Eleven

We had been trying to rouse Shane from his second-floor flat for easily half an hour. We’d touched together the wires sticking out of the frame of his front door. We’d shouted up. In the end I reached in through the railings of the Holy Cross Church, scooped up a handful of gravel and threw it across Shane’s windows. He snatched open the casement and stuck his head out.

‘ALL FUCKING RIGHT!’

Another half an hour later Shane came down swinging a filthy bag which clanked with bottles. We slid the door of the van open for him and made room.

‘All right?’ he said.

It was the last week of September. We were on our way to the first gig of our tour supporting Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Our first single with Stiff Records, ‘The Boys from the County Hell’, was about to come out, though we had had to stomach the record company’s insistence that we edit out half of Jem’s banjo introduction. We had our own merchandise: a T-shirt and a beer mat with a line from the song – ‘Lend me ten pounds and I’ll buy you a drink’ – on the back; a miniature bar mirror; a lacquered shillelagh.

*

The first gig was in Belfast. Our gear had gone ahead in one of Costello’s trucks. Darryl had rented a passenger van – a white Iveco Daily with, unaccountably, an orange stripe down the side. We had three hundred miles to drive to Holyhead to catch the ferry. Darryl was anxious about the time.

As we set off Darryl pushed a tape into the van’s machine. A banjo and an accordion warbling with musette tuning started to play a jig backed by clicking spoons and a country bass-line. Cait, as soon as she heard the introduction, knew what it was.

‘Brendan!’ she shouted.

I’m a páidín

From Tullabhadín

I didn’t know what a páidín was, nor where Tullabhadín might be found. The singer was a guy called Brendan Shine. I didn’t know anything about him either. From the ironic fuss Cait made about the song I supposed he might be the Irish counterpart to Rolf Harris. His phrasing was heavy with elaborate h’s before many of the syllables. All the a vowels were exaggeratedly flattened. The song was a kind of personal ad: Fifty-year-old man, called Dan, ‘with money and acres of land’, enjoys music and ‘the craic’, seeks ‘a honey’ with ‘a bit of money’.

In the past couple of years, I’d heard the word ‘craic’ a lot, the words ‘awful’ and ‘mighty’ as emphasis, and the substitution of ‘my’ by ‘me’, too. As I listened to the song, the phrase ‘sure I’m your man’ started to annoy the fuck out of me.

When it came to saying anything at all about the Irish, I hadn’t a leg to stand on. My experience of the Irish was scant. My English upbringing resulted in my regarding them as, at best, figures of fun or, at worst, in the climate of the Troubles, agents of death and destruction. The little experience of Irish people I had, had come from working on building sites with men my father called ‘navvies’, whom he dismissed as feckless, universally stupid and, more often than not, drunk. Otherwise, what I knew about the Irish and Ireland had come mostly from books. At school I’d read Wilde, Shaw, Beckett and Yeats and had struggled with the fact that the former two weren’t English. On one of my visits to Shane’s flat on Cromer Street, he had lent me a couple of Flann O’Brien’s books, The Best of Myles and An Béal Bocht, and told me to read The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds.

In the books, the comical archetype of the Irish seemed only to confirm my father’s judgement of them, until I came to see that the butt of the joke was not actually the Irish themselves, but people like my dad who were too witless to get it.

‘That song degrades the Irish,’ I said when the song had finished, hoping to typify the sententious northerner to the same degree that Brendan Shine’s Dan typified the rural Irishman.

Spider honked in disbelief. Shane and Cait told me to fuck off. Jem simply sighed, ‘James.’

As hard as Darryl drove to make up for our late departure, when the ferry terminal at Holyhead came into view we saw, out beyond the grey rim of the Irish Sea, the mauve smudge of smoke from the stack of the ferry we were supposed to have been on. We said nothing about how we had had to wait outside Shane’s flat. Instead Darryl left us in the van and hurried across to the terminal. In fifteen minutes he was back with the news that we could use our Sealink tickets on a B&I ferry leaving in forty minutes.

I’d never been to Ireland before. I had never been on tour before. I went up on deck and leant on the rail to await the spasm of the screws starting. As the ferry cleared the breakwater and the lighthouse, salty hair-stiffening blasts gusted off the Irish Sea. In the stern, the Welsh coast narrowed to a dark thread, slubbed with hills.

In Belfast, helicopters floated clattering against the vivid bracken of the Black Mountain rising up beyond the fringes of the city. Armoured Land Rovers with louvred steel windows and mesh aprons crept through the streets. Security cameras craned from the corner of every building.

Our route from the ferry terminal took us through neighbourhoods of coloured kerbstones and painted gable-ends. The red, white and blue, the Protestant Red Hands of Ulster, the St George’s Crosses, the initials UVF gave way to depictions of Bobby Sands, men in black balaclavas and the Ulster, Munster, Connaught and Leinster flags. Shane was in a ferment about driving through a Nationalist area in a vehicle not just with British licence plates, but also one with a broad orange stripe down the side.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Shane said. ‘We’ll get killed.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ I said.

‘What? What!?’ he screeched. ‘What the fuck do you know? You English cunt!’

In the van on the way up to Holyhead, Shane had pointed out that the colours of my lumberjack shirt were those of the Union Jack. I hadn’t given much thought to it when I’d got dressed that morning. It was one of only two shirts I had. The other was white.

‘And your accent,’ he had said.

‘What about my accent?’

‘What you mean what about your accent!?’ Shane said. ‘The squaddies, in Belfast – the occupying force – are all guys from fucking Yorkshire and Lancashire. They hear an accent like yours in – in West Belfast – you’re fucking well dead!’

‘They’ll kneecap you down an alleyway,’ Spider said.

Darryl nosed the van through the security checkpoint of the Europa Hotel, according to Andrew the most bombed hotel in Europe. The concrete and glass frontage was severe, angled into a shallow chevron. The hotel was surrounded by razor-wire.

The following day we had an interview and photo shoot for an English music paper in the Crown Liquor Saloon opposite the hotel.

‘Just keep your fucking voice down,’ Shane said to me as we left the security gate and crossed the road. ‘If anyone asks you what religion you are,’ Shane said, ‘well – just don’t talk to anybody.’

The Crown was an oppressively Victorian gin palace with stained-glass windows, a tiled floor and a moulded ceiling the colour of blood. After the interview we fell into talking with a couple of men who wanted to know who we were, what we were famous for. So much had Shane’s protectiveness got to me that I dreaded them asking about me. I kept my mouth shut and made sure to keep my coat closed up to my neck for fear they would see the red, white and blue of my shirt. Whatever social adeptness I thought I had, deserted me.

We showed up at the Ulster Hall around the time we’d been told to and mustered our gear in the centre of the floor of the auditorium. The hall was huge, with a balustraded balcony, huge windows and chandeliers. Behind the stage towered the ranks of pipes of an organ. We sat around waiting for our turn to go up onto the stage to do our sound check while Costello did his. We disdained his prerogative as the headliner, the time he took over his sound check commensurate with his sense of self-​importance.

I’d been taken to see Costello at the Nashville Rooms on Cromwell Road in London in 1977. When he came out onto the stage, the pigeon-toed testy nerd in Buddy Holly glasses, wearing jeans with deep turn-ups, turned into an apoplectic scourge – agitated, impatient, spleenful. His veins swelled at his temples and a ridge formed down the centre of his forehead.

At his sound check at the Ulster Hall, Costello looked like just another guy in blazer, jeans and specs making a living. We scoffed at his puffery when he went back to his hotel after he’d finished.

When it came to our sound check, we were confused as to how it was all supposed to work. There was a chaos of cables and boxes and activity. Space seemed reluctantly to be made for us. Darryl wheeled out our gear and arranged it around the stage, liaising with whomever of Costello’s crew he could get to lend a hand. We got our instruments out and then stood around waiting to be told what to do. The feeling that we were a nuisance was made worse by the implicit requirement to be grateful to Costello for bringing us on the road in the first place, and to his crew for bringing our gear on the truck.

Despite all the gigs he’d done, Shane had never come to understand that the guy behind the desk in the wings controlled the sound on stage. Shane directed all his requirements to the front-of-house engineer in his barriered pen in the auditorium. He was a fat, balding guy with a red face whom everybody called the Bishop.

‘Don’t talk to me!’ the Bishop laughed from the desk, inviting his crew to laugh at us too. ‘Talk to your guy!’ he shouted. He waded out of his enclosure crying out ‘Dinner!’ and wafted his crew towards backstage, leaving only a guy called Flakey to look after us. Flakey was our guy and we drank up his kindness as he nodded us through our instrument checks from his desk.

Wearing our cherished duster coats, we strode out onto the stage in front of half an acre of faces, upturned at the front but thinning out abruptly the further away they stretched from the stage lights. We crashed through our short set. The half-hour we had been allotted hurtled past, strewn with such crises as Jem snagging on the introduction to ‘Boys from the County Hell’, my left hand failing to keep up with the rhythm of ‘Dingle Regatta’ on the accordion buttons. The hall boomed with reverberation. Spider bent a beer tray in half against his head. As the end of the chorus of ‘Streams of Whiskey’ came up we all stepped back from the line of microphones as one, to play the instrumental section. And then it was over and we went back to our dressing room, laughing. We wrenched off our duster coats, complained about how little beer there was to drink and went out to find a pub.

*

The next show was in Galway. Darryl drove with his arm resting confidently in the open window, his hair blown by the wind, occasionally swapping hands to pat the passenger seat next to him to confirm that he had everything he needed – tapes, papers, maps, fags. Jem sat with the Office on the seat next to him. The Office was a Crawford’s shortbread tin. It contained a notebook, a pencil, receipts and all the money we had – a meagre float from Stiff Records as tour support, to which we would add the £50 a night we were being paid to play on Costello’s tour. Shane sat looking devoutly out of the window at the Irish countryside. Overgrown yellow-flecked hedges crowded lush fields. An estuary, still as a mirror, reflected reed banks and swans. Plaits of ivy strangled stands of twisted oaks.

We drove through towns with such names as Gubaveeney, Corraquigly, Sheskinacurry, Drumshanbo, Ballinaboy, Knocknafushoga, Cloonsheeva. Andrew repeated them in his liquid basso profundo as the van passed the signs. Without disdain of my ignorance, Shane told me about the Anglicisation of Ireland, dating from the earliest plantations in the 1500s, and the renaming of villages. At best, he told me, the Irish place names were translated into English. Failing translation, they swapped syllable for syllable, phoneme for phoneme, Gaelic for English. If the conglomerations of surds and diphthongs stumped them, or if they just felt like it, they gave the town a new name altogether.

I was ashamed to know so little. My upbringing seemed to doom me never to know enough. I had been a dunce at history at school. In the rubble of my comprehension of English history stood a pillar maintaining that Oliver Cromwell had single-handedly invented parliamentary government by means of vanquishing the foppish and florid, and above all Catholic, Charles I. Before forty-eight hours had elapsed in the minivan in Shane’s company – and in Spider’s and Darryl’s, neither of whom was a slouch when it came to history – I discovered Cromwell to be a murderer who laid waste to a town called Drogheda in 1649, killing 3,500 of its inhabitants, before going on to do the same in Wexford. I hadn’t known about this other side of the Lord Protector. My oblivion seemed tantamount to condonement. Privately, I claimed immunity from my inherited responsibility for Cromwell’s binge-killing by the fact that, when I came across his death mask on a trip to Warwick Castle when I was fourteen, I thought he looked like a shithead.

When we got to Galway we were told that one of our flight cases had been left in Belfast. Costello’s crew had brought instead a case belonging to the Ulster Orchestra. It was full of woodwind. The Attractions lent us some of their equipment – a bass for Cait and one of Costello’s acoustic guitars for Shane. The Attractions didn’t have a banjo. The crew offered Jem a turquoise electric guitar from Costello’s collection. During the gig, if he didn’t know the chords, Jem turned the volume off and strummed away as if he did.

Each day we listened to Darryl’s tape, over and over. We never tired of hearing the Jolly Beggarmen, the Dubliners and the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. They sang hearty songs, which were full of appetite, thirst and lust and which generally ended up in a fight. Though beer and whiskey flew, noses got broken and gobs belted, though shillelagh law became all the rage, nobody really got hurt. In ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, the corpse even came back to life.

We listened to reels and jigs and slides, played for the most part by the Bothy Band whose melodies hurtled round in a seemingly endless train of notes. The uilleann pipes, flute, fiddle and whistle locked together, though now and again one would brim over the others with a brief line of harmony. Against the acoustic guitar which slung the rhythm forward, the bucolic and Arcadian sound of the flute brought to mind a country of fields and tilth and hills and livestock. When the uilleann pipes struck up, the sound conjured flights of waterfowl, rushes, water and clouds. The bouzouki fanned the fen with an almost Mediterranean wind. The fiddle struck in and superimposed imagery that was American, hoisting up shameless harmonies.

The Bothy Band meshed with our van journey as we passed lakes and rising fell-flanks. The landscape was rough, overgrown and brutal. Spider lifted his face and crowed to the ceiling of the van.

On our way to Dublin we sang along with the Dubliners.

And we’re all off to Dublin in the green, in the green

Where the helmets glisten in the sun

Where the bayonets flash and the rifles crash

To the rattle of a Thompson gun.

We drove down O’Connell Street on our way to our hotel on Ormond Quay. Shane pointed out the bullet holes in the fluted columns in front of the Post Office, from the Easter Rising in 1916.

‘Oifig an Phoist,’ Andrew said in stentorian tones.

‘Oi’m figgan poissed too!’ Spider said.

At the National Stadium, the corridor and dressing rooms were hushed. Costello, we were told, had come down with laryngitis and was going to pull the gig. We rolled our eyes ceilingward and shrank into our dressing room – a cubicle with a heater up on the wall – to wait and see what was going to happen next.

Shane had been complaining about his throat. We never let him pull out of a gig. It became a regular occurrence to see him buckling over in the dressing room, coughing explosively in an effort to hawk up whatever the obstruction was. Increasingly, he resorted to jets of Chloraseptic which he would get as close to his vocal cords as possible by craning his head forward to the nozzle. He extended his neck as if to protect his filthy clothes. After thumbing the doings down, he doubled over, retching and gagging. When he’d finished and wiped his nose the length of his forearm, blinking and teary, he looked woundedly across at us, as if the victim of an affront. We implored him to rest his voice, but it was never long before he started up shouting with Spider, trading outrages, braying with laughter, before we went up on stage.

In the end, when word came that Costello had changed his mind and the gig was going to go ahead, we derided him for his capriciousness.

We left the fields and abundant hedgerows of Ireland for the combed stubble of English hayfields. We stopped at roadside pubs and off-licences and loaded up with beer and whiskey. I sat with my knees up on the back of the seat in front. The open window of the minivan blew tears into my eyes. The autumn sunlight shone across the fields, gilding the hedgerows and the trees. I clutched a bottle of duty-free Powers by the neck, tasting the fields and peat-water in it. We hooted at the ructions at Tim Finnegan’s wake. We hollered at the braiding of the pipes and the fiddle and the flute. We huzzahed when Andrew had learnt the words to the Clancy Brothers’ and Tommy Makem’s ‘Courtin’ in the Kitchen’, singing, in his tremulous bass voice, chin down, Adam’s apple low:

Come single belle and beau

Unto me now pay attention

Don’t ever fall in love

For it’s the Devil’s own invention

There were a couple of occasions which threatened us with expulsion from the tour. Fed up with the Bishop’s ill-treatment, we ambushed him in a corridor on his way to catering and backed him up against the wall. I was scared we might have overdone it. He was tiny. His belligerence evaporated. His cries of ‘Dinner!’ ended.

In St Austell, on his way back from the beach, Jem filled the pockets of his duster coat with sand. He cut a tiny hole in each pocket to let it trickle out while he was playing. He had hoped to leave two tidy mounds to mark where he had been standing. After the usual commotion of the changeover between our set and Costello’s, Steve Nieve, the Attractions’ keyboard player, was furious to find the sand had gritted his organ pedals.

It was a couple of weeks before Guy Fawkes Night that we spent the morning drinking Centenary and Bismarck port in Yates’s Wine Lodge in Nottingham. Spider and I bought a bottle each for the drive. By the time we got to the University, we’d loaded up with Brock’s bangers from a newsagent’s and I was villainously drunk. Spider and I sowed the bangers about the room. After threats of expulsion, at the Hammersmith Palais we eventually came clean to the promoters about the scorch-marks we left behind. We had to shell out £40 from the Crawford’s shortbread tin.

It became obvious that there was something going on between Cait and Costello. She had started to call Costello ‘Brian’ when they passed one another backstage or if they should come across one another in catering. In return, he had begun to call her ‘Beryl’.

It had made us laugh to give ourselves the names of characters from ‘The Bash Street Kids’ in The Beano. Jem was Biffo the Bear, Spider Roger the Dodger. I was Lord Snooty. Shane was Plug. We had chosen Minnie the Minx for Cait, but Elvis’s choice of Beryl – from Beryl the Peril, a character in The Topper – was the one she wanted to stick.

‘Who the fuck is Brian?’ we asked. Cait giggled girlishly and covered her mouth. ‘He’s Brian – the snail!’ she said. ‘From The Magic Roundabout! He’s all cute and defenceless and everything.’

Underlying the banality, there was a needfulness about her which looked like it wouldn’t tolerate mockery.

A hazard in the glancing flirtation between Brian and Beryl came with the arrival of Bebe Buell, model and Playmate, with whom Costello, separated from his wife, had been having what had been described in the papers as a ‘tempestuous’ affair. She showed up at the Apollo in Oxford. I came in from the minibus after Costello’s show, to see Buell and Costello in the hotel bar. They were sitting on stools on the far side of the room away from the rest of the Attractions and crew. Costello was in his suit, leaning with one arm on the bar. She wore a knitted beret. There was an atmosphere of exclusivity and implicit danger about the place.

The following day at Portsmouth Guildhall, a change seemed to have come over Cait. Displaced from Elvis’s court, she rejoined us, wanting to be one of the boys again and full of an exile’s self-righteousness. Up in our dressing room after the gig, she began to hurl empties out of the window. They exploded on the ground where Costello’s crew was loading out. When we heard the sound of boots stamping up the stairs and loud shouts, Cait knocked off the bottom of a bottle of wine against the wall. She brandished what was left by the neck and waited for whoever was coming up the stairs. Before they got to our dressing room, Andrew managed to wrestle the broken bottle from her and hid it behind his back.

A couple of roadies and a driver appeared puffing and indignant in the doorway. We faced them down with a unanimous and impregnable denial that we knew what the fuck they were talking about.

The wheel of Costello and Cait’s relationship soon recovered from the poked stick of Bebe Buell’s appearance. I came across Brian and Beryl in the lobby of the hotel in Leeds before going out to the University for our show. The two of them sat in intimately uncomfortable positions, knees, thighs, elbows, shoulders touching, a notebook open somehow on Costello’s lap. When I sat in the armchair opposite, Costello looked across at me, lofting the quizzical eyebrows above his heavy-rimmed glasses framing tired but serene eyes.

Between Leeds and Newcastle we had a day off. We took our time setting out. It was already the afternoon by the time we pulled up for lunch at the Three Horse Shoes in Boroughbridge and filed into the pinched front parlour for beer and steak and kidney pie.

By the time we left, it was dark and we were drunk. We bought carry-out for the drive to Newcastle. The pints seemed to have loosened Andrew’s face and cast his eyebrows adrift. Shane hobbled to the sliding door.

Once we were on our way, on a whim, Darryl ducked off the A1 and into the North Yorkshire Moors. Through the windows, but for the headlights frosting the road ahead, the sections of dry-stone wall and the verge of heath, it was pitch dark.

In the van in the blackness, Shane muttered something about feeling shit.

‘You drink too much!’ Andrew shouted, laughing at the back of Shane’s head. ‘If you gave up drinking! Or at least moderated it a bit!’

Shane sat with his arms folded across his stomach, his face turned to the window.

The month of touring had been hard on all of us but harder on Shane. We hadn’t slept much, sometimes three to a room, in bed-and-breakfasts. We’d all been drinking a lot, staying out. The hours Shane kept, though, were yet more adrift. Though the tour production laid on catering, we were lucky to get any food. Shane hardly seemed to eat anything but kaolin and morphine, which formed a crust around his mouth and caked the front of his coat. Every day Shane brought a bag clanking with bottles onto the minivan.

His throat was already a chronic grievance. Now his guts were troubling him. His carriage had become careful and hunched in protection of his ailing stomach. On some days, his defenceless eyes stared out from the pallor of his face.

‘Oh, I do worry about him,’ my mother had said after our show in Manchester. ‘If I could only have him for a while, if I could have him home, and give him a good meal, and a bed, just for a while.’

Her eyes had filled with tears which she tried to blink away.

In the van, we all started to chide him.

‘No fucking wonder your voice’s shot and your stomach’s ruined.’

‘We worry about you!’ Spider shouted. ‘Can’t you see?’

‘Fuck off!’ Shane said.

‘Stop the bus!’ Jem yelled. ‘Stop the bus. I can’t stand this any more. It’s all just so fucking stupid. Let me off.’

‘We’re in the middle of the moors,’ Darryl said.

‘I don’t care!’ Jem said. ‘I’m getting off. Stop the fucking bus.’

Darryl drew up by the roadside. We remonstrated with Jem in the doorway, but he wrenched the sliding door closed behind him and disappeared.

A couple of moments later, Spider clambered down the bus and climbed out.

‘I’m getting off too!’ Spider said. He vanished into the darkness.

‘Oh fuck,’ Darryl said.

We sat there for a minute not knowing what to do. Shane sniffed and brought a bottle to his mouth. Darryl started up, drove down the road, rounded a corner and pulled in to the side a quarter of a mile further on. He shut down the engine. I got out.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to run off.’

The moor tops were barely visible under the night sky. There was an orange dinge above Middlesbrough beyond the horizon to the north. Until Darryl set the hazard lights going to let them both see where the van was, the separate masses of Andrew’s anger, Shane’s intransigence and Spider and Jem’s disappearances combined and intensified in the pitch dark until I thought my head would crack.

Spider came scrambling up the bank, out of breath. Ten minutes later, there was a knock on the side of the van. We slid the door open. Jem got in.

‘And in a tradition that was to become time-honoured,’ Spider said, ‘they rejoined the group.’ Shane wheezed with mirth. We drove the rest of the way to Newcastle in silence.

Though Costello was going on to play a couple of shows in London at the Dominion Theatre, our last gig of the tour was in Norwich at the University of East Anglia. After his shows in London Costello was going out on another tour of the British Isles, with T-Bone Burnett. After that, he was leaving for Europe. Cait was skittish.

She burst into our dressing room. She had a can of shaving foam and a razor. She wrenched the taps open at one of the basins and started to shave her head, upward from the nape of her neck and her ears.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Spider asked.

‘What’s it look like?’

When she’d finished, a crown of dark hair sprouted from a disc on the top of her head. The rest of her scalp was white, flecked here and there with pink foam and covered in nicks from the razor.

‘You’re not fucking going on stage looking like that,’ we said.

‘Why not?’ she said.

‘Because it looks fucking stupid,’ Shane said.

Someone threw her a towel to wrap her head with.

‘Really?’ she said.

‘Fuck yeah.’

‘Fuck yez all,’ she said. ‘You’re a bunch of cunts.’

She wrapped her head with the towel like a turban, her black hair sticking out of a hole in the top. When she had gone, a silence descended on the room.

‘Well,’ Spider said, ‘he’s not going to forget her in a hurry.’

After the show, the road manager came to invite us to Costello’s dressing room. There was an awkward air of festivity. Costello climbed up to play the piano which stood on the dais. Cait sat morose and sullen on the upholstered ledge with her head in the towel turban. We drank the Attractions’ beer and laughed. Then the Attractions and Costello had to head off. Their bus was waiting.

‘We should do something together,’ Costello said breezily as he made his way out of the room.

‘Yeah,’ we all said, but knew he didn’t mean it.

‘You’re all coming to the Dominion?’ he said, looking at us over the top of his Buddy Holly glasses. ‘You’re all on the list.’

We sat on the minibus waiting for Cait. When she was in, she sat with her coat about her, her knees up, her dark eyes staring sideways out of the window. Darryl pulled out of the car park. On the way back to London I nursed a half-bottle of Powers in my lap and watched the pulse of the motorway lights on the road through the windows.

It was around two in the morning as I walked up from where Darryl dropped us all off outside Shane’s flat, up Midland Road by the side of St Pancras Station and along the body repair shops in the arches under the railway, my bag over my shoulder. I clasped the front of my coat across my stomach against the cold. I had never been so tired, dulled by the sustained crush of other human beings, concussed by the confusion of their demands, blunted by the cycle of sleep, travel, sound check, show, sleep, travel, sound check, show. At the same time I was aware of the certainty, dense and hard, that the crucible of Darryl’s Iveco Daily had fused us all together and permanently, with the makings of the next record among the tracks on Darryl’s tape.