THIRTY-ONE
He’s dancing on the ceiling
With a showgirl in a feather dress
Time is meaningless
—“The Puppet Has Cut His Strings”
Among the many strange sensations I’ve experienced during my life in show business, few have matched the panicked scrabbling of a live rabbit that had been placed inside a top hat on my head.
Rabbits are tricky beasts, as you are probably aware. They’ll drop dead if you look at them crooked, but this one was attempting to tunnel to safety through my skull like Charles Bronson in The Great Escape.
The rabbit wrangler—if that is indeed the correct technical term for him—had assured me that the rabbit had been perfectly happy to sit on his head for hours while watching television.
The wrangler that is, not the rabbit.
It should be noted that the handler had an abundance of curls worthy of Harpo Marx, so anything nestling there would have enjoyed the same comfort and security as a baby chick within the nest. My head, however, was slicked flat with brilliantine, as I was playing the role of Rosco de Ville, an incompetent magician thrust into the New Year’s Eve chaos of Alan Bleasdale’s film No Surrender.
I had even received a little instruction from theatrical magic expert Ali Bongo, so I could produce a playing card from my sleeve with a convincing flourish while appearing otherwise inept, which was certainly within my capabilities as an actor.
All attempts to introduce the rabbit into my hat failed miserably. The rabbit demanded an understudy. The director summoned the head of the props department.
There was a brief interlude while a stand-in was obtained, a much larger stuffed hare that would only fit inside my hat once much of its innards were removed and it resembled a leporine concertina.
The scene had me pleading that I could not complete my magic act due to illness, at which point I was supposed to lift the brim of my top hat to reveal the indisposed creature.
Now we had a different problem. The stunt rabbit hadn’t read the script. Each time I lifted my hat, a different part of the dead hare fell onto my brow. Sometimes it was a paw. The next time it was an ear.
There is an old theatrical saying that you should never work with rabbits or children, but by the twentieth attempt to say their lines without laughing, the actors Bernard Hill, Michael Angelis, and Joanne Whalley were ready to add both “magician” and “musician” to that list.
Alan Bleasdale and I had become friends in the early ’80s. We had been introduced over the telephone regarding some radio show that neither of us wanted to do. It was as if we were picking up a conversation that was already well under way. Our friendship soon became like that of brothers.
We were both of the opinion that there were few better songwriters alive than John Prine. We might spend hours debating the relative merits of Liverpool F.C. strikers from Alf Arrowsmith to Robbie Fowler. And we shared the dismay at the things being done to the country, and in particular to his and my mother’s hometown at the hands of Margaret Thatcher and that loathsome cabal of toadies and sneering opportunists that passed for a government.
His television drama series Boys from the Blackstuff caught the heartlessness with which a group of workingmen and families were cast aside, how they had been asked to betray themselves and even courted madness.
His name was blackened and reviled and he was accused of being in the pay of the Kremlin by head cases on the Tory backbenches and in columns of the Daily Mail. There was sometimes a curious clicking sound when we spoke on the telephone that may not have been neighbors listening in on a party line, all of which told me that he was probably doing something right.
Or maybe that was left.
Alan was the only person I ever sought an opinion from about a first or even final draft of a new lyric. The art of songwriting and record making is not a democracy in which everyone gets to vote, but I trusted Alan’s counsel on such matters then as I do now.
“Tramp the Dirt Down” was actually the second draft of a ragged set of verses called “Betrayal” that I had written more in anger than reason during the last days of the 1984–1985 miners’ strike.
After playing Alan the song as it was eventually released on Spike, I told him that I was still considering rewriting it. I’d had an idea for a third draft, inventing a countermelody that allowed for a dissenting voice, contrasting with the mounting violence of the main lyrics in a cynical and detached way:
Ah, that’s what they all say
You don’t understand the way things really are
The reality of the world today
You’re just a face in the crowd
And a voice at the bar
It was the kind of condescending argument usually advanced by politicians and their stooges in the press in order to diminish songs or plays or pleas of conscience.
Alan was absolutely adamant that I should retain the more direct approach. His advice prevailed and the rest is misery.
In 1991, Alan wrote and produced an eleven-hour drama series about loyalty, corruption, and childhood secrets called G.B.H., for which I collaborated with composer Richard Harvey on the musical score.
Although I was then unable to write my ideas on the stave, Richard and I worked well together. I was completely reliant on his expertise as an orchestrator to combine my themes and his own and turn them into coherent film cues. At times, this made me feel like a dunce, while at others I feared I could not convey my intentions clearly.
Still, the music seemed to serve the drama well. Richard and I were nominated for a BAFTA award, sometimes rather grandly and presumptuously called a “British Academy Award.”
I told myself that such ceremonies were not my cup of tea and went out to a concert at the Royal Festival Hall that night, but I wasn’t entirely blasé about the contest. When I got home, I fast-forwarded the video recording until I came across Richard looking mischievous on his way up to the podium.
He turned away for a moment from the vision that was Catherine Zeta-Jones, who was presenting our award, and mimed the unscrewing of a bottle directly into the camera. By then, several bottles had already been opened and drained.
The closing titles of the final episode of G.B.H. were accompanied by an instrumental adaptation of my song “Couldn’t Call It Unexpected No. 4.” My recording of the song closed Mighty Like a Rose, an album that contained everything from songs of petty spite to one that welcomed the devouring of mankind by a race of vicious insects.
It was the Feelgood Hit of the Summer.
Whenever I tried to explain what “Couldn’t Call It Unexpected No. 4” really meant to me, it always crumbled away like scorched paper, but I had imagined it should ideally be sung by a doubting Thomas played by Jimmy Durante.
Please don’t let me fear anything I cannot explain
I can’t believe I’ll never believe in anything again
The musical arrangement belonged in the circus, but the melody is one that should be sung by gaslight. The lyrics even made fun of my inability to write music down on the page in an image from a half-remembered cartoon:
Well, I’m the lucky goon
who composed this tune
from birds arranged on the high wire
In 1988, I played fewer than ten shows. I spent a lot of this unaccustomed idleness listening to all of the music that I had overlooked or for which I had always lacked sufficient patience. I started going to concerts and the recital hall up to five or six times a week. I was there so often I think the ushers started to believe I was sleeping in the lobby.
Like anyone entering those places for the first time, I found the rituals of both attendance and performance somewhat claustrophobic and even a little ridiculous, but when the music began all other cares, fashions, and favors simply dissolved. I heard extraordinary things that hit me with the force of new love. I would sit in the midst of a big symphonic performance, a vocal recital, or a chamber music concert and imagine all the songs that I’d never thought to write and everything that there was still to learn.
It was during one such evening that I first heard the Brodsky Quartet. They were playing a complete cycle of the Shostakovich string quartets. I attended one concert that was so startling and vivid that I was compelled to return the following week to hear the conclusion of the series.
From then on, I tried to hear the Brodskys whenever they were performing in London. I heard them play music by Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, and Bartók and some contemporary compositions, some of which were marvelous, while others sounded like a man turning his head in a vise.
Eventually, my attendance at their concerts was noted and an introduction was made. To my surprise I found that members of the quartet had been in my shows over exactly the same period of time. There was an ease among us from the outset.
The Brodskys had been a quartet since their teens, consisting of a brother and sister, the violinist and cellist, Michael and Jacqueline Thomas, and their childhood friend violinist Ian Belton. The relative newcomer was the violist and Derry man, Paul Cassidy, who was married to Jackie.
Their accents and even their Middlesbrough sense of humor were familiar from my days with The Attractions, but far from being high flown, as an outsider’s view of the classical world might deceive you into imagining, they spent their spare time talking about football and understood the importance of tea and cake to the rehearsal process.
So much in the music was left unspoken. Agreements were made with little more than the point of a bow at a bar number or a withering glance between them.
Music lessons at my school had mostly consisted of making scraping noises on the violin, playing tunelessly on the wooden recorder, or lustily singing patriotic songs like “The British Grenadiers” or weird old ballads about dying for love like “Barbara Allen,” but that’s about as far as it went.
I told myself that if I could find a left-handed piano, I might be able to play it properly. My failure to master musical notation had always been two parts stubbornness and one part superstition, with a liberal dash of laziness.
I’d always got my songs across to musicians just fine until I wanted to convey things that I couldn’t play or even whistle, but I’d always been able to hear such harmonies and melodies, so learning to write them down now was hardly equivalent to cracking the Enigma code.
Initially, the members of the quartet patiently transcribed what I was picking out on the piano, but in the time it took us to write The Juliet Letters, I went from scratching out a single line of melody to completing four-part scores. I wanted to write songs that were unhooked from the backbeat and would let the harmony wander where it would. Working with the quartet made it seem more natural for the tempo to yield to the bidding of the words.
Now all we needed were some stories to tell. I didn’t think we should just take the next ten lyrics in my notebook and dress them in unusual clothes.
A news item about a Veronese professor who had been unmasked after years of secretly answering the lovelorn letters and entreaties addressed to “Juliet Capulet” was picked out by my wife Cait, and pointed to a way that we could all contribute to the piece.
Once we had a title and had settled on the letter as our lyrical form, the variations came to us very easily: a child’s note, a postcard from a regretful lover, the reply of an eccentric aunt to a begging letter from scheming relations.
There were letters spelled out at a séance, a diatribe carved on a wooden door, a pact with the devil signed in blood, even a suicide note.
The words didn’t even need to rhyme. In fact, they sang better if they were unpolished and unlike lyrics at all. We all chipped in drafts that I edited in an attempt to avoid any of my own lyrical mannerisms.
“I Thought I’d Write to Juliet” was adapted from a real and highly conflicted letter that I had received from a twenty-three-year-old female soldier called Constance serving in the first Gulf War. She had written to me about her fear and anxiety while hunkered down in her foxhole in a strange and hostile country, having really joined the army only to complete her education. I set parts of the letter almost verbatim:
This is a letter of thanks
As I’m so bored here in I can’t say where
So I’m writing to people that I may never meet
And I was thinking of something you said
I was taken off guard by the openness of the letter and tried to reflect that in the more cynical words of the recipient. The song didn’t propose any easy solutions for her dilemma:
I’m sleeping with my eyes open for fear of attack
Your words are a comfort they’re the best things that I have
Apart from family pictures and, of course, my gas mask
I don’t know why I am writing to you
I left it for the quartet to summon up the scene, their instruments imitating the air-raid sirens.
The first performance of The Juliet Letters was given at the Amadeus Centre on July 1, 1992. This converted chapel in Maida Vale was the Brodsky’s rehearsal room and had acted as our writing workshop.
It was the first time in more than fifteen years that I had performed a program that consisted entirely of songs that were unknown to the audience. Even though the hall was loaded with family and friends, the success of the concert was an elating experience.
A month later, we took the songs to the Dartington Summer School in Devon, where the Brodskys were the quartet-in-residence. We lolled around on the grass in the heavy air of the English summertime between the classes. It was one of the perks that I’d always imagined academic life might bring.
Composer John Woolrich had even embroiled me in a songwriting course, although we quickly realized that my questions and suggestions seemed only to perplex the attendees, who ranged from a retired lady who sang unaccompanied songs in a quavering voice that wandered in search of a key, to a rather impatient and impertinent boy genius, who arrived clutching a huge score to which he wanted us to devote all our time and attention.
One afternoon, I asked the class if they ever held a model in their head for the music they were writing, in the way people once placed a bust of Bach or Beethoven on the piano as a beacon for inspiration. Mine would have once been of Levi Stubbs, although I didn’t mention this at the time. The reaction was one of mortal offense, as if I had questioned their originality, so I just nodded approvingly at everything after that.
On the afternoon of our second performance of The Juliet Letters, I found a piano in the choir loft of the Great Hall and wrote “Favourite Hour,” which would find a home on Brutal Youth. I’d even thrown the title out to the songwriting class to see if it might provoke any interesting musical ideas, only to have it tossed back at me like an unwanted fish.
I wanted my version to sound like a hymn. Maybe that was the mood or the chapel I was in. It was a song of uncounted blessings, commuters hanging from straps on an Underground train at the exact hour a young man was to go to the gallows, while the narrator strolled past one of those troubling, talkative streams that turn up all the time in German songs.
Michael Thomas wrote out my still and simple piano chords for the quartet in less time than it had taken me to compose the tune, and we played the song as an encore that night. It was the first of many numbers that I do not think I would have written if it had not been for the experience of working on The Juliet Letters. Not only did it open the way for more ambitious melodies like “London’s Brilliant Parade” and “I Want to Vanish,” but the act of stepping outside the rock and roll combo for a while made those sounds seem more vital and surprising to me when I returned to them.
The recording of The Juliet Letters took place in London. Kevin Killen did a wonderful job balancing the elements that were put on tape in a live performance without any overdubs. However, once Warner Bros. released the recording, we were able to go on a world tour like a real pop sensation, and the songs really started to come to life.
We circled the globe, playing nineteen concerts in twenty-five days.
One night we appeared in the classical splendor of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, where Michael Thomas played less like a man with 102-degree fever and more like a man possessed, and the next, we found ourselves backstage among the feather boas and sequins of the Folies Bergère in Paris. We played La Palau de la Música Catalana, one of the most exquisite halls in Barcelona, and then a converted chocolate factory in Pisa. We traveled to Japan for three concerts in Tokyo, then flew on to do The Tonight Show in Los Angeles. The Juliet Letters were performed at UCLA’s Royce Hall and in San Francisco and Boston before closing with a very memorable night at Town Hall in New York.
Our encore now included arrangements of songs by Tom Waits, Jerome Kern, Kurt Weill, and Brian Wilson. We had Paul Cassidy’s setting of the ballad “Scarlet Ribbons” and my own chart for “Almost Blue.”
This was just the beginning. Over the next two years we gave performances in Spain, from Toledo to Jerez, where I would have usually struggled to get a booking playing the spoons.
I wrote a suite of songs for Anne Sofie von Otter and the Brodskys called “Three Distracted Women.” We filmed Kurt Weill’s “Lost in the Stars” in a freezing Toronto warehouse.
Even after Michael Thomas left the group and it never felt quite right to perform the entire piece without him, our programs with the subsequent lineups included titles from The Juliet Letters alongside new arrangements by Paul Cassidy of “Pills and Soap” and “My Mood Swings” from the Big Lebowski soundtrack, or charts that I wrote myself for “My Three Sons” and “Shipbuilding.”
We appeared at the Café Royal, the Ryman Auditorium, the Beacon Theatre, in a tent in Denmark, and at the Sydney Festival.
I recorded Randy Newman’s “Real Emotional Girl” for the Brodsky’s Moodswings record, and Steve Nieve and I collaborated on the string quartet parts for “Still,” which they performed on the album North.
Sometimes it is hard to persuade people to listen to something different and have them believe it is founded in curiosity rather than perversity or hubris, but this alliance outdistanced such suspicion.
It is now more than twenty years since the premiere of The Juliet Letters, and several other full recordings of the piece exist, including one arranged for a jazz ensemble and translated into Polish. The songs have been adapted for dance performances and dramatic scenarios. “The Birds Will Still Be Singing” was recorded beautifully by Norma Waterson and has been played most touchingly as a solo piano piece by Steve Nieve.
I had no idea that Steve had ever thought quite that way about anything I had written. Despite all the time that we have worked together, to speak of such things might have inhibited the trust and liberty on which our musical relationship was founded.
But now I know.
However, all of this proved to be but a rehearsal.
• • •
Summertime withers as the sun descends
He wants to kiss you will you condescend?
—“THE BIRDS WILL STILL BE SINGING”
We had no chance to avoid the impact.
I saw the white minibus pull out as I rounded the bend.
I was about five minutes from home.
The other driver must have been looking the other way for approaching traffic or surely he never would have attempted the turn.
I hit the brakes, and although the road was dry, the surface was slick from wear and we went into a skid. People will always tell you that those last few yards seem to be in slow motion.
The contact wasn’t as severe as it might have been but enough to crumple up the left front wing of the Mercedes. Everyone was shaken up but unhurt. At least I hadn’t hit them broadside. There was a football team inside the bus, most of them little more than children.
That would have made a good headline in the Evening Herald: “Former ‘Accidents Will Happen’ Star Slaughters Local Heroes.”
I walked a step or two away from the vehicle to regard the scene as we all waited for the Garda to arrive. I saw a pool of oil spreading out below the twisted metal, while James Alexander Gordon read the football results on my car radio.
Only then was I aware of the alarm of birdsong in the trees.
“The Birds Will Still Be Singing,” our finale on The Juliet Letters, was my father’s favorite of all my songs.
When he first said that he wanted it played at his funeral, I brushed it off as gallows humor. His epitaph seemed very far off.
At the time of the premiere of The Juliet Letters, he was still singing occasionally. Backstage after the performance he was full of jokes and stories, even a little flirtatious.
I didn’t notice him getting older. We still talked on the phone all the time from wherever I was in the world and would visit regularly enough that I didn’t register the change in him.
Just before his eightieth birthday, my Dad told me that a woman had come from Jamaica to announce she was his daughter. Her mother had worked at the Hammersmith Palais in the 1960s and later claimed my Dad had fathered her child.
It was not a conversation that we expected to have at this or at any age.
Finally, I had to ask him, “Could she be your daughter?”
“I honestly don’t remember. The only good thing about losing your memory is, you don’t know whether you were a bad boy.”
I was initially protective of my father, having been on the receiving end of various wild claims and fishing expeditions over the years.
In 1984, I discovered that a theatrical agent was passing herself off to many of her clients as my wife, using the fact that little was then known of my private life in order to weave a very complicated fiction.
According to her, I had a house in the Hamptons and an apartment in Greenwich Village. On one occasion, she had feigned great distress because Scotland Yard was said to be looking for me after my Aston Martin had been found abandoned at Heathrow Airport.
I was living a more exciting and lucrative life in her fantasy world than I was in reality. I couldn’t even drive.
She had apparently been known to put clients on hold in order to take calls from her imaginary husband, and it was only after an acting acquaintance of T Bone Burnett had asked after “my wife” by the wrong name that the sham marriage was uncovered.
Eventually, enough people must have caught her in the lie and she went underground, never explaining what she sought to gain by the pretense and mercifully without ever contacting me personally.
By comparison, my Dad and his wife were immensely kind to this woman who had unexpectedly arrived in their lives. He went to great lengths to reassure her, even after the paternity claim was found to be false, and our almost-sister was last seen looking for a doorman with whom her mother had also allegedly dallied.
I felt bad for her and I almost wished the claim were true. One more chair at our table wouldn’t have troubled any of us by now.
• • •
The crowd went home and left you
For dead
My old woodenhead
Took the thimble and the thread
Choked back tears like a cymbal
—“THE PUPPET HAS CUT HIS STRINGS”
By the time Diana and I got married in 2003, my Dad had begun to look more his years but could still dance a step or two. He had waited until everyone else had performed at the reception before he got up and totally stole the evening with beautiful, intense renditions of “My Funny Valentine” and “Danny Boy.”
He never missed one of our London shows. The last he attended was a solo performance at Royal Festival Hall in 2010, a couple of years after his initial Parkinson’s diagnosis.
By then I could see the light was dimming.
He had a tremor in his hands and two fingers of each were folded into the palm by Dupuytren’s contracture. He had refused the corrective surgery, even though it caused him to put away his trumpet.
Then, in late 2010, everything changed.
A series of distressing hallucinatory episodes suggested a profound downturn. I was told that my father’s life expectancy was now “between three to five years” but that this was the year to spend time with him, as the way ahead could be very uncertain.
His specialist was frank with me. Medication could only do so much, the deterioration of cognition and memory might erase his personality within as little as twelve months, just as Alzheimer’s had done to his mother.
Yet by March 2011, there had been such a remarkable improvement in his clarity that we were able to spend a beautiful afternoon listening to music, much as we had done in the past. He and his wife, Sara, even planned a summer trip to Spain.
My Dad had always loved that country, and now asked nothing more than to walk a short distance to a café and sit over coffee, speaking the few words of Spanish that he still retained.
When the time came, the journey proved far too much for him and he quickly became exhausted, dehydrated, and delirious and was hospitalized. He was transferred back to England with very great difficulty, the Parkinson’s symptoms returning with full force, but he was also experiencing vertigo and was unable to stand or walk. Neurological specialists soon determined that a brain tumor was developing. His condition was regarded as beyond surgical intervention.
My initial response to the news was the desire to cancel everything on my calendar and spend every remaining moment at his side. This was an unrealistic desire. I was about to begin another tour and needed to be with my young boys prior to leaving for work. In fact, I needed to be in two or even three places at the same time.
When I got to London, I was shocked by my father’s sudden decline. He was unshaven and emaciated. It was late in the day and the nurses did not want me to stay too long, so I kissed his head and said, “Good night, Daddy,” as I had done as a boy. I wanted to speak to him as I had done as a child, thinking this might reach him, just as it gave me comfort to do so.
What lay between us was not measured in time.
As he slipped in and out of sleep over the next days, I tried to think of things we’d done together that might give him joy in the moment of recollection. I soon realized that I had exhausted our shared experiences very quickly.
But then, I had lived from the ages of seven to seventeen with my mother. She had really raised me alone. She was the one who had made sure I knew how to dress myself, bless myself, to look right, look left, and never talk to strangers. Despite being raised Congregationalist, it was my Mam who saw that I went to mass every Sunday, until I could explain why it no longer held any mystery or meaning for me.
It was the priest who had baptized me who banished me from Holy Cross Church for laughing hysterically with a teenage friend who was visiting Birkenhead. I told my pal it would be quite impossible to understand a single word of the Irish canon’s mumbled sermon, but he was always clear as a bell when it came to the amount in the previous week’s collection plate. I left and never went back.
My Ma made sure that I did my homework, encouraged me to get a job to pay for my first guitar, and picked me up from the riverbank the first time I got drunk, at fourteen.
It was my mother who had driven me, with my amplifier and guitar all crammed into her Fiat 500, to my first club gig in Liverpool, and threw my shoes in the dustbin when I came home sick and bedraggled on my first Christmas after leaving Liverpool for London again.
She listened when I told her I was to be a young father.
She watched as my career went off like a Roman candle and blew my life to smithereens.
Implicit in so many of the records I brought home to play to her was the thought Look, Ma, look at the mess I’ve made of my life. Lucky I know how to write songs about it.
“I Want to Vanish” was the only song that she did not want to hear again, because its implication was too upsetting for a parent.
My mother doesn’t play an instrument but she knows things about the truth of music and its practitioners that some musicians don’t know or won’t admit.
A few years ago, I told people that I wouldn’t be making any more record albums. The argument I advanced was that recording, while pleasurable, had become a vanity, and advocating records was no longer a good use of my time set against making a respectable living taking the same songs directly to the stage.
The real reason was that I needed time to imagine how I could bear to write songs and not be able to play them for my father.
Watching him listen to music was irreplaceable to me.
There are some things that music just can’t fix.
• • •
We carried you on buckled limbs
Through mournful airs and martyrs’ hymns
Then one blue and one more yellow pill
One keeps you quiet
One keeps you still
—“THE PUPPET HAS CUT HIS STRINGS”
When his home could no longer provide for my father’s needs, we went looking for a place in which he might spend his remaining days in something like peace and comfort.
The first was a retirement home for variety artists and musical performers that had always been supported by an annual royal command performance and benevolent fund. Walking down the corridor, I took in a framed poster for the Royal Variety Show of 1963 on which my Dad had appeared.
You might say he’d paid in advance.
Each door in the nursing home was painted with a star and inscribed with a famous name, like that of a theatrical dressing room. I wasn’t sure how aware of his surroundings my Dad was likely to be, but I thought he would never forgive me if I landed him in a room named after a racist comedian he couldn’t stand.
The company of other entertainers might have seemed convivial, or it could have felt like being trapped in a television studio greenroom, forever.
It was a brief moment of black comedy in a melancholy search.
We finally found a more suitable address that, by complete coincidence, was just a five-minute walk from the cul-de-sac in which we’d lived in turn, between 1960 and 1976. I was able to tell my Dad truthfully that he was almost going home.
On the day he arrived in his new digs, he became terribly agitated, demanding to leave. He struggled to his feet then realized that he could not command them to take even one step. He let out a stammering wail, “This is so demeaning.”
I couldn’t give him an argument, so I eased him back into the chair.
Soon he was all but silent.
The few words he said were in response to music.
Al Bowlly was singing “The Very Thought of You.”
Someone in the room asked idly, “He was English, wasn’t he?”
My Dad stirred, and in a barely audible whisper said, “South African.”
Some afternoons in early September, Ross was well enough to sit up and enjoy some crumbs of cake and a dram of Bushmills in place of his cup of tea. It couldn’t harm him now.
I played him a recording of Diana accompanying Paul McCartney singing “More I Cannot Wish You.” He looked at the last note hanging in the air as he had often done before.
“That’s beautiful,” he said, and then went back to vacancy.
He often struggled for his words and his speaking voice was little more than an exhausted whisper, but there were some interludes when jumbled images would suddenly escape in staccato bursts between catches of laughter.
“A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” was playing and I gradually pieced together that he was describing the way Judy Campbell had once performed the song. It was something that he had probably seen in the 1950s and never mentioned until that moment.
If you listened,
Very carefully and patiently,
It was possible to,
Understand,
How,
She would let,
A handkerchief,
Fall,
From her hand,
Onto,
The stage,
Upon each exit.
I had to return to America the following day, and each departure was made with the fear that it might be the last time I would see him.
I prepared myself to go. My Dad began to sing along with the Fred Astaire recording of “The Way You Look Tonight,” his eyes looking through mine to some far-off place as he sang:
Yes, you’re lovely, with your smile so warm
And your cheeks so soft
There is nothing for me but to love you . . .
He trailed off for a moment as he lost the lyrics of the bridge, but sang on wordlessly as the melody wound its surprising way upward, his voice still true and resonant enough to be felt in your chest.
• • •
The footlights glare
The trumpets blare
Why is your face drawn on so glum, old chum
Paintbrush dragging on a drum
The rimshot on the punchline that you fumbled
—“THE PUPPET HAS CUT HIS STRINGS”
Within a few days, The Imposters and I were on a run of Spectacular Spinning Songbook dates, employing a game-show wheel emblazoned with thirty of our song titles and leaving the choice of repertoire to be performed to chance and to the tiny hands and strong shoulders of contestants plucked from the orchestra stalls.
We spun that vaudeville contraption for all it was worth, and I was glad of the distance that this show put between the ringmaster role and my real feelings and fears.
When I returned to London in October to begin a European solo tour, Diana went with me and sat with my Dad while I traveled to Athens.
The place was in turmoil and I was concerned that I would get stranded there during a general strike. Diana called me from London to reassure me that all was as well as could be, although in those days, any telephone call startled the heart.
Her voice was bright. She said that a friend of mine was at her side. I really didn’t grasp what she was saying, so she sent me a picture of my father sitting in his wheelchair next to her at the piano in the residents’ lounge.
“What did you play for him?” I asked.
“‘Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,’” she replied. “He laughed at that, but I know from his eyes that he knows.”
That was the last time he left his room.
When I returned to London the next afternoon, I found that a small brass ensemble was playing for the residents. I heard “Danny Boy” as I was coming up the corridor and asked if they would reprise it in the doorway of my Dad’s room, as I’d heard he wasn’t up to getting out of bed that day.
The sound brought him only torment, and I had to ask them to stop playing. Perhaps there was no magic in this unfaithful music after all.
I traveled to Belfast in a black mood, then called for the news of his condition, only to be told that my Dad had woken up and asked for ice cream.
I went onstage feeling heady and unreasonably hopeful. A little thing like that could be so elating.
Six songs into the show I sang “Last Boat Leaving.” I don’t know what possessed me to attempt that number, as it alludes to the lines “Hush, little baby, don’t you cry / You know your daddy’s bound to die” from “All My Trials,” better known as part of the Elvis Presley hit “American Trilogy.”
I felt my throat tighten as I sang:
Hush my little one, don’t cry so
You know your daddy’s bound to go.
I barely got through the song, but knew that if I could sing this, I could sing anything, wherever my mind might wander.
My father’s delirium now increased and could only be suppressed with medications that brought sleep and would hasten his end. In the waking hours, his agitation and hallucinations mounted, his eyes widening with horror as he called out for someone that none of us knew, scrabbling until his heels were raw, in an attempt to escape something that none of us could see.
I made sure now that the music was always left playing in his room. It was the only thing that gave him ease other than the sedating draft. I had to trust my instinct that music was preferable to silence.
I had flown from my Prague show to London to visit him, although I mostly watched him sleep. Then I had to leave for Berlin, not knowing if he had heard me say good-bye.
Four days later, I flew in from Amsterdam to spend just a few hours with him before taking the last plane on to Oslo. I had just finished a rehearsal of Nick Lowe’s “I’m a Mess,” when I saw my tour manager walking toward me, holding up a mobile phone. Robbie McLeod and I have worked together for more than thirty years; he isn’t given to displays of drama or unnecessary emotion.
He said, “You’d better take this.”
I knew from the look on his face that it was bad news and assumed that my father had died.
I heard Diana’s voice over the line from New York. She said plainly and calmly, “The boys are all right, your Dad is all right. Sara has had a heart attack . . .”
I started to say that I had been concerned that being at my Dad’s bedside every day was asking so much of her, that she was both health- and heartbroken, when I heard Diana’s voice beneath mine saying:
“And she died.”
The air went out of me for a moment,
Then I drew it back in, along with the details.
Sara had suffered an aneurysm while visiting her husband’s bedside and passed within seconds. You could only hope that it was with little pain or awareness. My father had been sedated and was completely unaware of what had occurred.
Sara’s closest friends were with her when it happened and my eldest half brother, Kieran, was soon summoned. Unable to locate my number in his distress, he had phoned Diana in New York to relay the news to me.
It was already too late to get back to London that evening. I could feel a strange humming feeling within me, like electricity, that I suppose was shock. I didn’t know what to do with myself other than to play the show as scheduled.
I maintained my composure until the final number of the evening, “The Scarlet Tide.” At the closing line, the room began to revolve, and I stumbled. I sensed a kind hand upon my back, although I could not be sure if it was really there.
Then I canceled the rest of my tour and flew back to England.
I was at once an only child and the eldest of my father’s five sons.
We sat around the kitchen table and tipped out that drawer that every house must have, the one that contains all the old receipts, insurance policies, swimming certificates, and First Holy Communion pictures.
We were searching for all the documents that must be located at a time like this. There were stacks of orange and yellow jackets from a photo-printing shop filled with shiny colored prints from the ’80s, date-stamped at the edges, but they were jumbled up with black-and-white shots from my childhood and small, brown-tinted photographs from the ’30s to the ’50s of people whom only I could identify. There were snapshots of three or four editions of the family and even a few that could not be explained.
At the bottom of the drawer we found a white, tattered, long-forgotten envelope containing postcards and photographs from my Dad’s Bulgarian pen friend. The photographs were of a woman in a tight sweater and leather skirt, nothing overt, but too intimate to be innocent. She was posed in a dour but vaguely seductive manner, sometime in the late 1960s.
None of us really knew the true story of the Bulgarian temptress, but by end of the evening we were so punchy that we were ready to believe our Dad had been a secret agent. I think the hysteria kept the shock at bay for a while, but we still faced the dilemma of whether to tell my father of his bereavement.
It was then that the doctors had to disillusion us. My Dad’s apparently reasoned responses were just chance agreements with things that we said and wanted to believe. We were assured that to tell my Dad of his wife’s death would be devastating to him in the moment but that he would not retain it, and we would be obliged to wound him again and again. They were almost certain that he could no longer form the thought to question her absence.
Still, that “almost” played on my mind.
Two weeks later, on the eve of the funeral, the doctors advised that my father was showing signs that the end was quite near. He was given his last rites with all of his sons, his oldest and youngest grandchild, and even both his first and most recent daughters-in-law gathered together in his room.
Later that night, I returned to his side and saw the true horror of his predicament. The pain and distress were now beyond control, and I wished only for his release.
The following day was a hard one, but I saw my brothers borne up in the church by their family and friends. Then we were at the reception after their mother’s funeral, the whiskey was being handed around, and the fiddles were starting to come out under the harsh neon glare of the function room.
I suddenly had an overwhelming feeling that I had to leave immediately. I took Diana’s hand and headed for the door without speaking to anyone. We drove the short distance back to my Dad’s bedside. It was obvious the moment we entered that we could not have delayed a moment longer.
Ten minutes more would have made all the difference.
I went to step out into the hallway, to summon my brothers by phone.
Diana said, “Don’t leave, this is it.”
We each took one of his hands and stood on either side of the bed. I told him it was okay to go. I wanted so much to keep him with us longer, but that was just my selfishness.
I heard a breaking voice that did not seem to belong to me say, “I love you, Daddy.”
I watched him take in one gasp of air,
A pause,
Then a breath,
A pause,
And then a breath,
Then silence,
Then nothing,
Except there was not really silence,
There was music playing, very softly.
At the moment of his departure, my father’s favorite trumpet player, Clifford Brown, had been caressing Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays.”
The nurse confirmed the obvious with gentle but practiced words of condolence.
I looked back to the hollowed husk, still wearing a curious printing of my father’s stilled face.
Then we went back to the reception to tell my brothers that they were now orphans.
On the short ride, I called my mother to tell her that her first and only husband was gone. Then I called my best friend, Alan, to ask if he would look out for her until I could reach her side.
Between Diana and me, we got to all four of the brothers like assassins before the news spread around the room. When they saw us coming, they knew he was gone.
The music died down in the moment, the murmur was low.
If it had to be that these young men lost their father on the very day that they buried their mother, then at least everyone who knew and cared for them was already at their side. They were spared that first awful responsibility of telling the story.
The next day, we were back in the funeral director’s office.
As with the heart specialist called Dr. Beat or dermatologist Dr. Cream, the sign over the door read WAKE & PAINE.
We had no more piety within us. They had to be patient as we exhausted our nervous laughter. We just pointed to “Number 18” in the catalog. We had become old hands in the burying game.
Then I planned my Dad’s final appearance. I engaged a trumpet player to lead off with a solo rendition of “Yesterdays.” I imagined that we could carry him in to “Faith of Our Fathers”—not the sentimental air of the beloved Bing Crosby recording, but the militant martyr’s march that the ecumenical reformers had banished for frightening off converts. I chose it for the defiance of the tune, not for its lyrical sentiments. I don’t think any of us really believed that we held to our faith “in spite of dungeon, fire and sword.”
In any case, it didn’t really turn out the way I had imagined. Only the oldest parishioners even knew the hymn. The casket was borne into the church to the sound of our leather soles slapping on the stone floor.
I sat between my wife and my mother. Once the prayers had been said and the psalms had been read, it fell to me to tell the story of my Dad’s life.
Most of the younger people gathered there had no idea about my Dad’s career, having met him after he had retired and become an eccentric old man who spoke only in a tangle of private jokes and half-remembered punch lines.
It read like a very full and beautiful life. The only child, succeeded by five sons and then seven grandchildren. All the other detours and departures were meaningless now. Abject grief would have been an indulgence.
When I had finished speaking, his recording of “At Last” was played. Hearing his voice fill the church was probably the hardest moment to bear.
Then Paul, Jackie, and Ian from the Brodsky Quartet played an instrumental trio arrangement of “The Birds Will Still Be Singing.”
It was better that no bird or human was singing.
Jackie played the opening cello line that ascends like a question and Paul and Ian answered her, just the two of them playing tenderly where three voices were usually heard.
There were no tears, at least not at this hour.
They would come later.
For now, I heeded my own refrain, printed in the order of service:
Banish all dismay
Extinguish every sorrow
If I’m lost or I’m forgiven
The birds will still be singing