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 Ki |
