piano, and
not the electric piano we use on stage. It sounds so
much better. I don’t make a mistake, at all,
not one. And the rest of the song goes according to
plan and Katie Melua and Shane shuffle around the
stage, as Darryl and Philip huddle by the drums to
give them space, and Shane doesn’t fall over and
it’s alternately Katie Melua’s ringlets,
tiny little body, sparkly dress over jeans, I think,
her tiny feet, followed by Shane’s enormous
black presence, flopping hair, shuffling feet, staring
hard at the floor to keep it beneath his feet.
We hang around in the dressing room and watch the rest
of the Jonathan Ross show on the flatscreen tv they
have in there. Ricky Gervais sits on the orange couch
at a ninety degree angle to Jonathan Ross, and the
conversation, after fifteen or twenty minutes veers
toward the Pinteresque and it’s as if some
malignant being has breathed foulness on the human
condition that we have to make, and listen to,
conversations like these.
Back to top
I drive over from the Cotswolds, where I’ve
managed to introduce a bit of a buffer between the
last, fairly frantic, day of rehearsals (because our
time at the rehearsal place had had the holes of
promotion days – the Jonathan Ross Show, to be
aired 22nd December, and the kids’ pop programme
CD:UK, to be aired, well, I don’t know, might be
23rd – punched in it) and the beginning of the
tour. Sorry, my grammar has a propensity for
tortuousness oftentimes.
Everyone else isn’t much longer after me, but I
get time to greet Paul Scully at the desk, hunched
over something glowing on his mixing desk and
headphones on, and one wonders if one might choose
one’s moment to disturb him in his work, but,
bugger it, I haven’t seen him for a couple of
months. He’s been away on the road with Luka
Bloom in Europe and has only just got back.
It’s the same thing with our tour manager, Ross,
who’s been away in North America, to arrive back
in England at eleven in the morning the day previous
to starting our tour. Ross tells me that he has been
home for fifteen days since May 1st. It’s the
way it is. Anyway, everyone turns up on the bus from
London, with the exception of Shane, who’s
coming up on the train with Joey and Victoria. It has
the tendency to introduce an element of uncertainty
when Shane travels separately and we tend to be
piquantly interested in his whereabouts.
The dressing rooms backstage at the what’s it
called? The International Arena? Something like
that. The dressing rooms are, I don’t know,
loges – as I remember seeing such things labeled
on a tour of France, once. They’re suited to
accommodate maybe three or four at the most, with your
perimetric light bulbs, half of them out, a couple of
them just missing. Terry gets one of the dressing
rooms to himself, because, well, he just took the time
to find it - a cold room at the end of the corridor,
with a door at the other end that opens onto some
breeze-block shaft with pipes and conduits and stuff.
The rest of us congregate cheek-by-jowl in the room
that Fiona from catering has made to look very
sumptuous– velour tablecloths, cheese plates,
matching (a sort of custard colour) kettle and
coffee-maker in the corner, bottles of wine, red and
white. Shane has always preferred a white wine,
wouldn’t know what grape, but it has to be dry,
I know that (although I remember a good run on
Piesporter many years ago. Piesporter and garlic
cloves were de rigueur on a tour of Norway, or Sweden,
or some laky, mountainy sort of place). There’s
a bottle of Absolut vodka, cartons of cranberry juice,
tomato juice. On the side, there’s Spider and
Louise’s juice-making gear, with beetroots and
ginger and horse-carrots and lemons and apples and
celery. The noise of Louise making juice is
obliterating and would stop conversation in any other
room, but I suppose we’re used to extended,
penetrating noise, background or otherwise, besides
which, when Darryl’s in spate, there’s not
much you can do to stop him.
Cerys Matthews comes in, from somewhere, to introduce
herself. She’s all in black, with sunglasses
the colour of pomegranate, with a tight-fitting black
coat, tight-fitting black pants, with ankle-warmers,
and heels on black boots. Some of us have worked with
her before, quite in what capacity, I’m not
sure. Andrew knows her from somewhere. Spider and
Louise have met her before somewhere. She sits next
to Louise on the couch in the dressing room and fields
our questions. She’s got a fine jaw, good
teeth, neck-length blondish hair, and she comes across
all compact and sure of herself, though it must be
weird to find herself in a room like this, sitting on
the couch, and all of us standing round her. She
tells us that she went to Nashville, to work on
something, and liked the place so much that she
stayed. She stays in the dressing room longer than I
expect, chatting, and then goes off to get her in-ear
monitors which she’s left at the hotel.
When she comes back, we do a soundcheck, run through
the material we’ve been working on in rehearsal
and go through ‘Fairytale of New York’
with Cerys, with Spider singing, because Shane’s
not here yet.
We have a new roadie by the name of Buddy, who’s
a nice guy. Murray, who worked with us last year, and
over summer, has a family matter and has had to stay
home. The Christmas trees we have each side of the
stage are a matter of scattered branches behind the
back-line. By the end of the soundcheck,
they’re putting the silver balls on them and
stringing lights round.
After dinner, back in the dressing room, Nora, the
documentary director, asks one of us where Shane is,
for the purposes of the film. On an occasion like
this, one might be forgiven for showing a bit of
unease about the whereabouts of one’s singer,
but Andrew leans forward at this point, as he can,
mostly, be relied to do, and says,
“The salmon are early in the Usk. He’s in
his waders out in the river.”
Somehow or other, the conversation moves to Fidel
Castro and the fact that he’s given up smoking.
It’s agreed that, now, the exploding
cigar’s not going to work. Spider suggests that
the CIA are working on exploding nicotine patches.
Marcia, Jem’s wife, and Kitty arrive. Kitty
looks like someone out of St Trinian’s, with her
yellow sweatshirt and a tartan skirt with shoulder
straps. She’s very funny, and is so much a
product of both Jem and Marcia, in the way she looks,
the connections she makes, that one moment I see
Jem’s face in hers, the next Marcia’s.
It’s uncanny. I sit and watch her for a while.
Marcia’s here overnight, to be here for our
first show, and then to Harrow to work (where she
teaches art) and thereafter, up to Glasgow, the next
day to fly to Berlin in the course of another facet of
her work.
Shane, Joey and Victoria arrive from the station, and
by degrees, Fiona removes all the drinks and glasses
and cheese-plates from the room she’s taken such
pains to prepare for us, into the room next door,
which Shane and Joey and Victoria have taken up.
It’s just a partition wall between them which I
wonder vaguely whether or not can be taken away. I
wish it were. It would make it easier to talk about a
set-list, for one thing. Darryl, as Wing Commander
Hunt, plies between the two rooms with the set-list
and subsequent amendments.
Ross announces that the doctor is here. It’s
the first show on the tour and we have a doctor
already? There are B12 injections to go round, in the
bottom or in the arm. Philip says he wants his
injection in his left arm; he plays guitar with his
right arm. I point out to him that, actually, he
plays the guitar with both arms, so shouldn’t he
have his shot in the arse? The doctor and Philip
retire to the bathroom.
“I don’t want to have my shot in the
bottom,” Andrew says. “I sit on
mine.”
A constituent of the show, apart from such new/old
songs, such as ‘London You’re a
Lady’, ‘Sayonara’, ‘Sunnyside
of the Street’ and ‘Misty Morning Albert
Bridge,’ as well as remembering the stuff we did
in Japan, and dealing with the onstage sound of the
first gig in a tour, which is always an ordeal, is
Shane thrashing his mike stand with a leather belt,
which he does with abandon a couple of times. The
activity strikes me as almost Jesuitical. If
he’s not punishing his mike stand, he’s
sweeping the mike stand aside as hurricanes snatch up
saplings, and otherwise dangling his mike over the
monitors to marvel at the cortex-burning squealing it
makes. It takes him four or five numbers to warm up
his voice, and he even takes time to swap a couple of
the numbers around, mid-set, which actually helps the
show go along. But, it’s a tough gig to do.
We invite the audience to give Cerys Matthews a
“big, hillside welcome” and we start
‘Fairytale of New York,’ the second to
last song. We’ve been playing this so much in
the last week that I have none of the customary
shit-my-pants fear about playing the piano along with
Shane that I normally do. The whole thing’s a
breeze, now. And Cerys Matthews is good at what she
does, and with hip-slapping and interaction with Shane
and one of her in-ear monitors dangling down her back.
She’s very capable. I even forget that this
performance is being recorded with a view to provide
an iTunes download. I don’t even think about
it, while we’re playing.
And then the show’s all over and we’re
back in the dressing rooms and I sit and have the
biggest vodka and tomato juice I can get hold of and
sit with my forearms on my knees and pant a bit, then
go to hang out with Louise and her mum and Cerys
Matthews who, by now, has taken off her pomegranate
sunglasses to reveal rather lovely blue eyes.
Later on, most of us drive by bus to an airport hotel.
Shane and Joey and Victoria elect to stay at
Jury’s hotel opposite the Arena, as do Jem and
Marcia and Kitty. Our journey is longer than I want
it to be. I hang out with Ross in the ground floor
parlour, I suppose you’d call it. Ross spends a
lot of time on the phone, sorting travel arrangements
out and generally exhibiting a level of non-judgmental
unflappability that is staggering to behold. I
stretch out on the seats and fall asleep.
Back to top
Well, the Bristol Holiday Inn’s an airport
hotel, innit, your white building with regular
windows, your sort of automated door business under
your glass awning business, with your carpark business
round it, in the middle of a business of fields
somewhere. We get in a van and go to the airport.
We had the option of bussing overnight from Glasgow,
but we’re pussies and it’s something
we’ve hardly ever done (except Darryl, ever
youthful and something of Ripping Yarns about him, has
done some extraordinary, to my mind foolhardy, trips,
like driving across Texas in the crew’s
Winnebago on one tour of the United States, and always
says he doesn’t mind harrowing passages). I
don’t want to start bussing overnight at age 51.
That’s for the youngflas. So it’s the
sterility of an airport hotel in the middle of
nowhere, and, strangely, outside, as we get on the
minibus, I don’t hear the sound of one solitary
airplane.
I meet Jem and Kitty in the departure lounge. Kitty
is Ella’s assistant on this tour and will be
traveling with the tour party. Kitty will be reunited
with her sister and charge this afternoon, when we get
to Glasgow. Kitty’s smart as a whip and can be
relied on to deconstruct pretty much anything that
smacks of the least pretentiousness and render it to
laughable pieces. There’s perceptible lineage
going on here, since both Jem and Marcia have an
aptitude in that way, in their own way. Kitty’s
like one of the possible syntheses of her
father’s and mother’s finesses, but the
synthesis is Kitty’s own. She’s a hoot,
and I’m aware of really not wanting to say
something stupid within her earshot, but, that
can’t be helped sometimes.
Jem’s not had a restful night at the hotel,
having to answer the phone to Joey, who had identified
Jem as a reliable source of information on Great
Britain’s railway network and wanted to know how
to get himself and Shane to Glasgow by train.
Apparently Shane, since flying back from Morocco, has
discovered a hitherto unconscious fear of flying. Jem
recommended to Joey the actual railway network’s
information switchboard. In Jem’s opinion, Joey
also wanted to know, would the railway network be a
reliable one? In anyone’s opinion, let alone
Jem’s, the answer to that would be no. And
it’s true in this country: you fuck up one
connection, even your first departure, and your
itinerary’s in ruins.
Joey rang back later with the happy news that
he’d found a train to get himself and Shane to
Glasgow. He told Jem that his ruse to get reliable
information from the switchboard was to impersonate an
American tourist. Could Joey, as an American tourist,
to the person on the railway network switchboard,
expect the trains to run on time in this country?
“Yes, of course, sir,” was the reply. The
train Joey had settled on was due to leave at twenty
to seven, so Jem tells me. Oh, I think to myself,
they won’t have bothered going to bed or to
sleep, which I know is not unusual for either Shane or
Joey, so there’s every likelihood that they will
have managed to catch the train, and with it being a
long way from Cardiff to Glasgow, I’m heartened
that they’ve given themselves plenty of time.
The twenty to seven would be the twenty to seven in
the evening, however. My heart sinks and I
recriminate myself for being so credulous, but
privately, because, at this moment in time, I
don’t want Jem to know how naïve I am.
Twenty to seven in the evening? Well, there’s
fat fucking chance Shane’s going to get to the
Academy by show time, that’s for sure, if
he’s going to go by train.
And then Jem’s sleep was interrupted again by a
refuse truck backing up the street behind the hotel,
outside his window and a female computer-voice from
the truck announcing: “Caution! Caution! I am
reversing.”
We check our bags on. Darryl’s got a cardboard
box inside a plastic bag. I ask him what it is. It
turns out that it’s the hard disk recording of
the show last night. We’d been lead to believe,
by the record company, that the performance of
‘Fairytale’ with Cerys Matthews would be
available for download after the show, but, as it
turns out, Cerys Matthews’ management knew
nothing about this, and required the recording to be
deleted. So, we’ve got a hard disk with most of
the gig on it.
The plane is a tiny one that you have to walk down
with your head bowed. I’ve already bumped the
crown of my head on the doorway coming in, which,
being bald, is really, really annoying, because, after
interactions with tree-bark, low beams, lintels and
whatnot, I can look as though I’ve been in a pub
fight or something. Every nick, scrape, scar is
visible. I have a declivity in my head from when I
was helping someone move house and didn’t see
the verandah support. If I had fucking hair, no-one
would have to ask: “What’s the dent in
your head?” The plane takes off and banks over
the Severn Estuary. I try to discern the pall of
cloud from the explosion near Hemel Hempstead, but
I’m not sure if that’s it, and then
there’s the Severn Bridge down there that I
drove across yesterday, spectrally white, and then it
disappears beneath the clouds.
The stewardesses come down the plane with something
called a chicken wrap, where the wrap is a flour
tortilla that looks like cadaver-skin.
We fly in over Glasgow. It’s dour and dark and
drab and drear up here, but there’s an intense
beauty about the place. I love the north. I
don’t know why I live in California. It’s
not my place, that’s for sure, somehow, in spite
of the fifteen years I’ve more or less been
there. I’ve got the rain in my bones,
that’s what. The more Thulish it is, the
happier I am. And there’s a lustre on the
streets below from the damp, and a lake that mirrors
the sky.
Outside arrivals at the airport, Ross is keeping his
eye on the two doorways that the rest of us could be
coming out of, to make sure none of us gets lost.
Glasgow is dense with stationary traffic. I think
it’s because it’s that time of day, but it
seems that it’s that way all the time in Glasgow
and Ella’s stuck in it somewhere and it’s
dark and getting close to soundcheck. Finally, she
arrives, without a pass or anything. She’s so
nervous about what she’s let herself in for,
singing Fairy Tale, and fretful about the cab ride to
the Academy, and then not being able to prove who she
is to the doorperson. “I’m Jem
Finer’s daughter,” she says – as if
that’s going to work (for a while once, we had
“Shane’s cousin” in every last town
in Europe). Ella bursts into tears and cries out:
“I’m singing ‘Fairy Tale of New
York!’” She’s in a state, indeed,
when she eventually gets into the building.
Ross holds a sweep, at some point, anxiously close to
showtime, as to how far Shane and Joey are from
Glasgow. Steve Sunderland, the production manager, is
the closest, at 70 miles. Ross has encouraged his
Russian driver to lock all the doors and put his foot
to the floor. They stopped for a piss at a
service-station somewhere and weren’t back in
the car for an hour.
It’s cramped backstage at Glasgow Academy, with
doors that open into your back, and pointless, tiny
lobbies, a small dressing room in which we have to
move the couches around in order not to not have to
sit knee to knee. There’s a shower room that
takes up a lot of space, but isn’t at all useful
for us. The stairs are narrow and the ceilings seem
low somehow and you’re always having to move out
of someone’s way and they’re having to
move out of your way, and there’s a lot of
people moving about back stage: Aden (I think
that’s how you spell his name) our onstage
monitor guy, who’s tall as a house; a Steve
who’s our stage manager; Buddy our roadie, with
his corkscrew curls; Jos, with his eyecatching shirts
– well, blinding, actually, leastways the one he
was wearing during rehearsals, and he’s always
going around with a pack of cards, nervous tension I
bet, shuffling and shuffling them. In the production
office, a cupboard basically, on a landing halfway up
the stairs, there four or five men, laptops, printers,
cables, walkie-talkies. Someone comes in asking who
wanted the scaffolding poles, and here they are and
you have to get out of the way, and in order to do
that, you have to squeeze past someone, open a door
into someone’s back, thread your way round
something, duck under something else. It’s like
something out of Franz Kafka.
Shane and Joey arrive with unabashedly shambolic
casualness.
I have no idea about the gig, either of the gigs in
Glasgow, other than a Glasgow audience is hard to
beat. On one of these nights Roy Keane signs to
Celtic and there are chants of Keano! Keano! And
then a Glasgow audience can be relied on, en masse, to
sing a Celtic song, or maybe the Celtic song, the
words to which I’ve never known, other than
“we don’t care what the animals
say,” and it’s so loud that it’s
often impossible to play, and you just have to wait
till they’re finished. I think one of these
nights in Glasgow, we try ‘Dark Streets of
London,’ but the key’s too high for Shane
and you can hear him straining to get up to the notes.
We’re not going to do it again without changing
the key, which always presents a problem or two.
Besides, I think we agree that there doesn’t
seem to be a place for it, somehow, in the set. We do
figure out ‘Sayonara,’ and
‘Sunnyside,’ or have I mentioned that?
‘Sunnyside of the Street’ is a joy to
play, and Andrew whomps it up when we tuck in
‘Brown-eyed Girl’ in the middle.
Shane goes adrift on a couple of songs, and we have to
insert a beat here and there, maybe we’re
getting into fractions of beats, to accommodate him.
Sometimes it’s the aural equivalent of being
drunk out of your gourd and watching the television
and trying to get the image that’s going into
one eye to match the image going into the other eye,
you know, when you’ve come to that time in the
evening when you’re forced to stick your finger
into your eye to watch telly. It’s like that on
a couple of the songs, as Shane sort of peels off and
the rest of us have to stick our finger into our eye
to get what we’re doing to match what Shane
thinks we’re doing. That make any sense?
And then, it’s time for Ella to come on to sing
‘Fairy Tale of New York.’ I’m
nervous, because I don’t know what to expect,
and I’m sheepish too, because I was pretty much
the lone dissenting voice when it was mooted, twelve
months ago, that Ella might be considered. I
don’t know. At the time, last year, it was the
nepotistic angle that required me to dissent (fie! As
if an ageing cowpunk band were the bleeding Politburo
or the Borgias or something: I’m embarrassed and
ashamed), along with the wonderment of the prospect of
having (nearly) all the original members of the Pogues
on stage last year. (I say ‘(nearly)’
because, of course, last year we hadn’t invited
John Hasler our original drummer.) Not to mention the
fact that I had always adored Cait’s voice and,
after Kirsty’s, thought it to be the best suited
to the song. But Ella brings to it something that no
other singer can, and that’s, well, posterity
– and whatever fears I had about, you know, the
mum and dad being so proud of their offspring as to
render them deaf (ever heard of an all-girl group
called the Shaggs?), like so many mothers and fathers
of Pop Idol contestants, that sort of thing –
well, the way Ella walks across the stage, with her
hair done up in a wave, (she did spend a deal of time
preparing herself for this debut, with a friend, in
the bathroom off the dressing room, doing her hair)
with a rose pinned into it, wearing jade dress made of
some elven fabric and in heels, I know it’s
going to go well. We’ve known this woman all
our lives. I’ve known her from the first day
she drew breath (when I ignored, or chose not to be
aware of – I’m sure there’s a
difference – instructions that there were to be
no visitors to the hospital). She sings the girl part
in ‘Fairytale’ without pretension and
handles the lower harmony (difficult) without bother,
and then consents to be twirled around by Shane, not
in a Prince Charming way, as the word
“twirled” suggests, but rather as if he
were operating some sort of capstan in a heavy swell.
During ‘Fiesta,’ I think on the first
night, I’m standing close to Shane,
concentrating on my fingers, because it’s not
easy play that damn song without looking where the
fingers are going, concentrating really hard.
There’s mayhem going on around me. I’m
aware of that, with the crashing of those
efuckingnormous beertrays that Jos or someone has
found a never-ending source of. There are two of the
things to hand, one of which is going against
Spider’s head, and the other Shane has, which he
throws down on the ground with a crash. The next
thing I know, my head is sent into a quiver as Shane
brings the damn thing down onto the top of my head. I
feel like Tom, out of Tom and Jerry, running into a
wall, and I’m sort of standing there with the
vibrations of the beertray reverberating through me.
Then Shane buzzes the beertray out into the audience.
I have to turn away and not look, because if it
catches someone not paying attention, it’s going
to break a nose or worse. In fact, when I come off
stage and sit panting in the dressing room, I’m
half expecting the fucking police.
Marcia’s sitting cross-legged on the sofa
catty-corner with her friend from primary school, with
a bottle of champagne. She’s firing on all
cylinders and her skirt’s slewed about.
Shane’s slumped in the couch next to her with a
scree of cigarette ash down one lapel.
I go up to the backstage bar to meet Carmen
who’s come all the way from LA to Europe for
Christmas. Last time I saw her was at a Cranky George
Trio show at Molly Malone’s. We have a chat
standing by a pillar in the bar. The floor is
adhesive with spilled drinks. There are a lot of
people about, photographs to be taken of one as one
throws one’s arms around people one’s
never met and wait with a rictus of mirth plastered to
one’s face and a prolonged rictus too, since
iris-contraction devices on cameras are an industry
standard nowadays. Can’t remember his name
– a guy, with a mohican and a lot of surplus
energy – comes up to me to complain about the
bouncers and how he’d been thrown out three or
four times from the front of the stage and how the
bouncers were the underlings, the infantry of the
fascist conspiracy, the elite of which would be WTO
and MacDonald’s. Talking about
iris-contraction: his irises were like soup-bowls. He
says something about us and him against the
dictatorship and we get into a rather long and
complicated valedictory handshake which I fumble my
way through, and then he’s gone. Later on,
I’m told that the Mohican recognized in Jem a
“deep soul.” Well, that’s not
untrue.
Back down in the dressing room, Marcia’s
ebullience has evaporated, and I find her foetally
curled up on the slatted bench in the shower room.
In the morning, it’s breakfast at
Bradford’s Tea Rooms on Sauchiehall Street
(which reminds me of our first visit to Glasgow, in
the minibus, many years ago, and Cait mispronouncing
the street, to our stomach-clutching hilarity,
“Saucy Hall Street”). Breakfast at
Bradford’s Tea Rooms has become a Christmas tour
tradition for not just me, but Darryl too, though I
don’t see him there this morning. At the Tea
Rooms, there’s a gauntlet of cakes and rather
clumsy-looking snowmen made out of marzipan. Upstairs
there is a sprinkling of women with mauve rinses and
tables with glass over the tablecloths and your table
number on a piece of paper. I sit at the table I sat
at last year, and order oolong tea and a glass of
water and sardines on toast.
We have a sort of day off, since we’re playing
two shows in Glasgow, so I wander about town. I
don’t know – I feel immune to Christmas,
in spite of ‘Fairytale of New York,’ the
sodding christmas trees on stage, Muse’s
snow-blowers, which we’ve either borrowed or are
renting from Muse and the ubiquity of Elton
John’s ‘Step into Christmas’ and
George Michael’s ‘Last Christmas I gave
you my heart...’ which are playing in all Boots
and Sainsbury’s across the country, and all the
time, plus also the mince-pies in the hotel lobbies
and the people staggering down the streets from office
parties and the paper hats in the restaurants and the
crack of one of those streamer-poppers draping
someone’s head with dribbles of paper and all
their colleagues laughing. It’s not getting to
me, and probably won’t until I get back after
our last show in Dublin.
Except there’s something else in the air
that’s better than Christmas today, which is
that it’s Spider’s birthday. I have lost
count of the number of birthdays Spider’s had in
Glasgow. Glasgow and Spider’s birthday are
virtually synonymous, somehow, in my mind. I wander
down Sauchiehall Street after my visit to
Bradford’s Tea Rooms with the intention of
plying the Buchanan Galleries, to look for something
for his birthday, but come across Biggar’s
musical instrument shop just down the street from
Bradford’s, where, in a glass case, hangs a
brass claxon with a big black bulb. I have a think
about that as I walk all the way down to the mall at
the bottom of Sauchiehall Street, where I find a set
of carpet boules and a card. On my way back up
Sauchiehall Street I have a look at the people –
sitting squatly on the black iron benches, forearms on
their knees, smoking, a lot of them with ancient
hair-colour growing out. There are guys sitting in
service doorways talking. The trees up and down the
pedestrian bit of Sauchiehall Street are leafless
sticks among the black iron furniture. I go back in
to Biggar’s on the way back to the hotel and get
the claxon, and talk to the guy about who’s been
in the shop lately – the Foo Fighters for one.
We talk about Oasis, who are playing at the SEC on our
night off. Ross has arranged a van to take us if we
want to go and our passes will get us in.
We all gather in the hotel bar, to wait for our
transport to the Academy, and to give our gifts to
Spider – DVDs and CDs (of Darryl’s
favourite group: the Ockerville River – if
that’s how it’s spelled) and books and
claxon and boules.
In catering, at the Academy, there’s asparagus
on the menu, and later I have beetroot and ginger
juice from the juice-maker. Later on, my piss smells
and I have iodine-coloured shit.
I get a lift back to the hotel for a bit, after the
soundcheck, with Zim, one of the runners. His phone
goes off and the ringtone is a muezzin’s call to
prayer. Jem’s ringtone is the sound of the
telephone ringing in ‘Once Upon A Time In
America,’ the one that goes right through the
opium-den scene at the beginning. Spider and
Louise’s ringtones are what I first thought were
twittering birds, but turn out to be raygun sounds
from arcade video games.
Let’s see, I suppose the second night at the
Academy is like the first night I suppose –
well, there’s not much I remember about it
that’s going to distinguish it from the previous
night, other than, while we’re waiting to go out
onstage, in the pretty much shoulder-width
back-stairs, with the guy down the stairs at the stage
door and another guy down the stairs the other way,
towards front-of-house, both of them holding the doors
(it’s the previous night that brings the toe-end
of Joey’s boot repeatedly against the back door,
wanting to get in, and then the bouncer letting Joey
in, with an amount of black luggage which he has to
wrestle up the stairs). Shane’s taken up a room
up the stairs from this tiny little landing with
barely space to swing a cat but with seven men
shoulder-to-shoulder waiting to go on stage and the
door to these stairs opens into Andrew’s back
(I’ve been having a look at Andrew’s face
and it looks as though it’s scrimshawed in old
whale bone) and out come Joey and Shane into the
hugger-mugger. Shane wants his filthy old coat off,
so Joey helps him. But Shane holds his arms up (like,
it occurs to me, the way Wallace holds his arms up to
allow Grommit’s machinery to dress him in
shirt-sleeves and v-neck) and he can’t
understand why the coat-removal’s not working,
nor why Joey’s getting campily testy with him.
Tonight Shane does not clang my head with the
gong-sized beertray, but after ‘Fiesta,’
Jem and I and anyone who can come across the key
it’s in, play ‘Happy Birthday’ for
Spider and there’s cake backstage.
Before the cake, though, we are visited backstage by
Josephine and Stephen Behan, Dominic Behan’s
wife and son. Originally, Stephen requested that we
play ‘McAlpine’s Fusiliers.’ I
think tonight we might have dedicated ‘Dirty Old
Town’ to Josephine. She’s 78 years old
and she’s thrilled to meet Shane, who gets up to
embrace her.
Back to top
There’s a day off after Glasgow. I mooch around
the room for the morning, getting my rest, drinking
tea, then going off to Bradford’s Tea Rooms.
When I get back from Bradford’s I go to the bar
downstairs in the hotel and sit writing in my
notebook, surrounded on all sides by shelves of Veuve
Cliquot. There’s all manner of crap music in
the bar downstairs in the hotel, which, after a while,
I’m convinced is only chosen for the fact that
it’s unlikely that anyone, anywhere, has
actually clapped ears on it, ever. It gets very
tiresome. The hotel restaurant, off the atrium where
I’m sitting (overlooked by some of the hotel
rooms, two of them occupied by Anthony, our manager,
and Terry, who stay up all night, unable to sleep for
the conversation between Marcia and Shane in the bar
below) is a liver-coloured dungeon with the bar and
shelving and tables of black wood and all along the
back off the bar, underlit bottles and up in the
vaulting, strings of low-wattage light bulbs. On the
tables all around, and all around the hotel too, are
everyday items, like ashtrays, and up in the rooms,
soapdishes and whatnot, and on the barstaff, t-shirts,
with words on them that refer in some tiring, oblique
way to their purpose.
I’m joined for a while by Ross, who’s on a
mission to retrieve the CCTV tape of the bar the night
previous, which will show Shane lying full length on
the floor, immovable and very sleepy. He
doesn’t want that sort of film to get into the
wrong hands.
I hear a laugh from the top of the spiral stairs,
where I look up to see the prickly dome of Terry
Woods’s head looking down, and his
near-as-dammit iberian moustache and goatee. We hang
out a bit at one of the tables and have a cup of
coffee. He leaves me after a while. Suddenly, I
remember that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
starts in fifteen minutes down on Renfrew, or Renfield
(but that’s the character in Dracula, which Tom
Waits plays, is that right? so I’m sure it
can’t be Renfield St). Whatever. I bugger off
to watch Harry Potter for the afternoon, and then
round it off with dinner in the Kama Sutra (oh dear)
indian restaurant on the stretch of Sauchiehall Street
I haven’t been to, away from what I’ve
been considering the centre of town. The restaurant
is full of dinner parties. My table is positioned
dead centre. I watch scottish men, mostly, though
there are women here and there, sit shooting tiny
paper streamers at one another and wearing paper hats
and laughing.
Next morning Shane’s on the bus, traveling with
us. He sits downstairs in the saloon that has the
tables in it, up against the window, a great big,
black presence, alternately smoking and sleeping,
sometimes both. It’s probably a beautiful trip,
through the Borders, but I’m not really aware of
it, maybe tractor-tyre ruts that are bright with water
every now and then.
The hatch on the top of the bus is open. It gets so
stuffy in the top lounge, which is a matter of
leatherette seats in an elongated horseshoe shape. Up
in the upstairs lounge there’s Nora, the
documentary film-maker, not sure if her co-director,
Tom, is on the bus today (oftentimes, they’re in
a hired car following behind), Kitty, Philip who
lights a cigarette every now and then, smokes half of
it, crushes it out and listens to something on his mp3
player, myself, Sean Fay, a relative of Shane’s
who’s becoming known as Joey’s Joey, which
doesn’t fully describe his usefulness.
Sean’s a placid presence. He’s often not
to be found while he moves behind the scenes behind
the scenes if you know what I mean. He stays up late
posting on the web the photographs he’s been
taking. Jem comes up and we both have a look down the
roof of the bus through the hatch. It looks good out
there, like something from a film, you know, the fight
scene on top of a train. The hatch puts us in mind of
the start of a tour of the UK, years ago, when Joey
wanted the hatch open and twisted all the red handles
around the hatchway, trying to get it open, but
couldn’t and gave up, as the bus drove through
London. It wasn’t until we were on the motorway
north and at full speed that I came up to open it up
for some fresh air and loosened the correct handles,
not realizing that Joey had been tampering with the
emergency fastenings, and with a sudden sucking noise,
the wind plucked the hatch right off and sent it
flying back down the motorway behind us. We
didn’t dare stop and had to ride on to wherever
it was we were going freezing cold, until our
bus-driver could get a replacement. I’m hoping
that the hatch buried itself in some roadside field
rather than into a windscreen, but I’m sure we
would have heard about it.
Jem and Darryl tell me about having gone to see Oasis
the night before. No-one else was interested. Darryl
said that the drums were so loud that he feared for
his internal organs. After six or seven songs, Jem
looked at Darryl and then at his watch. Darryl nodded
and they both left.
We’ve swapped busses. The configuration of ours
was all wrong and with no place to escape, if you
needed to. We’ve donated ours to the crew,
whose bus was worse, freezing cold when moving because
of all the cracks in the superstructure, then
overheated at a standstill. The crew were having a
miserable time, and with overnighters too. Steve
Sunderland, the production manager (whom Kitty and
Ella have dubbed “the geography teacher”
because he goes around in a lumpy tweed jacket with
the pockets full of things, and unkempt grey hair from
a staff-room snooze and sort of sidles up to you, for
a bit, to ask you a question, then goes striding off,
hands deep in pockets) rules over his crew-brood like
Fagin and his urchins, seems to me, and they’re
miserable about the bus and rooming together (Jos
says, about sharing rooms: “I don’t do
sharing.”) It’s the least we can do to let
them have our bus, despite the shenanigans. We
don’t need all those damn bunks in a bus in any
case. Next time we’re going to have to get
something sorted with crew accommodations and what
not. I mean, we get to stay in boutique hotels
(although the Malmaison doesn’t strike me as all
that boutique; I discover that Malmaison was the
country retreat in which Napoleon kept Josephine. As
far as a small chain of contemporary hotels goes, the
name seems to imbue a place to kip and hang out with a
gratuitous veneer of carnality. In the Glasgow
Malmaison, there’s a virile and roistering
reproduction of a portrait of Napoleon behind the
reception desk).
Well, of course, I have no idea where the bloody
Newcastle Arena is in relation to the Five Bridges
(well, it’s more than five I think nowadays
– I have the feeling they added one, for the
Millennium or something).
It’s a barn of a place is the Newcastle Arena,
with the stage half-way up the hangar. Everywhere is
either stuffily hot or freezing fucking cold. The
colour scheme backstage is custard and
police-constable, with grey fibre carpet. There are
two sofas facing off in the middle of the dressing
room across a table with stuff on it. Perimetric
mirrors, open-front cabinet with wire hangers, windows
that open a bit. The security staff are in their
mid-sixties and sit on chairs in the corridors in blue
uniforms.
Outside the dressing room window is a belt of sodium
lighting in the dark. Could be anywhere, really, and
it looks cold, which it is. Joey’s been talking
about Francis Rossi. Joey had something to do with
Francis Rossi at some point in his life.
There’s a photograph of Francis Rossi in a frame
on the wall in the corridor outside the dressing
rooms. When I start to take the photo down, in order
to show Joey, the security guy jumps up from his seat
at the far end of the corridor and says, “Ya
canna take that down man!” Up until now
I’ve had a good relation with this security man.
I’ve soured it a bit by having him think
I’m up to japery, which I suppose I am. He
joins me in front of the photograph and we talk about
people that have played at the Newcastle Arena. We
end our conversation with the photograph of Status Quo
still on the wall, and in agreement about what a great
singer Paul Rogers is.
Philip comes into the dressing room. He’s
always very presentable – almost royal garden
party presentable - no matter what he wears, no matter
the time of day. On the bus it’s sometimes a
clay-coloured polo-neck with an angled zip up the
neck, or a blue such, then there’s a corduroy
jacket that has something of the smoking twelve-bore
and plummeting ducks about it. But he comes into the
dressing room, pretty much always, in a suit, and
always a very nice suit, often enough of an extremely
understated, tasteful sort of material and of a cut
which complements his – well, slight little
body. Oh, I think, he’s going to look all right
on stage. But then, he changes out of this one and
into another suit, equally as dapper, and with a tie
that, often enough, if I’m paying attention, he
likes to match with his guitar strap (well, at least
once I have been aware of a message being sent down
the line of communication – to Gerry, to Jos
– to have either the white strap, or the black
one, or the one that bears motifs something to do with
Las Dias de los Muertes). Anyway he steps into a yet
another suit, which he slips out of a suit carrier
which bears the label “CHEVRON” in green,
and beneath, in red, the name of the suit-designer.
He has sufficient of these stage suits that I actually
don’t know how many he has. He’s
extraordinarily well-turned-out. So is Spider, in his
new dog-tooth check suit, or a pair of grey pants
which are ‘haphazard’ on the ankle of his
boots (I think ‘haphazard’ is the word;
there was a specific word, that both Spider and Louise
use, to describe the way the bottom of his kecks met
the top of his boots), and a white shirt with three
buttons at the throat. Me, I’ve brought out a
suit I bought in Covent Garden in 2001, which already
has a rip in the knee from time I guested with the
Decemberists, to be followed by another rip from the
stage at the arena in Cardiff and probably more to
come and it goes into a laundry bag at night, and
comes out of the laundry bag when we get to any of the
gigs in order that a few of the wrinkles can be
allowed to fall out of it. Do you brush lint off a
pair of overalls? Because that’s what they are
– overalls. I’m going for the romanian
peasant farmer look, I suppose, except I doubt that a
romanian peasant farmer would have shelled out the
money I did to buy this particular suit. I have the
feeling it’s going to go in the bin at the end
of this tour.
I go out to watch the Dropkick Murphys. If
there’s one thing I learn from them, it’s
that jumping around on stage works. I wish we all did
what they did. There are explosions of gymnastics
every now and then, as if one or two of them sense a
pommelhorse. A guy wanders on stage to play the
bagpipes, in a towering, full-of-porridge sort of way.
He plays his thing, and then walks off, like
Hamlet’s father on the battlements. There are
more acrobatic paroxysms – and with their
guitars hanging orangutanicly low. While I’m
watching them, I realize that they’re playing
‘Captain Kelly’s Kitchen.’ It takes
a while for the song to appear out of the blizzard of
overdriven guitars, but it’s nifty when it does.
When it’s time for us to go on, there’s a
string of lights along the floor from the backstage
door into the arena all the way to the ramp up into
the back of the stage, where there’s a sort of
vent in the backdrop. There’s something very
romantic about these lights, as if they were going
down a garden path or something. Philip does a kind
of dance in the light – sort of Elvis Presley,
Bob Baker and Dick Emery in equal parts – while
we’re waiting to go on.
On stage, Philip comes across a little like Bing
Crosby, and I wonder how he keeps his hat so nice.
Spider has re-discovered his bewitching line for the
verse of ‘Sayonara.’ It sounds so lovely.
I have a look at Shane, his slow blue eyes and white
paste round his mouth. I take time to look at his
hands – almost squat, cadaverous fingers with
spade nails - as he gesticulates his way through the
verses of ‘Fiesta,’ signifies women of
easy leisure by gesturing pendulous breasts, then, in
the verse about el Rey del America, puts the boot in
to an imaginary body on the ground. Terry gets into a
sort of treadmillish dance during Tuesday Morning.
Darryl gets lost on the bass a couple of times, and if
Shane shunts us onto the wrong track in a song, Darryl
doubles up his bass line, waiting for things to come
around.
Afterwards, we’re invited into the Dropkick
Murphys’s dressing room. There are so many
people in there and I’ve no idea who’s
who. I end up by the window with Mark and I think
Tim, who, confusingly, both play the accordion, but
one of whom didn’t tonight. We talk about
accordions a lot, which is fun to do. No-one in the
Pogues ever talks about accordions much any more.
Back at the hotel, I hang out with Shane and Nora and
Tom and Darryl and Andrew and some people singing
selections from Ziggy Stardust in the bar. Shane gets
hold of the film camera and takes some long shots of
the backs of people’s heads because he
can’t be fucked to get up and film them from the
front. He’d probably be able to rationalize his
filmic point-of-view another way, but that’s the
way I see it. It’s not altogether the acme of
social entertainment to watch an unashamed alcoholic
film the backs of people’s heads, so I fuck off
to bed.
Back to top
I knit on the way down to Manchester. I have to
finish a scarf for my wife’s birthday which is
coming up, on the second night in London. My knitting
is the cause of some interest, the documentary lens
for example. I mean – rock and roll bus,
middle-aged ex-cowpunk hellraisers and one of
them’s knitting? Damn right I am. I’m
fifty-one. You’re lucky it’s not bootees
for the grandchild.
It’s getting colder the further south we go. We
drive in to Manchester through Whitefield and Lower
Broughton, places like that, and I pretend to Kitty
and Nora that I actually know where these places are.
I don’t. I lived in Manchester until I was
eleven, and then went away to school in Yorkshire and,
with the exception of the year I had to go back home
to retake A-levels, never returned, unless it was for
Christmas or a wedding or something. Still,
it’s my home town, or at least where some of my
accent comes from, so, for that reason alone it feels
incumbent to pretend I know places like Whitefield and
Lower Broughton. There’s a lot of excitement
about the houses in Lower Broughton – large,
Victorian houses, until we come upon a stretch of
estates, named after racecourses, with boarded-up
windows, and then the enthusiasm dissipates a bit.
The dressing rooms at the MEN Arena are red and white
(well, of course they are, though the woman sitting
down the echoing corridor doing security, and who
cannot accept a newspaper to read or any other
distraction, is a City fan) and are designed for
ice-skaters, because the facility is all showers and
hard plastic floor and toilets, screened off by some
crappy black curtain. Ross’s heels you can hear
a mile off. The noise he makes when he walks around
has something square-bashing about it, and I’m
to understand that Shane and Joey have described him
as “sergeant majorish,” though the
adjective might actually say more about them than
about the person they’re describing.
I’m sure I remember, last year, that under the
fibre carpet covering the main floor of the arena,
there was ice. I’ve looked already, out there,
in the middle of the hangar, in the space where I can
picture crouched, padded men slicing back and forth,
but the floor is concrete. Must have been somewhere
else. Anyway, the place is vast and with a huge
scoreboard up in the roof, pointing four ways and
seats pretty much all the way round. It’s the
Saturday before Christmas, like last year.
We were nervous as all get-out this time last year
– with the prospect, if we should sell out, of
15,000 people in the Manchester Evening News Arena (as
it turned out, we had something like 13,800 odd last
year), along with the unfamiliarity of tv screens each
side of the stage (and recording the show for an
eventual DVD) and all that. This time the nerves
aren’t so bad.
Can’t remember much about the gig, except
it’s generally agreed that it was a warm one,
meaning full of human warmth. Because it’s my
home town – or just because – I find
myself stepping out onto the top of the PA stacks
stage right in the hope of finding a prime platform to
show off, except that as soon as I do I realize my
mistake and it’s a matter of keeping quite,
quite still – well, stillish, stiller than I
want to be since I’ve stepped up there to show
off, anyway. The whole thing wobbles like hell
underneath me and I’m scared that I’m
going to bring it down and I can’t wait for the
bloody song to end.
Shane has discontinued thrashing the mike stand to
within an inch of its life each gig. That activity
fell by the wayside, actually, after Cardiff. But he
still spends time untwining the mike cable from around
the stand, in a thoroughly cack-handed fashion, to
take up the mike and swat the stand to the ground. At
one of these gigs – can’t remember which
one, as if it matters – all eyes turn to him as
the end of an instrumental section and his cue to come
back in singing comes riding over the brow and
he’s still in the middle of some macramé
with the mike cord.
During ‘Rainy Night in Soho,’ Shane and I
have been exchanging looks that I hope I’m not
mistaking for, well, I don’t know, human contact
of some kind, maybe. He’s all lit up blue with
the lights. Philip’s a bit in the way of our
line-of-sight because he has a place (marked out on
the drum riser, in white tape, with a little notice
that says something like: “Philip’s area,
keep off.”) where he sits on this amp for the
slushy songs. Shane has to come wandering away from
centre front to exchange whatever these looks mean
with me.
He’s taken to screaming too. Well, he’s
always been a screamer, but this is penetrating,
banshee stuff, from time to time, and you have to
clear off away from the front wedges unless you want
your eyebrows plastered to your eyelids.
After the gig, I hang out in the hotel bar with him
and Nora and Tom. Shane laughs at something a little
on the inane side and the wheeze goes on for longer, I
think, than necessary. In the course of his lengthy,
spittly expiration, one can’t help but think
he’s gone into the realms of such a private joke
where one can’t follow him, nor does he expect
one to, somehow, nor would he want one to, and if he
suspected one thought one could, he’d suddenly
break off the wheeze and ask one what the fuck
one’s laughing at and one wouldn’t be able
to say. If you get my drift.
Anyway, the prolonged wheeze alarms me after a while,
for reasons of the capacity of his lungs, rather than
the increasing solipsism of his experience, though
that kind of bothers me too.
“Oh, breathe in, for fuck’s sake,” I
say.
This engenders a breath-holding competition that I let
him win. I explode in a great show of not being able
to hold my breath any longer, in order that he
doesn’t do himself a mischief. Well, you just
have to look at him to know that would be on the
cards.
Back to top
We check out of the hotel in Manchester. I’ve
left something back in my room, which is a bother. A
woman comes up in the lift with my to my floor, where
we come across Joey in an open shirt, without socks
and smoking a cigarette. He has a rash between his
eyebrows. He’s either scratching his head or
sweeping his hair behind his ears. Either way,
it’s a gesture of annoyance and impotence and
general fretfulness.
“Does anybody work here?” he says.
He’s locked out of his room and doesn’t
seem to know which one it is.
Outside, by the bus, it’s a suitably leaden day,
and cold. I’ve been out to Sessy’s (I
think it’s called) for my breakfast, a greasy
one with pools of fat in the egg and tomatoes that
have merely been seen by the grill. Before check-out
time (we all know the check-out time and what time the
bus will be going off because Ross hands out
call-sheets backstage after each gig, or posts them
under our doors at night) I hurry off to what I
suppose is called the Triangle or something, the new
bit in the middle of Manchester (it’s been said
the IRA bomb, whatever year that was, I can’t
remember, was the best thing to happen to Manchester),
to buy Louise a birthday present. It’s cute
that Spider and Louise’s birthdays fall within
days of each other’s.
I hang outside the bus. There’s a small huddle
of strangely-shaped people with things to sign (though
only one comes forward to ask for autographs) at a
ridiculously respectful distance from both the bus and
the front steps of the hotel, unless some concierge
has backed them up to a required distance or
something. I go over, because it’s obvious what
they want, and try to make sure that everyone else
does.
I hang with Scratchy for a bit. For biographical
reasons we stand around appreciating the
pewter-coloured sky and the incipient rain: Scratchy
was born in Hope Hospital, Salford; I was born in
Worsley, Manchester, maybe three or four miles away
from the hospital. We have the rain in our bones and
we like standing around in Manchester in the miserable
cold. (Well, it’s not really Manchester, this
car park we’re standing in, so Scratchy tells
me. The hotel has its own postcode, because, by
rights, its postcode should have been a Salford one,
but since Salford has one of the worst raps in the
United Kingdom, and is pretty much on the bottom of
the list of desirable places to live, for health,
education, crime-level reasons, to list just a few,
possibly, the Lowry hotel applied for a postcode that
would dissociate it from the city.)
A bunch of flowers carried by one of the concierges
comes down the steps. It’s not the concierge
with the kilt. For some reason the hotel has a kilted
concierge. There’s some confusion as to
who’s responsible for the flowers, because the
concierge says he is and no-one believes him. It
turns out to be Terry, who’s old-school
gentlemanly and self-effacing when it comes to ladies.
We all get on the bus. We have to wait a bit for the
bus to leave, because Ross comes downstairs to let us
know that Shane has picked this moment to try on a new
suit. As precursors to Shane’s arrival (as it
turns out, in the filthy coat and trousers he has been
wearing since rehearsals and not, disappointlingly,
the new suit), John the Baptists, if you like, come
first Victoria out to the bus, in a muscovite hat, a
coat made of a material redolent of a 70’s
suburban restaurant, with patterned tights and
horsechestnut-coloured knee boots. Victoria smiles
guilelessly at all around her as it’s considered
what to do with her bags. The second harbinger of
Shane’s imminent arrival on the bus is Joey,
who, with gasps and curses, coerces his luggage up the
stairs, effortfully dislodging it when it gets stuck
in the stairwell. If his luggage were a donkey,
he’d be thrashing it mercilessly.
When we get to Birmingham Kitty enjoys a run,
throughout dinner in the canteen, of popping up with
reality tv show titles, one of which is “When
Christmas Reunion Tours Go Wrong.” While
she’s eating, she suddenly clutches Louise by
the wrist.
“Oh my god!” she says. “I thought I
was going to choke!”
And it turns out that her greatest fear of dying is by
choking. So we have a talk about one’s greatest
fear of dying. Philip further develops the theme by
declaring that he wants to live until he’s a
hundred and ten. Jem wants to live until he’s,
well, ancient.
“When Long Player finishes,” Kitty quips.
The dressing rooms have a kind of reproduction regency
hotel feel about them, if that makes any sense. I
think the doors have panelling maybe, and each one is
numbered. Shane’s in a crap mood at the moment,
and when he goes into dressing room Number 3, we sort
of agree the way a network agrees – ferromones,
electrical charges, or just that we’ve seen this
sort of mood on him before – to occupy another
room down the corridor from him. I have the lack of
wisdom to go into the room Shane’s in for
something, I don’t know what, a piece of
chocolate maybe. Shane’s sitting down the far
end, surly, sleepy, feet up on a chair. My presence
wakes him up. As I’m leaving, he shouts:
“Hey, James, you want a piece of bread?!”
The piece of bread – buttered, I happen to
notice too – comes flying up the room somewhere
not a lot in my direction and bounces off the toilet
door in the wall opposite me.
Later on, while I’m doing laundry in the machine
and drier we’ve found in one of the rooms
backstage, Joey installs Shane in a room with
breeze-block walls, where he lies, in his coat, legs
apart, asleep and smoking, both. Joey has a table in
this room and a CD player which is blasting out what
sounds like Alabama 3. Whenever I come in, to check
on my laundry, which is washing in a room beyond the
room in which Shane and Joey have taken up residency,
he raises a finger to his lips and indicates the
sleeping Shane on the massage bench.
Later on still, there’s a sign on the door that
reads: FUCK OFF, UNLESS YOU’RE INVITED.
I go to hang out in the dressing room, where Jem has
altered the lighting, as he likes to do, and we both
have a rest. The rest of them have gone to the day
rooms we have at a nearby hotel. Neither of us can be
bothered. Oftentimes Darryl too.
When everyone comes in, Philip gets changed into one
of his suits, and then, from a washbag or something,
he brings a bottle of scent. Now, I’d always
thought, in order to optimize distribution of scent,
that a man sprayed a cloud in front of him and then
walked through it. Someone showed me that once. But
Philip disagrees. By the way, someone asks,
what’s your scent?
“Jasper Conran,” he says.
Well, of course, we investigate that, how can you not?
The label of a bottle oftentimes indicating the
contents and all, plus also the pretension of naming a
bottle of anything, least of all scent, after
yourself, which is asking for trouble, prompts Paul
Scully, who can be relied on to throw a flower on the
top of something, to pipe up.
“I prefer Norman Tebbitt, meself.”
I play a shit gig. I can’t hear myself
particularly well. I get involved in a lot of
mistakes.
‘Fairytale of New York,’ and I have a look
at the pride and love in Jem’s face when Ella
comes out, with her flower in her hair, and –
but what’s she doing coming round that side of
the PA speakers? It looks like she got lost at the
side of the stage, and we’re all looking in the
direction we expect her to come from, but she comes in
from somewhere else.
We played at the Academy last year. I was rather fond
of the Academy, with its hard stage and its balcony in
your face and by your ears, at least to us, and a
smaller stage than we had become used to, but a hard
stage is the thing. It’s tough on your feet, if
you like to stamp, which I do, and it sends jarring
shocks right through me, from my heel to the top of my
head and I can lie in bed later, after my bath, and
feel the effect of them. But it always sounds so much
clearer on a hard stage. All the arenas we’ve
been doing have been on what feels like half-inch
plywood and I can’t count the times I’ve
nearly knocked Shane’s drink off the ridiculous
70’s barstool with the leatherette seat cushion
and the brushed steel, whatever it is, stem and base
and footrest about which there seems to be a consensus
that Shane would be livid, if not surly and
disgruntled, if it were not to turn up on stage, where
it restricts my movements from time to time, standing
like some sort of memorial to something, slap bang in
the middle of the fucking stage – a memorial to
Dave Allen maybe. Shane hasn’t sat on it once,
so far, on this tour, not that I’ve noticed. I
hate it and wish it would go away, but anyone who has
anything to do with it seems to be a slave to its
power.
When I come off stage and commit myself to the first
of a couple of pint glasses of vodka and cranberry
juice – hardly Cosmopolitans in such a format,
but they work. I have guests to go and see in the
backstage bar, such as it is – a room with
tables and a fridge. Before I get into the room
however, I’m tugged back by a grey-haired woman
in a blue dress. She tells me she’s from
Nenagh, which I suppose you might describe as the
closest urban centre to Shane’s home village,
except “urban” would be a misnomer;
it’s a market town with, when I was last there,
strings of lights from the lampposts and tannoys
playing accordion music. The woman wants me to let
Shane know that “Tom and Paula from
Nenagh” are here and would like to see him. I
happen to meet Paul Scully in the corridor coming away
from the woman, having said to her that I would do the
best I can – not that I want to; I have friends
of my own to see, for the short time one has in the
backstage bar after a gig. Paul says he’ll go
and tell Shane about his visitors. He comes back in a
bit, to where I’m with my people in the
backstage bar to say that Shane would indeed want to
see Tom and Paul from Nenagh. Big guys? Shane has
enquired. Paul Scully hasn’t been able to say,
because he hasn’t seen the woman who has
approached me, but, yeah, maybe. “Not Tom and
Paul!” I say to Scully. “It’s Tom
and Paula.” “Whatever,” Scully says.
But I take the woman to the dressing room anyway and
when I do, Shane’s in there on his own and has
no idea who the hell this woman is, with her consort,
but I have people in the hospitality room and have to
go, so leave them to it.
I meet with Miss Walshy. It’s her birthday and
she’s smashed, and so smashed I have to ask her
to repeat pretty much everything she says.
When I go back to the dressing room, not all that much
later, it’s dense with boys whose hair you might
describe as ottery, and another woman in a blue dress
but with a necklace. This woman holds me back from
the refill vodka and cranberry juice I’ve gone
in there for, to talk with me about life and Shane and
Ireland, and with a self-assurance that’s rural,
somehow – the self-assurance you need to drown
kittens in a bucket of water or to thrust your arm up
to your elbow into a cow’s vagina to assist
delivery, that kind of assurance. All I want is my
vodka and cranberry and to return to my guests.
Later on, there’s a car to take Darryl and me to
the hotel in Birmingham. Everyone else has gone on to
London on the bus (though not without complications
that have required Ross to discuss the clearing of the
dressing room with someone and – this must be a
page from the Tour Managers’ Manual, surely
– to keep his hands behind his back, in order
not to appear threatening to his interlocutor –
except, whenever has a Scot with his hands behind his
back not been threatening, given the wince-able,
imminent
nasal-septum-flat-as-a-clove-of-fucking-garlic
syndrome that’s written all over that tableau?)
Darryl and I are staying in Brum because Darryl has a
ton of Birmingham friends and they’ll want a
drink in the hotel bar, and I’m going down to
the Cotswolds first thing to meet my family. It takes
an amount of time to squeeze all Darryl’s
Birmingham friends into the van as Darryl goes about
organizing them in, it occurs to me, an aviary sort of
way.
The front door to the hotel needs to be opened by
someone on the inside with a key and the bar’s
closed. I’m kind of relieved, because I want an
early start. I say goodnight to Darryl and his
friends and go to bed.
Back to top
I follow Darryl up the escalator and up the steps out
of Brixton tube station. I cross the road at the
pedestrian crossing, before we both get to the railway
bridge. I have a look at him walking with his suit
bag, with him on one side of Brixton Road. He’s
got a footballer’s flick to his legs, when he
walks, and he looks to be thinking hard about
something, taking sidelong glances into the shop
windows. I lose him at Stockwell Road. I do look
behind me when I get to the stage door of the Academy,
but he’s a hundred yards up the street and
there’s no point in holding open the door for
him.
We’ve played Brixton Academy so many times now
that, well, there’s the dim disappointment of
the familiar set against the comfort of the
accustomed, if you know what I mean. I press both
buzzers on the door to be let in because I don’t
know which one does which, and then there’s the
office/reception window with its bank of security
screens, the guys in their quilted jackets who give
you a guardedly beaming greeting – shy, maybe,
is what they are – when you first come in
through the stage door. And the corridors are the
same – a kind of dried blood and semolina colour
scheme throughout with dimples in the rubbery
flooring. It’s fucking cold, backstage. I
enjoy walking up and down the hallway behind the
stage, with its worn boards and high ceiling and the
enormous barn door-size get-in door.
We do a soundcheck, without Shane. Friends of
Andrew’s show up to the soundcheck, a woman and
a couple of kids. Jem shows the kids the hole in the
stage that has always fascinated him: a small round
hole with maybe an inch bore. Below you can see a
huge, illuminated, grey-painted space under the stage.
Jem says that, during shows at Brixton Academy,
he’s found himself pondering the space down
there, standing over the hole and looking down.
There’s always a light on down there, but none
of us have ever visited that place and we don’t
know know what goes on under there.
Brixton Academy’s a big barn of a place. My
brother-in-law came to one of the shows we did here,
last year, and during the show found himself looking
up at the Mediterranean-style village built over the
proscenium arch and along the top of the walls and he
was surprised that it should be an open-air theatre.
Andrew’s not well. He’s got bronchitis.
A doctor comes to visit and gives him antibiotics and
a B12 shot.
We have our dinner in the overheated canteen room,
while the Dropkick Murphys make the air in there throb
with their soundcheck. They play ‘Guns of
Brixton.’ Some of us go back to the hotel for a
kip. Darryl, Andrew, Paul Scully and myself hang out
in the dressing room. Scully stretches out on the
black sofa in his corduroy pants and starts snoring.
I remember in a hotel lobby in Germany, waiting for a
replacement bus, Scully slouching in an armchair, head
thrown right back, mouth open, and making the air
shudder with the vibrations of his soft palate.
Jem has found a room for himself down the corridor,
with a sofa in it. I sit in his room for a bit, by
the dressing table and we have a chat about the art
installation he’s working on, which, if
I’m not repeating myself, is a subterranean
chamber with, above ground, a large horn to broadcast
the sounds of water dripping in the chamber below. I
have no idea where this installation is, or will be
– in a woodland in the Peak District somewhere,
I have the feeling.
Having left Jem to a snooze, and back in the other
dressing room, Louise comes in and apologizes for
disturbing our peace in here, as I’m slouched on
the other sofa, with a hand over my eyes, trying to
get a snooze in myself, and Andrew on the other end of
the couch, Darryl pottering about making tea, flapping
his hands over some missing component. Louise’s
body is so constantly on the move, stepping side to
side in her huge boots, that it looks as though
she’s about to launch off skating.
And then everyone gathers. From the hotel: Terry and
Philip – Terry in a black polo neck sweater and
his face glowing from the outside; Philip in a suit
that he’s going to change out of, into yet
another. Spider gets changed. Will it be the
flat-cap tonight? People come in and go out, into the
ante-room where all the suits are hanging. I’m
not quite sure of Shane’s whereabouts at the
moment.
In due course, we go downstairs to collect by the big
black doors to the stage. I like to have my accordion
on before I go out onto the stage, to put the straps
under my jacket, because I know I’m going to
have to take my jacket off after three or four
numbers. I go in through the doors to the side of the
stage. Buddy helps me with my accordion and bends
down to switch on the wireless pack which is about the
same height on my body as my genitals. Steve, the
stage manager, says: “Cough.”
And then I warm up my fingers by shaking my hand all
about, and Andrew twirls his hand, holding on his
wrist, to loosen up. ‘Straight to Hell’
comes over the PA. We wait for the chorus. And then
we go on.
Quite what Shane thinks he’s doing with
‘If I Should Fall From Grace With God’ I
don’t know, but it’s as if he has the song
written out in front of him and he tears it all up and
puts this bit here and that section down there, and
generally reassembles the damn song right in front of
our eyes, comes in with the chorus where it’s
never been before and threatens to leave us bobbing
helplessly in his wake. Some of us are quicker than
others to catch him in this trapeze-artistry and we
shoot looks from one to the other to see where
we’re headed and then at the end we sort of
laugh with relief and shake our heads a bit. In
‘White City,’ Shane forgets when to come
back in, and I’m forced to launch myself into
yet another bloody solo – at least, I think
that’s what it’s supposed to be –
making it up as I go along, coming to the end of it,
not entirely knowing if I’m going to have play
another bit by the seat of my fucking pants.
I’m not sure how we resolve that song.
We have to wait a while between songs tonight, because
Andrew’s panting with bronchitis, can’t
catch his breath and has a urinary issue, which means,
half way through the set, he’s gone to the bogs.
Shane sings the song that starts “On the 14th
day of November (December, whatever, can’t
remember the sodding month).” I don’t
particularly want to play this song. It’s about
explosions and killing, but, well, there’s
nothing else going on with Andrew not behind the drums
so I join in.
Andrew comes back, with a mug of tea. He stretches
his legs out over the top of his bass drum to drink
it.
Later on, I find myself watching Terry playing, and
notice that the collar of his shirt is turned up. I
hope it’s not a fashion statement of some kind.
For the next couple of numbers it’s all I can do
to resist the urge to go over and turn it down for
him.
Roisin Murphy was supposed to be singing
‘Fairytale of New York’ for the Brixton
shows. I don’t know anything about Roisin
Murphy, and I don’t even think about this when
Ella comes out to sing. We’ve been so happy for
Ella to sing ‘Fairytale.’ We
couldn’t have had a better person to do it.
During the song, I look out into the audience. The
darkness out there is sprinkled with the tiny screens
of mobile phones.
21st December
We’ve been encountering a problem at
soundchecks, which is the downbeat. I don’t
know why this should have become a problem, at this
point in time. Someone counts in, and we all come in
at different times. Philip has been the one to
abruptly stop playing, and beseech us to concentrate,
though sometimes it’s been Darryl. I
can’t say I’ve noticed too much of a
problem – except there have been issues with
keeping the time right at the beginning of
‘Thousands are Sailing,’ when both Darryl
and I have had to concentrate hard on Andrew’s
hi-hat and tambourine – the hi-hat particularly
for me, because I can watch it do what it does, and
get the tempo from that, at the beginning of the song.
But, whatever we’re doing in the soundcheck
– stopping and trying the song, whatever song,
again – does work, when it comes to doing the
show itself, because pretty much every song startles
me with the synchronousness of its downbeat, everyone
right on the mark, seems to me.
I’ve got my family in the audience tonight,
which makes me nervous and I can’t seem to shake
thinking about it, while I’m cavorting on stage.
When the lights go up, I can see them up in the first
row of the balcony. My youngest, last year, was so
done in with jet-lag that she slept forty minutes
through the show. This year, it’s lovely to see
her awake and hesitatingly waving up there. The last
show she went to, of any kind, was to see the Globe
Theatre’s production of ‘Measure for
Measure’ at one of the theatres at UCLA. It was
unadulterated boredom for her. From the stage, here
at Brixton, I shout up to her:
“This has to be better than Measure for Measure,
doesn’t it?”
I think I get a thumbs up from the balcony.
Since we’ve been having trouble counting bloody
songs in and coming in on the downbeat – I mean,
after all these years, we encounter a problem like
that? What’s that about? Well, I think we must
have made one another nervous or something, because
all of a sudden, Terry thinks that the count-in for
‘Lullaby of London’ is one, two, three and
in. ‘Lullaby of London’ is in four-time.
It always has been. We used to joke that, since we
played Irish music, we should do everything in threes
(and, if you notice, we run through tunes –
intros, outros, middle-eights – in groups of
three, a lot of the time [but listen, however, to
‘Mama You Been On My Mind,’ the Bob Dylan
song, covered by Rod Stewart on a solo albums, with
accordion and some sublime twelve-string guitar
playing, and I laughed out loud with joy when I heard
his band play the intro round three times before the
song starts]), but for Terry to start thinking, at
this stage, that ‘Lullaby of London’
should be counted in by means of a count to three,
well, it’s either that he’s taking
something too seriously, or he’s as nervous as
fuck. So, this is the second night he comes in after
a count of three, and I have to catch up with him,
again. Tomorrow, I’m going to have a word with
him, if I can remember.
In ‘Fairytale,’ Shane takes Ella by the
hand and waist and does his shuffling,
subject-to-no-tempo foxtrot, or whatever it is, with
her, turning her round as if he’s making a hole
for a fencepost, and the next thing you know,
they’re over, on the ground, arse over tit,
flailing feet, outstretched hands, clambering up to
all-fours, until one of them tries to use the other to
get up, and brings him or her down, to start over
again. Eventually – and I wouldn’t have
taken bets on this – it’s Shane
who’s up, successfully, first, and who gallantly
extends a hand to Ella to help her up.
Last night, I jealously watched Philip trip to the
front wedges, skip over them in a bound, and mar the
whiteness of the fallen snow with his swiveling,
dancing, guitar-playing thing. Tonight, I vault over
the front wedges to beat him to it, slide into the
snow drift, and do my snow angel – for my kids,
I tell myself. It’s pathetic, isn’t it?
Afterwards, all my american family’s in the
backstage bar. My oldest has a stomach-ache and wants
to go home. My youngest is all sort of demure in
response to the overwhelmingness of having witnessed
some weird transformation of her dad from washer-up to
accordion-hero and she wants to go home too. My wife
has lost her voice. It’s a Christmas tradition.
My in-laws, who have flown over from the US, are
elated. They haven’t seen the Pogues since 1991
at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, when Strummer
effectively got us barred from ever playing that place
again, by inviting a stage invasion or something.
22nd December
Jos is having an exhibition of his paintings in the
canteen. They’re ranged all along one of the
tables. They’re about as brightly coloured as
the shirt he was wearing during the couple of
days’ rehearsals we had three weeks ago. They
combine found elements, or just some fucking weird
shit he’s come across, and what looks like
acrylic on canvas. I don’t know whether
they’re for sale, or just to let us know what he
gets up to on the tour bus, or something. Darryl says
he’s going to buy one. I feel a bit sheepish
about not buying one – because, firstly, I
don’t know if they’re for sale, and
secondly, because, well, I don’t know if I want
one of them on my wall, lovely and original as they
are. Throughout this tour, we’ve come across
Jos’s “found elements,” or just some
fucking weird shit he’s come across, which
he’s displayed, usually on the top of
Terry’s amp. They have been tiny little
creatures that you might get free at a petrol station
or in a box of cereal or something. They’ve
been ranged, as I said, on the top of Terry’s
amp, and they’ve been labelled with the names of
certain people in the entourage.
We summon the catering staff, Fiona and Simpson, to
the dressing room to accept tokens of our gratitude
for feeding us so well on the tour, and making our
dressing room each night so sumptuous with velours and
the foison of the fields. Fiona has a little cry. On
the subject of catering, it’s always been a
treat to watch Joey and Shane at the trough, so to
speak, after a show (Shane can’t eat right
before a show; makes sense), each of them sitting
before foil-covered plates on the coffee-table in the
dressing room.
It’s good to have read Sheva’s account of
these nights at Brixton Academy. I have forgotten
about Shane not hearing the count-in, after the
introduction to ‘Sickbed’ – and when
will I stop being surprised when Terry never plays the
introduction like it is on the record? He’s
never played it the way it was recorded. Never.
We’ve got a full complement of horns tonight,
(or was that last night too?) with all the Jesse James
brass section and Dan of the wire-wool hair, stepping
back and forth, up and from the microphone to deliver
his bits. I enjoy watching Dan during ‘Rainy
Night in Soho,’ but, musically speaking, I have
no idea what he’s doing, nor what the rest of
Jesse James are doing, because I can’t hear them
at all, all the way across the stage. I hope
they’ve been “woodshedding” (which
is a new term for many of us in the band [I first
heard of it from David Briggs who produced the only
Low and Sweet Orchestra record, and who was the kind
of person who would use that kind of expression
without feeling stupid], along with, surprisingly
“jumping the shark”, which, of course, has
nothing to do with music and I don’t know why I
bring it up at all at this point, other than that I
was surprised that no-one had heard of it) in one of
the dressing rooms along the corridor, and that they
listened to whatever suggestions Jem and I made as to
how they should go about playing on ‘Rainy Night
In Soho.’ The eye-contact Shane and I have been
making in the instrumental section, when his face is
lit up all blue down one side, has now fallen by the
wayside, and now I wonder if it’s because he
doesn’t actually need a cue, and not for what I
thought were reasons of human contact of some kind, if
you know what I mean.
And what’s going on with Andrew’s shirt,
or shirts? Every time I look at him on stage –
for count-ins and cues and stuff or with joy about
something he’s just pulled off, whatever –
I’m astonished at the pristinity (I don’t
even know if that’s a word) of his shirt, but
then, it looks like the same shirt he wore last night
and I don’t get it. His shirt always looks new
to me. What’s that about?
Is it tonight that Shane does the old chestnut,
walking about with a glass of gin and tonic on his
head to the delight of the audience? And then the
goofy, fingers-pointing-upwards ‘White
City’ dance? And then unwinding the microphone
cable from around the mike stand, letting the mike
dangle in front of the front wedges (a leitmotif of
this tour and one that has had a few of us, in panic
and fear for our tympanic membranes, night after
night, shooting looks to Aden behind the monitor desk,
to cut the signal from Shane’s microphone.
Leitmotif? Shitemotif, more like), and then to play
out the cable and dispense with the mike stand, and
then start to draw the mike back to himself - as if
he’s depth sounding and winding up the sinker -
and then it’s a question of: is he going to get
the mike into his hand by the time the next verse
starts, or isn’t he, is he, isn’t he? Oh
my god, and I’m looking from Shane’s inept
winding and winding, still no sight of the microphone,
just cable, and then to Terry, for some reason,
who’s staring at Shane’s antics with an
indulgent and calm smile, but a smile which is fixed
to his face, and then back to Shane who’s not
quite there yet, actually not even nearly there, and
it’s at this point that you sort of give up and
whatever’s going to happen’s going to
happen and we’ll repair the song as we go,
we’ve done it before, if Shane doesn’t
make it with the goddamn microphone sketch. But,
miraculously, he does, and I guess he knew he was
going to make it all along, and off goes the song
again without a wrinkle. And it’s then that
Terry looks at me with a twinkle, of relief, in his
eye. Oh, for heaven’s sake.
Katie Melua passes me in the backstage bar, with a
bottle of beer in one hand, and holding, a finger in
each, three Dixie-cup size plastic glasses (the kind
I’m used to seeing liquidized wheatgrass in)
with clear liquid in the bottoms. I wonder what kind
of drink is that. She says hello in a guarded,
I’m-much-shorter-than-you sort of way. Katie
Melua is really nice, I’ve decided.
Otherwise, backstage, I meet Roger one of our old
roadies, who came with us to Australia, and who got
his chest-hair stuck into the wax on a surfboard that
had been left out in the sun.
Back to top
Of course, I’m the first one at the airport.
I’m used to that. As Joey used to say, when he
was tour manager: “James Fenearley. He’s
never late. He’s always early.”
It’s true.
When they turn up, Terry’s wearing grey, what
looks like herring-bone tweed trousers, with turn-ups,
and what look like new, light tan, suede shoes, with a
fine welt. When I comment on them, he looks at me
avuncularly. “If you look after a good pair of
shoes, you’ll always be well shod,” he
says. In come Victoria and Joey and Shane, who looks
tired and sits down on Joey’s luggage with a
deal of heaviness. Ross gets us all checked in.
Spider and Louise are late, and so, I think, is
Andrew, about whom we all ask, on account of his
bronchitis. When I’d left him the other night,
to get into my car home and I thought he’d left
an hour before, he was still waiting for a member of
his party to come out of the backstage bar, so he
could to get into his car home. Didn’t seem
right somehow, to have him waiting outside in the
cold.
Up in the departure lounge, well, the aeronautically
designed – oh, don’t they work hard, these
architects, with a theme, you know? – holding
tank, Joey has given Shane a battery-operated fan that
lights up like a Catherine wheel, and with changing
patterns too. Shane’s happily staring into it,
as Joey comes up to me, combing his hair, sweating,
and wiping the sweat from his forehead with a paper
napkin that’s turned to pulp, to talk about
something.
I sit next to Jem on the plane. We talk about his art
installation project some more. I come up with some
titles for it – you need a title for
near-as-dammit everything – which are just dumb.
I pick the odd bit of snow from Muse’s
snow-machines out of his hair.
Ella’s not with us today. The lack of Ella and
her assistant Kitty makes everything feel unbalanced
somehow, and everything’s imbued with an air
that’s full of the possibility that they knew
something we don’t, yet.
Outside Dublin airport, Andrew and I watch a flock of
birds flying around in the sky above the road and the
terminal building, how they shift this way and that as
a distinct unit. He tells me about when he was on
holiday and was looking over a bluff into the sea, and
how a shoal of fish clung to the moving shadow of a
tree on the water.
We watch Shane come across the carpark in a
Soviet-style Russian hat that Victoria’s just
bought him – at the airport? I can’t see
them selling Soviet-style Russian hats at Dublin
airport, somehow, but there he is in one, a dead
housecat on his head.
After dinner at the Point, some of us go back to the
hotel. I can’t be bothered, so I stretch out in
the room marked “Wardrobe” (which has, by
far, been the safest room for us at the Point, which
tends to get over-run with people fairly early on).
Jem stretches out too, and so does Darryl.
We’re very sleepy at this stage. I take my
shoes off and put my legs up on the table.
But resting is useless. There’s always someone
coming in, wanting to know something, get something,
pin something up on a wall, for a drink, for a cup of
tea. In the end, Jem tells me about a book he’s
reading, the title of which escapes me, but the
narrative of which follows someone’s trip from
one floor to the one above, on an escalator.
I go for a wander. B P Fallon is in what he thinks is
the dressing room, pinning posters up on the wall for
what’s called “Rehab Disco” –
somewhere in Dublin (I’m afraid I won’t be
attending) – and for which he has invited Shane
as co-jockey. It’s a thing they do together
from time to time. BP is even more pixie-ish than I
remember him, with a perfectly shaped head for chia.
He still feels guilty about our cats. He came to stay
at our house in Los Angeles a good few years ago, and
our cats ran away.
Philip comes into the dressing room, in a rage. His
apoplexy is such it has actually sucked all the air
out of him, to the point his skeleton looks
vacuum-packed in yellow and pink hide. Philip is
beside himself that it would seem that Aiden Lee (is
that his name? The employee of the promoter of this
show in Dublin, Denis Desmond) has had an issue with
the guest-list and now not just the Radiators are
stuck outside, but Philip’s sister too. For a
minute I worry about my ageing aunt from Cheshire
who’s staying with her daughter in Howth over
Christmas, but then I figure I would hear on my mobile
if they were having trouble getting in. But Philip
rightly points out that it’s always the way in
Dublin: backstage is awash with people you kind of
don’t really know, but sort of, and the carpark
is awash with people you actually do know, who
can’t get in. Anthony goes off to sort it out.
I find myself hoping that Anthony takes a leaf out of
the supposedly non-threatening tour manager’s
manual, and folds the guy’s septum for him. I
think I actually say, when Anthony leaves the room,
“Loaf him.”
In a while, Anthony comes back.
“It’s sorted,” he says in his
Manchester accent. That was quick. I study his
forehead for for bits of soft tissue.
Tonight, on stage, I have a good go at knocking
Shane’s drink off the bar stool by stamping, in
time to the music, on the plywood stage near it, and
watching the gin and tonic jump about in the glass and
the glass itself edge its way to the edge, but it
still won’t get there.
I find myself sitting next to Spider on the drum-riser
at the beginning of ‘Sick Bed.’ Time was,
we’d all congregate at the bass-drum – our
water-cooler sometimes – and pass the time of
day, while we weren’t needed. Shane used to
drop in sometimes too. I was passing the time of day
there once, at the beginning of ‘Dirty Old
Town,’ in France, when Jem came across, stood up
on the riser, swung his leg over and sat down on my
shoulders. I managed to get myself up, standing, and
we walked around the stage for a bit, Jem playing the
banjo on my shoulders, me playing the mandolin
beneath. Anyway, tonight Spider and I have a
conversation about something, and then peel off to our
stations to do our work when our cue comes.
We play ‘Happy Birthday’ to Shane.
Victoria comes out with a cake. It’s got
“Eire” written on it and the icing is the
Irish tricolour. Shane holds it in his hands for a
while. Not finding a handy sideboard nearby, or even
a cake-knife to hand slices out, Shane dumps the cake
on the floor. He spends his energy on a few fudged
kicks at the candles, trying to knock them off. What
goes through my mind is this: “It’s going
to go all over the accordion, I know it is.
There’ll be a cake-fight and it’s going to
go everywhere.” I’m astonished that the
cake stays where it is, collapsed just behind
Shane’s microphone. While we play ‘Happy
Birthday,’ Shane acts fingers down his throat
with what he takes to be the surfeit of sentimentality
on his behalf. What’s he thinking of? We play
‘Happy Birthday’ for everyone.
There’s a guy on the stage with a camcorder. I
know his face really well, but I can’t put a
name to it. He’s edging along the front of the
stage, closer and closer to the centre mike and
I’ve had enough of the invasion of space,
somehow, and the idea that the DVD turning up on Ebay
after Christmas starts to offend me. I was recently
given a bootleg filmed entirely from the backstage bar
at Brixton Academy. Hmm. Someone on the guestlist,
maybe (strokes beard thoughtfully). I have Jos
encourage him to fuck off behind the PA speakers.
And then, on the other side of the stage, in the
shadows, there’s an old man with a beard and
longish, grey thinning hair, in a tweed jacket and a
cardigan, tie and blue shirt, and I think to myself,
Oh, that must be Steve (the geography teacher)
Sunderland’s replacement. It’s amazing
what goes through your head. It’s the vaguely
academic aura about this man at the side of the stage,
that matches some idea I have about the notion Kitty
and Ella have about geography teachers, that links
Steve Sunderland with this rather elfish, twinkly old
man with fetchingly lidded eyes, standing, arms
folded, by the side of the stage and renders him into
Steve Sunderland’s stand-in.
Well, it’s not Steve Sunderland’s
stand-in. It’s J P Donleavy.
At some point, maybe in Fiesta, Philip climbs up onto
the cursed barstool. The way he gets up onto it makes
me think of rising water somehow.
Aisling Bowyer comes out to sing
‘Fairytale.’ I know nothing about her
pedigree. All I know is that her voice, to me,
doesn’t suit the song, and I wished it did,
because I think I detect in her face while she’s
singing it that she might suspect the same, and I
wonder if I perceive in her face some effort to
compensate for that. I don’t know. This
flashes across my mind, the thought quickly followed
by the question, Are we going to get snow this year?
Because last year we didn’t.
Afterwards, we see Aisling Bowyer inviting Shane down
the corridor to a room that’s not our dressing
room. We steer him into ours for safety.
I go out to meet my guests: my aunt from Cheshire and
my cousin and her husband who live out in Howth and
find out that this is the first gig that my aunt has
been to – since going to see the Beatles, for
heaven’s sake, in Blackpool in 1964; Manny from
the local Greek restaurant in my neighbourhood in Los
Angeles. I meet also Fiachra Trench, whom I last saw
in 1987 when we worked together on the string
arrangements for ‘Fairytale of New York,’
and ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah.’
Back at the hotel, with my accordion which I have to
take away with me, I have a drink with Terry and
Marian Woods, and accept a drink from Anthony,
who’s buying, and then, because I’ve got
to be up early, I fuck off to bed. My room’s by
the lift, dingy and sparse. I have a look at the
knees in my suit which are all ripped to shit and
think, I can’t live those knees down on another
tour – so, the suit’s in the bin again.
Next morning, as I come out of the lifts and into the
lobby, Shane teeters past me with some people, but he
doesn’t see me, though I’m right there but
I don’t make a point of my emphasizing my
presence. Can’t see the point at this juncture.
In the breakfast room I meet with Anthony and his son
Mark, and Darryl. The hotel’s closing down for
Christmas (what?) but they choose this time to get the
orbital cleaning machine out to do the sodding floors,
right outside the breakfast room doors, going
backwards and forwards, whining and scrubbing.
It’s a noise I can do without.
There is some tying up of loose-ends from last night,
the main one being how Shane says to Ross,
“I’m doing the disco with BP later. You
coming?” to which Ross replies, “No, mate.
That’s my job done. You’re on your
own.” And then, in the course of the evening,
Ross has a think about that, regrets his somewhat
precipitate reply, and, seeking to make amends, goes
out to the Voodoo Lounge, to find Shane sitting
– smoking maybe, sleeping maybe, maybe both,
well after all the Rehab hubbub – in a worn
Parkner-Knoll chair with the wadding coming out of it.
“Just wanted to say cheerio,” Ross says,
in an expiatory sort of way, I suppose.
“Awright,” says Shane, nodding no doubt,
maybe not glimpsing the process Ross has been through.
Here’s something else. Tom Sheehan, one of the
documentary film-makers, finds himelf not going to bed
until 5.30 in the morning and then a flight a couple
of hours later back to London. Nora has the
devil’s own job waking him up. When they get to
the airport, Tom says, “Oh my God, I
haven’t bought her a Christmas present!”
Meaning he hasn’t bought his wife such. Nora
remembers Darryl having said something about the best
smoked salmon that there is to be had is to be found
in Dublin airport. Nora steers the tired and
emotional Tom through the airport, past the lure of
Waterford Crystal and Irish Linen, toward the smoked
salmon place – and there – what do you
know – is Darryl, flapping his hands in
indecision over which slab to get.
And lastly, I ring up Ross’s room to get him the
hell to come down and check out of the hotel and go to
the airport with me and Anthony and Mark, because, of
the band, we’ve got the first flights out of
there and time’s getting a bit tight.
It’s a strange and uneasy thing to have to ring
the tour manager, who is probably – and
I’ve said this before – aside from my
wife, and oh yes, my father-in-law, the most
executively functional person on the planet, to get
him to get the fuck down to the lobby and into the
van.
At the airport, Anthony and Mark and I walk on ahead
to check in, and lose Ross somewhere en route. I have
to jump a queue to get through security and to my
flight. I’m pissed off that I didn’t get
to say happy Christmas and cheerio to Ross, so, when I
get to Birmingham and I’m in the car to my
family, I text him to say so. The text I get from him
later, much later, tells me that he missed his flight
to Manchester and had to wait until 2.30 in the
afternoon for another flight to become available.
“Just to think,” he says, “the one
flight I organize for myself, I fucking miss.”
Back to top
U.S.A., 2006
I’m wearing my hotel-issue, leopard-skin
bathrobe, sitting at the ironing board because there
isn’t a desk in this room and my tea’s
making in the drip machine. There is a picture, each,
of Barbie and Ken on the wall, in the top and bottom,
respectively, of a striped pair of pyjamas.
I landed last night around 6:30. It’s a
straightforward four hour flight for me across the
continent, from the ocean and the sculpted mountains
of California to the sere, wintry, drab fields and
forests of what would that be? Virginia or Maryland,
punctured by sad, slate-coloured ponds.
James meets me at the airport – a shrewd black
guy in a navy, corded hat and a raincoat. He says
nothing in the car, which I’m kind of relieved
about, to begin with. The last thing you want
sometimes is someone not just holding some dodgy
political position but holding forth about it, or
someone who’s too proud of his job, which, to
me, would be a crap one, driving people from one place
to another, but then it occurs to me it’s the
talkative ones that tend to be like that, who come out
with some stinker or other that worries your
conscience and your world-view from the moment
it’s released into the cab. The quiet ones are
the ones who, if they’re going to say anything
at all, are more likely than not going to say
something good. But it’s nice just to ride for
the present and I don’t permit myself to find
out what a nice guy James is, or not, but I feel more
than likely is, if you follow me. I think of Joe
Strummer who used to engage whichever and every driver
he had, to find out about him or her, leaning over the
back of the front seat, plying him or her with questions
about this and that, finding common ground. He never
failed to do that.
And then my curiosity and excitement to be in
Washington DC gets the better of me and I have to ask
questions about what I’m seeing, though
sometimes I half-know the answer, and as we come into
town, I point out the building that turns out to be
the Jefferson Memorial, because I don’t know
what it is, and as we get more and more comfortable
with one another, James reveals to me the Washington
Monument, and the strange-shaped light-business on top
of the White House, through the trees, that will be
the last thing a passing airplane pilot will see,
since it signifies that his or her airplane, the fact
of being close enough to see it, meaning that
it’s just, well, too close, and will be rocketed
out of the sky in a couple of seconds.
We pass Old Ebbett’s Grill on 15th and G. I
mention this only because my daughter has given me a
sheaf of notes on what to do in Washington. She came
to Washington with her grandparents a couple of months
back and the day before I left she was to be seen on
the floor of her bedroom writing down all the things I
had to do. One of her notes reads: ‘Dinner: Old
Ebbett’s Grill.’ (Another one reads:
‘Lunch - go to the International Spy Museum and
look right and if it’s open go in’.)
The hotel we’re staying in is the yanks’
idea of a boutique hotel – ‘Well,’
my wife says, ‘If they’re going to call it
Hotel Helix, what are you going to expect?’ The
check-in desks are sort of lecterns of particulated
resin, as blue as pool-paint. They have the colouring
of brawn on acid. When I’m not looking at the
guy who’s changing my room behind one of these
lecterns (I took one look at where 406 was situated
right by the elevator and turned tail back down to the
lobby), the man’s head and shoulders dead-centre
in an empty wooden frame behind him, my eyes struggle
to focus on account of the textured pattern of the
wall behind him, a dominant feature of the hotel, I
come to discover, at least the common spaces like the
bar and the corridors. I lug the luggage
(that’s why it’s called that) up the
corridor which has industrial flooring and fluorescent
lime green walls. Off the corridor there’s a
bar that’s beating with that ubiquitous hotel
beat and lights play on the sheer drapes at the
windows – de rigueur for boutique hotels. The
lights change irregularly but often, from a similar
lime green to blue to red.
I go down to the bar, to reject my first glass of red
wine because it has an unpleasant overtone of
rabbit-shit (don’t ask me how I know that;
it’s synaesthetic) and then have two more with
the thumping hotel-beat coming from the speakers
attached to the beam above my head. The waitress
behind the bar sings ‘of course’ to
everything I say.
I dutifully go out to the Old Ebbett’s Grill.
I’ve booked a table through the concierge at the
hotel, but the place is so crowded with lobbyists,
I’m assuming, that my table’s not
available. The guy at the reception desk at the
restaurant programmes some sort of gizmo and hands it
to me. It’s like a remote, with a single tiny
green light on it on one end.
‘When it goes red,’ he says, ‘come
back and see me.’ So I go to the bar and get
myself a pint of Sam Adams, find myself somewhere to
sit among the suits and the cacophony and the
shoulders and stuff, and station the gizmo within easy
spotting distance on a ledge behind the glass screen
separating the bar from the restaurant, hoping not to
miss the red light on the end of it replacing the
feeble green one. While I’m distracted, taking
in the vaguely pornographic mural on the far wall,
through the glass partition, of gauze-clad nymphs in a
sylvan, pondy sort of setting, the gizmo goes off as
if it had just detected the cyborg assassin or
something, with red lights chasing one another round
the edge of the thing, and vibrating so much that it
sort of chatters across the ledge I’ve put it
on. I try to stifle it in my hand and go up to see
the guy at the front desk.
My waiter turns out to have been born in Salford, to
move to Sheffield when he was six. He saw the Pogues
at some venue in Sheffield sometime in the eighties,
but I can’t remember when or where, though he
tells me twice. It might have been the Leadmill. We
chat a bit, in between his duties up and down the
booths, him leaning on the pillar next to my table.
He goes on the guest list.
After a unmemorable dinner (actually, not so
unmemorable, because a plate of oysters comes back to
me, with two extra because they’re so small) and
a brandy on-the-house, I weave up 15th Street.
It’s cold. I wonder if I’m going to come
across any Pogues when I get back to the hotel and, as
I turn into the u-shaped driveway in front of the
Helix, there’s Ross the tour manager, sitting on
a wall under the black awning over the front entrance.
His drunkenness, I find out later, was of high
entertainment on the flight over from London, or maybe
the second leg down from New York, and which now
causes him to be incapable of keeping still. He
stretches a leg out and then flaps his arm as if his
clothes are sticking to him, then sweeps his hair
back, then straightens his arm and rests it
purposefully on his knee. There’s a sudden
sharp in-take of breath as if he’s drowning, but
I think he’s trying to overcome the onset of
hiccoughs.
He’s waiting for Shane and Joey who are flying
in from Chicago, the theory being that Shane’s
been routed that way because he has such an aversion
to the city that he would do anything to catch a plane
out of it. They have been lost in Dulles for a while,
which they like to do and that’s why Ross is
waiting, to make sure of their arrival and to ease
their transition from the car to their rooms, or at
least the interior of the hotel. Ross’s phone
rings, which it does a lot, and he rises to do his
job, which is imminent.
Shane is the first to appear round the corner of the
wall that stands in front of the hotel doors.
He’s walking backwards, in his black coat and
his hat which has had all the shape punched out of it,
as if his head had suddenly released a burst of
compressed air or something and rounded it out.
Joey’s pulling luggage and muttering something
to it. They’re followed by James, my driver from
earlier in the evening, in his navy, corded hat and
the raincoat. He knocks out a shower of ashes and
butts from the ashtray in his car onto the sidewalk.
Joey goes straight to bed. He looks jet-lagged. There
are wisps of grey above his ears. Shane stays up for a
drink. Shane is largely immune to jet-lag. His
dyssynchronousness makes sure of that. In the bar I
watch as his face goes from aquamarine to puce and
jaundice from the lights in the bar. I’m
careful of his hat, which he’s put on the table
between us, because the table is adhesive from Tom
Collinses and whatever else and I know that felt and
liquor don’t mix very well. I’ve got a
thing like ringworm on the underside of the brim of
the hat I no longer wear from beer on a bar top. In
the ghastly changing light, I watch, enrapt, as Shane
mashes a cherry from his cocktail between his gums.
(The following day, Spider asks me: ‘Did he spit
the stalk out with a knot in it?’)
He’s smoking Sweet Afton cigarettes. He holds
up the packet and recites:
‘Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green
braes! Flow gently, sweet river, the theme of my
lays!’
I go to bed. I’m drunk. Shane, I think I
remember, either accuses me of desertion or is just
desolated to see me go. One of the two.
We drive off up Rhode Island Ave, past the statue of
‘Black Jack’ Logan in the middle of Logan
Circle which prompts a few questions, and every time
we pass it: who he was, why his statue’s there
– maybe because of the irishness of his name.
None of our drivers knows. And then we drive miles,
over the Anacostia River into Maryland, past the
pillar-fronted frat houses and the lawns of the
University of Maryland and on, further, to where
there’s nothing much to look at, except Jos
notices a coup d’oeil in the shape of –
well, a section of wall angled across the side of a
liquor store. The crew were up here yesterday and
they have nothing to report about the place other than
there’s a piano shop with fluorescent pianos in
the second story front window and it’s not long
before we have, in our minds, stationed fluorescent
pianos in front of each of the frat houses in the
crescent off Baltimore Road. Jos interrupts a quiet
moment with a joke about the lobster going into the
bar, ‘giving it all that’ (making nippers
out of his fingers and thumbs). And then the joke
about the bear going into a bar, to order a beer and
– it holds up its arms, followed by a long, long
silence, while we wait to see what’s coming and
still it doesn’t come, until finally: and
– a whiskey. The barman asks, ‘Why the
big paws?’
Our driver today is called 3ft Robinson. It’s
the name on his business card. Ross asks about the
3ft bit, and, well, it’s a nickname from school
that stuck. ‘And besides,’ he says,
‘Who gonna forget that? They member you. You
Three Inch, Two Bit someone? Yeah, I member you, they
says.’ He stops the bus somewhere, because the
bus behind (we have two) wants to stop for
refreshments. We can’t help watching him walk
back to the bus behind along the sidewalk. We have to
stand up to see him through the bus windows. He has a
black suit, half mast trousers and the tiniest feet
you could wish to see, and in cuban heels. He’s
tiny, even in cuban heels.
Drums Unlimited, where the rehearsal room is, is
pretty much a percussion motherlode – drums,
marching drums, chinese gongs, tubular bells, and more
drums, for any marching band that wants kitting out,
and for any touring band like ourselves who might find
it cost-prohibitive to lug the drum kit all the way
from Hackney and up the eastern seaboard of North
America. The trouble is that the drum kit Andrew
plays in the rehearsal room and at the first couple of
shows in DC is the first drum kit of as many gigs that
we have, i.e. he’s going to get a different kit
for each city we visit, but we don’t know that
yet.
We don’t come across the shelves upon shelves of
drums until we have cause to leave the rehearsal room
for a piss or something and have to walk along the
ends of the long aisles of shelving to the restroom.
Of course, we get excited, well, some of us do.
There’s a rack of what I suppose might be called
talking gongs that make swooping sounds when you hit
them, and we do, well, Jem and I do. Ross has picked
up the phone, at a desk nearby, with his computer open
in front of him, poised to start work, when Jem and I,
with a beater to share, advance upon a Chinese gong
that must be easily four feet across. We don’t
go at it gingerly. After the initial booming impact,
the crash it makes fills the room with white noise,
which goes on and on. Ross postpones his work on the
phone. I go back into the rehearsal room, while Jem
asks if anyone minds if he has a go at the tubular
bells.
Shane’s not at rehearsal. It’s an
arrangement that suits. We can go through the set,
with a bit of a departure or two, try out
equipment. (I’m up for in-ear monitors again, as
I was a few years ago: Scully says they will clear up
the sound on stage a bit; and Gerry the monitor
engineer has blagged a couple of sets from someone, on
approval).
Setting up, we marvel at Philip’s eel-skin boots
with their pointed brass buckles and his fringed,
mold-coloured Wild Bill Hickock jacket over pink
sweater. We marvel at how the wen on the side of
Terry’s nose that had been so unsightly over the
days we spent together at the Meteor Awards, for the
removal of which he’d set an appointment with
the doctor a couple of weeks after, chose to fall off
pretty much as he was leaving the house for the
appointment. Habilimentarily, otherwise, Spider has a
new hat whose overall aesthetic seems to straddle the
sixties, early seventies – a checked brat-pack
hat that goes well with the ink-black shades
he’s wearing. Dermatologically, otherwise, Jem
has some sort of wen between his index- and
second-fingers on one of his hands that hurts when he
puts pressure on it and Philip has a little bleb on
his head (well, don’t we all? As we get older I
see more and more burst capillaries and pocks,
lentigines and welts, not to mention the eight fucking
stitches on my head I got playing tennis at our house
with my daughter a few days before flying off for the
Meteor Awards – the scar which the tennis
accident left behind the reason for the hat I’ve
been wearing).
We run through the set for a few hours and then rejoin
3ft Robinson and the other driver for the ride back to
the hotel. On the way, there’s some laughter at
my expense. I don’t know what about. The scar
on my head maybe. Or the prevailing sententiousness
of the things that come out of my mouth. I
don’t know. Either way, there’s a short
silence, broken by Jem asking: ‘Is there
anything else you can tell us that we can mercilessly
take the piss out of you about?’ Whereupon, Jem
and Andrew and I talk about the mechanics by means of
which one could play both a snare drum and a bass drum
at the same time, in a pattern of one’s
choosing, that is, with one foot. It’s a Cranky
George Trio problem, because we don’t want a
drummer. The solutions get wilder and more improbable
as we drive back to DC. Andrew erects, in his mind
and ours, some sort of belt system with the snare drum
several feet above our heads; Jem suggests some sort
of lever system, with set delays, by means of cogs and
belts. Me, I think I’m just going to give the
hat-box bass drum to Brad the bass-player, and
I’ll get a beater on a pedal and a thing to hold
a snare drum in the right place and play that.
Later, we all meet in the lobby to go out to dinner to
a restaurant called Ten Pen (on 10th and Pennsylvania
– hmm). Darryl has organized the outing, the
way Darryl organizes things for which he eventually
would like no responsibility if the outing should go
south in anyway, with hand flapping and reassuring
himself with the concierge that this would be a good
place on which – how many? fourteen or fifteen
people – are likely to descend. When I come
downstairs I discover Ella waiting in the lobby
– with its bright mosaic floor and the
lamé curtain that sweeps aside when anyone
comes in or out – on the buoyant sofa, rather
disconcerted and exposed under the light of the
oversized Anglepoise lamp standing in the corner with
its dish directly over her head.
We have to wait a while for a table to accommodate
fourteen people at Ten Pen. We hang around the bar.
The place is crowded. Darryl, by this time, is in a
guilt-ridden state of vexation about dragging us all
here, to stand around waiting. Nora has the wit to
order – well, what do you have? Edamame beans?
That would be wonderful. Yes, Ma’am, right
away.
I discover and am secretly relieved that we’re
not doing the Conan O’Brien Show, despite the
fact that it’s been in the TV Guide, with it
being the first show in NYC for, god knows, fifteen
years or something.
When we get to sit down at a table screened from the
front door, the dinner is spiced to the point of agony
(Andrew has to lay down his knife and fork and give
up, shaking his head). I have so much to drink,
starting off in the hotel bar with three vodka and
cranberry juices with Spider and Louise, who, for some
reason, don’t make it into one of the taxis that
bring us down to 10th and Pennsylvania, that
I’ll remember pretty much nothing of my
conversation with Terry about Anne Briggs and Johnny
Moynihan, although I will remember the enormous
flounder with cross-hatching that is put in front of
me, and the brandy at the bar at the end of the night
that does me in.
We have a soundcheck at eleven in the morning,
driving past, or round, Black Jack Logan again. We
have to soundcheck at that time in the morning because
there’s a band playing in the afternoon. The
soundcheck feels to be all at the wrong time. Terry
and I try out our in-ears, as they’re called.
Terry is elated to draw a parallel between the way I
look with my in-ears in and Queequeg from Moby Dick.
We run through the things we run through –
through the things we ran through yesterday (basically
the set we did in England at Christmas) and it’s
pretty much straightforward.
I come across Joey back at the hotel who, as
he’s bustling purposefully down one of the
corridors, in an almost stipendiary semi-stoop, wants
to draw my attention to a photograph on the wall in
one of the corridors upstairs of a guy who’s
supposed to look like me. I go and have a look at the
photograph. Yes, he’s bald, but I’d never
be seen dead in shades like that and with such a
dementedly goofy smile on my face (with the exception
of the photograph on the back of Peace and Love, that
is – but maybe it’s that which has
prompted Joey to send me to look at the photograph).
I spend the rest of the afternoon wandering around
Washington. It’s warm, getting warmer all the
time, and it isn’t long before I’m running
with sweat, walking around the nation’s capital,
stopping at a park bench to stuff my leather jacket
into my backpack. I visit the White House –
well, the outside of it – which is a grubby, in
more than one sense of the word, little edifice, and
like celebrities, much smaller in real life than on
telly. The grounds outside, beyond the railings, and
within too – sere lawns and a pathetic fountain
– are unkempt, with flower beds that are just
shapes of dirt, and black guys in grimy quilted
wrapping littering La Fayette Park, and besuited men
with security tags talking up the city to visitors,
and a huddle of ban the bomb people talking amongst
themselves. I walk down to West Potomac Park, and
along the reflecting pond, very aware of walking amid
the footprints of the thousands who came to hear
Martin Luther King Jr. But then the nobility of the
experience is shattered by the clatter of choppers,
Chinooks cutting across the tops of the trees,
wheeling around and back somewhere. It’s a
country at war – with everyone, and with itself
too. My waiter at Old Ebbett’s Grill on 15th St
from last night, hard by the White House, told me
about the rooftop bar there, which, like other
buildings near the White House, has a bullet-proof
screen round the parapet, to deter people launching
things at the White House. If you lean your head out
beyond the screen, you’re encouraged very
quickly to retract it by means of the red dot of a
marksman’s laser-pointer in the middle of your
forehead.
I go down to the Vietnam memorial which is something
else – the slice of granite or whatever it is,
taking you down the incline from just that one name
tucked into the corner of the stone – and you
think, Oh it’s not going to be all that bad, is
it? until, by the time you get to the bottom and
it’s thousands of names, the weight of death is
pretty much crushing. The trouble is that by the time
you get to the top of the other incline and the names
peter out at the far end of the wedge, you end up
thinking, oh that wasn’t so bad, was it? I
watch a young girl lightly touching one of the names
on the wall and staring at it. Further up, there is a
kid in a school party pointing at the name DIX, hoping
to elicit a laugh from his school chums at the crap
pun. Kind of interesting to see the name Dix. I went
to a gallery once to see his etchings (were they? Or
woodcuts maybe, can’t remember) of the trenches
in the first world war. Harrowing in the extreme.
And then, as I’m walking back up to the hotel,
at the intersection of 17th and H streets, while
I’m going over the lyrics for the songs I sing
with the Cranky George Trio – lots of words, and
a middle eight, or even sixteen, that contains the
names of thirty-two cities round the world and a
bugger to memorize – a cop car starts chirruping
and flashing its lights and swings around in front of
the traffic coming up from the park. The cop in the
cop car, with those orange shades that are sort of
molded to his cheekbones and a jarhead haircut, stays
us pedestrians – myself and a rapidly blinking
guy in half-mast trousers and a blue windjammer and
crazy hair – from crossing. Down a couple of
blocks, over by the side gates, I suppose, of the
White House, I can see the tinsel of a couple of cars
and sidecar motorcycles that come swinging onto H
Street, the motorcycles sidewinding up the road and
howling away, a couple of them at first. The gap
between this first phalanx of sidecar motorcycles and
the next lot is too much temptation for
blue-windjammer-blinking guy – he looks the type
to be pretty contemptuous of pretty much everything
and of himself too – and he toddles across the
street, head down, Fuck you and the horse you rode in
on. The cop looks at him wearily. Then the rest of
the motorcycles weave past, and fast, followed by an
SUV with blackened windows, sprouting with aerials and
with flashing lights in the windows, in its wake a
coterie of motorbikes and, finally, a black town car
with blackened windows the contents of which is what
all the fuss is about probably.
‘POTUS’ I say to myself, but it’s
probably not, but you never know. I watch the parade
pass by. The cop clears me to go and jumps into his
car and then fishtails up 17th St releasing the dam of
cars that’s built up. I come across him at the
corner of the next block and he’s got his hands
on his hips, giving bluewindjammerblinkingman a
ticking off for crossing the street.
I stop off at an Italian chain restaurant with bare
floorboards and feeble lighting on 18th or 19th St and
get given a table against a pillar, have a couple of
glasses of shit red wine and a margerita pizza, pay,
and then walk back up to Rhode Island Ave and the
hotel.
Frank, our old manager, who lives somewhere in Virginia
now, is there to be found backstage when we get to the
9:30 Club. He’s wearing something black and
leathery and masculine. I remember him once in New
Orleans considering his cream-coloured linen suit to
have trumped mine because of some leather shoulder
patches, or elbow patches. I don’t rightly
remember. But then, he wasn’t going for the
Kowloon Ferry look like I was. We all hug our
greetings.
Shane’s down at the gig an hour before everyone
else. This raises fourteen eyebrows. It turns out
that Frank picked him up from the hotel and took him
to the club. Shane has had a thing for a while about
being early, or in good time, for gigs. On the
Christmas tour he never usually went back to the hotel
after soundcheck and would hang out with Joey in the
dressing room, watching DVDs, supine on a massage
bench, smoking, asleep, or recumbent on a grimy sofa.
But, of late, he’s been developing an eagerness
to be early.
Backstage at the 9:30 Club – and it’s a
different 9:30 Club to the one we played whatever it
was, fifteen or so years ago. The previous one had a
chequered floor and a stage in the corner. The
current 9:30 Club has at least three tiers, but its
main feature, from the stage, is the wrap-around
balcony, with the third level being what seems to be
platforms to each side of the back balcony bar, the
platforms lit up, and individually, like a stage set.
Anyway, the first night, here in Washington DC,
there’s Shane giving it out, moving around,
gesticulating, singing well, taking up a lot of room,
which is all right with me, really –
there’s always a space that opens up to hoist
the accordion skyward, catch it and retreat into the
ranks. The audience is quite, quite different in the
States – well, it’s such a goddamn
different country to anywhere, really isn’t it?
And the average age of the audience a few years older
than in England, and a few more older yet than the
ones we had in Japan.
They all seem very – rapt is the word that comes
to mind, leastways the people I can see along the
front. There’s some bouncing going on, up front
too. Philip remarks, later, about the embonpoint of
the woman at the railing, directly in front of him,
which, depending on the song, gets to be of the
heaving variety. Nora isn’t slow in picking up
the motion and stations herself to get it on film.
At the beginning of the instrumental section to
‘Tuesday Morning’, Spider says, ‘Hit
it,’ into the mike, and it’s the way he
says it that makes me want to do as I’m told.
We’ve been having problems with ‘Thousands
Are Sailing’, as I’ve said previously. I
concentrate on the hi-hat for the tempo during the
intro, watching it for the cue. So does Darryl.
Philip can’t see the hi-hat because he’s
facing the front. He can’t just turn his back
to the audience. (And I love, as Andrew comes to the
end of the intro, sometimes, to watch him shake the
tambourine in a wide arc from over the top of his
head, down by his side, to drop it under his floor
tom.) When the verse starts, Darryl, Terry, Andrew
and I drop out, to leave Jem and Philip on their own.
Jem’s been trying to watch Philip’s hands
for the tempo, because, all the way over stage left,
Jem can’t hear a damn thing. It’s a
quagmire sometimes, that first verse, with shifting
tempos and Jem finding that he’s lagging, Philip
tending to ratchet it up just a notch. Jem flails
around in Philip’s wake a bit, in a sort of
phase-shift of banjo and guitar, until the drums come
in like a teacher impatient for order or something.
But now I’ve got ‘in-ears’, I can
hear everything and I slap my upstage leg to help Jem
stay in time.
Mid-point in the set, Andrew has to take a bit of time
to tighten up his snare. As I said, it’s a new
drum kit, and will be, every city we go to.
My in-ear monitors slip out because of the sweat that
drains from my head into my ears and because of the
lack of slack on the wire that Gerry has fed down my
back under my shirt before going up on stage, what
with the jumping and carrying-on, pulling the fucking
things out, at which point all the cacophony of the
stage sound crashes in my ears until I squelch the
things back in. It’s going to take me a bit of
time to get used to these things.
It might be tonight that – what’s the
song? ‘Lullaby of London’ maybe, no,
‘Old Main Drag’ – that Philip takes
up a spot by the side fill stage right (a side Phil, I
suppose), in his suit and hat, like a character from
Damon Runyon: knee up and sole of his foot against the
speaker behind him, one hand in a pocket, the other
holding a cigarette a couple of inches below chin
level. Afterwards, I say to him, ‘You looked
very Broadway over there.’
‘You mean cheap streetcorner tart,’ he
says.
I wake up in the middle of the night and stumble
around in the dark trying to remember where the toilet
is and stove my little toe against the side of my
suitcase which is lying open on the floor. Over the
next few days my toenail will turn a kind of mauve
colour.
I wake up at around nine, and, with three hours time
difference between Los Angeles and Washington,
that’s about right. I faff around the hotel
room for a bit, making my chinese aged pu’er tea
(the ‘aged’ being redundant, so I’m
told – after a visit later on in the tour to
Moby’s Teany place in New York – because
all pu’er is aged) with the drip machine in the
room. I’ve brought a tea ball and an old Golden
Virginia tobacco tin full of pu’er. The drip
machine taints the tea with crap coffee. The weather
outside is lovely. I throw the curtains and the
window open and once again marvel at the shit
americans throw onto their roofs.
I get dressed in my suit – my old friend the
Allied Textile Workers Union-made suit, which
I’ve had for years, and which never came off my
back for a few years and in which I’ve even gone
ice-skating – and a white shirt because the
weather’s so nice, and go out for breakfast,
jacket slung over my shoulder, and in my straw
pork-pie hat.
On my way back from breakfast, at Café Luna on
P Street, round the corner from the hotel, where I
have had the place to myself and reggae on the radio,
I come across Darryl with a Wholefoods bag on the
block parallel to the hotel. Wholefoods turns out to
be where Darryl’s been getting his breakfast. A
few of the band, it turns out, are very excited about
Wholefoods Market. Oh, the stuff you can get in
there: the anti-oxidants, the acidophilus, the red
beta algae, the Jerusalem artichoke, the cruciferous
vegetable extracts, the glutathione peroxidase. That
sort of thing. Not to mention the little trays of
spicy tuna roll. These are among the things that make
Paul Scully’s eyes roll into the top of his
head. Darryl has also scored some Melatonin which you
can’t get in England without prescription
– or didn’t used to be able to –
because he’s not sleeping well with jet-lag.
Quite what I do with the rest of the morning escapes
me. I know I happen to come across a couple of
people, in the Caribou Café on the corner of
Rhode Island and 14th, who had gone to last
night’s show. I’m sitting at one of the
tables, making use of the wi-fi in there, because the
floor I’m on in the hotel is beyond hotel wi-fi
reach, and it turns into one of those experiences in a
public space when you look up and someone’s
smiling at you (which I want to put down to an
invisible phone ear-piece thing which I can’t
see, probably because of the woman’s hair, or
the angle of her head or something). So I look down
and don’t think much more about it, until I find
myself looking up and the woman’s still waiting
at the perch where they issue coffee (along with, this
morning, corporate soundbites, like ‘wake up and
smell the SUV’ or something, because you can win
a Yukon or some such today) and still smiling, and
right at me and not talking on the phone at all, it
turns out, but, well, staring right at me, with such
delight in her face, I realize, that’s, well
– unreciprocable at this moment in time, I have
to say. Well of course, she comes over, and with a
friend and she can’t believe she’s in the
same room as one of the Pogues, and I go all urbane
and suddenly feel like I’m overdressed for the
part with my fiftiesish suit and white shirt and my
straw hat on the table and I wish I were just in my
fucking jeans. But I’m nice about everything
and while her friend talks about something not
related, the woman smiles and smiles at me incapable
of getting over the fact that one of the Pogues, who
haven’t appeared in this country, in their
original line up, that is, for fifteen years, is
sitting at a table in her local café and if she
had gone to work today she wouldn’t have come
in, but with the show last night being as late as it
was...
When I come back to the hotel, Andrew and maybe Jem
and Ella are on their way back from somewhere. Andrew
laughs at my apparel, the suit, the jacket slung over
my shoulder, the hat. So do I. Jem has bought a new
hat: a Borsalino, black, widish brim- a
‘Florence’, I think. It brings out his
jewishness.
Soundcheck’s at four, which is altogether a much
more civilized time of day. On my way in with
everyone from the minivan, I’m glad to see that
the poster that Jeff Holmes (Rockers77) has designed
is up on the wall in the little merchandize cubicle
near the front door. I’m disappointed however
that it’s priced at $30. I’m sure
it’s worth that amount of money, but I’m
not sure a lot of people are going to buy it.
I get into something with Jem about his playing, since
I can hear pretty much everything that goes on in my
in-ear monitors and I want to let everyone know that
no-one escapes my scrutiny. The exchange is
good-natured. Spider comes up to me, in defense of
Jem.
‘Do you know what the smallest room is?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘The mushroom,’ he says. Then: ‘Do you know what the biggest room is?’
‘I don’t.’
‘Room for improvement.’
Backstage before the show there’s the Mayor of
Baltimore, Martin J O’Malley. Some people say
he’s got future POTUS written all over him. He
talks in soundbites and has one printed on his
t-shirt: something like ‘Baltimore. Let’s
Do It’. He’s dressed down pretty
radically, in, I think, a jean-jacket, but his head is
a pol’s, the way Tony Blair’s head is one
of those: the televisual contours of the haircut, the
twinkling eyes and the smile-lines and the bleached
teeth. He wants us to know he’s in a band too.
He plays guitar in O’Malley’s March which
I find out he’s disbanding in order to become
‘laser focused on getting our State moving in
the right direction again.’ He’d love to
keep playing, but ‘a vocation is a
“yes” that requires a thousand
“no’s.”’ That sort of thing.
He’s gobsmacked to meet Shane. He shakes all
our hands.
I implore Nora to get Martin O’Malley on film
for the documentary, but whenever he’s in the
room, she’s not, and vice versa – to the
point that it’s suggested that Nora is in fact,
herself, the Mayor of Baltimore.
Off the dressing room is the production office, and
off the production office (where Nora discovers Terry
apparently talking to himself, not seeing Joey lying
under the table that runs along the wall of the small
room) is a balcony over the stage. Frank’s
girlfriend (I can’t remember her name) has a
hard time making her presence felt on the side of the
production office door she doesn’t want to be
on, knowing that Frank is more likely than not on the
side of the door she does want to be on, so I give the
door a few kicks to attract her paramour’s
attention and then go off to do what I was on my way
to do.
The trouble, later on, is also that the door from the
production office to the balcony overlooking the stage
is lockable too. Ella and Nora find themselves up on
the balcony, one of them watching, waiting for her
moment to go downstairs and get up on stage for Fairy
Tale of New York, the other filming. When it comes
time for Ella to go downstairs, she turns around to
open the door back into the production office and
can’t get back in. There’s a panic about
what to do. Nora and Ella entertain the idea of
having a microphone thrown up in order that Ella may,
opera-fashion, have Shane serenade her while she sings
to him from the balcony.
I’m told Juliette Lewis is in the audience.
Where do I hear this? On a bootleg recording which
comes out pretty sharply after the show, I’m
told she can be heard giving out about something.
During the gig, there’s some rambunctiousness in
the audience, or it might be someone shouting out:
‘My name is MacRua and I don’t give a fuck
about your rules,’ or something, to which Shane
replies: ‘Shut up!’
Again, Shane conducts us all in ‘Broad Majestic
Shannon’ with broad majestic sweeps of his arms.
There’s a girl in front of Spider in the
audience, Louise tells me afterwards, devoted to him,
gazing up at him, all the way through the gig, up
until Spider dedicates Tuesday Morning to Louise,
whereupon the girl abruptly shifts her devotion and
gazing to me.
We successfully play ‘A Pair of Brown
Eyes’ much more slowly that we’ve been
doing. The accordion figure in the song has become so
hard to play with any clarity at the speed we’ve
been playing it. Jem and I huddle round
Andrew’s drums so we can get the tempo right.
Darryl dedicates the gig we’ve just done to
Eartha Kitt. Backstage someone asks, ‘Why? Is
she dead?’ But Darryl’s intention was to
celebrate a woman who spoke out against the Vietnam
War, and at a White House luncheon too, and was
blacklisted thereafter by the U.S. entertainment
industry for her trouble.
Afterwards, there’s food laid out on the tables
in the dressing room. I sit exhausted next to Andrew
and drink plastic pint glasses of vodka and cranberry
juice (why is it I always have to search for the vodka
and always find it where Joey’s been?) while
Shane gives out to Nora and me, though I’m all
the way across the room and can’t hear a thing,
other than the words ‘Khmer Rouge’, while
he waves chicken satay around, still on its skewer and
on the end of a fork.
We’re leaving for Atlantic City at eleven or
something and we all congregate in the sunshine
outside the hotel, to sit on the low wall along the
sidewalk. Outside the hotel, sitting on the wall where
I met Ross the night the band got in from London,
there’s a woman smoking a cigarette, barefoot in
track suit pants and t-shirt. Her makeup is
everywhere and her face is the colour of raspberry and
polenta and her hair is wild. I remember her from the
hotel last night, where, it comes back to me, I had
yet another sticky vodka and cranberry, sitting with
Shane and a couple of others of us in the
multicoloured alcove in the bar. This woman and a
couple of her friends came over to sit with us.
Whoever else was there peeled off and left myself and
Shane. I was too tired to stay up and made my
apologies and wondered if I should be leaving Shane
with strangers, but then I figured he’s left
himself with strangers many a time before and
he’s a big boy now. This morning, the woman
recognizes me from the night before and wants to tell
me what a great guy Shane is, how long they stayed up
with him, and is at pains to assure me that she and
her friends, though they might have kept him up until
six in the morning when the breakfast staff came in to
set up, guided Shane back to his room, respectful of
his value, somehow, and privacy. With a gesture
that’s meant to let me know she was aware of
boundaries (a sort of hand-raising, hands-off,
he’s-on-his-own sort of gesture) she lets me
know that at no point did she entertain the idea of
accompanying Shane into his room, satisfied with the
performance of some sort of duty, to Shane and the
band and the tour schedule or something. I thank her
for delivering him safely to his room.
The bus is idling in the street, double parked for the
meantime, with its hazard lights going. We load up
our luggage in the holds under the bus and sit around
taking photographs of one another, sitting on the low
wall, or in the sunshine, or sitting in the open hold
of the bus, waiting, because Shane and Joey and Sean
Fay, Ross tells us, are going to be some time.
It’s the transition thing again.
Philip tells us that the hotel we’re staying in
in Atlantic City is likely to provide $500 to each of
us for the purposes of gambling. It’s going in
my pocket.
Jem and Darryl and Ella and Philip set themselves up
in the back lounge. Jem’s got his lap-top out,
finishing off grant applications. Both Ella and
Darryl are reading what’s turned out to be the
tour’s required reading matter: Vernon God
Little. There seem to be more copies of this book
around that there are people who want to read it. Now
and again, in her corner by the window, feet curled up
under her on the seat, Ella laughs out loud at
something in the book. Darryl gets up to go to his
stash of curry-in-a-box that he’s bought from
Wholefoods for the trip.
I sit down at the front of the bus, with Shane and
Joey and Sean Fay eventually, and Spider and Louise.
Ross and Andrew go to the bunks. Terry’s riding
postillion next to the driver, Jeff – or Mike? Jeff.
We have a look at some of Sean’s photographs.
Because of the low light at the venue, many of them
are long exposure and prone to swirls and Francis
Baconesque heads and stuff.
The DVD player’s a problem. Shane and Joey want
to watch A Mighty Wind, which has been found in the
machine, but the machine will only play the film with
the commentary, and will only resume where the
previous viewer had left off, some other band before
us I suppose. All manner of solutions are thrown
about, in a range of deliveries from painstakingly
patient to just vitriolic, and with a range of effects
from constructive to obfuscatory. This goes on for
some time, with the screen alternating between set-up
menus and satellite searches, the place where the film
has been paused and the main menu. Getting the
sodding film to play occupies our brains for at least
an hour. Jeff the driver finally has to pull over off
the turnpike to sort it out. A Mighty Wind is the
sort of film you’d like to laugh at a lot more
than you do.
The conversation turns to the manufacture of
methamphetamine, somehow. Shane is sceptical that it
can be manufactured – as Louise has proposed,
after watching a tv documentary which pretty much
tells you how to do it – in the bath, from cold
remedies. Shane bitterly challenges Louise to make
some. I do hope she doesn’t, because I saw a
similar documentary – possibly the same one,
except with Will Lyman narration, on PBS Frontline
– and, well, I don’t want to be lifted
from my bed in the middle of the night from the
explosion.
We spot the Borgata from the Expressway, not that we
know at this point that that’s what it is, until
Ross, sensing its proximity, as he’s been known
to do when we’re within thirty of forty minutes
of the venue, or simply being woken up from his bunk
by the phone, since it’s getting to be toward
that time in the day when people are expecting us,
appears through the mirrored door from what I suppose
you might call the ‘dormitory’, to duck
down and give his environment a gander through the
window. Andrew describes the Borgata Hotel and Casino
as a giant Zippo lighter, and that’s what it
looks like – a huge, glinting,
divorced-in-every-way-from-its-surroundings-except-by-virtue-of-the-gravity-which-fixes-it-to-the-earth,
block of cheesily reflecting windows, rounded at each
end. Already there’s a heavy Soprano-vibe
emanating from it. It’s the colour of cheap
gilt – paste jewelry.
We go straight into its bowels. Though Ross tries
every day to have us leave our things on the bus for
bellmen to distribute (since the first reunion tour in
2001, there have been numbered tags on our suitcases
– Shane is Number 1 – to assist bellmen in
getting the right piece to the right room), I
don’t trust this system and haul my suitcase off
and up the ramp into the back of the Borgata. Inside
it’s an unearthly maze of wide corridors with
dado rails and baseboards of scuffed metal, through
which we have to be herded, to the dressing room, to
the staff cafeteria, to the stage, everywhere.
Everywhere we go, we have to ask someone how to get
there and wait while sufficient of us who want to do
the same thing sort of congeal in a corridor
somewhere, around a woman with a head-set and curly
wire coming from her ear, or in the vicinity of a guy
called Cowboy, a pyknik bouncer in a black polo-shirt,
whose neck is as wide as his scalloped head.
The stage is an ample one, which is nice for the
roving and the launching and the shit that I do. The
drum riser is sufficiently high off the ground to
think about jumping off. Out in the auditorium, the
walls are draped with some sheer material onto which
and all around is projected a submarine landscape,
through which, alluringly, a mermaid or something
swims, with slow-moving, liquid silk swatches draping
her curves. Later on, on top of each doorway into the
auditorium, there are dancing girls in silhouette
cavorting in the folds. I wonder if this sort of
shenanigans is going to continue through the gig.
We get staff caff passes and go and eat. There are
cocktail waitresses in there in minuscule dresses and
lustrous pantyhose getting their dinners, and
engineers in overalls. I don’t see a solitary
croupier, unless I don’t know what to look for.
The staff cafeteria is a curvy sort of place, with
televisions up on the walls and beaded metal curtains
around a feature or two. The food is shite and
it’s kind of hard to get it down. I look for
water, and ask, but can’t make myself
understood. ‘Water’ is one of the hardest
words in english to get across to an american, and
it’s even harder, oftentimes, to get it across
to an american resident alien. And, of course, it
comes back to me: it’s the tiny little unmarked
spigot that’s lost in the rank of opulent spouts
that gush with Pepsi, Sprite, Coke, Dr Pepper’s,
7-Up from the machine against the wall.
I go up to the room for a bit. It’s on the 23rd
floor. There’s a large piece of luggage that
isn’t mine in the room, up against the wall,
with a number 8 on it. I take out the rooming list
from the envelope we get whenever we check into a
hotel, and have a look to see whose it is, and am
about to lift the phone, when the door knocks and
it’s Louise who is going about bringing the
right luggage to the right rooms. Seems the bellman
has gone through the list, distributing the suitcases,
by means of the wrong column of numbers.
My window overlooks a gale-blown marsh with inlets.
Over to the east, I suppose it is, standing on the
edge of a wind-scuffed and wintry channel,
there’s Harrah’s Casino and the Trump
Marina, with a huge television screen, the only colour
in the otherwise drab, rainswept estuary, right at the
turn of the Atlantic City Expressway, advertising
Kansas for April 1st, plus also the chance yeah
whatever to win $100,000 and so on, and guaranteeing
80% chances of return on your bets at the casino
– Andrew deconstructs this at one point into
stumping up $100, to get back $80, to ante up $80 to
get back $64, and so on, until you leave the place
without a penny or fuck all. We didn’t get
Philip’s anticipated $500 betting money when we
checked in. I won’t miss it.
We have to meet outside Ross’s room –
well, outside the service elevator – to meet
with Cowboy and another squat bouncer whose arms
won’t hang flat at his sides, who are going to
escort us down to the innards of the hotel to the
dressing room, in the direction of which we move,
almost peristaltically, to where Shane and Joey have
been whiling away the time.
We go on stage. I’ve been waiting for the right
moment to say this and I’m glad it turns up: I
walk up to the microphone and say, ‘How did all
these people get into Shane’s room?’
It’s a reference to Sinatra at the Sands in
1966.
The gig? No idea how that goes. The shows all sort
of blend into one, after a while – well, after
two shows so far. We play the same set each show,
except we replace ‘Rain Street,’ which has
come to sound, to my ears, just repetitive, with
‘Boys From The County Hell,’ Jem’s
banjo-intro to which, from time immemorial, is tense
with willing him not to fuck it up. Now and again,
people throw up suggestions: you know, since
we’re in the USA, why don’t we do
‘USA?’ That sort of thing. Nah.
When I’m standing in front of the drums, I can
feel the regular puff of air against my legs that
comes from the hole in Andrew’s bass drum where
the mike goes.
Three shows in, and the knees of my newish suit (from
Arnott’s Bargain Basement in Dublin) are still
intact.
Backstage are Ramona, whom we haven’t seen for
fifteen years or more and who exudes a welcome
temperateness, and her friend Mawn who’s very
comely in a green tank-top and a jean-skirt. They
hang around in the dressing room for a while, talking
to Darryl. I leave with the three of them with the
intention of finding a bar somewhere and on the way
out happen to notice Shane’s scrawled signature
in the vicinity of Mawn’s right papillary stud.
Cowboy advises us that the best place in the Casino to
hang out and drink beer, and a place to have ‘a
quiet conversation’ would be the B-Bar. I tell
Darryl, Ramona and Mawn and whoever else is around
that I’ll meet them there. I go up to my room,
by the half-remembered tortuous route we got down to
the dressing room, jogs in corridors, service
elevators and such. I have to ring my family and
it’s maybe twenty minutes before I go back
downstairs, to the cacophony of the Casino floor which
I haven’t seen at all yet, moving as we have by
means of the hidden vascular system that pumps
servants in and around the building. The only hint
I’ve had up until now of the heart of the beast
has been the mysteriously beckoning upward escalators
from some part of the behind-the-scenes up into the
ringing, crashing, chirruping Casino floor. And this
is where I find myself, coming down in the elevator
and out through the doors of the residents’
seating area – the Living Room, I think
it’s called.
I spend a while walking round, looking for the B-Bar
and taking in the black-jack, roulette, craps tables
and the festively singing slot machines and the
manifestly miserable fuckers who are sitting at them,
in front of them. The croupiers all have machines to
dispense cards and the roulette wheels are mechanized
and all the equipment seems new, and behind them,
there are guys in suits standing at computer screens
who seem to be trading knowing looks with others at
other computer screens. There’s a fat guy with
beard and yarmulke and tallit, pinned by the weight of
his stomach against the back of his seat at a black
jack table, smoking and sullen. There’s a
Philippino guy with a spray-stiffened purple-black
wave in his hair, turning his whiskey around on the
baize, tense and inner. Oh, god, this is a miserable
place. I pass a counter with a rank of plate-glass
windows with the word ‘Redemption’ over
the top of it.
The B-Bar is crashing with music and it’s
back-to-back, shoulder-to-shoulder in there. I
shuffle around the bar. I can’t see anyone I
know and get hailed by a bunch of Pogues fans at a
table. I refuse a drink because there’s nothing
much that wants to keep me there. I don’t want
to be rude, but the Borgata is getting to me. I shake
a few hands and talk for a while, well, shout, really,
over the noise, then wander about a bit through the
Casino looking for the hotel elevators.
I’m up early, again. I sweep aside the
curtains, to reveal the sodden Atlantic City fen,
sheeted with rain blowing off the channels,
occasionally hissing against the window. It
can’t be so early that I don’t think
it’s properly light yet, but then it’s so
wintrily solsticial out there. I get dressed and go
down for breakfast. Outside the lift on the 23rd
floor, in the black sand of the ashtray, is a glass
with a glacé cherry in it. It’s been
there since we got to the hotel.
Downstairs in the Casino it seems to be business as
usual, about as noisy in there as it was last night,
except that the bars are more or less empty. The
Borgata Buffet has a line in front of the reception
desk – well, two lines: one for ‘black
card’ holders, whatever they are, and one for
everyone else. It’s manned – womanned
– by a Latina with mauve, hooded, reptilian eyes
and frosted hair. She wafts me to a table. Once
I’ve got my breakfast, such as it is, I have a
look around. There’s 9 carat, if that, bling
everywhere. There’s a woman at a table across
from me, with a couple of other people, in an Adidas
tracksuit, with an ormolu perm, Chanel shades, a hefty
ring on pretty much every finger and weighed down with
a fat necklace. A lot of the people around me, and
it’s busy in here, are grotesquely fat, and out
on the casino floor you can see them propped up with
their great bellies on the stools in front of the
slots with their buckets. I can hear a lot of
languages – what sounds eastern european here
and there, japanese, new jersey. There are
Christophers, Adriannas, Janices, Paulies and Juniors
everywhere you look.
I go out for a walk afterwards out of the revolving
door and along the approach road that sweeps up from
– somewhere, the Expressway probably –
with a wall, lined by small fir trees, each one held
upright by four hawsers set in the ground, against the
wind that blows in from the Atlantic across the
slough. But it turns out there’s nowhere to
walk to. You get a view of the pilings which is the
first phase of construction of more Borgata Casino and
Spa, and then – there’s no point in
continuing. I’m heading toward the Expressway
and with only road pavement to walk on. I turn back
around to the front doors, where there’s a kind
of reception atrium, I suppose you’d call it, in
front of the main doors to the Casino, and limo after
limo draws up under it, car upon car, wafted this way
and that by traffic operatives, all wrapped up against
the cold. It’s a Sunday.
At the appointed time, I come down from my room, well,
earlier, to check out, because I’ve seen the
line, but then, while I’m standing there knowing
it’s going to take much longer than I accounted
for, I spot the express checkout, where you fill
something in on the back of the little wallet thing
your key comes in and drop it into a slot. I peel out
of the line, and then come across Ross, whose got a
sheaf of extras bills that he’s paid already
because he thinks ahead more than pretty much anyone I
know, with the exception of my wife.
On the bus there is talk about the previous night.
Turns out that there were Pogues in the B-Bar the
night before: Andrew, Shane, Joey, Sean, Nora (I
think, without camera, because she was apprehended by
casino security the evening before on the casino
floor, filming, and, I think I’m right in
saying, relieved of her equipment for the night), the
nieces – Michaela McCafferty and another I
can’t remember the name of – and a couple
of friends, of Patsy O’Hara, the third hunger
striker to die in H Block in 1981, and family members
of a guy that died on Bloody Sunday. Joey and Shane
and Andrew get on the bus. Andrew still has his suit
on which isn’t a good sign. They’ve been
up most of the night if not all of it talking with the
O’Hara contingent in the bar.
‘It was a very explosive conversation,’
Joey says.
The O’Hara family have offered Shane and Joey a
lift in their limo up to New York, but they’ve
declined.
We drive past the marshland on the way out of Atlantic
City.
‘That’s where they dump the bodies,’
Shane says.
‘Who?’
‘The Mafia.’
‘Pushing up the reeds,’ says Joey.
‘Rub me up the wrong way,’ Joey says
later, ‘and I’ll rub you out the right
way.’
We stop for something to eat at a hideous food court,
somewhere, on the Garden State Parkway, probably.
It’s miserable barn with sulphurous tiling on
the floor and lavender-coloured tubular beams holding
the roof up. You eat in the middle of the space,
having chosen what you want from Sbarro’s, Panda
Express, Starbucks, that sort of thing, which are
ranged around it. Spider and I get coffee and stand
around talking about the Borgata and American culture
and the Founding Fathers and Puritans and the
Declaration of Independence and Babylon and Mammon and
shit. We sort of drift toward the exit, and hang
around on the steps outside, still going on about it,
him taking a micro view and myself taking a more or
less macro one, until Ross tells us that we’re
the last people on the bus and we have to go.
We drive into Manhattan out of the Holland Tunnel with
Exile on Main Street blasting in the front parlour of
the bus. It’s a perfect record to listen to
coming into this city, somehow.
The bus pulls up on Essex round the corner from the
hotel, because the pinched streets won’t let a
bus park up. This time, Ross has managed to ring
ahead to get the bellman to meet us with a hotel
trolley, but nonetheless, I pick up my luggage from
outside the bellman’s little room and take it
upstairs.
Once I get into the room (Andrew, who’s in the
room next to mine, and I spend a bit of time not
understanding the fact that you just have to wave the
key card in the vicinity of the plate with the room
number on it to operate the lock) I find it’s
nice enough, in an understatedly over-designed sort of
way, with a metal balcony and a view, between the
buildings, of a bit of the Williamsburg Bridge. The
bed has one of those memory foam mattresses that molds
itself to your shape. There’s a kind of vertigo
involved in lying down on it. There’s small
clear plastic box of sex toys in the minibar.
I’m supposed to go up to a fund-raiser for St
Brigid’s Church overlooking Tompkins Square
Park, whose demolition by the Archdiocese is being
resisted by the neighbourhood. I have a tour poster
signed by everyone for auction, but it’s late,
and Terry who said he’d come up to the
fund-raiser with me is shagged out, holed up in his
room, with his supply of boiled sweets, presumably,
plus also I’m hungry and the light’s
fading. I go down in the lift, with the poster in my
backpack, with every intention, almost, of going to
the fund-raiser and then going on to see a friend play
in the orchestra at a review of some kind at a place
called the Deitch gallery in SoHo afterwards, but I
come across Andrew in the bar, still in his suit.
He’s waiting for Darryl. They’ve arranged
to meet at six to go to dinner. By the time Darryl
arrives, giddy from the experience of yanking his
balcony door off its hinges and managing to put it
back on, I’m on my third marguerita and
Andrew’s finishing up his second. We have
already remarked what an improvement to the day the
first one made.
I have dinner at Inoteca across the road from the
hotel with Darryl and Andrew and – I’m
sorry the three margueritas have put paid to my short
term memory, and I can’t remember who else is
with us. Andrew and I get into a comedy of ordering a
bottle of wine, a lot of which, when it comes, I
suppose I drink, then see the time and have to go off
to the SoHo gallery and leave twenty dollars on the
table.
I have every intention of walking to SoHo but when I
come out of the restaurant I’m all turned around
and have no idea which direction I should take, so I
ring my wife back in Los Angeles to ask her
directions. Well, she used to go to NYU and I figure
she knows the lay of the land better than I do.
‘Get a taxi,’ she says. So, I get a taxi,
but it turns out the taxi driver has even less idea of
where I want to go than I do, unless my powers of
communication are shitter than I think and he ends up
dropping me off two or three blocks from the gallery
after an altercation.
The review is bizarre. There’s a bank of
Astroturf up the back of the stage, on one side of the
gallery, and rope swings and a sort of pagola and some
fairy lights, and on the other side of the gallery, up
on a raised floor, the orchestra: The Citizens Band
– piano, violin, percussion, upright bass, I
think, guitar, trumpet, trombone maybe. My friend,
the guy I’ve come to meet, is playing the
guitar. The orchestra are all wearing white shirts.
Some of them have little goat horns growing out of
their foreheads and all are white with make up, with
kohl around their eyes. I spend a lot of the time
rocking from my heels to the balls of my feet, craning
to see over the heads of the audience and trying to
keep standing up. Among the performers are Rain
Phoenix as a dusky sort of romany gypsy, or so it
comes across to me, Karen Elson, Angela McCluskey.
More or less halfway through, I peel off to the
complimentary bar to top up with a vodka and
cranberry.
I hang about outside afterwards getting some fresh air
and wait for Mark (McAdam – the guitar player in
the band) and Rain and Mark’s friend, Kit. We
get in a taxi and go off to Otto on 5th St and 8th Ave
to meet with Kieran and Dermot Mulroney and Eric, a
friend of ours, and an attorney (who I’m sure is
called Bill), Kit, Rain, Mark. I drink glass upon
glass of wine there until a presentiment of how lovely
it would be to sink into my memory foam mattress comes
upon me. The guys help me into a cab and I need help.
When I get back to my room, I fill up the enormous
bath. Afterwards, I have a certain amount of
difficulty with the curtains and eventually give up
with them.
I wake up in broad daylight, diagonal on the bed. It
takes me a while to get some sort of traction on the
day and when Terry sees me this morning, he says:
‘You need a slice of lemon for each eye.’
I go with him and Darryl for breakfast at the Pink
Pony on Ludlow Street, where I have pancakes and fruit
and coffee and juice and a bottle of fizzy water.
Terry talks lovingly about the banjo he bought in
Washington DC. I think Jos came across a second-hand
shop and happened to mention it to Terry. They both
went round there to have a look, and in the store, to
Terry’s almost mystical amazement, is a banjo
he’s been looking for for thirty, maybe forty
years: an Ome banjo. Ome banjos were the
reincarnation of Ode banjos, when Charles Ogsbury
revived the manufacture of them when Ode went bump,
presumably. Terry talks deliciously about his
preference for a wooden resonator over a metal one,
when it comes to frailing, at which he’s one of
the masters. There was a certain amount of inner
conflict when it came to buying the banjo, with the
cost being as it was, but then he’d been looking
for such an instrument for years. Each afternoon, off
the bus to the hotel, you see him carrying the
instrument, in its case, covered in a material
redolent somehow of a card-sharp’s suit, into
the hotel and I know there’s going to be a
far-away look in his eyes while he plays it sitting,
probably, on the edge of the bed. I’ve seen him
play a mandolin in a hotel room and he’s gone,
just gone.
Darryl’s, Terry’s and my conversation
turns to – what, middle age or something? I
don’t know. Darryl’s been beset for a
while with osteological unhappinesses – a
recurring knee thing, basically, for which he takes
shark cartilage tablets. He also takes calcium
tablets, and supplemental A and D vitamins.
‘When you get to a certain age...’ he
says.
After breakfast I walk around the neighbourhood, out
through the heavy red velvet curtains at the front
door of the hotel, and a couple of bellmen to each
side of them. The Lower East Side used to be pretty
much a no-go area – at least, you’d have
to be on the qui-vive when we were here last,
particularly after nightfall, but now the successive
gentrifying waves have swept through the place and the
hotel we’re staying in is a glass-fronted
specimen of such gentrifaction. The neighbourhood
generally is tenements and fire-escapes, luggage shops
and leather jacket emporiums and clothes shops, delis,
that sort of thing – but then you have
Moby’s tea shop down the street and trendy
restaurants like Schiller’s.
Down the street there’s the First
Roumanian-American Congregation Synagogue, or
what’s left of it. Behind boards and beyond the
rubble of bricks and beams and rubble, there’s
the exposed interior of it, with the candlesticks and
the reading platform and the stained glass windows at
the back. There’s a ceiling-high blue tarpaulin
over where I presume the ark is, was, I don’t
know, because it’s weird that the demolition
company should have started work on the place already
without taking all this stuff out, until I find out
that on an afternoon in January, the place just fell
in on itself. Outside on the sidewalk, there’s
a concrete Star of David weighting down the supports
of the board-fence.
I go and sit on a bench in the park between Chrystie
and Forsyth Streets and scribble for a while and watch
a dog waddle, due to a grotesque testicular issue,
down the walkway. On my way back to the hotel
there’s someone hurling extemporaneous,
blood-curdling screams from a window in one of the
high rises off Allen St, that cause everyone on street
level, pedestians at the instersection, the ConEdison
workers in hard hats, me, to look up to try and
discern which window they’re coming from and
ponder if the scenario might require us to gather
beneath it with a sheet stretched between us.
In the afternoon I go off to rehearse with the Cranky
George Trio at Mark McAdam’s apartment on Allen.
It was Dermot’s idea to do a Cranky George Trio
gig in New York. He and Kieran were going to be
coming to a couple of the Pogues’ shows at the
Nokia Theater in any case, and Dermot sort of just put
it out there, got in touch with Mark McAdam, whom we
know through shamelessly exploiting his facility with
and ownership of a computer with ProTools and a ton of
instruments, percussion, stuff, a couple of years ago,
when we recorded a sort of demo in Dermot’s
garage. Mark soon came back with a gig at the
Parkside Lounge, where he plays on a fairly regular
basis. There’s something almost puppyish,
doggedly puppyish sometimes, about Dermot’s
optimism, which comes out in the way he plays too.
It’s hot in Mark’s apartment, and
confined: we have to be careful passing instruments
around from one to the other in case we ding one of
them. We’re all hung over. Kieran and Dermot
stayed up drinking with Eric until five this morning.
Afterwards, I go off to meet my wife at the hotel.
She’s flown over from Los Angeles this
afternoon. We have dinner at Schiller’s and
then I go off to meet up with Kieran and Dermot at the
Parkside Lounge. I’m the first one there. Mark
has told me that we would have the back room to
ourselves to soundcheck, but when I get there,
there’s a bunch of country musicians standing
Down-From-The-Mountain fashion round a Neumann
microphone, or some such. Dermot turns up with the
first taxi full of gear – cello-height stool,
guitar, cello, hi-hat, mandolin, gig-bag and then
shortly after, Kieran and Brad with ukuleles, fiddle,
amps, bass. It takes us a while to get all the crap
off the sidewalk and into a little room at the back
with someone posted as look-out. The country band
play and sing to a couple of tables of friends until
twenty five past nine. Showtime for us is ten.
Andrew strolls in. I’m not sure if he looks
rested, but he looks clean.
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘I’m not late?
I thought it started at nine.’
By ten to ten the place is full. The sound engineer
is glacial and immune to disquietude. He takes his
time figuring out what inputs he has against the
number of DI’s and mikes and stuff we need. His
desk – such as it is: a box with Carlin or
Peavey on the front, set on the wall – is at the
front of the room, hard by the stage, up to which he
saunters, to twist a knob and then to trudge all the
way back, between the tables and the people, to hear
what the twist did. The customary divide between
setting up and actually performing – well, there
is none, really, though we gather for a minute or two
in the little corridor where the toilets are behind
the stage, and commit ourselves to the ritual meeting
of hands, the praising of God, and agreeing upon whom
we’re going to prevail to buy us a round, that
sort of thing.
It’s a ramshackle gig, and one where my
heart’s in my fucking mouth the whole time,
because Jem and Marcia and Ella and Kitty are sitting
at the front right under my nose, virtually, with
Andrew and Spider and Louise, and Philip at a table to
the side, sitting with a friend, and Terry and Darryl
at the back, and my wife, Danielle, and a couple of
friends, sitting with Steve Buscemi at the back. And
I spot Sarah Vowell and Edward Norton Jr and a very
vociferous Martha Plimpton. Neither Shane nor Joey
show up, which is a vague disappointment but kind of
expected. I had asked Shane to come, but it’s
best not to count on such things.
Halfway through the set, Mark McAdam shows up in his
white shirt and black suit from his show at the Deitch
gallery, the one I saw last night, with hastily rubbed
off make-up.
‘Ah,’ says Dermot. ‘The fifth member
of the band. The trio is complete.’
A lot of the words to the songs I sing I’ve
never been able to commit to memory and it’s
difficult to read them from the music stand with my
head up to sing into the microphone, so I bugger up a
few of the lines. I’m fifty-one, that’s
my excuse – three years away from a senior
discount on the Catalina Ferry, if I should ever care
to go there.
The stage is such a mess that at one point I drag a
cable free from the wrack of cables at the back of the
stage to give myself some slack for the guitar and tip
a pint of beer over onto the towel I’ve brought
from the hotel because, since the beginning of my
Pogues career, my pores tend to open the instant I
play a note.
After the show, I’m able, finally, to hand over
the signed tour poster to Paul Dougherty (brother of
Peter, who directed the video of Fairy Tale of New
York) for the benefit of St Brigid’s Church.
It’s Einstein’s birthday. I just happen
to know that.
We have to wait a long time out in the street for
Shane and Joey to come out of the hotel. We go into
the candy store opposite. Philip buys a bag of his
favourite American candy, which I can’t remember
the name of, but which is a matter of pink and white
torpedoes filled with liquorice. I buy English
toffee, which gets a laugh from a couple of people,
who don’t know how not English English toffee
is.
Shane and Joey are still not out yet, so some of us go
off to have very strong coffee in a corner coffee
house. Marcia and Ella and Jem and Darryl are talking
in a huddle outside the candy store. Philip and Terry
are already on the bus. Andrew, I’m not sure
where he is. When we’ve finished our coffee, we
come out into the spring sunshine and Shane and Joey
are still in the hotel. I’ve had breakfast
already this morning, but, with the lateness of the
hour, I’m beginning to feel doom-laden about the
prospect of sitting on a bus for four or five hours
getting hungrier and hungrier, because it looks like
we’re not going to get to Boston until six or
something. We’re down with this waiting around
these days. It’s just what you have to do. Time
was, I remember, one or other of us releasing gravel
against MacGowan’s window like shot, again and
again, waiting for the bellowing head to appear
through it, then sitting on the minibus wondering how
much wiggle-room we had, then repeating the cycle, and
then, finally, the minibus full of recriminations, off
to Holyhead, I don’t know how many hours, to
see, as we rounded a hill or something, the plume of
smoke rising from beyond the horizon, of the ferry
we’d been booked on. Oh, we’d all get so
botherated. We’re either older or more zen-like
about it, or it might just be a matter that
we’re not, shall we say, as open to scrutiny as
we were.
The bus is separated by ranks of bunks into the quiet
reading/sleeping room at the back where Jem and Ella,
Darryl and Philip hang out – Jem oftentimes with
his computer, completing applications for funding for
his work; Philip oftentimes with his computer,
because, sporadically, he can get a wi-fi network
connection; Darryl reading the at-the-present de
rigueur reading matter – and the cacophonous,
contentious, smoke-filled, and sometimes squalid den
at the front where Joey sits opposite Shane at a table
which is covered in materials – ashtrays, a
bottle of white zinfandel (not rosé, as someone
on the Pogues website identified it), plastic cup of I
don’t know, gin or vodka, hotdogs and a
shed-load of cheese.
Spider and Louise tend to be found up in the front of
the bus too, and Sean Fay, slide-showing photographs
or mending a faulty power cable (jumping up to the
roll of kitchen paper by the sink in the galley
because the knife he’s using slips from the
problematic connection into his finger). Joey moves
about rummaging in his luggage, getting something from
somewhere, giving out about something the while,
sending retorts to Shane, crouching down into a squat
in front of me to talk to me about something he
doesn’t want anyone else to hear, then sitting
heavily back down in his place, shirt buttons tight
across his chest.
It gets hot on the bus and Joey divests himself of his
shirt. The tattoo on his shoulder reads ‘DEATH
IS CERTAIN’. He cools himself with a
battery-operated fan, bowing to blow the back of his
neck. His body is lard-white and his hair at his nape
sticks in kiss-curls with the sweat. Shane sits under
the tv in the corner, head craned back at what must be
an excruciatingly uncomfortable angle to see up at the
screen, feet out in the aisle, one of them moving
continuously from some inner restlessness. He nods
out from time to time. Then wakes up to tilt back to
look up at the telly. Then he nods out again, with a
foot up on the seat and his hand dangling between his
thighs with a smouldering cigarette between his
fingers, whose contact with his skin through a burning
hole in his pants causes him to re-awaken with a sort
of puzzled ‘Aaah! Aaah!’ and a sort of
furious accusatory glowering about the den that seeks
to implicate us in a general negligence or something.
The burning wakes him up again, for a bit, while he
cranes his neck back, to nod off and, and so on.
Spider and Louise ply me with questions about
‘Drunken Boat’, if the verse that has the
lyrics ‘you wouldn’t expect that anyone
would go and fucking die’ was about Paul Verner,
our lighting man who died of alcoholism in October
1991. It is. The whole song’s about us and the
people round us, I suppose, when we were doing what we
were doing. The verse could also have been about Dave
Jordan too, but I wrote it two years before his death.
It could also have been about Charlie McLennan. Could
have been about any one of us, I suppose.
Terry rides up front, as he has done on any bus that I
can remember (except for a tour bus in Germany I think
it was that didn’t have provision for riding
postillion, and Terry was forced to sit further back
up the bus, without a clear view of the front window,
causing him a deal of distress. I can still see him,
in his hat, staring out of the window, aching to be
somewhere else). Terry just likes to sit up front,
saying nothing to the Jeff the driver, who assists in
such things as troubleshooting the dvd player and is
generally expected to be found standing by, watching,
as we jostle and bang suitcases together and duck down
to the hold underneath the bus to wrangle our luggage
out to haul it off into the hotel or into the venue.
Jeff doesn’t say much to any one of us. Neither
Terry nor Jeff enter into any social congress at all
up the front. It’s just Terry’s fuzzy
dome framed by the front window, as it drinks up the
road and the tollgates, the tunnels and the leafless
trees, the twinkling marshes here and there, the
clapboard hovels, the malls and smoking filtration
plants.
Today, on the recalcitrant and arcane dvd player,
it’s the Jimi Hendrix film, the one narrated by
Alexis Korner. Louise asks me if hearing Hendrix for
the first time was as life-changing as it seems to
have been for many other people. I tell her the first
time I heard and saw Hendrix was on Top of the Pops,
which was a family-round-the-television event in our
house – because, at the time, you could be
guaranteed, at one end of the spectrum, something like
Jim Reeves or Ken Dodd or Engelbert Humperdinck and,
at the rebellious end, Cliff Richard. But the night
Hendrix performed on Top of the Pops sent me into such
a conflict with myself and with my fidelity to my
parents’ world view and everything. Me, I
couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was
adrenalized and outraged and fraught and embarrassed
and – all those things, because I realized that,
eventually, I kind of wanted to do what Hendrix was
doing, play the guitar like that maybe, at the same
time knowing that all my dad could see was an
oversexed golliwog on the box.
After Hendrix, it’s the Cream’s farewell
concert at the Albert Hall – and there’s
no way this film cannot have been one of the prime
sources for the script of Spinal Tap. I’m
thinking of the interviews with Jack Bruce and Ginger
Baker, creaking from lack of content, but particularly
the one with Eric Clapton, with his sixties love-bug
paintjob Strat and his Sgt Pepper moustache, and his
elucidation of the intricacies of the circuitry of his
pick-ups (‘It’s got four knobs.’)
and his wah-wah pedal, and of course I’m waiting
for him to explain woman tone, because it’s one
of the sounds that wove through my adolescence, but
I’m not waiting with bated breath, because,
well, the explanation is going to be – well,
boring after all, but when it comes, it is its
irony-deficiency that’s jaw-dropping –
well, how could it be otherwise I suppose? Afterwards
I feel the need to say, out loud: ‘God is
dead.’
After the Cream’s Final Concert, and after a
certain amount of contentious toing and froing about
whether or not gin or vodka makes the better dvd
cleaner and Shane with a certain amount of authority
having declared gin to be the better solvent in this
regard, all the while Joey having pulled his shirt
tail out and having given the dvd a wipe, Dirty Harry
goes into the dvd player and I’m delighted to
see, when the credits play, that Lalo Shifrin wrote
the music, and I settle back into my corner. I have
to struggle to hear the soundtrack – and I
desperately want to hear, because the
cheek-by-jowlness of the front den is beginning to get
to me, with Joey moving about constantly, opening up a
cupboard above the galley and releasing a cascade of
plastic cups or waddling, against the motion of the
bus, to get kitchen roll for a zinfandel spillage or
wheezing the air in the seat covers next to me under
his sudden arse because he wants to talk to me about
something, or fishing noisily in paper bags looking
for something to eat. Shane’s the same way too,
but more sparing, or more selective. If he’s
going to get up, there’s going to be an
elaborate expenditure of effort to get out of the
seat, with groans of protestation and bangs of the
heels of his hands on the table top preparatory to
elevation, a weary, botherated grunt and some
lip-smackings, as if he were some old man having to
let out the tiresome dog. If he’s going to open
up the lid of some container just behind Jeff’s
seat, for a bottle of vodka, or gin, or tonic, or
whatever, he’s not just going to open it up
enough to get whatever it is in there out. He opens
it up the whole way so that the lid bangs against the
woodwork partition behind Jeff’s head.
He gets up to go for a piss and staggers in his filthy
coat to the toilet, where he needs assistance figuring
out how to open the door because it’s
rocker-switch-operated and slides open by means of the
compressed-air system on the bus. I experience a bit
of a sinking feeling that I realize it’s not
going to be long before I need a piss too, because
I’m going to have to go into the bog after
Shane, and what with the motion of the bus and the
unsteadiness of the pins and the Rain Street
lyric...
The beginning of the film seems to be an almost
Pavlovian cue for Shane and Joey to start disputing
like fishwives, almost as if Dirty Harry were a
backyard fence or something to give out about things
over the top of. Someone the other day compared the
two of them to Wilfred Brambell and Harry H Corbett .
I’ve become used to a Los Angelean, overpriced
cinema experience with darkness and hush and
respectfulness and silenced cell phones and the
banishment of candy wrappers, that’s what it is.
After Dirty Harry: Hannibal. Joey seems to be under
the misapprehension that he’s one of the few
people to have clocked the shape of Anthony
Hopkins’ face the pigeons make on the piazza at
the opening credits. He thumps his backside down on
the seat next to me to tell me to pay attention to the
pigeons. I notice that his teeth share more than a
few attributes with cribbage pegs. Again, Hannibal
becomes more or less another backyard fence, except,
this time, and for someone who hasn’t seen the
film before, never mind feeling the need for the space
and distraction it could provide, the conversation is
one I would just rather not have to hear, and they set
to, talking about the sequences in the film that are
the most laughably revolting and before long I know
pretty much what I can expect to see.
We get to Boston and park up outside the Orpheum.
It’s cold. Jeff is standing outside the bus
watching us get off. I suspect him of low-grade
contempt. We’re late, very late. Sound check
was supposed to be at 3.00. It’s twenty to six.
Paul Scully gives us the rounds of the kitchen, but he
knows there’s nothing to be done and backs down.
I’m convinced that the building is moving, at
least the cramped dressing room area; that it’s
made of some flimsy material that makes it shift in
slow temblors while I stand around with nowhere to
sit. It gets like this, on the road, sometimes, when
you can be standing having a piss or something and the
ground you’re standing on becomes like a moving
deck. So, I ask in a general sort of way, if the
building’s moving and I’m laughed out of
the house.
At the soundcheck I notice the Band-Aids on
Andrew’s fingers.
‘Oh,’ he says ruefully,
‘There’s always something.’
I rarely understand what Shane says on stage.
Sometimes he’ll look around after he’s
said something – not for approval or anything,
but to draw whoever he thinks is paying attention into
some sort of conspiracy with him, but if he catches my
eye, making the assumption, as I suppose one would,
that I was, firstly, listening, and secondly, able to
understand, neither of which I could say I am, I
generally smile supportively at him and he seems to be
satisfied, or whatever, or more to the point, he
probably doesn’t give a flying fuck what I think
about what he’s saying. Brokeback Mountain has
tended to come up on this tour quite a bit. For
example:
‘Anyone seen Brokeback Mountain?’ He waits
for a bit, does a bit of stage business, then says:
‘Sex Pistols!’
Philip comes up to the microphone for ‘Thousands
Are Sailing’ and says something like,
‘It’s great to be back in Boston!’
or wherever we are, and then: ‘How are
you?’ or, more likely: ‘How’s it
going?’ which is altogether more Irish, and then
something like, ‘Are you enjoying
yourselves?’ or some question that requires an
answer in the affirmative. He gives audience the
opportunity to scatteredly shout out the word,
‘Yes!’
‘Give me a “HELL, YEAH!”’ he
demands.
It might be tonight that having lined up to go back on
stage for the first of the two encores that I find
myself on stage, up at Shane’s strange-tasting
microphone (you just have to put your lips to it to
say something, like ‘It’s great to be back
in Boston!’ and the taste sort of escapes from
the mesh into your mouth), but tonight, before I do, I
happen to look round at my cohorts, to see that
they’ve all hung back at the side of the stage,
laughing and not coming on with me. A sort of
giddiness runs through one, being in front of a couple
of thousand people, on one’s own, at a
microphone and then the daft idea of doing a Cranky
George Trio song comes upon me and I go into a dither
of should I/shouldn’t I? It’d be dead
easy to go across, pick up Philip’s guitar and
go into something. But I bottle out and the next
thing I know, everyone’s on stage, grinning with
mischief, after all I’ve been able to come out
with has been ‘It’s great to be back in
Boston!’ One night.
It’s wonderful to watch Andrew come striding up
to the mike for ‘Star of the County Down,’
in his suit pants and his shirt a bit untucked.
There’s something of the artisan about him, a
smith on a night out or something, with his burred
face and his sleeves rolled up.
‘This is for all the anarcho-lesbians in the
audience,’ he says.
In the bit in ‘Star of the County Down’
where it breaks down and we leave Shane and Andrew
singing the one note on the word
‘colle-e-e-en,’ Jem angles his guitar pick
and drags it slowly all the way down, digging into the
strings from the bridge to the nut, channeling Yngwie
Malmsteen maybe, or Van Halen, or any one of them.
You can hear the pick rasp on the winding, through all
the harmonics, to end on the root chord. It’s a
metal technique, but the way he goes about it, and the
way he looks when he does it, with his wire wool hair
and in his suit – pink shirt maybe, feet at
ten-to-two – studying the action of the pick
against the string winding, in his own zone, well,
it’s just so wrong.
The snow in ‘Fairytale of New York’ is
suds coming from a machine up in the lighting trusses.
I mean, it looks well enough, except when it comes
down in clots, but it leaves no opportunity to make
snow angels, because it turns to slime on the stage.
Spider says it’s like having industrial effluent
sprayed over you.
I have a look at Ella’s face in Fairy Tale. She
looks so sad when she comes to stand at the
microphone, beautifully sad.
Afterwards, in the dressing room – well, the
dressing room that Ella has taken for herself next to
the doorless affair that we have (the act of taking
off the doors intended, I suppose, by including the
corridor outside, to render it more commodious) but
which Joey has moved into by the end of the evening
– Joey plugs in his boom-box and puts an Avril
Lavigne CD on it. He’s very keen on Avril
Lavigne. I point him in the direction of the song
called ‘I’m With You’, which is a
song, despite myself, I really like. (Joey rang me up
last week. The first thing out of his mouth was,
‘I agree with you.’ ‘About
what?’ I asked him. ‘About
“I’m With You”, for a start,’
he said.) Leaving on the second bus back to the hotel
(Philip and Terry are generally on the first), I can
hear Avril Lavigne echoing down the stairwell behind
me.
I’m up early, waking to renovations going on in
what seems to be a selection of hotel rooms at varying
distances from mine. I find myself tuning in with
detached curiosity, and with relief that it’s
not any louder than a tapping that’s fairly
benign, somewhere in the concrete. I listen to that
for a bit. And then a hammering starts up, a little
closer, reverberating throughout the hotel and, this
early in the morning, with just the slightest of a
hangover, it helps to form in your head a kind of
architectural drawing of the building, the reinforced
concrete skeleton of it or something. And then a
drill starts up and seems intent on probing into the
very core of the hotel, finding the acoustic quick of
the building and turning its bit in it until the
air’s full of Stygian singing. Well, of course,
I get up and get dressed and fuck off out of there.
Later, I find out that most of the renovation is at
the front of the hotel (it’s curious how little
of one’s surroundings one takes in – right
outside the bloody revolving door there are
scaffolding poles and cones and stuff), right outside
Ross’s window. Ross is indignant, because the
booking instructions that come from the travel agent
specify that Ross is to be notified if renovations are
expected during our stay. The hotel’s been
booked for four months.
After breakfast in a café up the road from the
hotel, I walk down to the Public Library. It’s
bitterly cold, which is one of the things I remember
about Boston from before, with snow in the air and
mephitic rags of steam blowing from a pipe in the road
on the corner of Huntington Ave and Belvidere St. Ger
Scully put me onto the Public Library yesterday,
telling me to go up to the 3rd floor. She’s
breathless about the scale of the place, and the books
they have. She’s starting designing costumes
for a film going into production soon and, at the
library yesterday, it seems she’s broken the
back of a lot of the work she has to do. When I get
there, I don’t find a 3rd floor. Turns out
there’s more than just the one building that
comprises the library. But I’m happy enough up
in a huge reading room with long oak tables under a
lamp with a green glass shade. I spend the rest of
the day there.
While I’m gone, there’s a fire-alarm at
the hotel. It rattles some of the touring party.
Others simply ignore it; they’ve come across
fire-alarms in the past – one notable one at the
Radisson in Manchester, that had us out in the fucking
back alley in the freezing cold at three in the
morning and for no reason. On this occasion, in
Boston, the starting up of the sirens and whooping
claxons is the signal for Jem to get out his digital
camera, to start to record, sound and moving picture,
what’s going on. At some point in the
afternoon/evening, we gather round the back of
Jem’s camera to watch Jem and Ella’s
genuinely frightful descent of the emergency
staircase.
We go to do a soundcheck again. There’s a tiny
alley behind the Orpheum that the minibus has a
struggle getting into, riding the kerb because
it’s so narrow. At the end of the alley is the
back door to the place, with a rickety metal staircase
up to the stage door where there’s an iron
landing. Scully and Gerry and Murray are standing on
this platform, waiting, smoking. There’s a kind
of thrill in passing under the landing, beneath the
soles of their feet, seeing their foreshortened shapes
above, before we duck into the basement.
Jos likes to go shopping, it’s clear. Since the
first couple of days there’s been a silvery
plastic Chinese cat on the top of Philip’s amp.
It waves its arm back and forth. In its paw
there’s a guitar pick. I think it might be this
evening that Jos has a sort of illuminated gum shoe in
his mouth.
Dinner’s in the basement. It’s laid out
in silver foil tureens on Sterno stoves. A
conversation starts up as to whether or not
‘ab-’ is a prefix. I remember
‘ab’ from German, but have to assume that
I have forgotten what it means, because I can’t
get it to make sense in my head when it comes to a
word like ‘abdomen’, which sounds kind of
Latin. Nora has the phone number for a
question-answering service in the UK, called Any
Question Answered, which vaunts response to 80% of
questions in five minutes and in five minutes her
phone beeps, with the answer that ‘ab’ is
a Latin prefix which means ‘away from’.
This doesn’t completely satisfy us with regard
to such words as ‘racadabra’,
‘attoir’, ‘ash’,
‘erdeen’ and ‘alone’.
A couple of cops come in. To their faces, the
caterers tease them about being so young and, behind
their backs drool, over the pretty one. The cops
station themselves outside our dressing room. We
think it might be something to do with the smoking,
because there are warnings posted that say that the
electricity will automatically shut off if the smoke
sensors go off. So far nary a single smoke sensor has
made a chirrup.
And then, as it often is, it’s back to the hotel
for maybe an hour, to ring the family, wash a shirt or
two and some underpants and socks, change into the
suit, meet back in the lobby under the huge
chandelier, wait for Philip oftentimes because
he’s scooted back to the hotel right after
dinner and has missed the assembly announcement, and
then back to the Orpheum.
In the minibus, on the way back, Andrew’s bottle
of water falls off his seat and into the stepwell with
a heavy clunk.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘That’s my
gun.’ I can’t tell if the driver stiffens
a bit.
‘I left my gun back at the hotel,’ Spider
says.
‘I left my gun in Shane’s room,’ I
say.
‘I left my gun in Philip’s room,’
Darryl says, and for some reason this is the clincher.
There’s a deal of mystery surrounding
Shane’s arrival at the Orpheum tonight.
I’m lead to believe that, at this moment, Ross
is not privy to his whereabouts. Ross tells us
he’s been up to Shane’s room to wake him
up and was so incapable of doing so that he began to
consider the possibility that Shane might actually be
dead.
There’s a newspaper open to a review of one of
the shows in the minibus that, I think, Andrew has
been reading from, the headline of which is: Spry
Tunes, Band Buttress Shane (there has been a
preponderance of reviews, so far, with this sort of
analysis, which Andrew has synthesized in this way:
‘Shane was drunk. The band was great. Tears
were shed for the Irish Famine.’).
‘He’s going to need a lot of buttressing
if he’s dead,’ someone says. All of us
find ourselves hurled back to the circumstances that
prevailed in 1989 or 1990 or 1991 and again we
consider the possibility of doing the show without
him. Spider says that he can’t remember the
words to Lullaby of London.
Nora asks what we’ll do if Shane doesn’t
make it to the gig.
‘Drop Lullaby of London,’ Spider says.
Back at the hotel, I don’t think Ross starts up
exactly pp, trying to wake Shane up, but it
isn’t until he gets to ffffff, and right in
front of his face, that, like Cesar in Dr
Caligari’s cabinet, I’m thinking,
Shane’s eyes finally snap open. Ross,
thereafter, has to herd Joey in the direction of
Shane’s room, and Sean Fay in the same
direction, in order to have Shane herded in the
direction of a minibus. They turn up at the Orpheum
with all the air of holiday-makers who have been taken
on the cynic route by a cab-driver.
I hear Joey recounting his day:
‘So, I spend the day resting up, having arranged
for an alarm call, in good time: half an hour before
it’s time to leave. We come down to the lobby,
and get into the minibus, and so – here we
are!’ I catch sight of Ross out of sight beyond
the door post, smacking his fist into his palm.
I hear myself say, when Ross has gone off to do his
work, ‘Ross is going to deck Joey.’
‘He’s not,’ Jem says and asserts
that Shane, Joey and Ross are in some sort of magnetic
attraction/repulsion relationship, none of them able
to escape the other and that blows is not what
it’s going to come to.
Before the show, I watch Sean, as Shane’s valet
now, with a wet cloth, dabbing the lapels of
Shane’s jacket and his tie and then to wiping
his face. He moves on to combing Shane’s hair.
Shane impatiently bats him off.
‘Leave me alone!’ he shouts.
Shane rides through the beginning of the set, on his
wild-eyed, snorting steed, swinging his sabre, until
If I Should Fall From Grace With God lies dismembered
in the mud and then, maybe, if I remember rightly, he
hacks down Turkish Song of the Damned and throws its
corpse on top and maybe lops an ear off Sunnyside of
the Street. Except, it’s not really like that,
because we give good triage. It’s at moments
like these that Terry tends to stroll up to
Shane’s vicinity in order to both, I suppose,
detect cues as they happen, and to generate ones of
his own, to rein in the over-valiant cavalier. Plus
also, there’s something undeniably chilling
about Terry walking, and that slowly, into to
one’s vicinity.
During the gig, Shane gives out about there being one
law and only one law and that law is God’s law.
I don’t know what he’s going on about
either. Well, I kind of know what he’s going on
about, but it’s the why that I don’t know.
I turn round, at some point, and see Shane’s
edentate maw gaping open, while he sloshes zinfandel
into the ruined opening. Most of it goes down his
front and onto the floor round the base of his
microphone.
After the show there’s pizza delivered, which
seems to be getting to be a regular milestone in our
day – boxes of them, all stacked up by the wall.
Slices are distributed here and there. Shane gets a
box to himself and it’s not long before
he’s giving out about something, as if the open
box were a lectern or something, his fingers crooked
and pointing – with a slice of pizza caught in
them. His forearms are orange from sauce.
Darryl asks the room: ‘Anyone got an
opener?’
‘“You want to come back to my
place,”’ Joey says. ‘That’s
an opener. And a closer too.’
Down in catering, we meet with Simon (can’t
remember his last name) whom we’d come across
lots back in the day in the States. Then, he was a
frank kid with swept back hair, blue eyes and an
earnestness about him that didn’t tolerate
neutrality. Now, he’s full-blown Hebrew, with a
tangled beard he picks at, and a hat, coat and
waistcoat, and Moishe his friend who wears a yarmulke
and turns out to be a rabbi. They tell us about their
experiences at gigs, how people tend to look at them
sidelong and ask them if they are managing to keep up
with what’s going on. Not at a Pogues gig,
Simon says, however, where they have been swept into
the tumult along with everyone else. We bring them
upstairs, where Simon has a gift of a mezuzah for Jem.
Moishe blesses a bottle of water. I ask Nora if she
got that on film, but the cable that attaches to the
microphone on the top of the camera has gone faulty
and all she has is Moishe’s moving mouth.
Kitty says to Moishe: ‘So you don’t shake
hands with women?’ I think something has come up
during the process of introductions. The Rabbi goes
into a historical explanation of why this is. Time
passes. Ella finds the mischievousness to poke him on
his arm.
‘So,’ she says, ‘have you broken the
law now?’
‘No,’ he says to her with kindly irony.
‘It is you who has sinned.’
Shane’s gone overnight on the crew bus.
It’s a long way from Boston to New York City.
We figure that since we’re the ones who do the
soundcheck and are able to assemble in a lobby at a
particular time without much fuss, it’d be
better for something other than Plan A. Plan B is the
crew bus. Plans C through, I don’t know, D or
E, include a train, private car, helicopter –
cannon even. So Shane and Joey and Sean go on the
crew bus.
There’s a lot of shenigans though – not
for us, for Ross, who, at the hotel, after the show,
after everything’s packed away and with the crew
waiting to go from the Orpheum, assists Joey by means
of a mobile phone to enter the correct code into the
lock of the correct bus to retrieve his bags at the
same time as encourage Shane to shovel his belongings
into a bag and get going. This province, to assist
with Shane’s packing, usually befalls Joey.
Eventually, tempers are lost, and there are huge bangs
in the elevator, but both Joey and Shane, and,
I’m assuming, Sean, set off with the crew.
We hear about the journey when we get to the Nokia
Theater, where there’s not a lot going on, due
to union regulations which, by the time we arrive,
have included lunch, where technicians vanish for an
hour and a half, and other obfuscations, uppersome of
which is that the patches or channels – or
whatever – don’t match, plus also
we’ve got a film crew in to shoot for,
eventually, a DVD and they need to patch everything
for their recording. So, with no work to do and aware
of the irony of dumping Shane into Plan B so that we
can get some work done, we hang around with the crew
for a while and hear about the trip, episodes which
include Shane sweeping aside the curtain of one of the
bunks to find Ger Scully trying to sleep, not
recognizing her, saying: ‘It’s a little
girl!’ to get the response, ‘Fuck off,
Shane!’; the matter of what Jos refers to as a
‘Jimmy in the Superbowl’ when
there’s a notice in the toilet of a $250 fine
for solids; Shane hoping to conjur up Sean from
wherever he is, shouting out ‘Sean’, as
in ‘S-E-A-N-N-N!’; and finally, when they
arrived in New York, the matter of turning the bus
engine off and letting the compressed air out of the
system, in order to manually open the door to the back
lounge, because they’ve locked themselves in
there and fallen asleep.
I spend a certain amount of time drawing parallels
between our situation and that of the men stranded in
the town of Las Piedras in ‘Wages of Fear’,
who drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerine across 300
miles of treacherous mountain country.
The Nokia Theater, I happen to find out, was designed
by David Rockwell, who also designed the Kodak Theater
in Hollywood. The Nokia Theater has a lot of design,
it’s true – mauve being a dominant colour:
mauve and orange walls in the dressing rooms, with
paintings I don’t spend a deal of energy on, but
peripherally at least, yes, orangeish and reddish, and
blackish too, against purple walls. A couple of
sofas, long enough to lounge full-length on, at right
angles to each other. An undulating design in the
carpet. Those black wood coffee tables shorn of
ornament.
Outside the dressing room, shades of plum, and
aluminium pipes. The auditorium looks tiered, with a
wood floor, a railed area at another height, and at
the back, seats. There’s a balcony each side.
The room, acoustically, sounds dead, and it’s
dead cold too.
At the soundcheck – I think it’s tonight;
as it often happens, my recollection tends to smear
more than a couple of nights in succession, and
we’re playing four shows here, so, it’s
going to happen – Spider sings, episodically,
Jacques Brel’s ‘Next’, Alex
Harvery’s version: ‘Naked as sin, an army
towel covering my belly. Some of us blush, somehow
knees turning to jelly. Next, next!’ Then he
wheels away from the microphone and you think
that’s it, but another verse comes back to him
and he twirls on his heels and bounds back to grab
hold of the mike stand and goes all twisted as if
someone were poking needles into his voodoo effigy:
‘I was still just a kid. There were a hundred
like me. I followed a naked body. A naked body
followed me. And next!’ And then, well, he
doesn’t do the whole song, but he could,
staggering away from the microphone and staggering
back. ‘One day I'll cut my legs off or burn
myself alive. Anything, I'll do anything to get out
of line to survive. And next! Next!’
By the time he’s finished, Terry’s wiping
a tear from his cheek.
Andrew’s having problems with his drums again.
‘Shit kit,’ Jos says. They’ve had
to return the snare, or something, and things are
still not right. I have been able to tell, on a
couple of the gigs so far, that Andrew’s playing
with ungiving gear, because there’s been
something chary about ‘White City’.
Steve Lillywhite comes to our soundcheck. He’s
all golden of hair and furry of parka hood and
candy-striped of shirt. It’s lovely to see him,
and especially after the documentary about
‘Fairy Tale of New York’ and especially
since we have such a connection with him through
Kirsty and ‘Fairy Tale of New York,’ not
to mention If I Should Fall From Grace With God and
Peace And Love. We go back a long way. For me,
his ‘remix’ of Fairy Tale at the desk for
the documentary was pretty much the high point in the
film and the catch in his voice when he hears
Kirsty’s.
BP Fallon is backstage before the show. He’s
due to whisk Shane away to Brooklyn after tomorrow
night’s show, for another in the series of
‘Death Discos.’ He sits like a pixie on
one of the chairs in the dressing room. He has a
complexion that looks, well, sort of dusted, somehow,
with an understated lustre – semi-gloss, or
eggshell, maybe – in his pate, and eyebrows that
are verging on the Eric Campbell if not in shape then
in density. He talks to me about the writing that
I’ve been doing for the Pogues’ website.
He wants to know what a chia pet is, not having found
the word in his dictionary, so I tell him.
Peter Dougherty, who directed the video for
‘Fairy Tale of New York,’ is backstage
too. I don’t get a chance to talk to him. He
won’t be able to get backstage after the show on
account of what he calls, afterwards, a
‘juiceless’ pass.
Backstage before the gig – and actually during
too, because we come across him when we come off
before the first encore, sitting on a chair a few feet
away from the monitor that shows what’s going on
onstage – is a man who’s described as the
Gerry O’Boyle of New York, who sits very close
to Shane, a four-square man but with a baffled predial
air about him. I’m given to understand that he
runs a funeral parlour, a florist’s and a
betting shop, whether or not on the same premises I
wouldn’t know. He’s given Shane a
flocculant green flat-cap to wear, with it being close
to St Patrick’s Day and all. We’ve had
reminders every now and again about continuity (on
account of the shooting for the DVD over two nights,
tonight and tomorrow), but I don’t see much
chance in the green flat-cap coming out again
tomorrow, somehow, nor perhaps the tricolour tie
Shane’s wearing.
From our dressing room we can hear William Elliott
Whitmore (some of us have such difficulty with
Will’s name that they’ve taken to calling
him Walt Whitman) singing in his dog’s howl
voice, playing his banjo next door.
Joey describes the means whereby he gets Shane to a
gig: ‘I lie around on the floor of Shane’s
room, smoking a cigarette. There’s Sean and Ross
coming in and out of the room, shouting. And half an
hour before it’s time to go, I say,“Hey,
Shane, it’s time to go.” And off we
go!’
Jem recalls hearing Sean and Shane and Joey in one of
the hotels, furiously shouting – I don’t
know, about luggage and packing possibly and people
waiting. At this point, Jem happened to be passing
their rooms, which are never far from one another. He
put his head round the door to Shane’s room and
said, ‘We’re going. You want to
come?’
‘All right,’ Shane said and got up.
Spider and Louise have taken Darryl shopping.
He’s come back with a new pair of trousers that
do that thing at the bottoms that’s held to be
in fashion – a rumpling thing around the top of
new boots, plus a new shirt and two new hats: one a
brown derby, and the other, I don’t know what
you’d call it. It’s not a pork pie. It
could be a lowrider, but I’m not sure. Darryl
gets dressed before the gig in all his new gear, with
the fetching rumply trouser-treatment, and in a duster
coat that a group called the Cherry Cokes, whom Spider
and Louise met in Japan, have sent. It’s
beautifully made and looks very well on Darryl, if a
bit on the costume side for me, with his brown derby
at a jaunty angle.
I stand around in the space between the dressing rooms
and the stage door, under ceiling spots with Anthony
Addis, his son, Mark and his wife, Sandra, who have
all flown over from Manchester for the New York shows.
Anthony’s wearing his caramel-coloured leather
jacket. I look over at Sandra, in her coat, her hand
covering her mouth which is all agape with yawns from
the jet-lag.
My men from the Cranky George Trio are down the front,
at the railing, with friends Staph and Eric –
all of whom came to the last show I played in the last
incarnation of the Pogues, in 1993. Staph must stand
maybe five six tall, so it’s imperative he gets
to the front. It’s the Napoleon complex at
work, except it’s not exactly complex –
it’s simple: otherwise he wouldn’t get to
see anything at all. Dermot and Kieran and Eric have
squirmed their way to the front, in Staph’s
wake.
‘This is for the Cranky George Trio,’ I
say into the microphone. This, what, exactly? The
whole gig? Instantly I feel the abashment that comes
hard on the heels of lavishness.
Near them, there’s a guy pinned to the rail, who
thoroughly creeps me out. There’s an unhinged
expression on his face. He seems to be staring
directly at me, intoning, over and
over: ‘Danielle! Danielle!’ which is my
wife’s name.
Shane comes over to me during the show, with his hand
up – in blessing or preparatory to strike, I
can’t tell which, and I don’t care to find
out, so I back away and duck under his arm to a safer
possibly, unblessed possibly, place on the stage.
Terry’s nervous, I can tell, because he’s
cranked up the volume on his amp. He does this when
he’s on edge. It’s something I know about
him.
There are cameras everywhere. A guy follows us out of
the dressing room, to make sure they get one of those
dressing-room-to-stage shots. There’s a
camera-operator by the side of the stage, a couple
along the front and one out in the audience (where I
see crutches waving in the distance), plus also Nora
shooting bosoms and nostrils at the rail.
It seems to be a quiet audience tonight. We’ve
kept them waiting a long time I suppose and given them
two support acts, plus changes-over, to stand through,
so I can’t blame them. It’s a long night.
Afterwards, Shane apologizes to Ross for something
that presumably happened last night.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to call you a
Scottish cunt, right?’ he says. ‘But
you’re a cunt. All Scottish are cunts.’
He throws his arms out confessionally
wide. ‘Listen! I’m a cunt!’
I come across Joey, on my hunt for vodka, which is
never where you want it, curled up, hands folded in
front of him, under the table in ‘the
tent’, which has been erected just by the door
to the stage, asleep.
It’s St Patrick’s Day. I put on the green
shirt I was wearing yesterday (my kids, though
they’re not with us, and their friends, tend to
want to pinch a person that’s not wearing green
on St Patrick’s Day) and find myself looking out
of the hotel window to see what greenery there is on
the streets. There is none that I can see, but then
I’m not in the vicinity of 5th Avenue, where it
gets really verdant, so I’m told.
Spider and Louise have had to change rooms, because
last night, in their room, during the course of which
Andrew, Nora, Spider, Louise and possibly Darryl,
having drunk the contents of first Spider and
Louise’s mini-bar and thereafter Andrew’s,
Andrew stationed the pileous green stool in the room
under one of the halogen lamps and set it afire.
Danielle and I go up to 23rd St to visit with Steve
Lillywhite and his wife Patty. We go up to their
penthouse apartment with beetling views of Madison
Square Park and a particularly sickening downward one
on the other side of the building. We have coffee at
their kitchen table. It’s a very sunny room,
being this high up over the city. I think
there’s football on the tv, leastways a league
table or something. Steve likes football to the point
that he doesn’t mind telling you that if he has
a meeting, conference call, whatever, in New York, he
consults the premier league television schedule first,
and if he is required to go to London, he arranges it
with reference to the Chelsea fixture list. On the
way to the elevator down to lunch, Steve points down
the stairwell which knocks the views of Madison Square
Park and the one on the other side of the building
into a cocked hat. There’s something boyishly
mischievous about Steve, that he should get a kick out
of spinning the heads of his guests so.
When we get back to the hotel, Danielle goes off to
meet with Nora about the documentary and I spend an
hour or so putting my hat-box bass drum back in the
box in which I sent out from LA and pouring the
styrofoam peanuts around it, borrowing packing tape
from the front desk (where, behind the receptionists,
a stop-action film plays on the tv on the wall, of a
bed whose sheets rumple and unrumple, whose pillows
travel around on the comforter, whose comforter twists
and untwists; it’s all very boutique, you
understand). I stagger up the street to Houston, to
the FedEx place, sweating, because the sun’s
out, to send the hat-box bass drum back home.
We drive up to Times Square in the minibuses. There
are shamrocks everywhere, mostly as bunting across the
windows of Irish pubs. There are those livid green
foam-rubber Mad Hatter hats everywhere too and we toy
with the idea of getting eight of them and going on
stage with them, but that’s all we do –
toy.
The bus pulls up at the back entrance of the Nokia
Theater, where we’ve been met each night by
Jill, a sort of Heather Locklear doppelgänger,
with a bright face and flame-coloured hair, who runs
things backstage and who operates the industrial
effluent that’s supposed to be snow in
‘Fairy Tale of New York.’ She and another
guy hold the door open and we go down a dusty concrete
stairwell. Today, there’s a guy who appears to
be loitering near where the buses pull up. I
don’t know. I’m circumspect. (While we
were on our way to the Fleadh in 2002 and had to slow
down at an intersection in Finsbury in the
people-mover for a guy sidestepping across the street,
seemingly in the direction of our van, I pushed the
lock down on the passenger door and got laughed at for
my trouble, and by the fucking driver too.) So, I say
to this guy, who steps over as if he’s trying to
melt into our côterie.
‘I’m sorry,’ stop on the sidewalk in
order that he shouldn’t get any nearer the door
than I want him to be. ‘I don’t know
you.’
Turns out he works at the Nokia and was here to make
sure we got in without too much mither last night too.
There’s cabbage and corned beef for dinner.
After the soundcheck, with mostly everyone gone back
to the hotel, Darryl and I hang out in the dressing
room. I can’t be bothered to go all that way
back. I have Danielle pick up my suit. Darryl falls
asleep on one of the couches. I listen to the squawk
of walkie-talkies and the settling of ice in the
buckets, and Darryl’s snoring. Now and again,
the light inside the Red Bull fridge comes on, then
goes out. It’s kind of peaceful.
I go out, up to the balcony to watch William Elliott
Whitmore. He twitches a lot on stage, and sings out
and up, and stamps his foot on the floor. Someone in
the crowd shouts out: “Where’s Tom
Waits?” I can understand the question;
Will’s voice might share a characteristic or two
with Tom Waits’s, but Tom Waits’s schtick,
not really wanting to oversimplify, is Bukowski while
Will’s, it seems to me, is more Faulkner.
When everyone comes bqack, Ella and Nora go out into
the streets outside the Nokia Theater to film
paddywhackery. Ella comes back with a shamrock tattoo
– well, a drawing of one in green felt tip, on
the back of her hand.
The continuity of the DVD filming has gone to hell, of
course. The Gerry O’Boyle of New York (or is it
Nenagh?) has repossessed the green cap that Shane was
wearing yesterday. Today Shane’s wearing, right
shoulder to left hip, a broad, tricolour sash, and one
black glove. He’s also wearing, and has been
for the past couple of days, one of those rubber
bracelets that are de rigueur nowadays. I don’t
know what charity it supports, though I’ve been
looking as close as I can most nights on stage without
getting my eye poked out, but just can’t pick
out the lettering on it.
Shane lets loose a scream in ‘If I Should Fall
From Grace With God’ which empties his lungs and
distends his external jugulars and which, since
neither I, because of the fucking in-ear monitors, nor
Andrew, because he’s sitting at his drums next
to a head-level monitor, can escape, probes the very
centre of my head, not to mention Andrew’s, in a
way that I can only describe as cauterizing.
Afterwards, Andrew complains of ringing in his ears.
The introduction to ‘Sickbed of
Cuchulainn’ I’ve never had much to do for
a while, really, unless I have a sit on the drum-riser
and look as though I can hear what Spider sometimes
says into my ear. Tonight I’m bursting for a
piss. So, I duck out of my accordion straps and run
off to the bogs. Joey picks up the unusual activity
with his unusual activity sensors and despatches
himself to assist, in the holding open of doors and
generally keeping people out of the way. Except,
I’ve been for pisses before, and know the route,
and am generally fairly adept at opening doors, and in
the end, Joey just seems to get in my way, holding
open the dressing room door and unluckily standing
pretty much in the doorway.
‘Get out of the fucking way,’ I say to
Joey, a little intemporately.
‘I’m trying to help!’ he says.
‘Well you’re fucking not!’ I say.
Afterwards, in the dressing room, Shane says, in a
torpid sort of way, with overtones of protectiveness
toward Joey, who I’m sure can look after
himself:
‘So, you’ve got a feud with Joey?’ I
utter a few words that basically add up to
‘balderdash’ and thankfully the matter
stops there.
‘White City’s’ a hard one to know
when to stop playing. It goes round two lots of
three, at the end, since we tend to do such things in
threes. We all finish in a sort of standard coda
thing, but Andrew’s lost and goes crashing on
into a fourth third of the second lot of three, or the
first third of a third lot of three, depending on
which way you look at it.
I don’t know if it’s tonight, that,
throughout the coda at the end of
‘Fiesta,’ probably – if
‘coda’ doesn’t dignify the crashing
and walloping and wheezing too much – Shane
draws a tie or a belt-strap of some kind in any case
– round his neck and pulls it very tight, so
tight that his eyes bulge out and his veins swell and
his face turns dangerously puce.
I go down to find my guests in the Indonesianesque VIP
bar – red walls, that Balinese
carved-screen-thing everywhere and shit music.
It’s crowded down there. I hang around with
Kieran and Dermot, Eric and Christopher Quinn. Dermot
disappears for a while. I spot him over in the corner
in a tête-à-tête with Michaela
McCafferty who seems fairly eager to occupy as much as
she can the same physical space that Dermot does.
Back at the hotel, Danielle and I go off to see
who’s around in the neighbourhood bar,
Iggy’s or Ziggy’s, which has, since
we’ve been around, provided the odd lock-in, and
find a bunch of us in there, in the mirky rear, in a
booth. Marcia’s smoking. She says she’s
lit up ten cigarettes and has been asked to put out
two, so she says she’s not doing too badly.
Danielle, Nora and I go and have a cocktail in an
underlit cocktail bar somewhere nearby. The syrupy
and cloying cocktail I order I can’t finish. I
leave the two women in the cocktail bar and go back to
the hotel. Ross is outside the front doors, and I
think, oh, that’s nice, he’s making sure
everyone’s in their beds, counting us as we come
in, but I think he’s still on some kind of duty.
Now Nora has had to change her room,
apparently. Andrew climbed into the vast, grey resin
tub and let loose the shower head and flooded not just
his bathroom but Nora’s bathroom on the floor
below too.
I meet Gerry, our on-stage monitor engineer, outside
the hotel. He looks dead tired. He’s got his
family with him in New York. His six-year-old son woke
up at seven, needing to go to the top of the Empire
States Building today.
Nora meets Philip up at the Lincoln Center, to come
back down to Midtown for a tour of the Great White
Way, for part of the documentary. They drive around
the block in a cab four or five times, while Philip
points out noteworthy features, such as George M
Cohan’s statue (who, though he wrote
‘Yankee Doodle Boy’ with the lyric
‘born on the 4th of July,’ and whose
family insisted that that was George’s birthday,
was actually born on the 3rd – just something I
happen to know).
Spider says to me, ‘You know those gigs when
you’re in the fourth or fifth number and you
think, “Oh, I haven’t made a mistake
yet.”?’ I think I know what’s
coming. It’s a feature of I’d say pretty
much every musician’s, performer’s,
experience: when you think everything’s going
well and as soon as you think that, the next thing you
do is fuck up. But he goes on: ‘Well, as soon as
I thought that, I didn’t fuck up, and then later
I thought, “I’m still not making a
mistake!” and again the next thing I did was not
make a mistake, and for the rest of the gig I kept
thinking I haven’t fucked up, and by the end of
the gig I hadn’t fucked up at all!’ We
agree that tonight’s gig is one of the best
we’ve done.
A movement in the corner of my eye makes me look round
at Philip. I can’t remember what song this is,
but he’s holding his hat on as if something is
going to blow it off any minute.
Terry, in one of the songs – in ‘Body Of
An American’ I’m sure it is – takes
his fingers off the fingerboard of his cittern, hooks
his elbow back and gives the neck of his cittern a
shunt with the heel of his hand, at the point where
Shane sings: And to big Jim Dwyer/the man of wire/who
was often heard to say, and then goes back to his
shredding, and then gives his cittern another
jolt. It’s a thoroughly awe-inspiring thing to
see.
Shane has changed – I don’t think
permanently – the words to ‘Dirty Old
Town,’ to: I fucked my girl by the gasworks
wall.
A t-shirt is thrown onto the stage. Spider holds it up
to read the front of it. It reads:
‘Legalizetheirish.org’
‘You threw one of these up on stage last
night,’ he says into the microphone. ‘And
you wanted it back. We’re going to keep this
one.’
We send Darryl out by himself for the first of the
encores. That is, we hang back and let him make a fool
of himself, letting him think that we’ve all
accompanied him out onto the stage. But unfazed, he
says something charming into the mike, and then goes
up to the drum kit to start up ‘Star of the
County Down.’ Still we don’t come on, but
instead shout, ‘Toad! Toad!’ to him
because we want a drum solo. He can’t hear at
this distance, so we give up and go on.
I can’t remember when this first started, but
it’s such a wonderful thing to say, before Ella
comes on, when Spider goes up to the microphone:
‘I’d like you all to welcome a woman
we’ve known since she was an egg!’
When Shane sings the verse about Jaime Fearnley
drinking fifty gin and camparis (I remember the night,
but it was nowhere near fifty - possibly a quarter of
that, or slightly less) I go up to him and pretend
puzzlement. Then he sings, instead of ‘Y se
tendio para cerrarlos’: ‘He must be
counted among the emplazadas.’ These words, for
some reason, sound new to me tonight (though, in the
course of writing this, I’ve come across, again,
the video for ‘Fiesta’ and find that this
is the line he sings in the video), which means, as
far as I have been able to discover, that I must be
numbered among those who have been erected in the
municipal square. ‘Imprecadas,’ with a
hard ‘c,’ means ‘accursed.’
For a while, I think that might possibly have been his
intention, until I find out that the word
‘emplazados’ comes from Lorca’s
poem, ‘El Emplazado,’ which provided a
handful of the lyrics for ‘Fiesta’ (and
the words that are printed in the CD booklet, which he
doesn’t sing tonight), and which means
‘The Marked Man’.
In response, Spider garrottes me with a belt, or a
tie, I can’t see which, because he does it so
quickly, round my neck, tightens it and stage-hangs
me.
I would prefer to be commemorated in civic statuary.
Here’s a thing that’s always bothered me:
how does Philip do all that whirling in
‘Fiesta’ and not lose his balance and want
to go crashing into the backline afterwards, like I do
when I try to copy him?
At the end of ‘Fiesta,’ I’m lying on
the floor, while all manner of mayhem’s going on
around me, with Darryl pounding his bass with the
beer-tray and Jem squawking down his saxophone and
Andrew gone Elvin Jones. Spider comes across, kneels
next to me, gives me the last rites and closes my eyes
with his fingers.
Back in the dressing room afterwards, there are medics
for Shane. He sits on one of the couches like a
character from Heinrich Hoffman, his hair a matter of
lank shags hanging at his temples. He’s shagged
out. His eyes are closed. The medics approach,
gingerly, it looks to me.
‘Have you been drinking?’ is one of their
first questions.
‘Nah,’ says Shane. They put one of those
things onto the end of his finger, for his pulse, and
wrap the blood-pressure sleeve on. Whatever the
reading is, Sean Fay says, ‘That’s good
isn’t it?’
There’s what’s called a campfire for Joe
Strummer tonight, somewhere beneath the Brooklyn
Bridge, being an element of a film about Joe directed
by Julien Temple. I wish I felt more inclined to go,
because I’m not. I’m just too tired. My
bones ache; I’ve got a swelling on my forearm
where it presses against the bass-button end of the
accordion; my left biceps is beginning to give up on
me (but not yet to the extent it did, on one tour of
the US, years ago, when I was incapable of holding a
can of beer in my hand after a show); and, as it
always happens, but which is the least of my worries,
really, the depilatory rubbing of the bellows on my
left thigh has left a bald patch.
Anita Daly, our press-person (whose business card
I’ve glimpsed reads ‘niche
marketing’ and who has already been making
serious in-roads into the champagne, saying,
‘Oh, there’s plenty more where that came
from!’) guides into the dressing room Joaquin
Phoenix, with his sister Rain and her husband. I spot
Aaron Eckhardt (Thank You For Smoking) too, not really
knowing where to put himself, and Jonathan Rhys
Meyers, who does. Kitty gets to meet Joaquin Phoenix
who extends his hand to shake. Kitty experiences a
certain difficulty in letting it go.
Andrew tells me later that he was talking with Anita
Daly in the VIP room, when her attention was diverted
by a bald man in a suit passing by. She corraled him
and talked to him for twenty minutes or so about how
awesome, or some such, it was to watch him play the
accordion. The guy had no idea what she was talking
about of course, but couldn’t get a word in
edgeways, or away.
I ride back in the minivan to the hotel. Behind
Danielle and me sit Hazel and Sarah, Terry’s
daughters, who are in their twenties now. We talk
about the first time we met, in Kenmare, in June 1985
or 86, when the Pogues played the Cibeal there. They
were nobbut kids then and I invited them round to my
cottage for afternoon tea, which, I have in my head, I
served in a doll’s tea service.
I go and look for breakfast in the neighbourhood with
Danielle, but it’s hard to come by such a thing
this early, and on a Sunday too. She’s flying
off this morning back to Los Angeles, because she has
to set up the Book Fair at our youngest
daughter’s school. We find a dispiriting latte
somewhere and she gets in the car and leaves.
In the afternoon I walk up to the Village East Theater
to watch ‘Why We Fight,’ a film about how
Eisenhower’s warning in his farewell address to
the nation in 1961 about the military-industrial
complex. There is just a smattering of audience, and
watching it with them, I get the feeling that the
effect such a film should have is pretty much a
non-starter. I come out even more depleted than when
I went in, and on the third anniversary of the
invasion of Iraq too. On the way back I stop in at
Russ and Daughters on E Houston to lift my spirits
with a bialy with smoked salmon and cream cheese.
Russ and Daughters is fantastic, with shelves of
tinned fish and caviar, refridgerated displays of
gefilte fish and schmear, all the staff in their white
coats and a photographic portrait of Mark Russ
Federman, I’m thinking, the fourth generation of
Russes, and his family, not the original daughters, in
a frame behind the counter, in 70’s garb.
On the way up to the Nokia Theater in the minibus, I
admire Louise’s new jacket, which is leather and
covered in metal spikes.
‘Oh, fuck,’ Spider and Louise say then,
having realized, with a bit of panic at the prospect
of the botheration they’ll possibly come across
tomorrow at the airport, that they haven’t given
Jos the bullet belt they’ve bought too.
We have gifts from the Nokia Theater. They’re
stacked up in boxes against the wall in the dressing
room: mp3 players, radio/cd players. I wonder how
I’m going to get my swag into my luggage.
There’s a stack of posters to sign and Jem,
Darryl and I kneel in front of the sofa, fan them out,
and, for ease’s sake, put our monikers in the
same place on each one.
Backstage, before going on, with Marcia in the room
and the Pogues having changed into their suits and
gathered on and around one of the sofas for a
photograph for the Nokia Theater, I suppose I must
have some sense of the end of the tour, of the
prospect of relaxing, or just a sense of laxity, the
expression of which, in the act of sitting down on the
other purple sofa in the dressing, comes in the
unthinking release of a fart. I’m instantly
embarrassed to realize I’ve done such a thing,
but I don’t expect it to be the subject of such
analysis by Marcia who, in a manner of speaking, soon
has my fart squirming on the end of her inductive pin.
Jem has only one thing to say about my fart:
‘Embouchure.’
I can’t remember much about this particular gig.
I think Spider comes across at some point, to mop the
sweat from my head. Shane does his
bottle-balancing-on-his-head trick, to the delight of
the audience. When I look round again, the
bottle’s on the floor and the stage around him
flooded with zinfandel.
Shane dedicates ‘Rainy Night in Soho’ to
Victoria.
We start up into ‘The Irish Rover’ and
it’s not long before we realize that
Shane’s coming adrift with the timing. We edit
to compensate, but I think Andrew and Darryl become
marooned on the off-beat and can’t get back
(though Darryl is valiant in thumping his bass on all
the beats, hoping that Andrew can flip his drumming
back into synchrony). Shane’s far too gone, by
this time, though, and Andrew just gives up. Darryl
jacks the song in, too. And thereafter, so do Philip
and Terry and Jem, and then me. But Shane’s
still going, unaware that we’ve sawn the hole in
the floor under the song, and waiting for him to drop
through it. With as much respect as I can muster, and
– gentility is the word I’m thinking of,
I touch Shane on the arm to let him know the point
we’ve reached in the song. He’s still
singing away, and kind of looks at me the way a
racehorse might regard a competitor thundering level.
‘We’re going to try it again,’ I
say, wishing it hadn’t befallen me to break the
bad news, since he was going so strongly. He looks
round from the mic to confirm the truth of what
I’m saying. Andrew counts us in again. A few
of us exchange rictuses of grim hope.
To start up ‘Fiesta,’ Jem puts the
mouthpiece of his sax to his mouth and steps up to the
microphone stage-left. The dedicated light in the
truss above him shoots a wedge of light down, but it
catches pretty much nothing of him except a hair or
two on the top of his head, and falls in a rectangle
behind him. I encourage Darryl into this rectangle so
it won’t be wasted.
Afterwards I revisit the ‘Irish Rover’
experience with Shane, sitting next to him on one of
the couches in the dressing room.
‘I was doing all right,’ he says,
‘until you stopped me. I’m a fucking
musician. I would have brought it around.’
Backstage, tonight, there’s Kate Moss and Clive
Owens. I ask Kitty, (who is wearing a t-shirt from
Katz’s Deli, one of the neighbourhood food
emporiums), if she’s going to find it difficult
to let go of Clive Owens’s hand if she gets to
shake it. I watch Kitty and Ella and Sarah and Hazel
Woods and Clive Owens talking in a group in the middle
of the dressing room, while I sign the Nokia Theater
guest book and waggishly swap around the Post-it Notes
in it that say which band is which. Clive Owens is
wearing a sumptuous leather coat which expresses its
extravagance by means of its apparent lack of
tailoring and, somehow, too, by its mindfulness of the
animal it came from. Kate Moss is wearing a blue
shirt over a black long-sleeved tee and a short silk
skirt, black tights and boots. The soot round her
eyes is pretty much Bardotien.
This is all in contrast to Terry’s clothing
which, because he hasn’t found the time to do
any washing, consists of what Jos hasn’t got
round to wearing on this tour yet.
‘And I’m wearing his underpants,’ he
says.
When Kate Moss comes into the room, there’s, of
course, a frisson and, around her, a sort of bubble
that disables you from either ignoring her or saying
hello. Shane, from the couch, shouts out:
‘Someone get her a drink!’
He looks at me, who happen to be closest to both Kate
Moss and the table with the drinks on it, with
something resembling angry paternal correction in his
eyes. ‘Someone get her a fucking drink!’
‘Fuck off,’ I say to him. ‘Kate can
get her own fucking drink.’ It sounds harsh, I
know, but I figure Kate’s grown-up enough to get
her own refreshments.
After a while, while I’m sitting next to Andrew
and Nora on the other couch, Moss steps over
Shane’s legs, to come and perch on the arm of
the sofa, by Victoria.
‘Well, hello. And how are ye?’ she says
in a delightful Irish accent.
Down in the VIP room, I meet Wilson Milam who’s
directing The Lieutenant of Inishmore (as well as
having directed a Dr Who episode a couple of years
ago), backstage. He was there the night, back in July
1986, when Aidan Quinn lead us all out of, what was
it, the Vic Theater? to a bar somewhere first,
‘to lose a few people’, and after that to
a club called Holstein’s where we were to meet
up with Waits after his evening performance of
Frank’s Wild Years, the matinée of which
we’d all attended (Scully’s bootleg
recording in the row in front of me ruined by my
laughing: ‘Oh, Tom. Tom. Oh. Ha ha!’
that kind of thing). Wilson tells me that the cast
had gone around for days afterwards whistling and
humming the theme from ‘Exodus’, after
I’d put my hand up to Waits’s question:
‘Anyone have anything?’ and had walked
down to the front, to sit in front of the piano not
having a clue what to do, and then going into Elmer
Bernstein’s melody, to discover how boring it
seemed to have become after a couple of rounds, and so
making it, by way of compensation, a tango. When I
got back to my table, where I’d been sitting
with Terry Woods, Terry was dabbing tears from his
cheeks.
In the VIP room, too, is Martin MacDonough, who wants
to see Philip, who has invited the cast of ‘The
Lieutenant of Inishmore’ to the show tonight. I
go back up to the dressing room to find Philip but he
is long gone.
In the VIP room, too, are DzM, whom I’ve spotted
night after night plying the stage-apron with his
camera, and Carmen, who has been to all four nights of
our shows at the Nokia Theater. I hang out for a
while with them, and then fall into a conversation
with a couple – one American, the other a guy
from Stuttgart – whom the Pogues’ music,
though they’d never seen us live, until tonight,
brought together – I can’t remember when
they said that was – fifteen or so years ago?
I’ve already packed everything, and managed to
get the cdplayer/radio into my suitcase. I have
breakfast in the room because I know nothing’s
going to be open out there this early. I don’t
see anyone around while I check out and pick up my
accordion from the concierge. It’s not long
before I’m at JFK and checked in.
As it turns out, Alan Alda is on the same plane to Los
Angeles as myself, but up in first class. I take a
second or two to wonder how many degrees of separation
there might be between myself and Alan Alda, but
it’s not until I get home that I discover there
are three whichever way I look at it: from Alda, who
plays Senator Vinick on ‘The West Wing,’
to Alison Janney, who plays C.J. and who also
frequents my mother-in-law’s bookstore in Studio
City and has become quite friendly, to my
mother-in-law, to me. Another route I could take
would be from Alda to Jamie Farr, who played Corporal
Sergeant Klinger in ‘M*A*S*H’ and who also
played Colonel Frierick in the 1986 made-for-tv movie
‘Combat High,’ to my father-in-law who
produced ‘Combat High,’ to me. Another
route I could take, but can’t yet, would be from
Alda to Rob Lowe, who resumes his role as Sam Seaborn
in ‘The West Wing’ on April 23rd, to his
brother Chad Lowe, who appeared with Danielle, my
wife, in a film called ‘Acceptable Risk,’
to me – a total of four degrees of separation.
It has been suggested to me that there might be a
fourth route: Alda, to Rob Lowe (come the ‘West
Wing’ reunion) who hosted Saturday Night Live on
St Patrick’s Day 1990, the day the Pogues
performed on it, to me, which would make it two
degrees of separation – but I didn’t
actually get to talk to Lowe that day. The most I did
was stand in a line with all of us and him for a
photo-shoot. The rules that define degrees of
separation – i.e. that meaningful social
congress must have taken place – have been set
by my wife. Philip was the only one to engage Lowe in
meaningful conversation that day. So, whichever way I
look at it, it’s still three degrees.
It’s taken me as long, well, longer, to write
this, as it has for Shane to get back to England. He
stayed on at the hotel in New York for another three
weeks, with the ‘do not disturb’ sign up
on the door the entire time, which, apparently, and oh
my god, the hotel staff took seriously.
My daughters chase me down the street again and I have
to ask the cab-driver to step on it a bit otherwise
they’d run alongside the cab all the way to LAX.
This year, my family’s not following me out to
London when the kids break up from school, so
it’s going to be a long time away from them
– not that even if I were just going away for
the weekend they wouldn’t sprint down the
sidewalk after the cab.
I watch An Inconvenient Truth on the plane –
along with a splendidly middle-class woman nearby,
whose husband, almost predictably, is watching The
Sentinel. There’s another woman further down
the plane watching An Inconvenient Truth too and
I’m beginning to think it might well be a girlie
film.
The film, by the end, makes one so regretful for, on
Gore’s graph, the point at which the wiggly
line starts to incline abruptly, but particularly for
the past six years of Bush administration.
And then I watch an episode of what I suppose is the
new Doctor Who, which is as fun as anything – as
fun, easily, as Tom Baker’s practice, and there
couldn’t be a more perfect girl assistant than
Billie Piper, except for maybe (I say maybe, after
viewing a photograph of her naked, straddling a Dalek)
Katy Manning. I sleep for a bit, wake up to find that
I’d moved my watch four hours the wrong way and
get all miserable until I work it out.
My luggage – suitcase and accordion – are
more or less first onto the carrousel. On the way out
– and through the ridiculous duty-free shop just
beyond the customs u-bend at Heathrow – I
can’t help looking about the people waiting to
meet people, to see if Ross has posted a driver to
pick me up from the airport, even though I remember
saying I wouldn’t want one.
I’ve got an upgrade voucher for Heathrow
Express, but I find myself at the wrong end of the
platform and don’t feel like running with
suitcase and accordion in tow all the way down to the
other end. And it’s only fifteen minutes and
there’s hardly anyone on the train in any case.
Paddington station’s all wintry and the ironwork
the colour of iodine, but London’s not as cold
as I’d thought. My cabbie is the same age as I
am, and he’s listening to Al Bowlly. He hands
me a four-disc set to have a look at and we talk about
the music our fathers used to listen to: his, Al
Bowlly, obviously, among others; mine, Jeannette
MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, among others. We go on to
talk about music otherwise, the usual suspects: Neil
Young, the Allman Brothers, Nils Lofgren among them,
the latter he went to see at the Rainbow and
Hammersmith Odeon and such. And then, when he finds
out that I’m the squeeze-box player in the
Pogues, he has to phone his friend who was supposed to
have gone out with Shane’s sister in 1994. His
friend, on the phone, says it wasn’t
Shane’s sister but his cousin, but I’m
dubious, because Shane has gone through his life
engendering cousins, or cousins seem be engendered by
the fact that Shane exists.
We go along Marylebone Road where I remember cycling
back to Mornington Crescent, where I was living, from
a pub, thrilled that cycling when you’re pissed
out of your brains should be so easy and, to me at the
time, safer than driving a car, until I came to a stop
at traffic lights by the park and keeled over onto the
pavement.
They’ve done over the hotel the out-of-towners
stay in since I stayed here last – not the
lobby, where I remember seeing Shane, when we played
the Fleadh a few years ago, stationed by the lifts at
a table, crowded with bottles, smoking and scribbling,
first thing in the morning, and it’s not so bad.
Gone are your floral bedspreads and pastel coloured
walls and those botanical prints – it’s
now swiss coffee and photographs of architectural
details and a sort of runner over the foot of the
bedspread.
In the room ring Spider and Jem and Darryl. I was
going to go down to where Andrew is playing with the
hKippers but then Jem is on his way back from yet
another tweak of his hole in the ground and is going
to order in curry and watch Manchester United against
Portugal. So I give the hKippers a swerve and have a
beer in the hotel bar and get a cab over to Kentish
Town.
Marcia’s wearing some sort of safari jacket with
a plethora of pockets. Jem and Marcia doing their
house up, at least what might have been the bedroom on
the second floor. There’s a smell of paint.
There’s a string of lights up the banister. A
venetian blind is gone from the living room window at
the back. The curry comes and we drink wine and then
go and sit in front of the telly to watch the match,
while Marcia’s on the phone with a friend.
I hang around for a while afterwards and talk with
Marcia about Paul Scully and why he’s not on
tour with us this time. Jem gets up to put on a record
by Moondog, whom I haven’t heard in thirty years
or something. And then it’s not long before
I’m all jet-lagged and it’s time for me to
go home.
When I get back to the hotel, a guy gets into the lift
wearing a corduroy suit, shirt and tie. He has that
sort of varsity oarsman physique and the haircut to
match.
When I get to my room, I give my teeth a good flossing
and brushing and a poke around with what’s
called, on the packet, a Go-Betweener. I’ve got
jaw surgery after Christmas because my bone loss is
getting out of hand.
I walk down Upper Street to catch a bus to High
Holborn and pass a restaurant with dead plants in the
window. The bus ticket machine swallows my first
three fifty p bits, and then a second lot, and no
ticket. A woman comes up and loses one pound fifty
too. Soon there’s a woman in a uniform
who’s prodding about in the place where the
tickets are supposed to come out with a biro.
It’s not a matter for Transport for London. The
machines are operated by a private company, so she
can’t help us. I take down the phone number of
the company and the number on the machine and walk
down to the Angel to get the tube.
In Covent Garden, I’m outside Urban Outfitters
(gift certificates for the nieces, you understand) and
the sky goes black and rain pelts the cobbles. I have
to step into Diesel out of the wind and rain to wait
for it to pass.
When I get back to the Angel, I see that the wind has
blown over potted trees on Upper St and dumped all the
dirt out of them onto the pavement. A couple of signs
on rubberized concertina stands have been blown flat
onto the flagstones.
‘Doors closing’ announces the voice the
lift, uncannily in time with the 21st century
equivalent of Muzak from the lobby.
I get a cab up to the rehearsal rooms near Pentonville
Prison. The driver asks, did I hear about the tornado
that came down Kensal Rise, ripped up trees, blew down
a wall or two and flipped a couple of cars? That
would account for the slashing rain and darkened sky
and the felled potted plants on Upper Street.
I walk into the rehearsal room to find Terry over by
his amp, with his winter coat over the back of the
chair he’s sitting on, and the room full of big
black flight cases and coils of multicore. I have to
work my way around all this stuff to hug Terry hello.
Thereafter, everyone comes in in dribs and drabs in
the course of a couple of hours. This first day is
not really a rehearsal. Jem’s already dropped
his gear off and gone. I’ve arranged with
Darryl to meet him there at two. We don’t see
Philip.
I notice, on top of Terry’s amp, a large box of
fuses and suggest, with that amount of fuses, he might
think about a fire-extinguisher too. I remember when
we alternated headlining gigs with the Violent Femmes
in whatever year that was. Terry’s amp worked
off a transformer that was flown over with us. Half
way through one of the shows, Terry became obscured by
dense, acrid smoke pouring out from behind his amp.
On the top of his amp, I can see his little pouch of
picks which goes with him everywhere, and his glasses
case.
My new accordion is here. It’s come to me by
way of Germany, to a town just outside Caerphilly,
where Hohner UK is, to Lewisham, to North London.
It’s lovely, sleek and black, with a grille of
parallel steel strips and a sort of bellows guard at
the back, and a couple of curious metal strap loops
situated behind the keyboard which baffle me and, when
I put it on, dig into my ribs. And it’s heavy.
When I told Emilio Allodi (my first accordion I bought
from his dad on Blackstock Road; Emilio took the
business over and set it up in Lewisham) that I was
going to get a Morino the intonation in his voice when
he said, ‘Heavy’, seemed to go some way to
indicate a foolhardiness on my part. A |
