Andrew had become victim to cluster-headaches. They came without warning in volleys of regular and debilitating attacks. Without warning too, the episodes stopped, only to start again weeks or months later. Frequently we would find Andrew curled into a ball on the sofa in a darkened dressing room in pain.
Andrew petitioned to be granted a room to himself. We all wanted a room to ourselves, but the economics – the burden of Frank’s commission and the number of people in the band and in the crew – wouldn’t permit it. In Andrew’s case, though, we had no problem.
Philip moved in with Darryl. It wasn’t long before he had formed an attachment – as he had to both me and, after me, to Andrew – to this new roommate, and had become just as devout a fan of Nottingham Forest as Darryl was, if not more so. When they could, the pair of them travelled to see Forest play. On the 15th April 1989, a month after we had finished the album we had heavy-footedly entitled Peace and Love, Darryl and Philip went up to Sheffield to watch Nottingham Forest play Liverpool in the semi-final of the FA Cup at Hillsborough Stadium. A few minutes into the game, with fans spilling onto the pitch and police officers racing to form a cordon, the referee stopped the match. The weight of thousands of fans coming out of a tunnel at the rear had caused the compaction of those already on the terraces, squeezing them up against the fencing. Though many managed to escape by climbing or being pulled onto the grass, that day ninety-four people died from asphyxia.
The photographs of those gasping for breath behind the bars of the fence along the perimeter of the pitch were disturbing. When I saw them next, Darryl and Philip were wretched with horror from their experience. We dedicated the record to the memory of those who died in the disaster.
*
My and Danielle’s wedding was set for the beginning of October. It was going to take place in the Cotswold village where the von Zernecks’ cottage nestled in a crook in the no through road. The village couldn’t have been more picturesque. It consisted of mostly Cotswold stone houses – with names like Tumbledown Cottage and Rose Cottage. A thirteenth-century church stood on a rise next to a manor-house-turned-hotel, the leaded windows of which gazed across patterned lawns, beds of impatiens, tennis courts and, beyond the inky copper beech at the end of the drive, the Vale of Evesham. Only jackdaws and the chimes of the church clock broke the silence – or an occasional RAF Harrier from Brize Norton which would come tilting over the wolds and rend the hush.
Danielle’s dad was the paradigm of a Hollywood producer – tanned to the colour of a hazelnut, a coppery hue to his thinning hair, an Errol Flynn moustache and predisposed to navy-blue blazers. Her mum had small, blue, vivacious eyes, girlishly short hair, the cut and colour of which were tastefully expensive. Her infatuation with rural England was manifest in her predilection for tweed flat-caps and sleeveless quilted jackets.
We had a wedding planner. The wedding was going to be lavish, with a marquee erected in the rectory garden. A bus would be laid on for those living in London. Since it was going to take place in October, there would be quiverfuls of umbrellas. Against the threat of ruffling the slightest feather in the village at the prospect of a rock-and-roll wedding bringing along with it drunken hordes of Irish, an invitation would go out to the last inhabitant. More than a significant contribution would be made to the Church Roof Fund.
*
Shane in the meantime had discovered Thailand. My familiarity with Thailand was tethered to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I and the picture of Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr on the sleeve of the soundtrack album – he in a crimson gold-braided pantaloon suit, foot up on a footstool, finger pointing skyward, she in a gigantic lilac crinoline at his feet. Otherwise my understanding of Thailand was restricted to a series of stereotypical images: the stiff, hindered choreography of tiny women with faces immobilised by smiles balancing miniature golden temples on their heads; rotting shantytowns made of laths, built on stilts in fetid estuaries crowded with filthy boats; thousands of square miles of sweating jungle in which labyrinthine ruins were hidden; lurid arcades crammed with child-prostitutes whose self-esteem was never likely to rise above that of a blow-up doll.
He returned to us extolling the benefits of Pattaya Beach. I couldn’t imagine him ever leaving his hotel room. He was smug with beatitude and had a childlike belief in the chubby benevolence which radiated from the huge, golden and ubiquitous Buddhas. He wanted us to believe that Thailand was Shangri-La, Cockaigne, Tír na nÓg. A glaze of mysticism twinkled in his eyes for a week or two, to be clouded once more by sullenness and resentment. He became irascible, unpredictable, rudderless and unmanageable.
At the end of May, we travelled to Portugal. Between shows in Lisbon and Oporto we were taken down to the banks of the River Douro for a photo shoot. We stood around a skiff that was beached on the shingle downstream from the latticework of the Arrabida Bridge and the jumble of buildings on the opposite bank. Shane was in a dark and precarious state. There was a piratical dishevelment about him, reinforced by the eye-patch he had taken to wearing. When it came to taking the photographs, he was intractable. He clambered up on board the skiff and screamed at the photographer, and screamed at us. We waited, ransom to his dementia.
He failed to show up at a photo session for the cover of our album in London. The Scala at King’s Cross had been rented for the day. The stage had been dressed with scores of church candles. The photographer and his assistant had set up their gear. We had all put on our best suits. In the end, dispirited, we pointlessly shot a roll or two and then went home.
On a night off in Madrid, a couple of weeks after our visit to Portugal, some of us were having dinner in the centre of town when we had word that Shane was wandering around the Barrio Salamanca with a samurai sword. The image of him staggering through the crowded, crepuscular streets, having obviously lost his mind, was appalling. I was thankful to be out of the clamour. We had become so inured that none of us interrupted our dinner.
The following day we arrived at San Sebastián airport at the same time as UB40, both bands on our way to play at the Velódromo Antonio Elorza. Discovering that our buses were parked next to one another, we agreed that, in exchange for Spider going on UB40’s bus, we would invite their singer Ali Campbell onto ours.
Campbell climbed on the bus and went straight to the back lounge to sit with Shane. He had a pugnacious face with narrow eyes, a wide mouth and prominent canines.
By the time I took a seat in the next row forward from the lounge, Campbell had already started up a confrontation with Shane. He sat opposite, leaning forward, forearms on his knees, hands clasped. Shane was sitting in what passed for a comfy chair with his legs stretched out, his head back, sunglasses on, and a bottle of gin between his knees.
Campbell goaded him about whether or not Shane meant what he said in his lyrics, if he was being true to his upbringing, if his money was where his mouth was when it came to Ireland. Campbell started to go on about how much money he made, about his hometown of Birmingham, about how he helped the community he came from. I pretended to take in the lush landscape and red roofs of the Spanish Basque Country as the bus drove the fifteen miles to San Sebastián, wishing that we hadn’t traded Spider for this brute. I would sooner have listened to Spider’s wittering than to Campbell’s aggressive apologia for his career, demanding from Shane a mutual account. Now and again, I looked back at the two of them. Campbell flicked the backs of his fingers against Shane’s knee at every point he made, as if he thought Shane might fall asleep. Campbell’s Birmingham accent made his brutality even uglier.
To begin with, Shane treated Campbell with the indifference he deserved, replying with noncommittal grunts and the occasional nod, preferring no doubt to have sat by himself with his drink and dozed off. Campbell’s prodding continued. At one time, Shane could have run rings round such a thug as Campbell, but he was down and the resources he once had seemed to have left him. I willed Shane to come back at Campbell and shut him up with a definitive coup de grâce but, to my dismay, he had nothing.
‘Shut up,’ I heard Shane moan. It had no effect.
I continued to listen, becoming more and more resentful of Campbell’s presence on our bus, more and more disheartened by Shane’s defencelessness.
A guttural and anguished sound issued from Shane – part-scream, part-whimper. It had the effect of intensifying my battered but abiding loyalty to Shane to such a pitch that I got up, knelt on my seat and leant on the seatback.
‘Hey!’ I said to Campbell. ‘That’s enough. Please leave him alone.’
Campbell stiffened and turned his pugilist’s face to me.
‘Shut the fuck up and sit down, fuck-face! What do you know about anything?’ he shouted. Confronted by such immediate and intemperate antagonism and knowing that to pursue anything with him at all would be pointless and could possibly make things worse for Shane, I sat back down in my seat, my forearms and shins prickling from adrenalin.
*
The release party for Peace and Love took place at the Boston Arms in Tufnell Park, the venue of our first rehearsal with Terry Woods. Mystifyingly, though the relentlessness of our touring schedule ebbed, Peace and Love climbed to No. 5 in the charts anyway. Throughout the summer, for weeks at a time, I was able to join my fiancée in California.
Los Angeles was a constant source of amazement to me. It was no longer a malevolently twinkling grid guarded by a thirty-foot cut-out of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Much of it turned out to be a vast suburb of family apartments and houses: Spanish colonial, English country, bungalows, craftsman; painted white, blue, puce, lilac; with roofs of pantile, wood shingle, asphalt. The trees – ficus, fir, palm and oak – never shed their leaves. Day after day, the sun shone without abatement. It was as if time never passed.
During my absence, the band shot the video for ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah’. Charlie McLennan stood in on accordion. I had not been able to afford to return from Los Angeles for it. The cost of the flights was punishing. I had locked horns with Jem about the band contributing half of the cost. I hoped to clinch my argument with the fact that Danielle and I were engaged to be married and had rented an apartment in Los Angeles. I implored him to acknowledge that Los Angeles was now my home, not London, though Danielle and I kept the flat on Great Ormond Street. In the end, it was Frank who ushered through the arrangement to split my airfares.
The Pogues had no money. Frank’s commission was still fifteen per cent of gross. At a meeting with Anthony Addis after one of our tours, Terry complained in a voice piping with emotion about how difficult it had become to make ends meet.
‘Terry,’ Addis said in his flat Manchester accent. ‘As much as I hate to say this, you have to live within your means.’
‘I don’t have any means to live within!’ Terry replied.
*
After a series of festivals in Europe, in July we travelled to the United States to co-headline what was called a ‘shed tour’ – a tour of small amphitheatres, half-covered by a cantilevered roof. Our co-headliners were a band called the Violent Femmes. They were darlings of college radio and deemed to be our counterparts in the United States. The tour went without incident with the exception of the first gig in Chicago, when the stage filled with acrid smoke from the transformer Terry needed to power his amplifier, and, at the last show in Fairfax, Virginia, Shane being assisted from the stage after managing to sing just three songs.
While we were in New York we shot the video for our next single: Shane’s song ‘White City’. Such inertia had started to encroach that there was no storyboard or artistic conceit. We allowed a film crew to point their cameras at us while we soundchecked before a gig at Pier 84 on the Hudson River. Since first playing the song, in the instrumental breaks, Shane had taken up a shuffling sort of caper, away from the microphone, across the stage, jerkily pointing his fingers skyward at each step. It was as sophisticated as the video shoot got.
When the tour was finished I flew back to Los Angeles with Danielle who had accompanied us. The rest of the band went home.
Word had come during the recording of Peace and Love that Bob Dylan wanted us to open for him for six shows at the beginning of September on the Californian leg of his so-called Never Ending Tour – starting at the Greek Theater in Berkeley and ending at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. The recognition by such a laureate was thrilling, but the pairing seemed late in coming. Frank saw it as a vindication of Shane’s stature as a songwriter. If Shane did, none of us were aware.
In the third week of August, we reconvened for a handful of shows in Ireland. Shane had just returned from Thailand. At Leisureland in Galway, in a flocculent white flat-cap, he stared blindly and for long periods out at the audience, not knowing what to do. He became lost in the middle of songs.
We had become adept at responding quickly if he should augment a verse or simply excise a peculiarity of the arrangement. When we heard him start singing the words to a chorus over what should have been an instrumental section, or sometimes the words of another song altogether, a tremor radiated out from the centre mike through all of us. Terry stepped forward into what he hoped was Shane’s peripheral vision. He exaggerated his height in an attempt to bring to Shane’s attention that he was singing the wrong song. Darryl pulled his face into an angry grimace. His instinct was to step forward too, but standing right behind Shane, he knew it was futile. Instead he swung his bass from side to side as if to sweep away all the wrong words Shane was singing. Beyond Darryl, Jem’s mouth would adopt a resolute pucker, accompanied by raised eyebrows and eyes full of misery. Spider quivered, ramrod straight, his whistle clenched in his fist, looking at Shane in disbelief. Philip would look from Terry to me and back to Terry to try to get a fix on where we were supposed to be in the song. On his drum riser, Shane’s fuck-ups darkened Andrew’s eyes with fury. His arms seemed to hurl the sticks against the drum skins and the cymbals. He stared balefully at the back of Shane’s head, beyond which, on the Saturday night at Reading Festival in August – a week before flying over to San Francisco for the first date of our tour opening for Dylan – fifteen thousand people receded into the twilight past the scaffolding above the mixing desk, towards a dim horizon of tents and the line of trees.
*
I flew to Los Angeles ahead of the beginning of our tour. Danielle and I made our way to Berkeley. On the day of the first show we drove up through lawns lush with grass and dense with trees to the amphitheatre, the concrete stage dwarfed by three walls of half-columns.
When the rest of the band arrived from the hotel, Shane was not among them. He had been too drunk, I was told, to be allowed on the plane. Not only that, but Charlie McLennan had also been debarred from getting on the plane at Heathrow. Charlie’s signature was required to release our equipment from customs. As a consequence, we had neither singer nor gear.
We set about distributing the three-quarter-hour set between those who could sing, as we had done in Malmö nearly four years before. Again, Spider volunteered to sing most of the songs. Andrew would take ‘Cotton Fields’ and ‘Star of the County Down’, which we had recorded during the making of Peace and Love. Terry sang the couple of songs he’d written, ‘The Gartloney Rats’ and ‘Young Ned of the Hill’, and Philip, ‘If I Should Fall from Grace with God’ and ‘Lorelei’. We borrowed a couple of guitars from somewhere. Dylan’s backing band lent us their drum kit. A friend of Terry’s was sent to scour Marin County for instruments.
I played a guitar belonging to Dylan’s crew for three songs until Terry’s friend appeared in one of the doorways at the side of the stage with an accordion.
It wasn’t until after Labor Day that Charlie showed up with our equipment. Shane, it seemed, could not be persuaded to travel out with him and had stayed at home.
Backstage at the next gig opening for Dylan, at the Starlight Bowl in San Diego, Frank teased Dylan’s crew about the charm stones each of them wore hanging on thongs round their necks.
‘Yeah,’ one of them said. ‘We got charm stones. We’ve also got a singer. You got a singer? I don’t see you wearing any charm stones.’
As we left our dressing room to go on stage, their singer was leaning against the wall outside his dressing room with a foot tucked behind him. His hands were in the pockets of a grey hoodie, the hood pulled up over his head. As I passed him on my way up the stairs to the stage, I took in his aquiline profile, papery face and wiry stubble. He met no one’s eyes as we filed past.
Most nights after our set, I went into the audience to watch Dylan play. I struggled to recognise the songs. It was only when the unmistakable choruses of such songs as ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ or ‘Positively 4th Street’ managed to break free from the otherwise arcane arrangements that I knew what I was listening to.
At the Pacific Amphitheater in Costa Mesa, he sang a Van Morrison song, ‘One Irish Rover’. The lyrics were addressed to someone far away, lost at sea. I couldn’t help but think he’d chosen it for Shane, who remained resolutely in London.
Again, the heat of an American summer was intolerable – daylong and without relief. Day after day the sun beat down.
P.V. suffered worst. He complained all the time, not just about the heat but about the Puccini arias we had taken to listening to in the Econoline. He grumbled about the ‘screeching’, sank down into his seat at the back of the van and covered his head with his unseasonable leather jacket.
There had always been an air of the indoors about P.V. He had never been a person who cleaned up nicely, but we had noticed how much worse he was starting to look. Gradually, over the course of the tour, a jaundiced pallor had replaced his mottled and usually stubbly complexion. I would come across him backstage with his face in his hands or sitting with his back up against the wall cradling his head in his arms. I put his malaise down to the heat and road-fatigue. The crew’s schedule was more punishing than ours, with early mornings and long days. That he drank a lot was common knowledge, though I hadn’t seen much evidence in all the months I had shared a room with him.
By the time we arrived in Costa Mesa for the penultimate show on the Dylan tour, the yellowness of P.V.’s face had spread into the whites of his eyes and he was immobile from lethargy.
The weekend of the last date at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, P.V. suffered a gastric attack of such violence that it dashed the walls of the bathroom in the hotel with blood and excrement. He was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
Now I realised what the source was of the vapour which had filled the rooms I had shared with him on the road. It wasn’t so much the drink on his breath, nor a leaky bottle in his luggage. It was the smell of acetone coming from him. I was embarrassed at my naïvety.
When the tour supporting Dylan was finished, we had no other option but to leave him behind and go on to Phoenix where our own tour was going to continue and where we grimly expected to be reunited with Shane.
Shane turned up in Dallas. When he showed up backstage before the gig, there was no confrontation, no demand that he explain his absence. We welcomed him back in the dressing room as if he had returned from a day out. We went about the business of our sound check with an enclosed, self-preserving earnestness. It was hardly intended to punish him, merely to show him how little his absence had affected us.
That night we found ourselves standing out in the car park of the hotel in our nightwear. A burning cigarette in Shane’s room had set off the fire alarm.
Our tour took us through the South and up into the Midwest. We were on our way to a gig at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor when Shane insisted we stop at a bar. We indulged him as we always had. Since turning up from England there was a mardiness about him which brooked no contradiction. The bar was a small lilac-coloured room with louvred shades. It was the middle of the afternoon and we were the only people in there. Shane made a great clatter with the stool which had been set against the bar with its legs on the other side of the foot rail. When Shane was eventually settled, the Hispanic barman came across.
‘What’ll it be, sir?’ he said.
‘Lo’i’lan’icetea,’ Shane said. The barman set a paper napkin in front of his customer.
‘Sorry, sir?’
‘Lo’i’lan’icetea!’ Shane shouted. ‘Lo’i’lan’icetea! Lo’i’lan’-ICED-TEA!’ We helped the hapless barman to understand he wanted a Long Island Iced Tea.
‘Dago cunt!’ Shane said, as the guy went down the bar. Either he didn’t understand or chose not to.
‘Shut it!’ Spider beseeched.
‘Dago cunt,’ Shane said. ‘He’s a fucking dago cunt.’
I watched the barman make the Long Island Iced Tea. It was basically the same as a Black Zombie but with the substitution of triple sec for pastis. After the third or fourth, we managed to prise him out of the bar and get him back onto the bus. After the gig, he was so drunk that four of us had to carry him from the dressing room. We grunted with his dead weight across a car park. As we heaved him up the steps and onto the bus, he looked up at us and cackled as if the whole thing was a joke. We threw him onto the plastic leather sofa in the back lounge.
*
A week after the end of the tour, on the presentation of Danielle’s Certificate of Approval to Marry, I picked up my and Danielle’s marriage licence from the Faculty Office at Westminster Abbey.
For the weekend of our wedding, a striped tangerine-coloured marquee had been erected in the gardens of the rectory. All bed-and-breakfast accommodation in the locality had been taken up by Americans, the Pogues’ entourage from London and my family from the north of England – and Twiggy, whom the von Zernecks knew. Jem was my best man. He took me, hung over from the rehearsal dinner the night before, to a café in Evesham for breakfast. I loved Jem and was grateful for his solicitude, and for a glass of champagne along with the bacon, eggs and black pudding in the Crown Tea Rooms on Bridge Street.
As I stood with Jem at the chancel-rail, Julie my soon-to-be mother-in-law came down the aisle to touch my arm with unsuppressed excitement. She was wearing an elaborately embroidered dress in creamy white and a cartwheel hat. When she’d gone to her pew, my uncle John came up.
‘Tha’ll not be living in a shoebox in t’middle of t’road then,’ he said and went away.
At the exchange of vows, Danielle fought briefly with the vicar in order to say her vows without the impediment of her veil. At the reception, children tugged at the tails of my morning suit as Danielle and I cut the cake. Among them were Jem and Marcia’s daughters, Kitty, now four, and Ella, two days away from turning six, along with Strummer’s two daughters, Jazz and Lola. They had come with their mum, Gaby. Strummer himself was on tour with The Latino Rockabilly War, an hour down the M5 in Bristol. When Danielle and I had fed each other cake, Philip took his place on the stage with the swing band to sing ‘Summer Wind’, which since our ten days on St Martin had become our song.
The speeches had been made. Darryl had won £42 in the sweep as to how long the groom’s speech would be. My aunt had threaded her way through the tables and chairs to sit and give me the one piece of advice which had sustained her in her thirty-year marriage to my uncle. My dad had finally had a dance with Twiggy. I had persuaded Rick Trevan to get out of the Bentley parked outside the rectory which he was convulsing with prolonged pressure on the accelerator pedal.
A watchful hush followed the procession of Shane and Victoria as they made their way between the backs of the rented chairs, towards where the rest of the Pogues were sitting. Shane was oblivious to the stir he caused. Victoria seemed at pains to deny it. I was annoyed at the shift in the centre of gravity. I was chuffed, though, that he had shown up at all.
He came over to my table with a gift for Danielle and me.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. He and Victoria had been to a few villages of the same name. There were four others – in Surrey, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire and Kent. ‘I didn’t go to the one in Kent,’ he said.
He dropped his wedding present on the table. It was wrapped in maroon tissue paper. It obviously contained a record.
‘Open it now if you like,’ he said.
It was a bootleg of the Buzzcocks. With it was a stack of stills from the video of ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah’ which had been laminated into place mats. For the most part they were pictures of himself in demented attitudes of imperiousness wearing a coolie hat.
I tried, but couldn’t persuade myself that there was no significance in his choosing stills from a video shoot I had not taken part in. Everything Shane did was imbued with significance. I was glum at the prospect that someone was eventually going to have to figure out what he was trying to tell all of us, as he continued to lurch into decline.
