Twelve

In the Boot on Cromer Street, Jem leant on the table and started to draw a finger through the beer on the tabletop. He protruded his lips.

‘I’ve been meaning to say something,’ he said. He stared at his finger in the beer. We all looked at him. His eyes were wide and sad. His eyebrows lifted wrinkles into his forehead.

‘I can’t do this any more,’ he said.

‘Can’t do what?’ The thought that he was going to leave the band horrified me.

‘I can’t do this – this,’ he faltered. His eyes became so wide that his pupils floated free of his eyelids. ‘I can’t do – basically,’ he continued, ‘what I think a manager should be doing.’

During our tour with Costello it had befallen Jem to organise the itinerary, buy the ferry tickets, book hotels, settle bills, wrangle the money we were due from Costello’s production and try to balance our accounts. In the van, he would sit with his knees up against the back of the seat in front with the Office open in his lap, tapping his teeth with a pencil. At the end of each week, when we returned to London for Costello’s weekly residency at the Hammersmith Palais, Jem had gone round to Stiff Records to ask for more money.

To add to his tribulations, a couple of weeks after we had returned from the tour, he told us that Marcia was pregnant again. Their second baby was due in May.

He lifted his eyes to gaze forlornly at all of us. He complained that the responsibility he took for liaising with the record company, for decisions concerning where, when and for how much we played, anywhere, was too much for him. Stan Brennan had been right: increasingly the companies we attempted to do business with were reluctant to conduct negotiations with any one of us.

‘But it’s not just that,’ he said. ‘Eventually, eventually, it’s going to make me into your enemy. I’m not prepared to set myself up for that. I want to be a member of the band again.’

I was riven with guilt to think we had deserted him. The one gig I’d set up at the Ritzy in Brixton seemed a paltry contribution.

‘We need to get a manager,’ he said.

The prospect dismayed me. I trusted Jem with our affairs and I hated the idea of bringing anyone else into our adventure. The hiring of a manager – with all the imagery of briefcases, blazers and thinning hair – I feared would scuttle the story of our transition from disparate bunch of strangers into something more or less resembling a unit, with an identifiable ethos. But I felt so badly for Jem that I did not contest.

Shane came up with a guy from Dublin called Frank Murray. Murray apparently had been Kirsty MacColl’s manager and had tour-managed Thin Lizzy. We arranged to meet him in the Windsor Castle on Parkway in Camden. It was early in the day and the place smelled of cigarettes and Brasso. We sat around with pints and waited.

When Murray came in he bore an unsurprising resemblance to Dave Robinson. As anticipated, he was wearing a blue sports coat, jeans and loafers. His hair was cut in a generic George Orwell style, but wavy. He sat down on one of the stools across from our table with his legs apart, elbows planted on each thigh, a twist of hair needing pushing back. He looked vulnerable despite the thinness of his mouth and the dark plush which shaded his jaw.

We were unruly a bit, to make an impression and because it was expected. We took the piss out of him too, to break the ice and to show him that we weren’t going to be walked over. He rebuffed our teasing by means of an airy outline of his capabilities, our expectations and the music business, then got up and left.

There wasn’t much to review, other than the guy himself and his offer to take us on for twenty per cent, for a trial period. It had hardly taken up any of our time at all. We had a manager and we hadn’t even to sign a contract.

The following week, we met him again in the Boot after a rehearsal to talk about the plans he had.

‘Just give me two years of your life,’ he said. ‘That’s all I ask. Just two years.’

I pictured us in a couple of years as an established musical entity enjoying deserved esteem, making records regularly. We would each be a musician of repute. We would each have side projects: record production, collaborations, film scores. I would be able to balance my musical and writing careers. I would be living in my own house, if not my own narrow boat.

Frank’s management company was called Hill 16 Ltd. Frank was proud of the name, so called after one of the terraces in Croke Park, the GAA stadium in Dublin. The story was that Hill 16 – originally a mound at the north end of the ground – got its name from the 1916 Easter Rising, the rubble from which had gone to build the terrace.

Up Kentish Town Road from Hill 16 Ltd’s offices was a pub called the Devonshire Arms. After the Pindar of Wakefield, and lately the Boot, the Dev as it was known started to become our watering hole.

Gigs began to come in. We played the Cricketers Arms near the Oval in London. We went up to Digbeth Civic Hall near Birmingham. We drove out in the minivan to the Labour Club in Newport, to play a gig in solidarity with the National Union of Mineworkers, the miners’ strike already in its ninth month.

On the 31st December we played at the ICA on the Mall, as part of Harp Lager’s ICA Rock Week. As the end of 1984 had been approaching I had made Debsey a card to welcome the New Year. It depicted a window opening up towards a blue sky, fluffy with clouds. I wanted it to come across as a statement of hope for the year to come. My career with the Pogues was taking off. Debsey’s seemed to have all but stalled.

Debsey’s last project with Hester and Rachel had been in April, around the time the Pogues had recorded our first session for John Peel. Dolly Mixture had spent a couple of weeks recording an EP at a home studio in Suffolk. It consisted mostly of instrumental parlour pieces, with Rachel playing the cello and Debsey the piano. The Fireside EP, as it was called, had been released a month or so before the Pogues went into the studio to record Red Roses for Me. Since then, Dolly Mixture had been away with Captain Sensible for scattershot television engagements in such places as Stratford, Bristol and Hull. At an appearance at Alton Towers Debsey found out that Sensible and Rachel were due to have a baby.

Debsey did not attend our New Year’s Eve show at the ICA. After the gig, I walked the three miles through the West End and up Rosebery Avenue to Islington to drop the card into her parents’ letter-box on Liverpool Road.

In the first week of the New Year, Frank flew us up to Newcastle for a live performance on the Tyne Tees Television music show The Tube, hosted by Paula Yates and Jools Holland – our first appearance on a bona fide pop programme. On the plane he gave us details of a tour he had booked of Ireland, with a couple of dates up north and one in Scotland, due to start at the beginning of February. After that he had plans for a couple of St Patrick’s Night shows in London, followed by our first tour of Europe and Scandinavia.

Not long after, I got a phone call from Jem. The weeks away from his family on the Costello tour had been hard on him, made plain by his flight from our minivan on the North Yorkshire Moors. Now Marcia was five months pregnant and Ella a baby of fifteen months. The advance from Stiff Records and the fees from the gigs we were doing were only bringing in £150 a week. It was probably more than any of us had ever earned, but hardly enough for a new family.

‘I haven’t spoken to anyone else about this,’ he said. ‘I wanted to talk to you first.’ His tone was so measured and gritty that my heart sank.

‘You all right?’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really.’ There was a long pause. ‘I really feel I have to leave the group.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said.

Without Jem’s nous the band would just collapse. None of us had the canniness to make the decisions that seemed to come so easily to Jem. None of us had his mental alacrity, his energy or his pertinacity when it came to dealing with Shane. None of us had the acumen or the moral stamina to deal with the likes of Dave Robinson and maybe Frank Murray.

It occurred to me that Jem might have rung me to challenge me to argue him down. I knew the approaching weeks of absence from his family would aggravate his circumstances at home. I was shamelessly indifferent to them and not afraid to imply that his defection would amount to a betrayal of what had become our brotherhood. I asked him not to quit.

‘And don’t get me wrong,’ I added, ‘but what the fuck else are you going to do?’

‘Let me talk to Marcia,’ he said in the end.

When Jem showed up at the next gig, neither of us referred to our conversation.

The gig was a return to the Cricketers Arms near the Oval cricket ground. Frank had set up a slew of interviews after the sound check, in advance of what was described in our fanzine as our ‘Irish mini-tour’ in February. Frank distributed us throughout the blue-panelled rooms and ushered in a journalist for each of us.

I admired the ease with which Shane both sent up and relished the process of self-publicising. Jem had a knack for synthesising and giving a context to what we were doing. Spider was mischievous, unpredictable, funny and personable.

It was rare that I was asked to do an interview. My eagerness to come up with something printable tended to produce ponderous and over-earnest commonplaces. Besides, I had little idea about our context – in Irish music, folk music or in pop music in general. I found it difficult to formulate an opinion about what we thought we were doing beyond the matter of playing music with people and trying to get on with them.

The first string of Frank’s gigs took us to Reading University, the Blue Note in Derby, Queen Margaret College Students’ Union in Glasgow and the Paradise Club in Preston, where no sooner had we started playing than the crowd swarmed the stage. In frustration, Andrew delivered a crack to someone’s head with his drumsticks.

In a couple of days we were back in London and Debsey finally moved out of her parents’ place, into a housing association property on Wharton Street round the corner from where Jem and Marcia lived. Debsey and Marcia had become firm friends. Part of me regretted her not moving in with me, but Debsey wanted her independence. Before we left for Ireland, I went to see her new room. Her window overlooked the street which rose from King’s Cross Road. A door from her kitchenette opened onto a small balcony over the front door. Debsey sat me on her bed and had me listen to the Smiths’ ‘How Soon Is Now?’ over and over while she ironed in the doorway.

Before our flight to Belfast for the Irish section of the tour Shane drank himself into a dither. Spooked by the door of the metal detector, he tried to shimmy his way round the side of it. The security officer ushered him through. When the engines powered up and the plane thrust forward, Cait shrieked and pummelled the back of my seat with a volley of kicks.

From Belfast we drove across the Six Counties to Letterkenny. After our show in a local pub, a spotty kid came to sit next to me at the bar. His accent was hard to decipher and he was drunk. I was about to finish my pint of Smithwick’s and put the glass down empty as a signal that I was going to move on, but I ended up listening to him. He spoke more to the surface of the bar than to me. All his life, he said, he had been waiting for someone like Shane to come along.

‘He’s just like me,’ he said. ‘Well, not like me. People like me. The people who live here. Anywhere, really. Those other wankers. In bands, whatever bands. Don’t have the fucking time for them. They don’t have the time for people like us. But MacGowan, he’s like us. He’s a man of the people. It’s like he knows, you know? How’s he know about me? He’s clever, like. You got to be clever to write songs the way he does. But that clever that he knows about people like me? He’s the man. You know what I mean?’

After Letterkenny we drove two hundred miles to Carlow, a market town an hour south of Dublin. It was dark when we arrived and the streetlights cast a wintry yellow light on the drab parade of businesses and bars along Tullow Street. In the bar of the Royal Hotel I had a whiskey and red and watched an earwig crawl up one of the porcelain beer pumps. Before our show at the Ritz Ballroom we went to a bar called Archbald’s. It was raucous with our fans. A phalanx surrounded Shane and Spider and started to ply the two of them with questions. The determination and eagerness of the interrogation seemed focused on preventing Spider and Shane from making their excuses and peeling off. One after the other, lads jostled to get a question in before the others.

My attention was drawn to an argument on the other side of the bar. A guy wearing a leather jacket was quarrelling with another guy, pretty much dressed identically. The guy’s eyes were glassy and his face was contorted with drink as he fought to moderate his reactions by constant flicks of his head as if he were trying to dislodge the impulse to shunt his interlocutor to the wall and give him a pounding. The thought that he was likely to show up in our audience at the ballroom down the street made my heart sink.

We walked out on stage. The ballroom was not much more than a large saloon, sparely furnished with a fruit machine near the steamed-up windows at the back, and a bare chimney-breast and mantel in the wall near me. A boisterous, drunk, predominantly male audience pressed against the flimsy barrier.

Things went well at first. The opening song, ‘Streams of Whiskey’, seemed to act like an astringent on the crowd of men, convulsing the throng, sending shoulder against shoulder, elbow against elbow, hip against hip, buttocks against groin. I winced to see a windjammered body collide obliquely with a neighbour, elbows high enough to catch a cheek.

From my vantage point by the side of the stage, I loved to watch the line of us step up to the microphones, as one, to sing the chorus and then to step back for the instrumental section. Shane scrubbed his guitar, head down. Cait, her hair recently dyed red, the collar of her duster coat up, scribed an arc with the neck of her bass. Spider, the only one remaining at his mike, twitched his leg. Jem stood looking out with the detachment of a maître d’hôtel, his lips pursing and puffing from the concentration of playing. Angled away from the crowd, fag in my mouth more often than not, blinking against the smoke, I bent over the accordion and stamped my heel.

A quarter of the way through the set, alerted by a rumbling in the audience, punctuated by shouts and a girl’s angry scream, I looked up from my fingers to see frantic shoving going on in the middle of the crowd. The guy I’d seen in Archbald’s, his face pink and distorted with the effort, lunged, arms straight, palms up, into another guy who in a valiant but ridiculous attempt to both keep his balance and to fend the guy off was windmilling his arms. People stepped back to get out of the way but others came striding in, clambering to get through. They pulled at jackets, hands clawing and swiping, their legs in half-crouch. Some of them dragged arms free from the press and turned them into swinging fists arcing down into space or against someone’s shoulder. The occasional sickening knuckle-blow glanced against an ear or someone’s temple.

All the while we kept playing. The image came to mind of the bewhiskered piano player in a Western saloon pulling his hat down over his ears as the saloon explodes in gunfire and smoke, the tables go over and the ranks of bottles disintegrate into a cascade of liquor and shards. We didn’t look at one another but gawped at the turmoil on the dance floor and kept going, thinking that the end of the song would bring the furore to an end.

Eventually we were able to finish the song, and with a flourish I hoped might come across as conclusive, but the fighting continued, the non-combatants flung to the edges of the dance floor, the participants going at it, deaf to anything else that was going on in the room. We stood there watching, Shane gawping at the tumult in front of him with an expression of bemusement on his face. I didn’t have a clear plan when I stepped up to the microphone that Spider wasn’t using.

‘Quit fighting!’ I found myself shouting. ‘Quit it! Just stop the fucking fighting!’

My command did nothing. The squall lurched sideways as if the ballroom floor had tilted. Fists opened into claws grabbing for stability. Legs that a moment before had waded into the rumpus now capered backwards, trying to find a grip on the dance floor. The ruckus sent itself against the wall and along it into the corner. A couple of guys lost their balance altogether. When they hit the ground they tucked their knees up and covered their heads as the scrimmage appeared to bounce off the far wall and back towards us.

We stood and watched. Hostages to the chaos, there was nothing else we could do. I went around the stage in panic, appealing to everyone, anyone, to do something, vainly assuming that there was something we could do. Shane just shrugged. The fighting eventually ended with a couple of guys – one of them the guy from Archbald’s – being dragged to either side, penned in by their mates and subjected to bellowed appeals to reason. There was panting and gasping and nodding of heads and hateful stares and eventually capitulation. The rest of the crowd started to return to press against the barriers. In a moment or two the combatants seemed to have vanished, absorbed by the rabble.

We played on without further incident. I played on without enthusiasm. I couldn’t help thinking that beneath society’s superstructure of civility and mutuality was a basement writhing with blind and inchoate urges.

‘The fucking cunts!’ I said when we were able to finish and go backstage. ‘What a bunch of fucking cunts! We’re supposed to be playing fucking music out there. It’s supposed to be entertainment! Christ!’

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Shane said. He scratched his nose, bored, and pulled on a cigarette.

‘Fuck off Shane,’ I said. ‘That was just fucking debasing.’ I appealed to the others, who looked just as depressed and stunned as I was. ‘We can’t allow that to happen again. We should have the lights go up, shine torches on them or something. We should leave the stage and only come back when . . .’ I ran out of ideas just as Shane screamed:

‘Oh, shut the fuck up with the fucking whingeing, you fucking faggot!’

His hands were gripping his face. His eyes slowly appeared from behind his brown fingers, staring dementedly at the floor. In a show of mastering his fury he spread his fingers in front of him, level to the ground. It took him a moment to get some sort of a grip on himself.

‘Listen,’ he said, as if he were talking to a child. ‘Listen. They do what they do and nothing you can do or say makes any difference. People are – not just these people – people, you know – people just want to kill one another.’

‘People,’ he went on in a hoarse, supercilious whisper, ‘are just this much away from murdering each other, this much away from raping one another, this much away from knifing, shooting, massacring, garrotting. It’s fucking dog-eat-dog out there. It’s fucking dog-eat-dog wherever you look. It’s what they want to do and you got to let them get on with it because it means the fuckers are not likely to rape or knife or shoot or garrotte me or any of us. It’s what they want to do and if it’s what they want to do they’re going to do it anyway no matter how much fucking whingeing and screeching and flapping you do. So shut up, stay away from my fucking microphone or anyone’s microphone. They’ll come and kill the fucking lot of us. They’re just looking for an excuse. And shut the fuck up with your fucking debasement and all that shit – just play the fucking accordion and stay out of the way. That’s what you’re paid for.’

‘And if only he could do that properly,’ Spider sighed.

When I got back to the hotel, first back to the room I was sharing with Jem, I stood between the bed and the cheap dresser by the window and then crouched down to the ground, tucked myself into a ball and pounded my head with my fists. I couldn’t understand how anyone could let himself become so bereft of responsibility for anything and yet write songs of such incisive beauty, full of chastening pity for the human condition.

*

Depending on whom we talked to, our gig at Trinity College in Dublin had been cancelled because of a protest at the University or because the Students’ Union had bottled out of putting on our gig. Either way, the venue was changed to a club called McGonagle’s on Anne Street for the following night. We had a day off. I drank whiskey and reds all afternoon in the hotel bar. It was dusk when I staggered up Grafton Street under a triumphal arch into St Stephen’s Green. Willows draped the walkways and water birds shunted about. The road alongside the Royal Canal crawled with traffic. Reeds choked the canal. Somehow I ended up back in Grafton Street and drinking whiskey and red in Kehoe’s with its moulded ceiling and bar dividers. McDaid’s was crowded. I sat at a table with Jem and a couple of students. Jem laughed at how drunk I was. The tabletops were scrubbed oak. Every inch of wall was filled with framed pictures. The only one I recognised was James Joyce. People kept going on about Brendan Behan. A journalist from Hot Press magazine reckoned we could all breeze into a club called The Pink Elephant because of who we were. We squeezed arse to arse into cabs. The club was dowdy, concussive with music and full of people who knew of somewhere else to go.

The next day, I took the DART out to Howth. I looked out over the estuary – the flashings of the Poolbeg power station chimneys, the distant lattices of cranes under the dappled sky. I climbed up Howth Head, my shoes crunching on the granular quartz on the paths. Up on the top, I breathed in lungfuls of salt air blowing off the sea out of the mist. I wanted to go home. I dreaded McGonagle’s.

A line of punks squirmed forward against the chests of the bouncers along the front of the stage, behind them a crush of puce faces and wet hair. The first song, ‘Greenland Whale Fisheries’, seemed to send a charge through the crowd. In one mass, they jumped, staggered backwards and rushed forwards, pitched sideways. Heads shook, bodies cavorted. Here and there shoulders twisted to free an arm, but to my relief only to wave or let loll over someone’s shoulder. Though I stared down the keyboard of the accordion, I watched the audience, bracing for a repeat of the gig in Carlow. Now and again a bouncer rammed the pistons of his forearms into the crowd to push them away. Otherwise, nothing happened until we were clearing up after the set and people were leaving. The two bouncers in the middle of the apron, relaxing now that the compression had eased, let a kid through to collapse with his forearms on the stage and his head buried in them. Just as Jem came to the edge to pull the cables out of his DI box, the kid’s arms opened up like a claw, wrapped around Jem’s legs and started to pull him off the stage. Jem shouted. The bouncers detached the kid and hauled him away.

Afterwards, in the dressing room, Spider shouted:

‘See? Dublin loves us. It loves us so much it wanted to keep our banjo player!’