Thirteen

‘You sick fuck!’ Spider said. ‘ “Labelled parts one to three?” What sort of a twisted, fucked-up sort of mind comes up with lyrics like that?’

‘Mine,’ Shane said.

We had been rehearsing in the attic of Andrew’s house, a Victorian white-painted bay that he and his long-time companion, Deborah Korner, shared in West Hampstead, a walk along the railway line from the station. The room we rehearsed in was under the roof and had a dormer window. It was a job getting us all in.

The first song we rehearsed was called ‘Sally MacLennane’ and was in jig-time, full of shouts of ‘FAR AWAY!’ and explosions of single stroke rolls on the drums. The melodies were so seamlessly Irish that I was surprised to find out that the song wasn’t traditional. The words of the chorus brought to mind the ceremony I knew Shane indulged in, when he would gather his bosom friends in one of the bars at Euston railway station to see him off on the boat train to Holyhead for the ferry to Dun Laoghaire.

Another of the songs Shane brought in was a waltz, in C, called ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’. There was a delicacy about the chord progression I hadn’t heard in Shane’s writing before. A relative minor chord changed position from verse to verse. The harmonic structure of the chorus avoided resolution, going instead into a refrain of single notes, to be played on the banjo, stepping down in an aching reiteration of the chorus melody. A couple of verses and refrains later – finally resolving the melody of the chorus and underpinning the words – came a cadence so reminiscent of songs immemorially older than this one that it nearly brought tears to my eyes.

I tried to make sense of the lyrics I could hear – streams and rolling hills bearing with them images of water lilies and canals. After a couple of runs through, I started to become aware of an almost nightmarish kaleidoscope. As soon as I thought I had got used to the scene I’d happened on – a pub somewhere with a jukebox and an old man – a smash cut deposited me in a landscape worthy of Wilfred Owen, full of dismemberment, with arms and legs scattered all around.

As gruesome as the words were and as elusive as the meaning was, what I understood and felt for most of all was the guy at the end: Shane, I supposed, in the dawn, crawling and walking, talking to himself.

To our surprise, making good on what had seemed in the dressing room at East Anglia University a casual proposal of recording with us, at the beginning of 1985 Costello had let it be known he wanted to produce ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’. At the end of January, however, it was no longer Elvis Costello who sat waiting for us in the subterranean control room at Elephant Studios, but a guy he wanted to be called Declan Patrick MacManus. MacManus wore a black linen suit with a pork-pie hat tilted back. Though he still inclined his head to lift his eyes and brows over the top of them to view us, his glasses were no longer Holly but burgundy-tinted Lennon.

He sat on one of the swivel chairs with his arms on his knees peeling a pomelo. We sat on the lumpy couch in the control room, respectful, somewhat in awe, and listened to his account, told with an endearing diastematic lisp, of the recording of Almost Blue, the country record he had made in Nashville in 1981 with Billy Sherrill, the producer of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, who routinely brought a gun into the studio and had once emptied it into the mixing desk.

The recording was straightforward. We had rehearsed ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ over and over and had been playing it live since Christmas. A short snare roll brought in a straight C chord on the accordion with Jem playing an arpeggio, Shane strumming underneath. An accordion hook I’d lifted from Dermot O’Brien’s ‘Connemara Rose’, one of the tracks on Darryl’s tape, brought in Shane’s voice. Costello had hired Colin Fairley to work alongside Elephant’s engineer, Nick Robbins. Fairley had worked on Costello’s Punch the Clock and knew how to execute ‘radio-friendly’ mixes.

Once the backing track was finished, Costello brought his musician/producer’s attention to bear on the matter of overdubs. He had an idea to lift the chorus by means of a roll on the snare, to be answered, every measure but one, by a beat on a tambourine.

Andrew played the snare, Costello the tambourine. To listen back it was Costello’s custom to lean on the far side of the mixing desk, an impish expression on his face, his arms up on the ledge and the brim of his hat tilted up.

‘I hear mandolins,’ he said. ‘James?’

I sat across from Costello, our knees close to touching, both of us on swivel chairs in the control room. Each of us cradled a mandolin. His was a scroll-neck Gibson of some ancient provenance. Mine was the one we used on stage. We duplicated the banjo melody in the refrain, Costello taking a harmony above mine. We extended the tune downwards and, where the song was to fade out, played couplets in a style we both agreed was ‘kind of Greek’. I was elated to submit to the tutelage of a musician I had revered for years, lofty with his approval, hot with embarrassment when I fucked up.

We broke from the studio for our gigs in Belfast, Letterkenny and Carlow. When we got back, we played a couple of gigs in Leeds and Nottingham. A grey-haired guy wearing a combat jacket buttoned up to his throat met us on the gravel driveway of the hotel in Nottingham. I assumed he’d come to fix the van, which had something wrong with it. The guy turned out to be a long-time friend of Frank’s and the front-of-house sound-​engineer for the bands Frank had managed in Dublin – Skid Row and Dr Strangely Strange. Paul Scully had crystalline-blue eyes in which flashed a mixture of benevolence, sensitivity and mischief. His arrival whittled Darryl’s functions of general factotum down to those of roadie and driver.

If the recording of ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ and ‘Sally MacLennane’ was Costello’s baptism by aspersion, after our shows in February he committed to full submersion by taking on the production of our second album. So completely had we come to like and trust Paul Scully that we asked him to engineer alongside Nick Robbins.

Most of the new songs we’d practised and practised either in Rick Trevan’s back bedroom or at Andrew and Deborah’s house, and many of them we had been playing live. ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘The Old Main Drag’ we’d been playing for over a year. We had recorded the former the previous February with Stan Brennan. The latter dated back to my first rehearsals with Shane and Jem. Over the past couple of months we had been working not just on ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ and ‘Sally MacLennane’ – and on one by Phil Gaston, Brennan’s partner at Rocks Off record shop, called ‘Navigator’ – but also on another two of Shane’s newest songs: ‘Billy’s Bones’, which referred to a traditional Irish anti-war song called ‘Mrs McGrath’, and which borrowed the traditional Scottish melody ‘Highland Laddie’ for the introduction; and ‘The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn’, a song which seemed to tower above the others, lyrically and musically, from the start. The mandolin introduction was like the turning of the flimsiest of flyleaves to reveal a frontispiece of prodigious conceit: the figures of the Irish tenor John McCormack and his Austrian counterpart Richard Tauber in attendance at the bedside of, in Irish mythology, the equivalent to Achilles.

Costello would sit hunched on one of the wheeled swivel chairs contemplating the item of fruit he’d brought in from his local delicatessen, the sleeves of his black coat rolled up halfway. His fingers would turn the fruit he would never eat in his pudgy hands, all the while listening as the tape machine recorded. He would summon us into the control room to play back what we’d done. We would line up on the lumpy sofa or, if there wasn’t room, perch on a radiator or lean against the wall and listen to the playback. Once we had arrived at consensus, we did repairs – a clunky dyssynchrony between the tom-tom and the bass, a flubbed note, a mishit. None of the songs was particularly problematic. Those we hadn’t rehearsed much, we worked on in the studio: ‘The Wild Cats of Kilkenny’; ‘The Gentleman Soldier’, yet another of the songs on Darryl’s tape; ‘Dirty Old Town’, Ewan MacColl’s song about Salford which we knew from the versions by the Spinners and the Dubliners.

Now and again, Costello would point out a structural problem. ‘The Old Main Drag’ in particular seemed to proceed verse after miserable verse, its protagonist suffering degradation after degradation until, with the final expiration of hope, it ended. Costello’s solution was more the product of necessity than inspiration. In rehearsal, at the end of the song, a drone from a bass button on the accordion a fifth below the root note cut underneath the last line: ‘For some money to take me from the old main drag’. By way of caesura Costello suggested we should similarly shift the key down a fifth for a couple of bars for a middle eight – appositely, we thought, after the mention in the lyrics of Tuinol. The respite was hardly a relief. The bass, banjo, guitar and tom-tom tolled fatefully over the low drone of the accordion until the horror resumed.

Excited to have stumbled on the idea of key changes, Costello took up the matter of modulation again with ‘Dirty Old Town’. He cited Johnny Cash’s ‘I Walk the Line’ which modulates down a fifth, two times in the song, to return the way it came to the original key of F. Giddy, Costello swept us along before him towards a similar structure. Costello played the guitar and Andrew the harmonica for the introduction in D. The verse with the full band came in a fifth lower, the melodies played on the whistle and, in preference over the accordion, on the mandolin. For the middle eight the key modulated another fifth downward, to return to G for the last verses. It was beautiful in its simplicity and almost noble in its provenance. I was proud to share with Costello his enthusiasm for such a construction and wished I had thought of it.

To complete the record Shane came up with the Scottish traditional song ‘I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day’, and volunteered Cait to sing it. The minatory cordiality of the song suited her. Spider’s willingness to sing ‘Jesse James’ – the romantically fallacious biography of the murderer and train-robber – wasn’t entirely inapposite either.

We used few session musicians. Tommy Keane and Henry Benagh came in to overdub, respectively, the uilleann pipes and fiddle on a couple of the tracks, notably ‘Dirty Old Town’. Benagh was a bearded Tennessean. Keane was from Waterford. Both played up at a pub in Camden called The Good Mixer. When Keane took up the pipes, such a look came over his face that you’d think he was blind. He worked the chanter, lifting it up and down off his thigh, staring sightlessly into space.

*

St Patrick’s Day at the Clarendon Ballroom was a clamorous, tumultuous and deranged event. The hall seemed huge. It had ancient-looking fluted columns covered in peeling brown paint. A black curtain hanging from scaffolding separated backstage from the ballroom where I could hear conversations against the cacophony in the background. It was airless and hot. Fluorescent strips lit a concrete corridor lined with chip-frying machines and dented kitchen furniture.

Frank had brought his friend Phil Lynott to the gig. I tried to get a glimpse of him. I had been in my last year at school when the first incarnation of Thin Lizzy had released ‘Whiskey in the Jar’. I had been more into the likes of Amon Düül, the Strawbs and Peter Hammill. The laddish glamorisation of sex, drink and violence of ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’, which a couple of my friends never seemed to have off their record players in 1976, hadn’t interested me much. Nonetheless, I was fascinated by Lynott’s presence and by the rumour he was going to come out and play with us.

I eventually managed to get a look at him. He was sitting on a metal table under the fluorescent light. Frank and a couple of other people were standing by. I mistook his slumping on the table leaning up against the wall for charismatic ennui. The fact was, he looked ill. His face was filmy and pallid, his eyes blank and watery. When we went on, Lynott stayed backstage. When we came off, our shirts stuck to our backs, faces running with sweat, he was gone.

Frank had read an interview with Alex Cox, the director of Repo Man which had come out the previous March and had been acclaimed for its punk energy and oppositional politics. On the strength of Cox describing our music as ‘quite interesting’, Frank had apparently got in touch. In the week after our shows at the Clarendon Ballroom, Cox, who lived nearby, came out to see us at a gig at Liverpool Polytechnic. He was a gangly guy, lanky, dressed in a tan duster coat and eager to work with us. A couple of weeks later Frank hired him to film the video for ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’, in which a literal pair of brown eyes in a paper bag becomes a metaphor for the blindness of society to a totalitarian state under Thatcher.

We resumed at Elephant Studios to do overdubs. We were sitting squashed together on the brown couch, behind Nick Robbins and Paul Scully who had replaced Colin Fairley. Costello stood on the far side of the mixing desk, the window to the studio behind him, his arms on the ledge, the grey pork-pie hat set at a junior reporter’s angle, listening to playback through the speakers mounted in the wall behind.

At the end of the song, Costello stationed his destined-to-go-uneaten pomelo or star fruit, persimmon or guava on top of the Yamaha speakers behind the far side of the mixing desk and stepped around in front of it. On the way, he picked up his guitar. He wafted a space for himself on one of the wheeled chairs. Robbins got up.

‘I hear this,’ he said. He took out a plectrum from his pocket and picked something out on the guitar – a line of notes, low down, ascending. He wheeled round to look at us all squished together on the corduroy couch.

‘For the bridge up to the chorus,’ he explained. His eyes came into view over the top of the rims of his glasses – not so much questioning as declarative.

We all nodded at Costello’s idea. Sounds good, we said. Let’s give it a try, we said. Swivelling back to the desk, he twirled a finger to indicate he wanted the tape rewound. He listened back to the section a couple of times, swizzling his finger once more, refining the line. He got up and floated the guitar over our heads, towards the door into the studio.

‘Set me up,’ he said.

Robbins and Scully followed him. Through the window I could see them station microphones, run wires, plug in things, deliver headphones, adjust, tweak a little and then leave.

I smarted at his droit de seigneur and became glum with myself for not coming up with something. I was always alert to the possibility of an overdub, not just to supplement a particular sequence or highlight a transition with a sonic frill, an amuse-​oreille, but also to show off my ability with any instrument I laid my hands on. It should have been me out there, one of the band, the one who worked out all the chords to the songs, the musician in the band – as we had always joked but which I had always believed. I resented Costello’s encroachment and I wondered if anyone else was aware how embarrassed for myself I was.

Later on in the afternoon when he’d recorded his overdub and everyone else was either round the pool table at the end of the corridor or had gone for something to eat, I overcame my restraint and put it to Costello that when it came to doing overdubs, didn’t he think it should be one of the band to play them?

‘Why?’ he said.

‘Because you’re the producer,’ I said. ‘And we’re the band.’

‘You want to do overdubs?’ he said. ‘Here, take my guitar. There’s mandolins, an autoharp. There’s a pair of fucking maracas lying about. You’ve got an idea? Go and do your overdub. I had an idea and I went and I had them set me up and I did it. If it doesn’t work, you can tell me. I’m not a child. I can take it.’

I wished I hadn’t had the temerity to contest him, exposing my resentment towards him, and my jealousy. My failure to prevail seemed also to have exposed my abiding awe of him.

When we resumed to tackle another track, Costello took up his customary position on the far side of the mixing desk.

‘Anyone of you wants to fly the idea of an overdub,’ he said in his vaguely Scouse accent, ‘be my guest. I’m trying to make a good record here. You’ve all probably got good ideas. Let’s have them. But if I’ve got an idea, I’m going to go in there and try it out and if you don’t like it we’ll just move on.’

‘James!’ Spider said. ‘What have you done now?’

Embarrassment coursed over my skin like fever. I wanted revenge on Costello but gave up expecting it to come in the form of plucking a sonic ornament from the air and taking it into the studio.

The recording continued amiably enough, and in Costello and Cait’s case amorously enough. They were very much in love. Occasionally we found ourselves sitting in the control room waiting, as Costello took time with Cait in the studio, patching up a bass-line she’d fluffed. He stood close behind her – she almost a head taller than Costello – his arms encircling her, from which position he could guide her hands over the neck of her guitar and put her fingers on the correct fret. Now and again her shoulders wriggled with resistance.

At the beginning of the recording we all deferred to Costello as befitted his status and accomplishments. As the weeks passed, his presence in the studio became a more and more familiar one. We ceased to be curious about what kind of exotic fruit he’d picked up on the way to the studio and whether or not it happened to rhyme with his name. We had become used to his standing behind the mixing desk, bending over a guitar or a mandolin in the control room. The wonderment of being in the daily company of such a luminary wore off. In Shane’s case it wore off sooner and more dramatically than in anyone else’s.

One day Costello brought to the studio an Ovation Patriot Bicentennial acoustic guitar. It was blue – like a bluebottle – and one of the ugliest guitars I’d seen. It had the signature Ovation rounded fibreglass back which caused it to be forever sliding off my knee when I took it up to play one afternoon, and it had what were called the ‘multi-sound hole epaulets’ – the abstract, Seventies-style filigree near where the neck met the body. The sound that came out of it was by no means the acme of acoustics but in the course of our recording with Costello, the guitar, to Shane, seemed to attain hyperbolic importance.

Costello, like all of us, was in awe of Shane’s talent, nervous of appearing not to understand him, shy of his irony, fearful of his temper. Costello, aware of Shane’s covetousness of it, gave the guitar to him.

The guitar would not have been the only one Costello owned. I imagined the walls in Costello’s flat in Holland Park to hang with all manner of vintage instruments – a couple of which he brought into the studio to play overdubs: an acoustic lap guitar with playing-card motifs up and down the fret board and a beautiful chocolate and tan J-series Gibson. Shane’s inability to take care of anything would have precluded Costello from letting Shane even look at any of the guitars that really mattered to him.

Though the gift looked careless, I wondered if Costello hoped to rub Shane’s nose in his distinction. It was as if the Ovation, too, was a means of distracting Shane, the way a parent jangles a bunch of keys to distract a child from the pain of fingers shut in a door. I suspected Costello of seeing how much Shane wanted to be in control, and of throwing a sop to Shane by letting him have his guitar.

In a week or two it seemed Shane thought the guitar possessed a mysterious power, as if it were not just the repository of all the songs Costello ever wrote, but a sacred charm to summon up songs as yet unwritten, hidden within Shane. The guitar never left Shane’s side. It came to the studio with him every day, in a plastic bag. At the end of each day, it went back into the plastic bag and went home with him.

As the recording went on, the guitar seemed to become a talisman which somehow in Shane’s mind stood for Costello himself. Shane’s possession of the guitar appeared to have become protection against some sort of malevolent power he was beginning to convince himself exuded from Costello. As long as he had the guitar, he had Costello where he wanted him.

If Shane resented the way Costello was going about producing our record, it was difficult to tell. That he should covet Costello’s crap guitar and keep it in constant sight should have alerted us that something was irking Shane. Shane’s propensity for superstition didn’t surprise me, but I had not been aware of how much it was a symptom of his lack of ability to say what was really on his mind. The bile that had been building in him only became obvious through the violence with which it erupted.

Costello happened to leave the room. As soon as he had, Shane levelled a kick at the Ovation Patriot Bicentennial as it leant against the arm of the sofa. Clumsy as he was, he did no damage to the guitar. It spun on its axis and ended up against the wall with a boing of strings. I was appalled not so much by the ferocity with which he laid into it, but by the fact that Shane seemed to have lost his marbles.

In fear of Costello’s return to the control room and his probable puzzlement at Shane’s behaviour and what it signified, we implored Shane to calm the fuck down, which he did, and as suddenly as his fury at the guitar, and at Costello himself, had flared up. At the end of the day, as usual, he bagged up the guitar and went home with it.