The Thrill of it All

ON SAILED THE Ships. The Santa Monica rocked. At the end of a fortnight we had more than enough for a demo. Eight solid songs, maybe nine. The mixes were rough and the playing was raw, the arrangements so basic that Trez felt we’d wasted our time. I thought she was wrong but I feared she was right. She said we should start all over. To placate her, we laid down a skittery version of one of the few numbers by anyone else that all four of us unquestioningly liked, an album track by the Boomtown Rats called ‘Living in an Island’. One night back in Luton I’d taped it off a telly show called Rock Goes to College when I should have been studying for the A Levels. It’s a prizefighter of a song, although no critic ever mentioned it at the time. From memory, it was Fran’s idea to record it. Maybe it was Seán’s, though that seems unlikely to me now. Perhaps it was the bald little bastard’s.

A specialist in passive-aggressiveness, he’d try to upset us whenever we took a break. This he did by claiming close association with the esteemed personages of pop-rock whose images adorned the studio’s walls. Marc Bolan had been his discovery. (‘Poor kid. What a waste.’) ‘Mick’ was a mate. ‘Muddy’ was a buddy. ‘Cliff’ once bought him a bible. U2 were not yet as huge as they’d soon become, but already he was referring to Bono as ‘Paul’, often the sign of a monster. He’d communed with the greats and you weren’t among them. Particularly loathsome was his smirking silence or tactical reticence if the name of any female rocker was uttered. Janis Joplin? ‘Oh dear. Mustn’t go there, young friend. Could tell you a thing or two about Jannie.’ Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane? ‘A gent don’t kiss and tell.’ Joan Baez? ‘Fakkin wildcat. Move on.’ Every woman in the history of music was a notch on his bedpost. Had you mentioned the Andrews Sisters or Dame Vera Lynn, he’d have claimed they once blew him in the back of a Roller.

But having an enemy can sometimes be useful. The more he wrecked our heads, the harder we worked. His indifference became our instrument, and we played it. It came to be my favourite fantasy that every time I strummed a minor seventh it caused a fierce and spectacular pain to shoot up his anus. He’d listen to my solo, then smile tolerantly, a little sadly. ‘You know who could play? Jimi. Makes you think. Twenty-seven when he left us. What a talent, what a talent. And I said to him, Jimi, that dope’s gonna kill ya. But fuck me five ways, could he play.’

Trez and I researched the matter of where to send the demo. But as is the case with all research, our knowledge contained gaps we didn’t know about. There turned out to be little point in inviting EMI to sign you for four million pounds when you hadn’t a regular gig where an A&R could come to check you out; if in fact you’d never played London and had no immediate plans to do so. For days we traipsed around Soho, delivering our masterwork up staircases. The same whey-faced young woman reading The Face or i-D was behind every desk. She smiled, indicated the in-tray, and didn’t call the stupidity police. The jiffy bag, as well as carrying our cassette, contained a Photostat ‘press release’ that was four and a half pages long, i.e. too long by four and a quarter pages. Seasoned with lines from Samuel Beckett and other noted humorists, its tone of unearned superiority now makes me want to bludgeon it with a mallet. I have a faded copy on my table as I write, but not faded enough.

We sent our parcel to every radio and television station in London, to every branch of the BBC, including the World Service, Fran having contended that as a ‘non-British group’ (a what?) we might stand a chance of getting heard there. Seán and Trez, native Londoners, and your chronicler, a Lutonian, listened, enthralled, to his attempted redefinitions. Desperate, you’re open to persuasion. ‘Ah’m fookin Vietnamese, me,’ he would thunder, in his Yorkshire-Irish brogue. ‘That’s got t’be worth summat off these BBC bastards!’ I exaggerate the accent, but the point proved moot. The World Service, for whatever unfathomable reasons of its own, appeared not to regard Irish-Britain or British-Ireland as eligible for the ether. ‘I understand you’re from Luton,’ the producer wrote crisply. ‘It isn’t the Côte d’Ivoire.’

FROM FRAN’S FINAL INTERVIEW

This Ireland-versus-Britain thing. I don’t buy into it, man . . . In the past, that’s different . . . But not now . . . I know things were done . . . I’ve read all the history . . . History of Ireland’s gonna crack your heart in two. But to me, England and Ireland, it’s practically the same place . . . It’s mulatto, to me . . . If you look at it again . . . A mate of mine used to joke, we ain’t British or Irish, we’re from Brireland. That’s where millions of people live, quietly intermarrying and ignoring all the bullshit and getting along with the neighbours. And that’s where my band come from . . . We weren’t English or Irish. Who’d settle for either? We were the Ships in the Night. Stick your passport . . . When I sing, I’m Vietnamese, Mississippian and bloody Bolivian if I want . . . A Cajun Billy Fury, a West Indian punk . . . Like, our drummer loved ska and we weren’t no ska band, but we’d stir it all in, let it mix. And me, I liked soul. So I gave it full Aretha. You’re gonna sing a song, man, you give it all you got. Why would you tie yourself down? Ninety-nine per cent don’t do. So don’t wrap me in no flag, man, not when I’m singing. Flags are for parades. They’re foolishness. Singing’s my nation. The only country I ever had. The place I felt safe, where it mattered what I thought. Give you a vote every three minutes, not once in four years. I’ll stand and salute the cover of Never Mind the Bollocks but run up the Union Jack or the green, white and orange, I’m sitting right down . . . Means nothing . . . Not to me . . . Flags are for children . . . I don’t mean no disrespect. Whatever you’re into. But I believe in the People’s Republic of Song. That’s my land. Never lived anyplace else . . . Being honest, it’s why I got into a band as a kid. You’re young, you know, all the arrogance of that . . . You don’t have all the answers but no other sod has any. If our group achieved anything, which is open to fair comment, we never spouted nonsense or reverse-racist codswallop . . . You can look at our songs . . . We always had dignity . . . And I’m proud we stood up for the Brirish.

The Beeb’s army of security porters accepted our packets with perfect courtesy, before setting fire to them in a skip out the back. As for the late John Peel, it would only be a small exaggeration to say that we stalked him. Trez heard that he occasionally supped a pint in the Lamb and Flag near Broadcasting House. We sat there every night for a week, left packages for him behind the bar, marked URGENT AND PERSONAL or MESSAGE FROM THE UNDERTONES ENCLOSED. Famously, Billy Bragg once sent him a mushroom biryani as an incentive to play a record. We sent bhajis and pohas and palak paneers. I don’t know what we’d have done had he ever entered that pub. The scene would be frightening and violent.

I think we paid for 300 copies of the demo. Seán says more, Trez less. What is certain is that when we got down to the last box of ten, we realised we were wasting our time. Without a gig and an audience, we wouldn’t be signed. Christmas came. I skulked home to Luton, returning to London on New Year’s Eve because Fran was alone in the flat. He was very, very down. I was glad I’d come back. January ’84 was cold.

Trez and Seán were cheerful. We started again, approached the neighbourhood pubs that sometimes did music. Nobody wanted to know. I tell a lie, there was mild interest at one Irish-themed establishment of the kind then beginning to appear in London – posters of Michael Collins, agricultural machinery hanging on the walls – but when they asked us to put together ‘a night of ballads, good air-punching stuff’, we felt the fit was wrong. We’d be supporting a trio called the Jacket Potatoes, the landlord explained. You think I have invented the name of that band, but on my life, they truly existed. I’m behind the curve on what the Irish scene in London would be like these days, but in the middle 1980s the potato’s unfortunate role in matters Hibernian was perhaps over-frequently sung about.

The brothers who managed the Dutch bar in Chinatown asked if we could play anything ‘smashed Australians might like’. This was a facer. Fran began suggesting.

Unable to figure out what the Oz-boys required, we were forced to admit that we lacked it.

Trez went to Dublin for a weekend and came back with a possibility. Her aunt had reminded her that a second cousin of the twins was studying at Leeds Poly and was Entertainments Officer there. Seán rang and asked if he could help. He said he’d stick us on the bill with a visiting Jamaican reggae act with the improbable name of Lady Di and Dark Star that was doing the college circuit at the time. Up the M1 we bussed that wintry weekend, through a storm that blackened the skies. Arriving late, the Ships in the Night went on at half past nine, without sound-check, cuppa, shower or refreshment, to a predominantly white audience out of its face on ganja and the excitement of higher learning. My tranquilliser of choice had a Russian name, Smirnoff, and I was perhaps over-thoroughly medicated. We didn’t play well. Not that it mattered, since nobody but the twins’ cousin was listening. Alas, ten minutes in, they started to. That was bad. When I remember the evening I’m reminded of a comic Victorian music-hall number that Jimmy used to sing when under the influence of happiness.

They made me a present

Of Mornington Crescent.

They threw it one brick at a time.

About Lady Di and Dark Star, I can tell almost nothing. I was pig-faced by the time they slouched on in a tornado of drums and thunking bass, Leeds Poly’s single strobe-light working hard to justify that week’s hire-purchase payment. Trez and I watched for a while, then betook ourselves out the back of the exam hall where among the coupling couples and pyramids of empty beer kegs we tanked a bottle of gin and had a little bop and did some but sadly not all the things boys and girls do. Laughed. Mocked. Danced again.

There was a moment when we realised we were looking in each other’s eyes. She blew her hair from her forehead and smiled.

From her pocket she pulled a little lump of Haile Selassie for which she’d paid a law student ten pounds.

Trez was not normally a devotee of the magical smoke. But I didn’t ask questions. Off we went. There was a little of the old electricity crackling in the air and perhaps she might cop off with me out of pity if sufficiently spaced – so I told myself. We passed the dutchie, inhaling in sibilant sucks. Even through the rainstorms of hard-liquor drunkenness, I thought it tasted unusual. But onward we toked, peering up at the stars and speaking of art and beauty. If Trez had a wild side, I wanted her to walk on it. And I’d stagger along beside her.

This was the life. This was rock and roll. Fools who toiled for the System would envy us. Them with their silly little mortgages. More gin? Okay. The time the wage slaves waste. And anyway, what is time? Another fukken . . . weapon . . . in their flaccid . . . ideology . . . Let’s roll up another. Course I’ve done this before, Rob . . . Hey, the car park is revolving! . . . I feel sick . . .

The ‘Moroccan Black’ turned out to be an Oxo Cube, a fact Fran established by the expert means of looking at it briefly before administering a tentative lick. This was shortly before the tarmac began rolling like a wave and I swam all the way to unconsciousness. I don’t know if you’ve ever smoked a product intended for the making of gravy. But I wouldn’t advise you to do so. Not only is there great and ineradicable shame, but your wee smells of casserole for a week.

The only good thing about that night was that it led quickly to more college gigs. Perhaps we weren’t as bad as we thought. Certainly, we offered the qualities most Ents officers wanted: cheapness and availability. Hatfield Poly was next to receive us. Then Aston University, and Manchester and Bangor. We started getting paid actual money; not very much, not enough, as Jimmy put it, to put herrings on the spuds, but sufficient to procure a bag of bottles for the bus down the motorway, and maybe a good pinch of that aromatic herb not purposed for a coq au vin.

Seán and Trez went home to Luton one Sunday and returned with his car, a ’71 Hillman Hunter he’d bought for three hundred nicker at a police auction. Enterprising and ambitious working-class boy, he’d figured that his career and his social life might be aided by having his own vehicle. He’d kept it every bit as clean as you can keep a rustbucket frequently employed for conveying leaky washing machines to the workshop. In London it became employed for conveying musicians. We were not as leaky, true, but we were noisy and ungrateful, like a carload of screeching chimps. Fran in high spirits did his amusing imitation of a tumble dryer on rapid-cycle containing ‘George Michael and a spanner’. Seán was a good sport about this and many other distractions, but there’s no doubt they added to his burdens. Our non-driverhood allowed us to drink, which we copiously did, while our chauffeur pretended to content himself with orange juice. But soon it became clear that the car, not being all that large, was unsuited as the band’s personal limo-cum-goodswagon.

‘I will not be fucking transported,’ Fran replied, like a foul-mouthed Queen Victoria, if such a travesty could be imagined. Rich, from a fellow who by now was much of the time on another planet, a realm where the Horse loomed large.

To save money while on the road, we slept in the car, more precisely in the car-and-accompanying-transporter, ‘two up the front and two in the horsebox’. This was a phrase Fran enjoyed saying. It reminded him of the title of an educational videotape he’d purchased in King’s Cross with helpful subtitles from the original German. But the sleeping arrangements gave rise to difficulty. It was hard to know which two should go where. In all chivalry we felt that no woman could be asked to sleep in a horsebox. Thus Trez’s berth in the car was a given. But what to do, then, so proprieties would be observed? It seemed a bit much, even in rock and roll, to require adult siblings to sleep together. Seán must be accommodated down the back in the straw. But whither boy Fran and your scribe? Fran was no molester, don’t get the wrong idea. I never once saw him put the moves on anyone who didn’t want them put on. At the same time, he was what he was. Seán felt that a bisexual druggie with a porn habit and few early-morning inhibitions wasn’t necessarily an individual you’d want waking up beside your sister. Down the back Fran was sent, making a pillow of his fun-furs and a blanket of his unending complaints. This meant that I would be up front, on a reclined leatherette seat, fewer inches from Trez than were usual. We’d have a laugh before rolling over, a midnight tête-à-tête, and there was no one in the world more interesting to talk to. We’d listen to the radio for a while, or play poker, at which she usually beat me. She was a cruel and cunning poker player, utterly ruthless, but since we were playing for matchsticks or fags it didn’t really matter. I was fond of the little togetherness. We’d share a secret nightcap: a mug or two from the winebox we’d hidden from the lads. If she was working on an essay, she might read me an extract, or I’d read her a bit from the NME while she took off her make-up and modestly prepared to retire. But things could be difficult, particularly on sultrier nights when the removal of exterior clothing became necessary. One’s impeccable non-sexism could be put to the test. You’d find yourself praying for a blizzard so she’d have to sleep in a tracksuit and overcoat, but the gods of the weather were unkind.

After a couple of weeks, I couldn’t stand it any more. Well, I could. But it hurt to be trying. Her habit of muttering nocturnal endearments in the dream-drifts of sleep was coming between me and my rest. She’d enfold her precious limbs around one or more of my own. She’d be cuddling up, half undressed. Merciful reader, I was young and a male of our species. I needn’t go dwelling on details. Suffice to note that Viagra is not targeted at twenty-year-old boys, since Eskimos don’t buy snow. In a state of flamboyant and ardent arousal, I awoke one sweltering morning on the outskirts of Hull, not a metropolis universally associated with epiphanies of the erotic, to the sight of a bared and purple nipple, her T-shirt having ridden up in the night. It’s hard to know what to do at a moment like that. One of the things I wanted to do was get out of the car. Thankfully, that’s what I did.

For a brief time thereafter, the permutation was three boys in the horsebox, another phrase Fran enjoyed saying. But this arrangement, too, proved problematic. Seán was a light sleeper, especially after a show. It’s a frequent complaint among musicians. Being on fire is a lot of fun, but you have to put yourself out. Depart a strobe-lit stage where you’ve made loud noises for a couple of hours and you won’t be nodding off soon over cocoa. Encouraged by all of us, Fran was trying to get himself off the poppy dust. As a result, he could be a little jittery by pyjama-time. His twitchings and rustlings and scratchings and burblings would drive Seán into paroxysms of hectoring. Pumped by the gig, nettled by Fran’s restlessness, cold, hungry, resenting the smell of horse-piss, he’d sit himself bolt-upright like the vengeful corpse in a horror flick and switch on his torch and start shouting. This led to him stomping from the horsebox, venting by moonlight, before trudging off resentfully to kip in a field or wherever else he might. His departure and its valedictory fanfare of obscenities left Fran and me alone and awake. Sometimes there was tequila, Fran’s favourite tipple at the time. Sometimes there was vodka, my own. He could get a bit flirtatious. He’d be giving you the Grin. Well, boys will be boys. Why deny it? Once or twice, we had an enjoyable meeting of mouths. I’ve no regrets. He was a sensational kisser. His persuasive skills, also, were extensive. But those occasions, fun as they were, mainly served to establish in my mind that the love daring to speak its name, indeed rarely shutting up about itself, was ultimately the one I was after. This being explained, he accepted in good heart. Fran would never take it personally that you weren’t in the mood. He’d have made a wonderful spouse.

Soon we ran out of colleges and began playing in pubs. Poole, Braintree, Slough (twice), Rottingdean, Staines, Shitterton, Gravesend. My diary confirms what I already know, that few of southern England’s offputtingly named towns were unvisited by the Ships in the Night. It is a country I love deeply, and I’ve lived there many years, but it’s easier to love England when you’re not seeing it from the back seat of a rustbucket or dreaming its dreams in a horsebox.

Pub audiences? Yes. I had better describe them. The dog-faced landlord and his slipper-wearing missus. The teds of the locality, in drainpipes and Brylcreem. The cider-fucked gloomies who’d only ventured on to the premises to tank up before going out burgling. The odd pubescent girl smuggled in by the barman intent on defloration down in the cellar, among the mousetraps and crates of pale ale. Glass-washers. Lunatics. Contestants at Pacman. The stripper who’d be on later. The grinning ‘old lag’. Spouse-haters, gallows-birds, wreckage on legs, lobotomies, dipsos, automatons. Men the colour of nicotine. Women with smoke-wreathed nostrils. Fiends of indeterminate gender shrieking at the Tom ’n’ Jerry pinball machine while slapping its day-glo flanks. Urinal-vommers, skinheads, the religiously disturbed. If I give you the impression that they had any interest in us at all, except possibly as food, I have failed.

Onward we apprenticed, up and down the motorways, through the violently cold March of ’84 in Albion, a kingdom of sleet and dismal little caffs and an acne of gorse on the hilltops. Cold chips for breakfast and baked beans for lunch, and bubble ’n’ squeak for to sup on. England does not have motels in the American sense, but if we happened to be in funds we’d put up at one of those small-town B and Bs where the sheets give electric shocks. A ‘toilet duck’ in the bathroom the only item of decoration. The landlady’s bra on the washing line. Slice of toast? Thirty pence. Microwaved soup. Pot Noodle as room-service menu.

Mostly we slept in the horsebox, which, in truth, was not so bad. Seán kitted it out with inflatable mattresses and sleeping bags designed for the Arctic. (‘I am going out,’ he’d intone, on departing for a pee. ‘I may be some time. Carry on.’) If you zipped two of them together and shared body heat with your colleague, and you didn’t mind the beating of rain on the roof or the whiskey-fumed befuddlements that passed as pillow talk, there was a sensation of consolatory fellow feeling, such as undergrounding Londoners are said to have known during the Blitz. When young, as previously noted, your stupidity is bomb-proof. But you can fall asleep anywhere. That’s the upside.

For all the privations, we were learning our trade. There was joy to be squeezed from the struggle. One night, at a gig in Stoke, Seán did a tiny thing out of boredom, reversing the snare pattern on the middle eight of Fran’s song ‘Mullarkey’, so the accent fell on the second beat, ska-style. The change was a lightning bolt, sudden and random, and the song burst out of itself like a fruit. To be young and in a band that is stumbling towards its own sound, messily, slowly, with all the infuriation of hope, is to realise what it feels like to be alive. When a gig went well, the fierce, besotted excitement would buzz through your blood till the dawn. Uplifting any audience, even a tiny crowd in a bar, is an addiction you’ll never get over. At Fran’s generous insistence, we started swapping lead vocals, the rest doing backing, even Seán. I always tell my daughter, I learned to sing by singing. Trez sang too, with presence and attack. Fran’s guitar-playing, meanwhile, was beginning to astound us. He’d wrench screams from a Strat, raise wails of plane-crash feedback, pull a Chuck Berry duckwalk if the mood was upon him, but if you wanted an anchoring shuffle-time chug he’d supply it with scrupulous discipline. He retuned my old Ephiphone to an open B-flat, in which he’d jangle away contentedly at the back of the stage, nodding us in turn towards the lead mic. Seán by now had taught me to drive, a thing I enjoyed and was good at. Those motorway nights I’ll remember all my life. Four kids in a scruffy car, facing into a rainstorm, punk on the radio and a hundred miles ahead. No drug comes close to that elation.

It was Seán who came up with the idea, probably through impatience, that we ‘release’ the demo ourselves. He’d shopped around and come up with a factory in Essex that would produce five thousand cassettes for three grand. We’d been playing the songs for a few months now, seeding them into our set of not overly known cover versions, like apologies into a conversation with a person you’re about to break it off with, and it had started to happen occasionally at the end of a night that a punter would ask if we had a tape for sale. Fran was reluctant but we won him over. Various titles were thrown around, many of them a bit pompous or defensively facetious. In the end we went for The Thrill of it All (And the Worry Afterwards), which had the advantage of being pompous and facetious. Trez and I condensed the ghastly four-and-a-half-page press release into ‘liner notes’. In the passport booth at Paddington station on the rainy Sunday morning of 8th April 1984, we took twenty pictures of the pair of us, Fran and Seán having refused to get out of their beds, and that became the cover photo. My daughter tells me that if you have a playable copy of that cassette today, it’s worth 900 quid on eBay, 7K if signed by Fran, eleven thousand if possessing the liner notes. I wish I’d stashed a box for my dotage.

Fran, having provided the subsidy that was keeping us alive, now decided its administration was beyond him. Every organisation is helmed by a leader who sometimes seems bizarrely opposed to it, and such was the case with the Ships. He had backslidden and was by now spending excessively on his favourite hobby. Entire villages in Afghanistan and rural Colombia were being funded by Fran’s enthusiasms. One imagined the ringing of bells when this week’s order arrived, and the cheerful folksong of goatherds. In the search for enlightenment, he could be recklessly experimental. He’d have snorted the ashes of martyred Joan of Arc if nothing more traditional were available. We said it must stop, and he promised it would, but up his nose or into his person by sundry other routes had gone a truly astonishing sum. A meeting was convened to ‘elect’ a Chancellor of the Exchequer. Trez, obviously, was chosen. Confronted with the exigencies of keeping us a step from starvation, she responded with frightening zeal. Indeed, she was to prove a ruthless monetarist. ‘We will live within our means.’ ‘The books must be balanced.’ ‘The spending simply cannot continue.’ She disbursed to each of us on a Friday evening the sum she’d calculated as necessary to sustain an adult human for one calendar week, less 5 per cent. Following an incident in which Fran claimed not to have received his allowance (from what was in fact his own money) Trez tried to institute a system whereby we signed for our dough. At this we drew a line and italicised it with blasphemies. I’m not saying she was heartless, but she could be steely and purposeful. She had something of the Grocer’s Daughter.

Funny old time, the 1980s in England. I am fond of my adopted country’s palette of restful greys, but things got a bit black and white. The electorate, or part of it, had imposed on us as Prime Minister a union-crushing, self-avowed admirer of General Pinochet. But there were important cities being governed by designer-suited Trotskyites who named municipal playgrounds after Sandinistas. When the centre fails to hold, opportunism sprouts, and from it we weren’t immune. A flag of convenience can sometimes be useful. Three of us in the group realised that construing ourselves as a ‘left-wing Irish band’ – which, by some definitions, we were – might result in a little harvest of apologetic money and sympathetic embraces from the populace. After all, it was only proper to have a feeling for the motherland. (‘The what?’ Trez said, astonished.) A long time had passed since the Great Irish Famine. But boy, were we still upset about it.

At Irish festivals and Militant rallies the length and breadth of the kingdom, speaker after speaker excoriated England, her cruelties and extortions, her invasions and annexations, historical, contemporary and allegedly planned, her back-catalogue of pitiless tyrannies. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of raw material. If you played in a university attended by upper-middle-class students, the ante was that much higher. Jude and Willow would want you to bring your guitars but also your ideological firmness. Anything short of outright support for the Red Brigades or the immediate necklacing of Education Secretary Sir Keith Joseph and you were regarded as a bit of a splitter.

On Merseyside, say, and in certain boroughs of London, we’d be handsomely remunerated for appearing on a bill that even Ho Chi Minh might have found a bit unnerving. For all that, in many of England’s less assertively Marxist towns – Bath, for example, or Leamington Spa – you tended to keep your Irishness muffled, lest it result in a burning crucifix. Seán was useful in this regard, since he spoke in the tones of south London. Not ideally what one would want to hear in the Nell Gwynn tearooms, but better than perceived bombers such as Fran or me. A dose of blarneying invective from that gentleman’s mouth and the smelling salts or the West Midlands Crime Squad might have to be summoned, and where would we all be then.

We returned home to the flat late one summery night in a state of nearly catatonic exhaustion. We’d driven the 400 miles down from Aberdeen in one go, a gruelling and sullen nine hours. My diary tells me it was Sunday, 27th May. We’d racked up eleven dates, and while the gigs had gone okay, we were sick of the road and sick of the songs and heartily sick of each other. There was never decent food or anywhere to shower. It was an eternity of peanuts and rinsing your pits in a sink and trying to get paid and taking less than you were promised and sniffing a facecloth before using it. The almost total lack of physical privacy was irksome to us boys; for Trez who complained least it was hardest. Being the only young woman in any group of young men is a trial, and the privations of touring made things worse. More than that, the little squabbles that attend close bodily proximity were starting to curdle and fester. The rows grew bad. We’d go at it like boiling water. Trez could be crabby as her final exams approached, Fran quite impossible, contumelious and fault-finding and unendingly negative, an embittered Reverend Mother whom the novices dread. A nimbus of suppressed rage seemed to glow from his face and you feared what would now be termed his mood swings. He was off the Shanghai Sally again but the worldview of people fighting addiction remains insular, even when the anaesthetic gets abandoned. I know what I’m talking about. I point no finger. The least capable musician, I loved the group most. The others had options I hadn’t, and that scared me to false glee. I feared they would sack me soon.

Drink was helping me develop strategies to parlay my dread into a cheeriness they must have found exhausting. As for Seán, he had a girl in London he didn’t like missing. With Seán, there was always a girl. Inability to stick the sight of your colleagues is the reason most groups break up in the end, not that we knew at the time. But we did know, I think, that we couldn’t go on as we were. It was notable that on any occasion when we returned to the flat all together, we’d each of us head immediately into a bedroom alone and, short of an earthquake, stay there.

This, I supposed, was what would happen on such a night. Trez lit a cigarette off the toaster, gathered her notes and retired without comment to the bath. Her finals were to start next morning and she was hoping for a scholarship. But life on the road doesn’t marry well with study. There was a sense that a junction was fast approaching. I could see she was worried and down.

I put together a pear crumble and got a simple pesto going, because I knew that she liked it and I wanted to give her a treat. A spider was scuttling in the sink but I spared it a watery demise. Let the ugly flunt live. Who cared? I imagined myself seen through his numerous eyes, a kaleidoscope of failure and geekery. Bills had arrived in our absence and I opened one or two. Among the mail was a statement from the outfit we’d hired to put around our cassette. It announced that we’d sold 141 copies in total. You might think it would be a consolation that there were 141 fools willing to buy the fruit of your labours in a country of sixty million. But I personally had bought 11, so there were only 130. At a push, you could have squeezed our entire British fanbase into Jimmy and Alice’s house. I murdered the spider. His death didn’t help. Violence never does, so they say.

Fran came into the kitchen with a shocked and haggard look. He asked if I would listen to the answering machine. Control freak that he was, he insisted the flat’s only telephone be kept in his bedroom, lest any of us use it to escape. He’d listened to the message himself. But he wanted someone else to hear it. He was naked but for his underpants, which were surprisingly conservative. Away with him I trudged, too weary to be alarmed.

Into that cavern of taffeta and lace and non-returned library books and poppers and fag ash and wet-wipes and lipsticks, a realm where the daylight was never permitted to enter, came a ray of Wirral-born sunshine. Any music-lover of my age would have recognised the voice, which pretended to be sardonic and just about succeeded. I’d heard it under blankets in the bedroom at home, and as I wept with my back to the runway lights of Luton Airport, counting up years, or smoking out the window, wondering why the Christ of lies had murdered my sister and if she could hear it too.

‘Evening, it’s John Peel here at Radio 1. Just to say I got your cassette. Excellent stuff. Playing a couple of tracks on the programme tomorrow night. Thought you’d like to know. Be in touch.’

Fran was at the sewing machine. I sat down slowly beside him. He was weeping. I held him. We cried.

Ten

FROM FRAN’S FINAL INTERVIEW