Strolling Queensway on a Friday night, you felt you were in a show, but the street itself was the showstopper. Lebanese restaurants, Turkish bars, Egyptian traders. Balti-houses, a bierkeller, bodegas, churrerias, a tiny Islamic bookstore, Greek barbers. Thai and Saudi newspapers in racks outside the minimart, with the Longford Leader, The Kerryman and Pravda. That street was a song, but we had songs of our own to get down. It was hard to turn away from the dazzle.
Six floors above a kebab shop on Bishop’s Bridge Road was an attic of almost perfect decrepitude and filth, rejoicing in the moniker ‘Santa Monica Studios’. The balding, rat-faced owner had placed advertisements in the windows of the area’s newsagents, among the cards offering FRENCH MAID MASSAGE and SCHOOLBOY CORRECTION, proclaiming his possession of a 16-track recording system. The rate was thirty quid cash per hour, a ‘lunatic price’ which ‘must end soon’. Thirty quid wasn’t nothing. It would have purchased you quite an amount of schoolboy correction, enough to do you till the end of term. But having shopped about the quarter, we soon came to discern that the Santa Monica was a relative bargain.
Up those 72 steps we’d hike with our gear, weighed like pack-mules, thirsty and hot, past bricked-up partitions, the torched remains of armchairs, past a freezer cabinet Fran quipped was employed by the chef-de-kebab downstairs for hiding illegally imported cadavers. As you managed to ascend further, the walls displayed posters of grinning inebriates, perhaps at some former time musicians, and helpfully cartooned arrows. Summit gained, you’d press onward and stagger into ‘S.M.S.’ (I kid you not), inhale the heady aroma of piss, chips and sadness, congratulate yourself on not having died of disgust, and wait for your creativity, which had fainted along the way, to follow you up the stairs.
But he didn’t make it simple, that balding, rat-faced man. Balding, rat-faced men rarely do. Out he’d toddle from the back room where he spent a suspicious amount of his time, now blinking and rubbing his palms and adjusting his underpants through his baggies and lying that it was good to see you. He had the wariness of one perpetually expecting to be arrested, and the meanness of a neurotic already in prison, guarding his contraband from the Daddy. Little things like having a piano or a drum kit on the premises of a recording studio he regarded as laughable extravagances. He charged you for hiring them in, for carrying them up, for unpacking them, for renting you a mic stand. ‘I’ll hold the fukken thing,’ Fran told him one day. ‘Can’t,’ replied the wizened one. ‘Musicians’ Union rules.’ Like a lot of rat-faced, balding men, he was always going on about insurance. He couldn’t possibly allow you to unload a flight case yourself. You might fall and break your coccyx, a word he enjoyed saying, especially to Trez, and where would we all be then? Fucked, that was where. ‘Fucked five ways.’ At the time I wasn’t sure there were five ways to do that. But if anyone knew, he did. Fran’s revenge was to secretly make a blithering fool of our host, which given the raw material wasn’t hard. Near my home town is a stately manor called Luton Hoo, these days a luxury hotel. ‘Hoo’ is a Saxon word meaning the spur of a hill, but Fran gave it a meaning of his own. Asked by our tormentor what was his ‘actual, Oriental name’, Fran replied carefully, enunciating with scrupulous clarity, ‘Lu . . . Ton . . . Hu . . . Say it with me?’
‘Loo. Tawn. Hoo.’
‘Harder. In the back of your throat.’
‘Lwa . . . Tung . . . Hwa.’
‘Very good.’
A plastic cup into which you might pour water cost 25 pence. As a favour, he’d sell you the water. He couldn’t permit ‘outside refreshments’ to be brought into the Santa Monica. They might damage the equipment or short out the circuitry. He’d standards to maintain. Standards meant rules. Beginners like Mr Hu mightn’t be cognisant of ‘best practice in the industry’, but he was happy to clue Lu in.
His malignity and balderdash notwithstanding, we started into the work unfazed. It was a relief to be playing again, and our progress was solid. I can’t say that either of Trez’s songs was the finest she’d ever pen, but the fact that she’d penned them at all signalled steadiness of intention in her, a more useful thing than genius for a musician or anyone else.
In she’d come with sheets of lyrics tidily typed on her Amstrad, ideas for harmonies and kickers. Often, she’d worked them up a bit in advance with Seán, and they’d unveil the effort with a shyness I found affecting and lovable, like kids showing you starfish they’d picked off a beach. Fran’s singing amazed me. He’d no right to be so good. He’d shamble up the stairs like a bad caricature of Marlene Dietrich, late, unkempt, bollock-eyed with exhaustion, ripped to the bonce on his chemical of the week, accompanied by the nice but excitable Ecuadorian boy he was seeing at the time, a muchacho that would cause him some pain. But when Fran opened his mouth to sing, a presence filled that shabby room. We did Trez’s ‘Seven Kinds of Vinny’ and ‘Can’t Face My Homework’, my ‘Ripping Up the Papers’, Fran’s ‘You’re a Sweatshop’ (later amusingly misprinted by the NME as ‘You’re a Sweetshop’) and his ‘Fighting in the Chinatown Pub’. Startling to see yourself materialise through the lyrics of a song. Seán had a little but hummable thing of his own, Otis Redding meets the Wailers with a splash of the Clash. If it didn’t totally work at the time, ‘Loving Hot Cities’ would turn out to be a memorable song. You know it from the Virgin Atlantic advert.
As to our sound, at least we had one, or were close to unearthing it. The Kinks were a touchstone but so was Marc Almond. Our aim was to blend the shimmer of the high-octane torch-song with romping, sixteen-wheeler guitar. Trez gave us depth. Fran gave us drive. Seán gave us an ability to go nought-to-ninety and back. It was important to all of us that the lyrics would be, as Fran put it, ‘unusual’. That seems, and probably was, a strange ambition, yet you knew what he meant at the time. Our ideal would be a song that raised your eyebrows while making you need to dance. Sometimes we got close. We’d get closer.
But it was obvious, at least to me, that there was a hole in our repertoire: we had nothing resembling a love song. Raising this subject with my fellows could result in unease. Seán and especially Fran felt the theme had been exhausted, and in any case was unsuited to the New Wave genre, in whose slipstream we found ourselves swimming. Trez drifted between camps, saying she wouldn’t overrule me if I could come up with an original approach. I was hobbled and dumbstruck. There seemed nothing to say. The hardest thing about writing is knowing what to write. Finally, painfully, I managed to get a verse of something down. My approach to any song at the time was to imagine one of my heroes singing it. In this case, I went for Tom Waits. It was a number I titled ‘Wildflowers’ and I played it to Trez in the kitchen one night, to see if she thought it worth bringing to the boys. My Waits-style growl was a thing I was working on. I tried to get the sandpaper going.
Stirring the ice cubes
Alone once again
Reasons you went
And the cry of the train
Hank Williams lonesome
I’m writing this song
Livid with wildflowers and
Overly long
Very pretentious
Extremely unplanned.
You’d rather not hear it?
Of course.
Understand.
Trez found it difficult to lie, especially when she was fond of you. Gently, carefully, she told me it ‘wasn’t great’. She felt I might do better. ‘Rework it.’ Somewhere in the writing I’d ‘got a little lost’. Well, she wasn’t entirely wrong on that point. Had she read the opening letter of each line in a downward sequence, she’d have seen just how lost I was.
There’s an old blues that puts across in ten plain words of honest sorrow what it took Dante 42 chapters of La Vita Nuova to say: ‘I love my baby. But my baby don’t love me.’ That song was on my mind a lot in those days. I knew the bluesman’s pain, and there are many songs on that theme. But they’d all been written before. I sometimes wished I didn’t know her. That would have been easier. Sharing close quarters wi
th the person you think is the other half of your soul isn’t easy when you’re young and she doesn’t feel the same way but still wants to be your mate. To stumble into our kitchen and see her washing her beautiful face. To join her on the sofa. To be treated as her girlfriend. (‘There’s a hair in the middle of my forehead. Can you pluck it for me, Rob? The mirror’s confusing my tweezers.’) Walking with her in Hyde Park on an impossibly gorgeous wintertime morning, when the sky was fierily vivid as the things I wanted to say, I was further from home than I knew. Once, boarding a bus, she briefly held my hand. Queensway was Paradise that night.
When she stood close to the mic in the Santa Monica, I envied it. I could barely play for wanting her. I’d talk to myself on long trudges by the Grand Union Canal. Her violin would tremor and purr like my hopes. We’d frowst away an evening pretending nobody noticed, and I’d resolve that before morning I’d have knelt to declare my obeisance again. But it somehow never happened. I think I know why. The idea that I’d force her out of my life was too terrible. Some say youth is wasted on the young, but I can’t second that emotion. I believe I was wise. Faced with a difficulty that has kyboshed many friendships we managed to keep ours going. I turned twenty that year. I’d made few good decisions. All my life, I’ll be grateful for that one.
Ten
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 cop
ies 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.