At the beginning of February 1987, we went again to Elephant Studios to record music for the soundtrack of Straight to Hell. Shane had written a couple of songs. I had once criticised Shane’s songwriting as a matter of stringing a load of swear words together and making them rhyme. He never let me forget it. ‘Rake at the Gates of Hell’ was a stream of invective submitted to meter and a rhyming pattern. He was so unsure about its biliousness that he went to seek Jem’s absolution for having written it. The second song was called ‘If I Should Fall from Grace with God’.
The opening melody of ‘If I Should Fall from Grace with God’ was gorgeous. I loved the unaffectedness of the pentatonic scale and its passing embodiment of ‘The Bonny Banks o’ Loch Lomond’. The song was as elemental as the best of all Shane’s songs. It had mud and land and rivers and oceans and corpses in it, in a landscape as expansive and ancient and threatening as the melody, bringing to mind the high road and the low road, one of which – after the Jacobite Rising of 1745 – led to death.
The remaining pieces for the soundtrack were instrumental, inspired by our five weeks in the south of Spain: boleros and tangos, with zapateado and palmas.
After recording ‘Rake at the Gates of Hell’ and ‘If I Should Fall from Grace with God’, Shane did not return to the studio much. The week at Elephant was my first experience of composing: a bolero based on a melody from Anton Brückner, played on a pan-flute; a piece of incidental music using the drone made by blowing into the mouth of a bottle of San Miguel – the sound I’d listened to, lying out on the sand beyond Blanco Town. Cox also wanted a treatment of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain. I sketched out an arrangement on a couple of pieces of foolscap and played it on a honky-tonk thumb-tack piano.
Spider showed up a couple of times during the recording. Snow had descended on County Cavan and had isolated Terry in what I imagined to be his lodge – a squat, rain-lashed pile in the wilds of the Irish countryside with a clapped-out BMW of rare vintage immobilised in the driveway.
Cox had finished editing the film and came to us wanting a version of Ennio Morricone’s ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.
‘To save the film!’ he said.
In an attempt at hip-hop, we built a beat on the drum-machine they had at Elephant Studios – instead of a real drum kit and against the advice of D.J., who knew about hip-hop. We layered samples taken from Morricone’s original music – bells, gunshots and Eli Wallach’s shouts of ‘Blondie!’ – over the top, along with the banjo, accordion, tin whistle. I borrowed Darryl’s Gibson SG guitar with the late-night idea of emulating Steve Vai’s guitar-playing on Public Image Ltd’s Album/Cassette/Compact Disc which had come out the previous year and for a time had taken a place in the constellation which included Rain Dogs. I didn’t possess a shadow of Steve Vai’s talent, but I thought at least I could pull off a handful of stock heavy-metal licks. I had never yet been able to rid myself of the sometimes elegiac compulsion to impress Shane. The Eden of his estimation of me, it seemed, had been when I had been a guitarist.
We pridefully brought a cassette of our finished version of the song into the Devonshire Arms to play over the pub’s sound system. As soon as the drum-machine beat started, I knew it was wrong. I wanted it to sound powerful and authoritative, but instead my shirt stuck to my back to hear how lame it was and how my playing sounded like guitar-shop guitar licks. The drum pattern turned out to be several thousand miles distant from Run-DMC and more in the province of Ultravox.
*
Soon after we’d finished recording, Philip admitted himself to hospital. Other than his looking more haggard than normal at Elephant, I hadn’t noticed anything particularly the matter with him. The explanation was that he had been drinking too much and had cutaneous oedema.
I went to visit him. He was sitting up in bed in a hospital gown, reading. There was a stack of books on the bedside table. There was a hollowness to his cheeks which made him look mournful. Though his complexion was only ruddy at the edges, he looked hale enough. His hair had a lift to it as if the hospital barber had been to visit.
‘I’m an alcoholic!’ he said. ‘I had to admit that to myself. It’s the first step to my recovery.’
I was surprised. During the months he and I had shared a room, his drinking had been nothing to remark on. I hadn’t noticed that he had been drinking any more than the rest of us. Our drinking of an entire bottle of schnapps on the Baltic Sea, resulting in the perforation of his ulcer and near-death, was a distant memory. He swung his downy leg out from under the bed covers.
‘Look what happens when I do this,’ he said. He leant down with the full weight of his mop-handle forearm onto the top of his bare thigh. We both watched as the impression it left filled in.
‘Water retention,’ he said.
In the third week of February, seeming to have neither improved nor deteriorated, he was out of hospital in time to begin promotion of the single release of ‘The Irish Rover’. Frank’s suggestion after recording with the Dubliners had become a reality.
First we flew to Dublin to appear in The Late Late Show’s tribute to the Dubliners, where we performed with Christy Moore and U2. The latter and their entourage drifted through the corridors with ecclesiastical gravity.
His appetite for acting whetted by our four weeks in Andalucía, Spider left for Nicaragua to take a part in Alex Cox’s next film, Walker, with Ed Harris and much of the cast of Straight to Hell. We flew without him to Northern Ireland for our next promotional appearance at the Tom O’Connor Roadshow in Derry’s Guildhall.
The damp countryside of the Six Counties was still bleak from the winter, though the ochre turf, where it was exposed in banks and in the hillsides, was almost lambent in the late-afternoon sunshine. In the middle of the fields stood small A-frame pens, we guessed for the sheep to find shelter, though in each there would only have been room for one.
‘You know what they’re doing in there,’ Terry said, in a low voice.
‘What?’
‘They’re plotting,’ he said.
We were staying in a hotel just outside Derry. Ronnie Drew, we were told, was staying at a hotel across the border between the Six Counties and the Republic. The very idea of staying in the part of Ireland that was still under British rule was anathema to him.
Most of our promotional appearances were a matter of miming to a backing track. With the exception for the most part of the Dubliners – particularly Drew, who I was told had been off the drink for a few months – and Philip, recently out of hospital, it relieved us of the necessity to stay sober. At the minimum, for the cameras, it should look as though we could be playing our instruments.
At the Tom O’Connor Roadshow we performed in a large hall to an elderly audience in frocks and blazers. Shane and Drew sang live. Shane stood tall, jug-eared by virtue of a recent haircut, one hand in a pocket. During the alternate verses he turned to watch Drew singing, then, closing his eyes, sang his own verse, awkward and suffering with abashment.
Afterwards, we found ourselves in the mayor’s office. It was a severe, wood-panelled room with a couple of huge oak desks, one of which spanned the bay window. Part of the room was lined with bookcases, the other ranged with portraits. Pediments capped the hefty doors. We sat around one of the desks with the mayor Noel McKenna and John Hume, the leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. Hume was a red-faced teddy bear of a man. He had a chin set halfway up his face and wiry sprouting eyebrows. His eyes flashed with the thrill of being in the same room as the Dubliners.
A bottle of Tullamore Dew appeared and went from man to man. It wasn’t long before we were all singing ‘The Auld Triangle’ – the mayor, the leader of the SDLP, together with the journalist and Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association organiser, Eamonn McCann, and James Ellis, the actor who played Bert Lynch from Z-Cars, the Dubliners and ourselves. Hume’s face glistened red with drink. Terry’s head twitched with emotion. Shane sang to the floor, his face solemn with meaning. I regretted Spider’s absence. He would have exulted in the occasion.
‘Well,’ I overheard John Sheahan murmur to Eamonn Campbell. ‘Ronnie’s well and truly off the wagon.’ I looked round at Drew. His eyes were swimming in their sockets, red and straining to focus. He was resting on Barney McKenna’s shoulder, leaning into his face, cackling piratically into his ear.
When it came time to leave, the bottle of Tullamore Dew was gone and most of us were drunk. Drew stated his intention to drive back to Dublin that night. The other Dubliners implored him to stay.
‘I’m not staying one fucking night in this fucking province,’ Drew said. Red-faced and gesticulatory, they argued about how they were going to get him home.
‘For fuck’s sake let Barney drive your fucking car!’ they beseeched. In the end, Drew consented. We hugged the Dubliners goodbye, clapped them all on the back and said safe home, see you in London. We were all booked to appear that weekend on a programme called Saturday Live for Channel 4. We got into the van to go back to Belfast.
When we met again for camera rehearsals in London, as he came into the studio in mackintosh and wine-coloured dark glasses, there was a contrite air surrounding Drew. As it turned out, his car had been an automatic. McKenna had become confused by the scarcity of pedals and had set the car off lurching down Queen’s Quay to the Foyle Embankment where the alternating screeches and bursts of speed attracted the attention of a patrol of the Royal Ulster Constabulary Traffic Branch, who pulled the car over.
Realising who they had in the car, charges of drunken driving or even driving without due care and attention were not brought. Instead they were each given a cell at a nearby police station to sleep it off.
When Drew woke the following morning, he woke the others with his shouting.
‘Barney! What kind of fucking hotel is this you booked us into?’
I could only imagine his chagrin on coming round: the ruination of his principle of never staying a night in the Six Counties, and in an RUC cell.
At Saturday Live the Dubliners were introduced to the floor of predominantly teenage dancers as the Dub Liners.
When ‘The Irish Rover’ reached No. 12 in the charts, we reconvened at BBC Television Centre in White City for Top of the Pops.
During the rehearsal, before we ran through the song for the cameras, I saw Frank take Sean Cannon to one side, to inform him that since Spider was away in Nicaragua he would be playing the whistle. Cannon demurred.
‘Sure everyone where I live knows I don’t play the whistle,’ he said.
‘You do now, right?’ Frank said, his falciform nose a foot away from Cannon’s schoolboy face.
Again, I had no real work to do, other than pretend to play the accordion and do my best not to indulge Campbell’s excitement too much. During performances of ‘The Irish Rover’ his yellow-toothed smile and his crazed face, surrounded by a haze of nicotine-coloured hair, would appear bobbing in front of me.
Towards the end of April, our last television appearance with the Dubliners was for RTÉ’s Sunday Night at the Gaiety in Dublin. By the end of the week ‘The Irish Rover’ vanished from the charts.
*
At the end of March, between our performances on Saturday Live and Top of the Pops, we started our next album, in the Penthouse of Abbey Road Studios. In order to circumvent our contract with Stiff Records – from legal necessity or not, I didn’t care – Frank enjoined us to let no one know, going so far as to pretend we were assisting Terry in a solo project. The sessions became known as the Terry Woods Solo Album.
We had already been rehearsing what we thought might be described as a Tex-Mex song, called ‘Fiesta’. Jem had not only written the melodies of both the verse and the chorus, but had composed an instrumental section too, folding into it a couple of lines from the ‘Liechtensteiner Polka’, which we had all heard blaring out over the Parque de Nicolás Salmerón during the Feria de Almería. We walloped the song out over a norteño beat, with a bass-line restricted to fifths, the guitar on the offbeat, and as much as I could replicate on the accordion from a couple of tracks on Los Lobos’ How Will the Wolf Survive?.
We played the song back in the control room in the Penthouse. The gaps after the choruses and throughout the instrumental melodies begged to be filled up with the cracks from the shooting galleries and the clangs of bells, the whistles and shouts we’d heard throughout the Feria de Almería. To demonstrate, I detached the top of one of the steel ashtrays in the studio and at the right moment dropped it into the metal waste-bin in the control room. Otherwise I made finger-pops, stuck my fingers in my mouth to let loose a Swanee whistle, or, as I had as a kid, mimicked gunshots with a plosive clearing of the tonsils.
Though still apparently embroiled in an endgame with Stiff Records, we came out of our bolthole in the Penthouse of Abbey Road in order to start work recording our next album in plain sight. As a precaution, Frank suggested we finance the recording ourselves. We set up our own label, Pogue Mahone Records, owned by Warner Music Ltd. Through his previous management and tour management of Kirsty MacColl, Frank was able to secure Kirsty’s husband, Steve Lillywhite, to produce the record.
We were excited to start, and with such a producer as Lillywhite. Frank was also in high feather, though he tried to hide it behind managerial aplomb, having persuaded Lillywhite to accept a reduced royalty and to decline an advance. Spider was back from Nicaragua with a goatee and moustache and a face swarthy from the sun.
RAK Recording Studios was a converted Victorian schoolhouse in St John’s Wood, with stern pillars framing the front door. The studio itself – the control room and the live rooms – was bright with light from the windows which ran the length and width of the building.
Steve Lillywhite was resolutely but ashamedly English, well spoken, meticulous in his manners and genial. His breezy affableness, though, tended to bring on a discomfiture which he would cut short by moving on and getting on with matters in hand.
Lillywhite was quick to admit that he had never recorded instruments such as the cittern, banjo, accordion and whistle, but he doughtily clapped his hands, rubbed them together and said:
‘Right! Let’s get started shall we?’
Lillywhite’s engineers, Nick Lacey and Chris Dickey, divided the large window-lined live room in half with a screen. It wasn’t long before those in the front half – Philip, Andrew and Darryl – were calling themselves the Engine Room, and the rest of us – Jem, Spider, Terry and myself – the Bridge. Shane had a booth to himself by the side.
We had already rehearsed many of the songs. ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’ and ‘If I Should Fall from Grace with God’ we had been playing for six months. ‘Turkish Song of the Damned’ we had been playing since the previous August.
Philip had been writing his song ‘Thousands Are Sailing’ for months. He managed to finish it after the end of our session for the soundtrack of Straight to Hell and a few days before he went into hospital. It dealt with the ocean passage of Irish emigrants to New York. I adored the song and let myself be persuaded that at least part of the lyric was about me. There were lines about a couple of guys in New York City visiting, as Philip and I had, the statue of George M. Cohan, and a line about whistling.
Shane had written a song about the Birmingham Six. It was as powerful as any song he had ever written, and sharpened to goading point. Terry happened to have written a song from the point of view of someone leaving Northern Ireland during the Troubles, vowing never to return. Because of the congruence of theme, we spliced the two songs together. Terry sang the first part, and plaintively. Shane sang the heavy end of the song, which concerned the continuing incarceration, after twelve and a half years, of the Birmingham Six, sentenced to life imprisonment for the Birmingham pub bombings in November 1974.
Halfway through recording at RAK, Lillywhite took a break to work on a Talking Heads record. We used the hiatus to play more or less weekly festivals in Europe, and support slots for U2 on their Joshua Tree tour.
We arrived at Wembley Stadium for the first of our opening gigs for U2 early enough in the afternoon that the turf hadn’t yet been covered and before even the goalposts had been taken down. Jem and I broke out from the mouth of the goal furthest from the stage. We deftly passed an invisible football between us, leaving behind us a trail of wrong-footed, imaginary opponents. When we got within eyeshot of the goal, I went wide, sent my non-existent marker the wrong way and lifted the ball over the baffled defenders. The ball met the lateral arc of Jem’s left foot and he volleyed it into the back of the net. We both went down on our knees and raised our fists to the sky.
A couple of weeks later we opened for U2 at Croke Park in Dublin. Before our set, Frank went to stand on Hill 16. After our set, I went out into the audience and jammed my way as far towards the front into the crowd as I could. The pounding of Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr, in andante tempo, supported a glittering superstructure of the Edge having as much fun as can be had with a WEM Copicat and an electric guitar. Bono’s singing was the grand incantation of phrases resembling advertising copy. I jumped up and down in synchrony with the crowd, pulling my arm out of the squeeze to stab the air like everyone else. I hoisted a girl onto my shoulders to give her a better view. Her bare thighs muffled the pounding of U2’s music.
In Paris we opened for U2 again at the Hippodrome de Vincennes in front of a crowd of two hundred thousand. We wandered out onto the stage like lambs, gawping at the immensity of the horde. It stretched so far back that the details of the sweaty heads, the waving banners, the girls on shoulders, the bare chests, merged into the colour of Plasticine before seeming to curve out of sight beyond the horizon. Somewhere in the middle of the throng, as if to illustrate the magnitude of the crowd, I watched a distant refuse truck slowly part the multitude, going from one side of the field to the other, like a bug.
Intimidating as the size of the stage and audience was, it came along with a requirement to produce something resembling a grand gesture, a vindication of swinging my accordion over my head, buckling up over the keyboard, foot-stamping, dropping to my knees.
*
Back at RAK in the second week in July, the heat was oppressive. We came upon Lillywhite standing with his back to a fan wobbling in the open fridge he had had brought into the control room. It blew damp air into the room to a distance of maybe three feet.
The irony of tackling Jem and Shane’s Christmas song, ‘Fairytale of New York’, in the sweltering heat was lost on us. By now, our problems with it had become so chronic, threatening to inure us to the idea that the song was probably just impossible to record, that we became even more determined to find a way of recording it. Lillywhite’s solution was so straightforward as to provoke you to slap your palm to your forehead: to record the introduction – the piano and Shane’s voice – first, and treat the duet with the full band as a separate song. We postponed the problem of who was going to be Shane’s partner in the duet. A couple of names had been put forward. Shane had been keen to have Chrissie Hynde sing. She had been at RAK in any case. She had come across us in the canteen and berated us for our carnivorism.
Lacking someone to sing the female part, we recorded the section in 6/8 time with Shane supplying both. It still made as much sense as it had in rehearsal. We moved on.
In preparation for the piano and voice introduction, I took whatever opportunity I could – while the others had lunch, or after dinner – to go down into the darkness of the live room to figure out and practise, again and again, my piano arrangement. I wanted my accompaniment to sound sophisticated and adult. Because the song was set in New York, I wanted to include identifiably American harmonies in the chords – chords with second and seventh intervals that I’d heard in Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, in Tom Waits’s songs too. Shane had a maddening talent for metabolising artlessness into beauty. Everyone else had to work at it.
When it came to recording it, I didn’t want merely to play the chords and follow Shane’s vocal melody. I wanted to make what I had come up with inextricable from Shane’s voice. I made the appoggiaturas I played synonymous with the ones Shane sang. I made myself Shane’s equal, at least for the time it took to play the introduction to ‘Fairytale of New York’. I made myself not fuck up too, despite the fact that the more coloration I had put into it, the harder it became to concentrate on what Shane was singing.
The whole agonising precarious minute and a bit, as I hung on every moment in which neither Shane nor I fucked up, was an ordeal. I attended to every syllable of Shane’s voice in my headphones. I was morbidly aware of the rest of the band listening in the control room. I strove to remember where my fingers were going next. I was ecstatic to get through it.
Of all the takes, the keeper was the one in which, after Shane had finished singing and I was on my own, in the very last measure, I hit a top E instead of a D. The mistake for ever imprinted on my mind the phrase’s similarity to Charles Parry’s arrangement of William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’. I wanted to do it again, but the rapture which met Shane and me when we came back into the control room was such that Lillywhite and everyone else declined to re-record it.
Lillywhite had a studio at his house in Ealing. One Friday, he took the tapes home. Over the weekend he set up his studio for his wife Kirsty to have a go at the female part of the duet with a view to seeing if the song was going to work as a duet at all.
He came into the studio on Monday. We sat around the control room to listen, perched on the back of the couch, on a cabinet, down the stairs to the door. Kirsty’s vernacular, familiar to all of us from the records she had put out, so suited the lyrics that it was as if they had been written for her. Her voice, with her slightly nasal South London accent, now breathy, now brassy, embodied the alternating buoyancy and bitterness of the girl in Shane’s song, agog with New York City, then betrayed. The harmonies in the choruses were one thing, but the layered vocals when she sang ‘Well, so could anyone!’ opened up the reprise of the opening melody as if it were a gift.
We sat in awed silence while the melody cycled out.
*
The summer ended with two last shows opening for U2, the first at Sullivan Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, and the second at Madison Square Gardens in New York City. Our set at Madison Square Gardens was a matter, as Jem said, of providing music for people to find their seats, but to play at such a place, on such a stage, struck terror. The stage had been rid of all equipment. Inclines made of metal grille hid from view the backline and the technicians. Mindful of the scale of the auditorium, the grandeur of the event and the empty expanse of the stage, I yearned to swing my accordion around and rove the metal platforms and ramps. My shoes had leather soles. Remembering my accident at the Fairways Hotel in Dundalk a couple of years before, I spent a lot of my time rooted to the spot, summoning up courage every now and then to shuffle tentatively up and down one of the inclines.
The première of Cox’s film Walker took place while we were in New York. I went with my New York girlfriend Heather. We happened to sit behind Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Newman and I were both wearing the identical Prince of Wales check suit. Neither of us remarked on the fact, and I suspected I was the only one of us to notice.
Heather had recently rented a performance space on the Lower East Side. She let us in through the sliding lattice metalwork. It was a black-painted corridor with a pressed tin ceiling. We kissed for a long time in the dark, on the plywood stage.
By the end of the summer, the record had been mastered. Frank had come up with an idea for the cover of the album. It was another spin on the theme of the head-replacement which Frank had co-opted for the cover of Rum Sodomy and the Lash: an undulating line of replicas of a photograph of James Joyce’s face, but with our faces flanking the original, each of us wearing Joyce’s fedora. We rejected the idea, and opted for a photo session in a studio in East London, a group tableau with our instruments and a steamer trunk.
Our failure to come up with a title for the record exasperated Frank so much that he burst into one of our rehearsals and demanded it.
‘All right!’ Shane shouted out. ‘If I Should Fall from Grace with God!’