We started rehearsals at John Henry’s, a converted Victorian factory at the end of a brick alley off Brewery Road in Holloway. But for the sagging black fabric which covered the walls in the rehearsal room, everything in the room was grey, from the cigarette-burnt synthetic carpet to the dinge which managed to filter in through the filthy window.
Andrew’s finger had healed, but his first demand at the start of rehearsals was that he should continue to be allowed to sit down to play. He had had Charlie McLennan pick up his kit from home. Around the familiar turquoise cocktail drum and snare snuggled a bass drum, cymbals and a hi-hat.
Shane seemed fully recovered after his pneumonia. He came to rehearsal in a dove-grey suit like the one he had worn for the video of ‘Dirty Old Town’, freshly dry-cleaned, over a black shirt. He wore latticed leather shoes.
He paced back and forth across the floor with a hand in his pocket, smoking, avoiding our eyes, waiting for us to finish chatting and reading our papers. He tapped on the windowsill as a couple of us drifted in late from the Balmoral on the corner or in from the café next door.
He moved me off the piano to show us a song he had written, called ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’. With his index, middle and ring fingers separated in such a way that they moved in a group, he stabbed out the three chords.
There was an introduction to play, repeated at the beginning of the middle eight and at the end. There was a three-note refrain in between each of the verses. He demonstrated it by pecking the keys with a tar-tanned forefinger.
As soon as we started rehearsing it, I understood the reason for his imperiousness and the impeccability of his clothing. The song was gorgeous. The lyrics were generous and grown-up. Despite the mysteriousness of some of the lines, there was a beautiful clarity in the song.
When we had learnt the chords and the structure I took over on the piano. Shane stood tall in his suit, his fingers round the barrel of the microphone, looking with feigned abashment at the carpet as he waited for the introduction to play through. After a while, he took the microphone off its stand and walked up and down, singing. Now and again, he lifted an arm for emphasis. The performance was too artless and too abashed to be pastiche. His embodiment of Frank Sinatra made me want to look away in embarrassment, but I was simultaneously compelled to watch, the conviction he had of the worth of his song was so conspicuous.
Another song Shane brought in was one he had written for the Clancy Brothers. In endearing hyperbole, it was called ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’. Like ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’, it was in 6/8 time. The lyrics were vivid with images and locations in Shane’s beloved County Tipperary. The melody in the middle eight he had based upon a sixteenth-century harp tune, ‘Tabhair Dom Do Lámh’ – ‘Give Me Your Hand’. Terry closed his eyes and nodded in approval.
The mandolin melody Jem had been playing on the bus in Germany formed the introduction and middle eight of another song Shane brought in to rehearsal. It was a song full of horrific and haunting images. Shane explained to me, with haggard relish, that the figure of the woman with the comb in her hand in the chorus was the banshee of Celtic mythology whose keening presages death. I sat on a speaker cabinet in the rehearsal room with Shane standing over me. He leant close. He mimicked the action of the woman forever combing, her hair falling half over her face, screaming and screaming. It wasn’t so much the phantasm of the banshee herself which struck me with horror, but Shane’s looming demented phizog, his ruined teeth, crusty lips, mouth blooming with cold sores, the blowholes of his nose and his terrorful eyes.
When we had been in Berlin, in the dressing room, Shane had been surrounded by fans, breathless with excitement to be in his company and desperate to impress, reeling off punk bands and pitching songs to him they regarded as seminal.
‘The “Turkey Song” of the Damned!’ one of them had shouted.
‘What?! Turkish song of the damned!? Fuck!’
The title of the new song was ‘Turkish Song of the Damned’.
Again we took up rehearsing the Christmas song we had worked on at NOMIS after coming back from Scandinavia the previous May. Marcia contended that a Christmas song without conflict was boring and predictable, and came up with the storyline of a straw-clutching loser bickering with his girlfriend. The song now had a couple of introductory verses. The melody of the first line was an undisguised reiteration of the theme from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America.
Our rehearsals were interrupted by a visit from Dave Robinson, who came to plead with us to stay with the label. Stiff Records, it seemed, was finally going under. Unshaven, the skin around his eyes papery, Robinson sat in front of us on a flight case and implored, his hands defiantly thrust in the pockets of his car coat. The balance of power seemed to have swung diametrically the other way. The record company had now come cap in hand to us. We stood with our instruments hanging from our shoulders and pretended to consider what he had to say.
Almost to spite Dave Robinson, in the couple of weeks we had before going out on a Christmas tour, we went into Elephant Studios to record music for the soundtrack for Alex Cox’s film about Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, Sid and Nancy.
The majority of the music we made for the film was suitably scourging, a synthesis of what we thought were basic elements of the Velvet Underground sound: rigidly down-struck guitar set against a grim Phil Spector beat. Jem had written a melody we submitted to a suite of variations, including one in which, when the location of the film moved to the French capital, the accordion evoked the streets of Paris. Otherwise it was a matter of setting up a groove around two chords with bass, drums and guitar, with Jem laying on banjo and myself a mandolin beaten with teaspoons or a violin meant to conjure up John Cale.
Shane had written a song for Cait to sing. It recalled the Shangri-Las and was called ‘Haunted’. In keeping with the music we’d been making for the film, the song relied again on a Phil Spector beat to underpin Shane’s favourite chords outside folk music: E, A and B, with the two top strings open, ringing across the chord progression.
By the end of November we had recorded as many as nine pieces of music, before going out on the road for what was becoming our customary Christmas tour of England, taking in the Midlands, the North-West and Scotland.
The tent-pole gig of the tour was the Hammersmith Odeon.
It was deemed a major gig, despite its less-than-grand location under the concrete span of the Hammersmith Flyover and the fact that there was something démodé about the place – the tabernacle for metal and the occasional glam band. Whitesnake, Deep Purple, Lynyrd Skyrnyrd – and Boney M – had played there. On the other hand, so had Frank Zappa, Bob Marley and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I tried to imagine people saying: ‘The Pogues at Hammersmith Odeon? That’s cool!’ I hoped the ethos I was convinced we embodied would carry us through and transform even the uncoolest situation into triumph.
The Hammersmith Odeon wasn’t cool, but then it happened not to be our gig. It turned out to be Frank’s. Once the gear was set up, Frank sauntered out onto the stage. He scanned the sweeping balcony with a self-conscious meekness, taking in the plush gloom of the empty seats. He tapped the stage with the metal toe of a snakeskin boot and then knocked a heel against it. But for the cigarette he was smoking, which was unusual for him, he was like a footballer getting the feel for the turf and the terraces.
The gig itself was a matter of the dreadful hurtle of song after song. We played by the seat of our pants and finished by the skin of our teeth. The beginning of each song felt like sheer folly.
Near the beginning, Philip went up to the microphone.
‘Hello!’ he said, in a voice which instantly invoked Val Doonican’s cameo in the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s ‘The Intro and the Outro’. ‘We’re the Pogues!’ The cheering and jeering of a couple of thousand people or more who bore nothing but maniacal goodwill for us carried us to the end of the gig.
Afterwards, drained by the exertion and cowed by the cycle of count-ins and finishing flourishes, we sat with our hands dangling between our knees and our heads hanging between our shoulders.
Frank came into the dressing room. His eyes were opaque with drink. His mouth clacked with dry spit. He laughed breathlessly. He ushered in some other men who more or less looked like him – wearing navy blazers and faded jeans. They gave off a superior air of having rooted for Frank from the beginning. They nodded at us and clapped Frank on the shoulders. As the congratulations proceeded and Frank got drunker, a flap of his shirt came loose and he gave up training back the lock of hair behind his ear that kept coming adrift. His face was flushed with vindication. Recovering from the concussion of noise and heat and light on stage, and because we’d had a drink or two from the fridge – Bloody Marys in pint plastic glasses, bottles of champagne – some of us draped arms over Frank’s shoulders. A chant went up.
‘Fuck the begrudgers! Fuck the begrudgers! Fuck the begrudgers!’
*
I spent Christmas with Debsey’s family at her grandmother’s house in Cambridge. Granny Butcher had haystack hair from which slid wisps of grey. Her low-ceilinged kitchen was humid with cooking. Upstairs in the room I shared with Debsey’s brother, it was so cold that ice formed on the inside of the windows. On Boxing Day, I got up before light to get a train to London to meet up with the rest of the band at Heathrow for another tour of Ireland.
Before we could relish the heady exclusivity and the leatherette seats of the turboprop fifteen-seater Frank had chartered to fly us to Waterford, we had to wait for Cait and Costello to show up – until we couldn’t wait any longer. We boarded, leaving to Frank the job of sorting out how to get our bass player to the first show the next day.
Whatever loftiness and rock-and-roll privilege had come with the chartering of an aircraft ended on arrival at Waterford airport. Our plane drew up in the middle of an otherwise vacant plot of tarmac in front of the terminal – an observation tower with canted windows and a squat arrivals hall. The place was deserted. We collected our luggage and walked to where a couple of vans were waiting. Freezing rain drifted across the trees surrounding the scrubby airfield. Lichen grew on the concrete posts which struggled to hold up the chicken-wire perimeter fence.
By the time of the gig the next day, Cait still hadn’t shown up. We drafted Darryl into the line-up. He knew all the songs. He had heard them often enough. How could he not know how to play them? Cait didn’t show up until our second date of the tour in Tralee.
It was a tour of unrelenting cold. The hotels were interred in the off-season and sparsely patronised, the radiators frigid, the bedding meagre, breakfast dilatory. A few of the gigs took place in drinking and entertainment emporia attached to the hotel we were staying in. They were vast, dowdy places in the middle of nowhere, full of smoke and what we took to be farmers, a lot of whom wore hairpieces of staggering conspicuousness. The gigs provided the only opportunities to warm up. Not even soaking in the bath prior to going downstairs for show time seemed to help much, the water tepid at best.
At the Fairways Hotel in Dundalk we had to be led to the stage down an outside corridor and past the door to the kitchens. My leather-soled shoes slipped on grating slimy with kitchen grease. Keeping my accordion from damage, I went down. The grate tore the skin on my elbow into a hanging lobe. A doctor we found fashioned butterfly stitches out of a couple of sticky plasters a barman came across in a drawer behind one of the bars.
As our opening act, we had travelling with us a singer-songwriter called Ron Kavana. He was a friend of Frank and Terry’s – a stocky guy with a flat nose and the beginning of a widow’s peak. In Belfast, he and Costello both opened for us, each of them with an acoustic guitar. Before he had even opened his mouth to say or sing anything, Costello was greeted with a gob of saliva spat from somewhere near the front of the crowd.
Kavana stayed in the same hotels as we did and travelled with us – in the bus we had or the car in which Scully sped through the country roads, sometimes within door-handle-striking distance of oncoming traffic, Frank and Terry his usual passengers.
‘A Corkman,’ Shane sneered. I liked Ron. He was a nice guy, if a little earnest and prosaic.
The drinking and cigarette-smoking and lack of fresh air got to me. In Limerick I became short of breath and my head had started to pulse. I stepped out of the bar we were in, hoping for the refreshment of the cold on my face. The air outside was acrid with peat smoke which seemed to have concentrated in the freezing fog hanging in the streets. The sulphurousness of the street lighting made the atmosphere look yet more noxious.
Fresh air, however, we got. On a detour between Limerick and Galway, Darryl took us to Cait’s family’s hometown of Lehinch, County Clare. The day was Cait’s twenty-first birthday. We walked through the town. The roofs of the bungalows shone with orange lichen in the low afternoon sun and their windows gazed out to the ocean. Fresh air we got too, and in great gusts blowing off the Atlantic, when Darryl stopped a couple of miles up the road at the Cliffs of Moher. Ragged piers of black shale marched in from the sea out of the mist and channelled such a gale up the bluff that I could hold my coat out like wings, jump into the blast and float for a second or two.
When we got to Galway we were told the news that Philip Lynott had died in Salisbury Hospital, of renal and coronary failure due to internal abscesses and blood poisoning. I remembered his pallid face and blank eyes at the Clarendon Ballroom the previous March. Backstage at Leisureland, against the seaside-blue paintwork and frosted glass of one of the corridors, Frank, Terry, P.V. and Scully were standing like a bas-relief in the grim fluorescent light. All of them had known Lynott. Each stared into space. The news of his death was a brutal end to an otherwise luminous day of sunshine and cold, sea and wind, sand and cliffs.
No one took Phil Lynott’s death more to heart than Cait. Unfortunately, the promoters, having heard that it was her birthday, had stationed beaded buckets of champagne and flutes on both ends of a table to await her in one of the function rooms at the hotel after the gig. A gleaming birthday cake was the centrepiece. It was too much for Cait. Inconsolable over Lynott’s death, her voice broken with anger and grief, she scooped up handfuls of yellow sponge and icing and splattered the walls, floor and anyone within range with it. After her fury, her party ended with racking sobs and heaving embraces. Her face was smeared with mascara. When I went back to the function room, corks rolled over the floorboards and broken glass ground underfoot.
Our last gig was in Shane’s hometown of Puckane, a few miles outside the market town of Nenagh. It seemed the entire village had come out to fill the sizeable, stone-flagged saloon in Paddy Kennedy’s bar, with pride of place by the iron kitchen range bestowed upon the MacGowan family in their navy blazers and print frocks. Towards the end of our set, a man I assumed to be Shane’s dad, Maurice, with a little girl in a cotton dress in tow, mounted the stage to speak a few words into the microphone – about his son, about us, about how welcome we were, what a great honour it was and so forth. When the speech was done, Maurice and little girl, bereft of a plan, stayed where they were, staring haplessly at the audience, while we played the last song around them.
*
Frank had already given us a sketch of a tour of the United States, to take place at the end of February. New York would be our base for shows up and down the East Coast. The whole thing would take a week and a half. The prospect of going to America filled me with dread.
In order to have some sort of release in advance of the tour, Frank had put forward the idea of recording an EP. Forgetting Shane’s animosity or oblivious to it in the first place, Costello had agreed to produce.
When we got back to London we started again at Elephant Studios.
‘London Girl’ was a pop song, urgently puerile and fun to play. Against a shuffle beat, Shane sang in an American accent.
When it came to overdubbing the accordion part, I played my heart out. Jem tacked a sign up on the hessian wall of my booth in the studio.
‘Cajun!’ it read.
I’d been listening to Nathan Abshire and Clifton Chenier – and Rockin’ Dopsie and the Zydeco Twisters. I played nothing like them, and made it up myself. I chattered chords against Andrew’s shuffle in semiquavers, toggling index and middle fingers all the way down the keyboard in a descending scale of couplets. By the time I was done with my overdub, I was exhausted and went to rest on the corduroy sofa in the control room while Terry went into the live room to overdub his parts on one of the other songs: ‘The Body of an American’. I lay curled up, going in and out of sleep. Terry’s cittern part infiltrated my dreams, the root note he kept striking on the offbeat mutating into a testicle forever dropping out of his Y-fronts.
We knocked out a jig Jem had written called ‘Planxty Noel Hill’, dedicated to the traditional concertina player who had been so scandalised by the Pogues at B. P. Fallon’s radio show at RTÉ the previous September. In Irish traditional music, the prefix of planxty denoted tribute. In the case of Jem’s instrumental – full of stops and starts and screams and yelps – it was intended ironically.
Before we left Elephant, we tried to record Jem and Shane’s Christmas song, which Shane had given the title ‘Fairytale of New York’, after J. P. Donleavy’s novel. In the duet, Cait sang the girl’s part. Costello played the piano. The fact that the song was divided into two parts, each with its distinct tempo, gave us no end of trouble. I wondered if the problem was symptomatic of Jem and Shane’s writing collaboration. Shane had written both lyrics and melody for the opening verses and the chorus. The main body of the song was Jem’s melody with Shane’s lyrics. We left ‘Fairytale of New York’ for a later date.
An orchestra was vital for ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’. Elephant Studios were too small. Through Frank’s connections with ZTT Records, Trevor Horn’s studios in Notting Hill were made available. Studio 1 at Sarm West was a huge place with oak flooring, a Bösendorfer piano in one corner and, in the distance, the window of the control room.
An arranger Frank knew called Fiachra Trench came in with a string orchestra and brass section. Trench had worked with Van Morrison and Phil Lynott. His nobility when he lifted his baton to conduct eclipsed the goofiness of his face. I watched in awe through the window. The presence of an orchestra in the studio beyond the glass and playing one of our songs put me in ferment. Trench’s arrangement included here and there a meticulous countermelody or a glissando to hoist the theme to a higher octave. The fourths which underpinned the instrumental verse towards the end of the song classily recalled Ravel’s Bolero.
In rehearsal we’d been playing ‘The Body of an American’ with the theme from The Guns of Navarone for a middle eight. Averse to sharing royalties with Dimitri Tiomkin, we had Tommy Keane come in and obscure the tune with uilleann pipes. One afternoon, we took pains to teach Tommy to play Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’, dumbfounded that he’d never heard it. Once he’d got the notes, as we had seen before, his face tilted upward, his eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling.
We were taken out into the streets of Notting Hill to have our photographs taken for publicity for our American tour and for the cover of the EP. It was the end of January and we wore our coats: Terry, his tweed three-quarter length and his battered hat; Spider, his leather coat Wolfgang. We found a Budweiser hoarding which propitiously depicted Mount Rushmore.
‘We should call it Poguetry,’ Frank said. Thinking it was a pun on ‘purgatory’, I liked the idea. ‘Poguetry in Motion,’ he added.
The EP, Frank was of the opinion, would be our calling card. His excitement to go to the United States was palpable.
‘You’ll be beating them off,’ Frank said. ‘You’ll all be getting blow-jobs.’
Despite the recent fourth anniversary of my relationship with Debsey, the remark added a twang of cupidity to my eagerness to go to the United States, and to my fear of it.