Fourteen

After our St Patrick’s Day shows at the Clarendon Ballroom, with a sheepish bluffness, Frank had announced he had booked us a television appearance in Munich, together with a string of gigs in Germany. He had driven a hand into a pocket and rubbed his stubbly, red face. It was as if he expected resistance and was never prepared for the eventuality that we never offered any. At the beginning of May we would be going on a tour of Scandinavia too.

The birth of Jem and Marcia’s second child was just two months away. With his staring, forehead-furrowed face, Jem said he would come to Munich for the television show, but would have to go home afterwards. Frank briskly put forward Philip Chevron to deputise. Chevron, it turned out, happened to be under Frank’s management too.

Chevron had been the lead singer and songwriter with a Dublin band called the Radiators from Space. In the past couple of years, since we had first met him at the Pindar of Wakefield, he had produced the first single and a handful of tracks on the début album by the Men They Couldn’t Hang and had worked with German chanteuse Agnes Bernelle, producing a collection of cabaret songs from the Weimar Republic. Chevron was a fan of ours. It was he who had brought Costello to see us play at the Diorama in Regent’s Park, just as we were about to start to record Red Roses for Me.

Philip Chevron standing in for Jem was a daft idea from the beginning. Philip was no banjo player. He played it like a guitar. Heavily, with a plectrum and with quivering fingers, he picked out arpeggios that were intended to mimic the forward and backward rolls which Jem had made second nature. I was surprised Chevron’s fingers had the ability to hold the strings down. Everything about him was diminutive, from his shoulders down to his shoes.

It was our first trip abroad. I loved being in Germany, its trams and trees, the angled grids of windows, the rectangles of grass and warm spring sunlight. In each of our hotel rooms was a greeting from the hotel manager and a bottle of wine wrapped in noisy cellophane. I took the wine to indicate the elevation of our status.

After performing a forty-five-minute set for a programme called Alabamahalle at the Bayerischer Rundfunk studios, we were taken across the road for a tour of U-boat 96, the submarine in Das Boot. Its cramped confines, its strangulated bulkhead doors which required one to both raise foot and duck head to climb through, horrified and excited us. Bunches of brightly coloured plastic bananas hung in nets under the ceiling. They did little to offset the severity of the rivets and the iron plating.

Ludicrous as it was, we were incapable of not drawing parallels between Das Boot and the confinement of our minivan. We understood the film’s German tag line: Eine Reise ans Ende des Verstandes – a journey to the edge of the mind. From that day Das Boot became a touchstone for our own experience of prolonged physical proximity magnified by the detachment that came with our particular brand of nomadism.

Jem flew back to London. We drove up into the Ruhrgebiet. After a couple of gigs, we crossed East Germany on the dilapidated transit road towards West Berlin. We bought vodka from an Intershop. There was a picture of a bison on the label, a sideways view against a green background with the word Zubrowka in gold across the top. The vodka was pale green with a grass haulm floating inside. Shane held up the bottle to compare the bison’s features with Andrew’s.

‘Bison vodka!’ said Andrew in his liquid bass. ‘Na zdorovje!’

‘Vorsprung durch Alkohol!’ Cait sang out.

It was late when we got to West Berlin. We were drunk. It was dark. A firework rose and embroidered the sky above the dismal high-rises. It happened to be Hitler’s birthday. In the tiny club, at the back of the crowd, a clutch of skinheads chanted with expressionless faces and heiling arms. We played on regardless, shooting looks across at one another until Cait swaggered over to the microphone and started to harangue them. I admired her spunk but it just made it worse. The Nazis shoved to the front and gathered before her, a thicket of angled arms and flattened hands.

Chevron stepped up to the centre microphone. He was all composure. In measured English he announced that we had come to play for those who had come to see us, and no one else, and that the best thing to do was to ignore the Nazis among them and enjoy our music. Cait backed off and lurked in the shadows.

Backstage we fumed about neo-fascism and regarded our deputy banjo player with wonderment.

*

On our journey back to London Andrew regaled us with naval monographs. One of them was his description of what he assured us was known, below decks in the boiler room, as the ‘Dance of the Flaming Arseholes’. It involved rolled-up newspapers, bare buttocks and a cigarette lighter. Another was an epigram describing the Royal Navy and attributed to Sir Winston Churchill: Rum, sodomy, and the lash. We all agreed, there and then, that that was the title of the album.

Just the mixing of Rum Sodomy and the Lash was left to do. Costello was going to take a break before committing to it. He promised mixes by the time we were finished with our tour of Finland, Sweden and Norway.

We had one show in London supporting Richard Thompson at the Dominion Theatre before going back out on tour. It was a tumultuous and – deemed by the tabloid press – disrespectful opening gig. During our set there was a stage invasion. During Thompson’s show the crowd chanted to the tune of ‘Cwm Rhondda’:

Richard Thompson! Richard Thompson! Who the fucking hell are you?

The following day we met at Elephant to record the B-sides needed for the single release of ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’. Again, we dug into Darryl’s trove cassette tape for the traditional songs ‘Muirshin Durkin’ and ‘Whiskey You’re the Devil’. Philip Chevron produced. He sat, diminutive and gaunt, bent over at the mixing desk, his head to one side due to a hearing disorder. The recordings were hurried and, after the night before, effortful.

At the end of the week we left Jem at home and departed for Harwich, and the first of our two ferry journeys to Helsinki. After a night of drinking and a ruckus with a handful of etiolated Finns, we arrived in Hamburg. I was tired and hung over. The ship stole through the dawn into harbour, down a foul estuary past the backsides of factories to port and a filthy beach strewn with rotting wooden hulls to starboard. We were not halfway to the first gig of the tour. Helsinki was another nineteen-hour passage across the Baltic Sea.

The tarnished white superstructure of our next ship – the Finnjet – appeared in the evening sunlight after an afternoon’s drive across Schleswig-Holstein.

Our assigned cabins were cells, pitilessly white, with berths fixed to the plastic walls. Darryl had a scheme. There were first-class cabins for the taking, he said. Almost from under the nose of one of the stewards at what stood for a reception desk, he plucked a couple of keys from a box on the counter. Darryl said to wait at least until the bar closed before squatting whatever cabin the key was for. In the meantime I bought a bottle of apple schnapps and took it down to the Horizon Bridge where angled, salt-rimed windows gave out on a view of the sheen of light cast by the moon on the sea.

I found Philip Chevron sitting with his tiny feet up on the rail, staring out. I took a seat next to him and threw my ankles over the rail. Both of us were already drunk.

Illuminated by the radar images of the coasts of Latvia and Estonia from the sickly screens above the windows, we talked, trading events in our lives, his in Dublin, mine in the north of England. He told me about his days at school, the feebleness of his health – a recurring stomach ulcer – his work with Agnes Bernelle and Costello, his love for musical theatre, his sometimes troubled relationship with his father.

As he spoke he flung his scrawny arms and legs into dramatic angles: an ankle up on one knee, his leg bent wide, spontaneously throwing an arm behind his head, his elbow pointing upward. He moved suddenly and often, as if at pains to show how comfortable he was with himself and me.

I told him about my boarding-school education in Yorkshire, my family holidays in the Lake District, my fondness for solitary twenty-mile hikes in the Yorkshire Dales, my penchant for classical music and my sometimes troubled relationship with my father, too.

I ended up forming the inebriated impression that most of his youth had taken place indoors, in schoolrooms and bedrooms and, now, in studios and the record shop where he worked. By contrast, the synopsis of my childhood turned into a parade of track-bikes and filth, open air and exercise, hiking, hills and lungfuls of fresh air.

When we had finished the bottle of schnapps Philip got up. Before he teetered off he planted a bristly kiss on my mouth.

The sound of the ship’s screws going into full astern woke me in the cabin I’d squatted. Huge wooden pilings reflected in the dark water glided by the window as the ship hove into Helsinki harbour. Ice floes nudged one another in the swell. I got up and made my way to the shuddering car deck to find the van.

‘What have you done to our replacement banjo player?’ Spider demanded. In the night it seemed Philip had had an attack. Andrew and Spider, who were sharing one of the cabins with him, had roamed the darkened ship looking for a doctor. They found none, only a pilot in the dimness of the bridge who had waved his arms about, shouting, ‘You must not be here!’

That morning they had brought Philip up to the car deck and had managed to get him onto the minibus. He was curled in one of the seats, his head nested in a pillow, moaning. His face glowed with a yellow pallor.

‘He’s been throwing up blood,’ Spider said.

‘We need to get him to a hospital,’ Paul Scully said.

Driving down the incline off the ship, an overalled customs official waved us out of the line and into an aluminium shed. The doors closed behind us and we were all ordered out of the van. We helped Philip to a metal stool where he groaned, eyes closed, arms folded across his stomach. The customs officials let a young golden retriever in through the back doors of the van. We weren’t worried. We weren’t carrying anything. The puppy padded around the seats, sniffing. Eventually it flopped out through the front door and made straight for Shane, plopped its paws on his thighs and sniffed his crutch.

‘Get it off me!’ Shane cried out.

We got Philip back onto the minibus. The pain seemed to suck the skin to his cheekbones and temples. He clutched his stomach and moaned at every brake and bump in the road. The prolonged shuddering of one of the cobbled streets on the way to the hotel contorted his face into a grimace of agony. Scully took him to a clinic.

After the sound check Scully, Darryl and I went to visit him. He had ruptured the ulcer he had spoken to me about on the Horizon Bridge. The clinic wanted to keep him for further tests. We expected the worst, but when the lift doors opened onto Philip’s ward, we saw him coming down the corridor fully dressed, though gaunt and pallid, and stooping a little. To the bemusement of the staff, minutes before, he had discharged himself.

‘I’d prefer to experience my first fist fuck in more conducive surroundings than a clinic in Finland,’ he said.

Grim as his determination was to convince us he was better, we forbade him to come down to the gig. Over the next couple of days his resolve to play forced us to relent, and for the next few gigs he taped a folded towel to the back of the banjo to soften the pressure against his stomach.

We arrived in Stockholm with just drumsticks and whistles, gaffer tape and guitar picks. Swedish customs were on strike and had forced Darryl to return on the ferry we’d come on, back across the Gulf of Bothnia. We made it to a club called the Living Room with a minute to try out the instruments Costello and Frank had rented, both men having flown in from London that afternoon. The accordion leaked air through a couple of holes. Costello bent over a mandolin, straining to hear the strings, cursing the clamour beyond the filthy curtain which separated us from the stage. We squeezed through a hole in the wall, to be slammed by the heat in the club.

Afterwards Philip collapsed on the fusty sofa in the dressing room with his eyes closed, his thin mouth drawn into a slit across his shrivelled face. He had laboured with the banjo, not just on account of his burst ulcer, but also due to the scale of the instrument which had been rented for him. It was huge.

We met up with Darryl again in Örebro after his seventeen-hour re-crossing of the Baltic. After Gothenburg Costello returned to London. We continued up the coast. By the time we were approaching Oslo, Shane and Spider were at the roaring stage of an argument. It had started on the subject of whether or not a tomato was a vegetable. It had gone on to the matter of whether dogs could think.

‘You fucking stupid fucking ignoramus!’

‘Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!’

‘Fuck you!’

‘No! Fuck you!’

‘It’s obvious that we’ve become incapable of conversation,’ Andrew said.

A piss stop brought us out of the van into the warmth of a spring afternoon and respite from Shane and Spider’s cantankerousness. We lay about in the sunshine on a vale sprinkled with spring blossoms.

I discovered from a couple of the humpers working backstage at the gig in Oslo that Fearnley was a historic Norwegian name, borne by generations of fishers. When I got to my hotel room I found there to be six pages of Fearnleys in the telephone directory. I imagined my forebears, in horned helmets, scudding across the North Sea. It made sense that they would in time turn their skill in the building of longboats to woodworking and joinery and, eventually, to the building of houses. I went about in the spring sunlight as if Oslo were my new hometown. All of Oslo fluttered with flags for Norwegian Independence Day. By evening, the news came from Jem in England that Marcia had given birth to their second daughter. We phoned him from Frank’s room, shouting our congratulations in the direction of the handset.

We left the bunting, sunshine and the spring behind and drove up into dense cloud over the Hardangervidda glacier between Oslo and Bergen. Now and again the van pitched into the sulphurous light of a tunnel that bored through the mountain, re-emerging into daylight the colour of galvanised iron. Up on the glacier strange disconnected shapes loomed and drifted noiselessly past. We listened in silence to recordings of John McCormack that Cait had brought with her. It was as if the glacier entered into us.

On the way down, as colour started to return to the landscape, Darryl ploughed the bus to a halt. By the side of the road a waterfall tumbled in full spate from a rock shelf.

We piled out of the van and stood on the side of the road. The air was chill, with the tang of peat. The water was like spun sugar, tinged brown. From a dripping slab between a couple of twisted trees above our heads the water lunged and crashed against a pitted boulder jammed in the ravine. The mist which rose from the impact silvered our hair and dripped from the trees. Down an incline, a sapling with a couple of dithering leaves on it grew at the edge.

‘Why we stop?’ came Shane’s slurred voice from the doorway of the van. Everyone looked round. He was clutching a bottle of vodka by the neck.

‘Nature,’ Frank said.

Shane eased himself down from the doorsill and steadied himself with an elbow. He looked over at the waterfall, rapt.

‘Fuck!’ he said, with drooping lids. He stepped with flat feet towards the roar and the rising mist, stopping halfway across the road to fumble a cigarette out of his packet. After a couple of attempts he managed to get one to fall between his fingers.

He succeeded in lighting up and then shuffled down the slope, to come to a swaying stop a couple of feet from the edge. He blinked against the mist and teetered closer, wafting for the support of the sapling. He tilted forward onto the balls of his feet, to look first down into the gorge and then up to the trees at the top. The spray beaded his hair. A dolour came into his eyes, followed by a smile of exaggerated dreaminess.

It occurred to me that communion with anything or anyone would always be impossible for him, shackled as he was to a self-consciousness that rarely rested.

When Shane had clambered back into the van and had dropped into his seat, Frank drew the sliding door closed behind him.

‘Well?’ Frank said.

‘Well what?’ replied Shane.

‘Inspired?’

Shane’s eyelids drooped. He looked up, bored.

‘What you mean?’

‘You know,’ Frank faltered. ‘Inspired? Any ideas? You know, for a song?’

Shane snorted wearily.

‘Get fucked Frank,’ he said.

Darryl released the brake and we descended from the glacier.

Fjord upon fjord appeared between the trees hundreds of feet beneath the cliffs, each as flat as whetstone with a white scratch of shoreline. The road yawed out of sight round the corners where concrete barriers, barked with tyre marks, kerbed the exposed turns. On the other side, bodywork-paint dashed the rock. Darryl seemed to take delight in swinging the van round the bends, veering at the last minute from a plunge down through the fir trees. Clutching his bottle of vodka by the neck, Shane screamed in the back of the van.

‘I’m ready to die! I’ve been to Norway and I’m ready to die!’

By the time the road levelled out coming into Bergen the vodka had eventually relieved him from the horror of swerving and the sudden vistas. His head had lolled back on the seat and he was asleep.

The last gig of the tour took place in what looked like a school library. Tables abutted the makeshift stage. The room filled with tow-headed students. Here and there an ankle rested on a knee or a hand tapped on the tabletop. Though his face was still the colour of tallow and the expression on it grim against what must have been the pain in his stomach, Philip seemed to have recovered. He dipped and twisted on stage with the banjo, sweeping the headstock up and over his head, to end somehow in a crouch where he stared with a pout out over the audience. With a flick of his head in the direction of a couple of rows of tables going out from the stage into the audience, he instructed me to take one while he took the other. I stepped between people’s drinks as best I could, until my cables gave out. I looked across at Philip. He paid no mind to the people gazing up at him from their seats. He crouched with the banjo as if hosing down a wall.

‘Ah, lads!’ Scully said afterwards. ‘It’s come to this – throwing shapes!’

In a couple of days, after another seventeen-hour ferry voyage across the North Sea, I was back in my flat on Royal College Street, shaving before the mirror. I had to grip the rim of the basin because the floor pitched beneath me like the deck of a ship. While it alarmed me, there was something strangely comforting about it, as if the tour had become a thing in itself, endearingly reluctant to let me go.