FROM FRAN’S FINAL INTERVIEW
I play guitar better than most, but I don’t rate myself much of a singer. I can do it. That’s all. It’s not much. Singing in’t about singing, it’s about what you got to say. Or what you see. Singing’s just looking. If you can talk, you can sing . . . Elvis wasn’t the singer Sinatra was. It’s context. People say Dylan couldn’t sing. To me, that’s balls. His diction’s perfection. His phrasing. His breathing. Dylan leads to Patti Smith, leads to John Lydon. And on you go. I’m a very average and limited singer in a technical sense. I’d have loved to be Roy Orbison. But I weren’t. So you do what you can. And that’s all I done. What I could. You know? And then some . . . And this thing about everyone saying I worked hard to connect with the audience? It’s cool to get a compliment but I never. People think you’re the cat’s miaow. But it’s only breathing, nothing else. What it was, I shut me eyes and went somewhere private. That’s all. Billie Holiday’s a singer. Etta James. Johnny Cash. Townes Van Zandt. Tim Hardin. The folk singer, Odetta – she’s a genius, to me. But then singing’s only a part of the game, not even the main one. Lou Reed can’t sing at all. But can he sing? Damn straight. Perfection’s too easy. I like flaws.
Singing can change things. It’s a lowering of borders. You’ll have noticed that you croon like Ole Blue Eyes in the shower, that you yodel in the car while the traffic lights watch, or do your Jagger for the chorusing dishwasher when the house is empty. But many of us, invited to serenade a cluster of upraised, kindly faces would rather be poked in the eye. Hardest is to sing to one person in a room. Lovers might risk it, or parents and children, but if your colleague at the office said ‘sing to me, damn you’, you’d back towards the door, smiling tensely. Perhaps because singing is the only music made by the body alone, a lack of wariness is required for any adult to sing before another. And oddly, once you’ve sung, how you see one another is recalibrated, particularly if you’ve managed to get through an entire song. Three minutes is an immensely long time for someone to listen. Even spouses don’t listen uninterruptedly for three minutes. If they did, we’d have a lot more divorce. You’ve done an intimate thing. And the listener has, too. You’ve shown who you are – who you wish you were, maybe, Thus, with Francis and me.
My daughter once asked if it’s possible to tell when a boy is secretly insincere. I told her: ask him to sing to you. If he won’t, he’s a waste. If he does, he’s a might. Simplistic, perhaps, but it’s not the worst touchstone. If a person won’t sing, he’s hiding.
I had rarely sung to anyone. Neither had Fran. But the fact that I wasn’t great at it diminished no possibilities. I remember his gentleness, that strange, new colour. ‘Sing, Rob. It’s nothing. You’ll feel seven years younger. Sing like there’s nobody listening.’ My voice was a croak, but with practise it improved. The bleat pressing up from my lungs was itself. Resistant to the air it was meeting, admittedly, but still, my bleat, my own. There was also what singing was doing to my friend. It’s hard to find the metaphor. Say it took off his masks. Fran was becoming possible.
Trust. Reliance. Call it what you will. The opposite of no isn’t yes, it’s maybe. Songs ended, began, were abandoned, reworked, and somewhere in the changed weather Fran began revealing details of his childhood. His early years in England with his adopters were horrific. Taken from them and placed in an institution, he ‘kept quiet and read books’, hoping he’d ‘live there for ever’. He told me more of the Rotherham couple that fostered him at the age of nine from the residential home. ‘West-of-Irish’, from the isthmus connecting Loughs Corrib and Mask, the place where The Quiet Man was filmed. They showed him photographs and postcards, taught him little songs in Irish. They tried to be kind. It confused him. Long accustomed to dread, he found silences terrifying. By the time he came to know that he wouldn’t be beaten for speaking, that he didn’t need to steal food or hide himself before sleeping, other pains and separations had grown. His foster-parents were religious and they found themselves unable to deal with the teenager he became: his clothes, his feelings, the particular writers he was drawn to, the music he adored, ‘the sex thing’. His foster-father, a night watchman at Maltby Colliery, was ‘a good man, but we didn’t like one another’. The quarrels grew violent. At sixteen Fran left, hitching south, sleeping rough, begging or thieving around the town of Boston, Lincolnshire before making an eventual way down to Bedfordshire, where he’d hoped to find casual work on a farm. A librarian at Luton Library caught him stealing a book. A woman of compassion, she didn’t call the police but gave him the price of a meal, helped him apply for welfare and encouraged him to enrol at the Poly. She tried to make him contact his fosterers back in Rotherham but he wouldn’t. To me he never spoke of them bitterly, but always in the past tense. They came from the village of Cong, County Mayo, had brought him there on holiday the year he turned twelve. Cong was beautiful, he told me. The people ‘talked quiet’. They were gentle to a frightened boy who didn’t look like their own but who bore an Irish name. They had let him milk cows. Taken him out on the bog. ‘You’re a grand little maneen, God love you.’ Sometimes the children in Cong had looked at him curiously, but never with hatred, not once. It was clear that these few days had been precious to Fran, that he clung to them as a rare memory of uncomplicated peace, and was grateful and, in an odd way, proud. In later years, when baffled journalists requested a definition of his nationality, he’d sometimes give the answer ‘Viet Cong’.
Here I apologise to the scholars burdened with penetrating my cranium. They deserved better than I was wired to give. The novelist Seamus Price was Professor of English, the peerless Amina Ali my Sociology tutor, a woman of such knowledge and tactful kindliness that words crumble in describing what I squandered. I bow before the executioner for the desert of wasted chances, but I have promised to be honest in this chronicle of my crimes. Essays went unwritten. Assignments weren’t met. The library, centrally heated and comprehensively stocked, was untroubled by my malodorous presence. Had I all to do again, I can’t promise it would be different, for there was an unhappiness in my heart that was driving me towards music, and what’s anyone to do, thus driven? Soon, I came to realise that pretty much the only reason I was going in to the college every day was to play the guitar and listen to Francis Mulvey sing, and, funds permitting, to get slaughtered.
Shakespeare, Scott Fitzgerald, they were pleasant enough interruptions, coordinates through which you had to pass in order to reach a destination, but no longer the point of the journey. Words on a page were only words on a page but a song needed someone to love it by singing. I counted every minute, every millisecond, until lunchtime. Fran and I would adjourn to the lofty Parnassus of B9, each of us pretending a casualness I don’t think we felt. It was like wandering into a confetti storm of song-scraps and traded hopes. Whatever discomfiture and self-recognition the songs were aiming at became the reason for existing at all. Most love stories begin with a Krakatoa of irrationality. Mine is no exception.
Scrawny cherry trees stood sentry along the walkway that led from the Arts Block to the canteen. Dr Ali said that when they flowered it was time for serious revision, because the exams would be fast approaching. Alas, their blossoms fell on my indolence and doom. I hocked my textbooks for a motorbike jacket, bleached my hair with lemon juice, pierced my earlobes with the needle previously used by Dad to mend punctures in our footballs, even contemplated shaving off my eyebrows because Fran bet me I wouldn’t. By mid-May, we started cutting lectures, then abandoning them completely. The wider world was beset by troubling events: Britain and Argentina at war in the South Atlantic, Duran Duran riding high in the charts. All of it passed us by.
Mum and Dad had scrimped hard to give me the start they never enjoyed. I’d made a mess of applying for a local authority grant, and the small scholarship I was grateful to have received from Luton Town Council covered only half my tuition. Books were expensive, and then there was my keep. I earned a little by collecting glasses and emptyin
g ashtrays in the Trap but it was really only pocket money, a few pounds a night, and it was spent at the very counter over which it was paid. I wish I could say I made more of my chances. But the facts are the facts. Fran and I were cutting loose. We didn’t so much bite the hand that feeds as devour it right up to the armpit. We’d often remain in B9 for ten straight hours. We came to regard it as our private Cavern Club, our place of first hopes. Mum, I’m so sorry. I know what you gave me. But, presented with the chance to sell my soul to rock and roll, I didn’t think about it long. I lunged.
Secretly, somewhat guiltily, I admired many genres of music. My dad’s Benny Goodman albums meant as much to me as did Slaughter and the Dogs or the Clash. After Patti Smith’s Horses, the record that set my dreams ablaze, the soundtrack of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! that we had in the house was my desert island disc. I was dizzied by the way Nelson Riddle’s blowsy brass lit up Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, still the sexiest song I know. My Fair Lady I preferred to Exile on Main Street, not a thing you admitted back then. But Fran was the least prejudiced singer I’d ever met. He adored the Mud number ‘Lonely This Christmas’ but was nuanced on all post-Ziggy-Stardust-Bowie: a treasury I worshipped with such eye-popping intensity that I’d have genuflected before ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and ‘Fashion’. But it wasn’t a pose, an empty-headed eclecticism; it was simply that he was like a child when it came to a song. When he reckoned it sucked, he wouldn’t sing it at all, no matter the hipster that made it. He’d do ‘Stranded in the Jungle’ by the New York Dolls, or a tornado of rocket fuel from Iggy Pop and the Stooges, segueing into ‘You Sexy Thing’ by Hot Chocolate or Shakin’ Stevens’ ‘Green Door’ by way of The Pistols’ ‘No Feelings’. The most evocative love song ever penned, in his view? ‘Love Me Like a Reptile’ by Motörhead. He raved of Tony Bennett, loved his ‘loosey-juicy’ style. He pledged allegiance to T-Rex, ordained Nina Simone the greatest soprano since Callas, bigged the diction of Christy Moore. I disliked all synth-bands. He praised Depeche Mode. Meat Loaf, an unlikely hero for a punk fan, perhaps, he loved with apostolic fervour. He thought Bat Out of Hell a more consistent achievement than Sergeant Pepper. I thought it a parody of Springsteen. Disco was regarded by student cognoscenti as naff, but Fran would do a Donna Summer or ‘Stayin’ Alive’, chucking slices of The Trammps, Chic and Imagination into his blustery covers of Blondie. I’ve seen idiot hacks write that he learned his exquisite falsetto from ‘the counter-tenors of grand opera’. He learned it from Barry Gibb.
For an absent-minded boy – he regularly forgot what day it was – his memory for lyrics was remarkable. Rockabilly enthralled him; he’d gibber like Elvis on speed, clawing at the air as he belted out Gene Vincent’s ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ to the audience of filing cabinets and pigeonholes. Fran had a slight limp, the result of an injury sustained as a child, but often he claimed a brotherly empathy with Gene, whose motorbike accident in 1955 left him in lifelong pain. ‘We cripples have to stick together, Roberto.’ He’d have a crack at a traditional ballad when the mood was upon him, which surprisingly frequently it was. If you’ve never seen ‘Scots Wha Hae’ sung by a Viet-Yorkshire-Irish boy in tartan bondage trousers and a Dead Kennedys T-shirt your youth was poorer than mine. Robert Burns he announced ‘the Baudelaire of glam rock’, magnificently rolling his r’s in the manner of a person who has never actually been to Scotland but has seen it on the television while stoned.
We ransacked my dad’s collection of American country records, learned whatever songs lit our candle – usually plunky three-chord heartbreakers about cowboys dumping waitresses – and then hocked the albums in a hippy kip called Pet Sounds, a basement smelling faintly of cooking oil. They demurred at the idea of offering us anything for the rare Luther Perkins and Merle Haggard. Those we flogged in Brereton’s pawnshop in the town. Fran was avid to spend the loot on a couple of Chinese rocks so we could get pigged out of our tits while listening to Richard Hell and the Voidoids, but I was very afraid of heroin, I am relieved to say, and anyway, I felt he was only testing me. With the dough, and some of his own, we bought a second-hand microphone and a little Vox AC30 amp, a cutie that worked off a car battery and even had a built-in echo that gave you a touch of Sun Studios. We nailed down ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ and ‘That’s All Right, Mama’, Fran substituting a satanic screech for every Presleyean uh-huh-huh. I began to see in him a seriousness I’d never noticed before. Maybe ‘seriousness’ is not the right word: more a patience. What I mean is that he revealed himself as a stickler for getting it right, for going at a song any number of times, sometimes literally scores, whatever it took, to drill to what he felt was its heart. Playing a song was easy. Playing it wasn’t. He taught me what little I ever knew about the mysteries of dynamics, playing quiet on the bridge, sometimes not playing at all, or shifting up a key for the final chorus to ‘whaang the mother on home’. Tempo drops, up-strums, dropping out the bass. He’d make me listen to blues or gospel tapes he’d stolen in town: Son House and Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Louvin Brothers’ version of ‘Cash on the Barrelhead’, Dylan’s Slow Train Coming and Saved. Patsy Cline’s recordings he adored for the sparseness of their production. ‘Nothing is wasted. Listen. You’re not listening. That’s a snare and a pedal steel. And a fiddle on the middle eight. There’s nothing on that record in’t needed.’
I still remember the whole day it took us to learn the Stones’ ‘Brown Sugar’.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. WOOO.
My glimmertwin buddy. My Fran.
The most striking thing about him? He just didn’t care. It was a stage of his life when he couldn’t tell a lie. The lies would all come later.
FROM FIRST YEAR EXAMINATION PAPER,
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE,
STANTON POLYTECHNIC, 2nd JUNE 1982
Q: Write an essay of 1000 words responding to William Wordsworth’s poem ‘Composed by the Side of Grasmere Lake’ (1806). What is of value in the poem? Why is it regarded as an important text in the evolution of the Romantic Movement? Support your answer by appropriate quotation.
Answer given by candidate Francis Mulvey:
WHAT I SAW BY THE LAKE
NEAR MY VILLAGE, VIETNAM
CLOUDS, vomiting flame, reflect on mirrored lake
Through the gold west, and hell-copters flit
By death-splintered air to scuttered murder, spit
Upon the naked orphans, forsaken.
Sleep on, Wordsworth, saint of rainy nowheres,
As I hid among the reeds, quaked, concealed
At speechless distance, you sang, fey hypocrite
Of daffodils and Dorothies, of tea and cake.
Poetry a mirror? To blinkered men in libraries
Choking on similes. Metaphor-beguiled.
And still you teach what only seems,
But never the screams of a motherless child.
Be thankful, thou, for Worthless Words.
They pay the rent, feed England’s dreams.
It was my custom, as a lad, to inflict myself on a diary. The punk rock Pepys, I was not. I started it on the night of my sixteenth birthday but I’ll spare you my existentialist gloom. I think I kept it going for one reason only, which is that Dad always told me I couldn’t persevere, that I was doomed to be a perpetual starter. I wrote it to spite him, a more common reason for artistic endeavour than is sometimes understood. Poor Dad. He was a compelling muse.
It’s because of that diary that I know the date on which Fran and I first offered ourselves to the public: 16th of June 1982, 41st birthday of Lamont Dozier, the Motown songwriter we both reckoned the primus inter pares. Fran felt that this anniversary would prove auspicious, and I allowed him to persuade me, though in truth I was petrified. Lacking even the money for the bus fare, we walked the three miles from college into town, hefting our instruments, amp and car battery on our girlish backs.
‘It was the hottest day ever recorded in Luton,’ my journal informs me. Many of t
he town’s youthful goddesses were wearing not much. There is no sexier bower in the world than a municipal park in summertime, its lawns bedecked with flocks of maidenly allurement, abdomens bared to the rays. By the time we got to St George’s Square I was in a miasma of piggish sweat, produced, I think now, by the lust and the nervousness as much by the merciless sun. Even Fran appeared uptight, which he almost never did. I had on jeans with a lumberjack shirt I’d stolen from Shay. Fran’s look was Pretty in Pink. We unbagged the guitars, smoked a joint in a doorway and downed a preludial naggin of vodka.
At that point, an extraordinary thing happened. Our family GP, Dr Shillibeer, emerged from the splendid art deco town hall, looking stately and plump and open for business. He was clad in a blazer with a rose in its lapel. In his wake followed a party of persons with notebooks. Dr Shillibeer saluted me amiably, asked after my parents, and mentioned, as though this were the most unremarkable of occurrences, that his companions were psychiatric nurses from East Berlin. What they were doing in Luton he didn’t explain. Wishing they weren’t, perhaps. As Fran began to tune up, and I began to tune out, they clustered, led by Dr Shillibeer, in a frightening crescent around us. One of them produced a camera.