Twenty

I let myself into my flat the morning of our return to London from New York and had to hold my breath against the smell. I opened a few windows. There were dead flies on the sills. There were crusts of penicillin mould in the tea mugs. Once I had tidied up and aired the place out, I rang Debsey.

Banishing the words ‘Mercan pussy’ from my mind, I traded my guilt for Debsey’s delight in the gaudy string of plastic beads, the striped tights and the parrot-blue wig which had been hanging under one of the awnings on the sidewalk of West 14th Street the morning after our show at the World.

‘Your face is all blotchy,’ Debsey said then, looking at me. ‘What’s the matter with you? You’re drinking too much.’

My hair was falling out too. That week she remarked on the hairs I left in the sink after I washed. Over the past couple of months an open sore had appeared on my left foot. My arm hurt from forever dragging open and hooking closed the bellows of my accordion. After gigs I couldn’t hold anything in my left hand without my arm going into spasm.

‘You should go and see a doctor,’ Debsey said.

After our three nights at the Hammersmith Palais, we had a week off before starting a month-long tour of France and Germany. Mindful of his appeal to give him two years of our lives, I surrendered to Frank’s urgency to break us, territory upon territory. I wasn’t unhappy to be going away again, and so soon. I was glad to pack my belongings in the canvas holdall from my dad’s days in amateur dramatics and lock up my flat for weeks on end. I promised Debsey I’d see a doctor before we were to go to Europe.

The last thing we had to do before going away was to finish recording our contribution to the soundtrack for Alex Cox’s film Sid and Nancy. Cox wanted another couple of songs. We met at post-production studios in Soho.

‘Hot Dogs with Everything’ was a song I had played with Shane in the Nips. After going through all manner of versions of the song – in the style of Costello and the Attractions, as a reggae song – Frank burst into the studio.

‘Just play the fucking thing how you used to play it!’

Shane took up a guitar. We ended up lashing through the song even more unflinchingly than the Nips had ever played it. Spider bleated the lyrics. Shane abraded the middle eight with a guitar solo. He fisted the guitar, head down, and with such recklessness that I was embarrassed how quickly at my audition for the Nips I had admitted that I could do disconnected shards of industrial noise. I ducked out of playing guitar on the next song – a minute-and-a-half Millwall Chainsaws’ song called ‘Glued up and Speeding’. Abandoning the tyranny of tuning and refinement, Spider, Shane, Cait and Andrew hurtled through it.

The recording done, Alex Cox took Shane and Spider out to dinner in Notting Hill. Afterwards, as Shane was getting into a car, a black cab coming up Westbourne Grove knocked him down. He broke his arm and tore ligaments in his leg.

*

Portugal at the end of March was beautiful. Debsey and I stayed a week at a farmhouse in the Serra de Monchique which a German friend of mine shared with the other bus drivers in his hippie coach company.

What marred the otherwise paradisiacal interlude was the sleepless nights I had, while I nursed the conviction that I was falling out of love with Debsey. After the farm-dogs had finished their barking, my predicament regarding our four-year relationship seemed inextricably linked to the baleful rectangle of moonlight which slipped from the bedcovers to mount the wall and fill the room.

When I got back to England I went to visit Shane. His leg and arm were in plaster and he was going about with a walking stick.

‘How was your holiday?’ he sneered.

‘How are you?’ I asked. In pubs, he told me, people moved to let him put his leg up and got him drinks.

‘Not much changed there, then,’ I said.

It was the first time in a couple of years I found I had nothing to do. There was a rerun of the eleven-episode Heimat on the television. I took up driving lessons.

I went to see the doctor about the suppurating lesion on my foot and the pain in the crook of my left arm. For my arm the doctor prescribed an ointment, made, he said, from the pituitary gland of a pig. He suggested weight training and swimming.

D.J. was a keen weight trainer. He took me to enrol at a fitness centre he went to in Camden. Though we laughed that D.J.’s enthusiasm for weight training was due to the similarity of the endorphin rush to that of heroin, we respected his commitment.

Guilty about the ebb of my feelings for her, I spent a lot of time with Debsey. We went swimming at Kentish Town Baths. We went up again to my parents’ country cottage in the Yorkshire Dales. In the course of an afternoon spent holding her hand while she sat crying on the bed in one of the upstairs rooms I finally admitted to myself that the end of the relationship was near.

Two days after the explosion at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, we went into the studio to re-record, as a single, Shane’s song for Sid and Nancy: ‘Haunted’. Frank had attached a producer by the name of Craig Leon. Leon had produced the Ramones’ first record and had been producer’s assistant on Blondie’s début album.

Leon exuded the air of an American living in London. A smile played on his lips as if he was aware of being ahead of some sort of curve. He had grey hair and a dark beard. He had the flattering knack of making you feel that what you had to say he hadn’t heard before.

We recorded the backing track at Olympic Studios in Barnes. It was another huge room with a venerable hardwood floor and walls of wooden panelling. The control-room windows frowned from beneath a tiled overhang. The Rolling Stones had recorded Their Satanic Majesties Request, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers at Olympic. Led Zeppelin had used it for all their studio albums. So had the Small Faces, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Blind Faith too. ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ had been recorded there. The place was imbued with the sanctity of a cathedral.

The Phil Spector beat which had so far characterised the music we had made for Sid and Nancy found its apotheosis in Leon’s production of ‘Haunted’. He ladled guitars, electric and acoustic, over the pounding drum part. I sat in a huddle in a booth with Ron Kavana, Terry Woods and a guy I didn’t know, each of us with an acoustic guitar on his knee. Terry played the guitar as if he were sweeping lint off his lapel. Ron Kavana dragged his pick backwards across the strings with elaborate flourishes. While we waited for the next pass, Kavana let me into the secret of strumming the mirror image of the take we had just done – starting the strumming on the upstroke.

‘Makes it sound bigger,’ he said.

After Cait had left Darryl’s band Pride Of The Cross, Debsey had taken up singing with Darryl and Dave Scott in what was now known as the Troubleshooters. Debsey came into the studio one afternoon to sing backing vocals on ‘Haunted’. Underpinning the staginess of Cait’s voice, the line of backing vocal Debsey sang was limpid and unadorned.

Once construction was properly under way of his wall of sound, Leon brought up the matter of what was going to happen in the middle eight. I brought up an idea I’d had for ages, something I’d been doing at home, which was to set a mandolin flat on my lap and beat the strings with teaspoons, in the manner of a hammered dulcimer.

‘Let’s give it a try!’ Leon said.

I knew Philip to have been waiting to play what would obviously be the guitar break. Philip happened to be out at the dentist. I was glad not to have to enter into a contest with him that I would probably have lost. By the time Philip came in at the end of the day, the middle eight was done. He looked crestfallen. The idea, though, was so direct a descendant of the rolling semiquavers of John Cale’s piano on ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, and so self-abnegatingly monotone, that I regarded it to have been inevitable.

*

Though not able to reinstate the entire European tour cancelled by Shane’s broken leg, Frank and our agent Derek Kemp managed at least to put together a tour of France, with a sketch of another tour of the United States in June. The French tour began at the end of May, after an appearance at a charity festival in Dublin.

Using Live Aid as its template – and featuring Bob Geldof – the purpose of Self Aid, held at the Royal Dublin Society Main Arena in Dublin, was to highlight the quarter of a million unemployed in Ireland.

We met to go out to the site in the bar at Jurys hotel. The remaining members of Thin Lizzy, who were going to close the festival, sat nearby: Scott Gorham in a denim jacket, the chafed pinchedness of his face belying the silkiness of his locks; Gary Moore with a face that looked as though it had been wrapped in barbed wire.

We didn’t see Cait or Costello until Cait turned up, in beatnik costume – leather jacket, leather hat, black slacks – at the RDS itself, where she announced her marriage to Costello that morning at a registry office in the city. The stage looked as if it had been decorated for their nuptials. It was all white, with white-painted monitor wedges, a white floor and a white backdrop – with the outlines of white Fender Stratocasters on it.

After playing the short set, I spent the rest of the day in a greenhouse of a bar backstage, paying scant attention to the concert, getting drunk with Eamonn Campbell of the Dubliners, missing Rory Gallagher, Costello and the Attractions and what was billed as the last performance of the Boomtown Rats. Towards the end of the evening I sensed the day reaching its climax and worked my way into the huddle of people by the side of the stage, where I craned to watch U2: Bono in a fringed suede jacket, his fingers continually sweeping his hair back; the Edge in a cut-off jean jacket and a brown derby with a playing card stuck in the hatband.

After the tribute to Phil Lynott by what was left of Thin Lizzy came the finale – as had become usual at events such as this one. The occasion and the pints of Smithwick’s with Campbell up in the bar had gone to my head. I was among the first to heed the call for all the performers to come out onto the stage. I strode in. My drunkenness made nonsense out of the shards of coloured shadow from the lights. Everything besides was painted white. I didn’t see the monitor wedge in front of me. One minute I was headed for the centre mike and Gary Moore and Bob Geldof and Bono and Chris de Burgh. The next it was as if my legs had been swiped from under me. I lay on my face for a second or two before I picked myself up and strode to the apron of the stage and threw my arm around Bob Geldof’s neck.

*

In Paris on the first morning of the reinstated tour I woke up on the bed in the hotel, still dressed, with my legs hanging off the edge. My pockets were empty of all the money I had changed at the kiosk at Charles de Gaulle airport the day before. I lay there hopelessly trying to reconstruct the events of the previous evening.

If the amount I was imbibing had not affected my understanding, I would have known that, along with the amount I was already putting away, the nightly binges on the road over the next couple of weeks constituted heavy drinking. Debsey had not been so distracted by the trinkets I had brought back from America as not to have remarked on the blotchiness of my face from alcohol.

The day after we arrived in Paris was the first day of the World Cup, hosted by Mexico. Football was an enthusiasm shared by most of the group. Darryl was a keen Nottingham Forest supporter. Jem’s allegiances were to Manchester United – as were mine, though nominally. Spider was an avid Arsenal fan. Costello and Terry, who I was given to understand had been something of a player in his youth, supported Liverpool. Charlie’s loyalty to Glasgow Rangers was so obdurate as to disable mockery. Shane was only capable of seeing football in terms of the sublimation of humanity’s drive to annihilation. P.V. avoided taking sides. Philip seemed not to be interested.

‘You’re mistaking me for someone who gives a fuck,’ D.J. said, when it came to the sport.

The first game of any significance for us was the match between Algeria and Northern Ireland. Our Irish connections sided us with the latter. Though the majority of its citizens were loyal to the English crown, the province was occupied by a colonial power. The Algerians, once occupied themselves but twenty or so years independent from France and still seemingly universally despised by the French, demanded our sympathy and respect.

We travelled along the Mediterranean coast from Marseille past the dream-like turrets and battlements of Carcassonne to watch the match in the time we had before the show, in the barely tolerable humidity of a bar in the centre of Toulouse.

The match was a 1–1 draw. Scully paid homage to the Algerians.

‘Ah, the Al-jaysus-gerians!’

It was hot in Toulouse, so hot that one of the lads in the opening band we had – a Scottish band we had come to know called Nyah Fearties – fainted. After the gig the heat was no less intense, even when we had come off stage and were away from the lights.

One of us found a swimming pool in the grounds behind the club. Most of us stripped to our underwear and dived in. Despite the sweltering heat, Shane seemed happy enough to sit on the rim of a planter with his drink, watching.

I was treading water in the deep end, relieved to cool down, when a dark shadow blotted out the night sky for a moment. The black shape exploded in the middle of the pool, sending the water lapping over the sides. In a moment or two Costello broke the heaving surface, blowing spray, and swam to the edge. He had left his hat on a window ledge, but otherwise he had been fully clothed, wearing his black caftan and his shoes.

Provinssirock festival took place on the first weekend in June, two hundred miles north of Helsinki and towards what looked to be the north-westerly curling path of the radioactive plume issuing from the explosion at Chernobyl. On the four-hour van journey through the forests and lakes and the late summer sunlight, I shouted for a piss stop. The driver pulled over. Shane and I got out and made our way over a trench to the trees and out of sight of the road, Shane carrying a bottle of rum and smoking a cigarette.

I’d seen Shane piss before but not with such a clear view. We stood feet apart on the far side of a large fir tree. When it came to the matter of pulling down his flies, encumbered by the bottle of rum, he hooked down the band of his Y-fronts with his thumb and stood with his foreskin lolling in the gap. He looked round the forest without interest, squinting through the smoke from the cigarette in his mouth. He adopted no stance. He didn’t even pull his foreskin back to piss, but allowed the rush, artesian rather than ejaculatory, to gout from the tan rosette, unconcerned about the drips going on his shoes or down the leg of his trousers. I looked down at the nose of darkened bark on the tree I had been pissing against. I carefully shook the last drops, stowed and zipped up. Shane’s flux petered out. He lodged his cigarette between his lips, blinking against the smoke, tucked the bottle of rum under his arm and rummaged his penis away. We walked back to the bus.

At the festival, our evening set felt like the middle of the afternoon. The sun gave little sign of descending and slanted brutally down on the stage. It was hot too. Shane came so adrift with the words to the songs that we were forced to scramble, falling in behind him as he lurched unpredictably from choruses which should have been verses, into verses which should have been instrumental sections. In the sweltering Portakabin afterwards, P.V. came in from his redundant lighting desk, shaking his head.

‘And he wrote the fucking songs!’ he said.

I changed out of my sodden suit. Our driver that afternoon had indicated the lakes all around on our drive up to the festival and had warned us of mosquitoes. I counted forty-seven bites on my ankles.

At two o’clock in the morning I found myself wandering round the festival site. Diffused daylight, soft and ethereal, bathed the trees and grass and the multitudes of the sleepless, staggering about the site like me. In the hotel car parks I passed a barefoot group rummaging in the boot of their car full to the rim with tins of beer.

When I got back to the hotel and tried to sleep, the room was bothersomely bright. I lay in bed worrying about the path of the radioactive smoke trailing north-westward from Chernobyl. The Finns were restless too. From the car park below the window a prolonged and guttural bray of exhaustion broke the quiet.

Back in Paris, we finished the last three dates of the tour. In a week and a half, we would be returning to the United States – and to New York where I knew I would be seeing Heather, my blonde performance artist. Sooner than that I would be going back to London and to Debsey’s possible admonishments about my drinking. I decided to put a buffer of sobriety between the tour so far and my return to London.

In Paris, we spent a day going from television studio to television studio performing ‘Dirty Old Town’ to a backing track. There was just one more gig to do on the tour and the impending sense of relief was palpable. Everyone else got drunk. As the morning went on, the more drunk everyone got, the later we became for everything. We swaggered into each studio, passing cheap wine between us. We were obnoxious. We slighted the director and laughed out loud at the voices that came through the speakers. At the end of the last taping before lunch Andrew kicked his drums all over the studio. His eyes were swimming in his head. No one but me seemed to notice.

We were taken to a restaurant on the banks of the Seine. I looked around at the other people in the restaurant. None of them seemed all that bothered by the rowdiness at our table. I tried to catch the eye of the girl attached to us by our publicist but she passed me over without eye contact. Not only did she seem not to notice Shane and Andrew and Spider’s drunkenness, but she seemed not to care whether or not they would be capable of playing or mouthing in time to the backing track at the next taping after lunch.

I knew it was my sobriety which made their behaviour offensive. I knew it was my apprehension about returning to London which necessitated my sobriety. I knew it was my guilt about both falling out of love with Debsey and looking forward to going back to America which were the causes of my apprehension. I yearned for the day to be over.

*

Northern Ireland were on their way home from the World Cup in Mexico. England were through to the Round of Sixteen – to meet Argentina in the quarter-finals, two days before we were due to fly to the United States, in the first bloodless conflict between the two countries since the Falklands War. We would be in New York for the final. On this tour, we would strike out from the Eastern Seaboard to Canada, the Midwest and California. I had never been to these places. The exoticism the upcoming tour held for me was both dreadful and exhilarating.