Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive? Read online

  It was pissing it down outside. I put on my waterproof and ran out into the wet pattering, turning left towards the black shape of Knocknarea past bungalows and fields. Round down another lane then turned left at some trees at the bottom of a little hill. This took me up to the waterside. The loch was misty and silent. I stood for a while trying to be poet-like, but all I could come up with was I am fucking cold. Brr brr. I then went up to the holy well and stared at the statues to see if they would move. A man arrived with a dog. He stared at me for a while as I stared at Christ. I think he thought I was taking the piss out of Jesus. I wasn’t. I was just staring to see if this statue would move. If I’d been taking the piss, I would have stood with my arms outstretched or something against a tree. I turned round and wandered back to the lane, trying to catch the eye of the man with a dog. But he refused, merely staring straight ahead.

  I got back into the house. I knew I’d only have about five more minutes to write down my thoughts before my memory switched off and they were gone forever.

  (Scene – B&B on the outskirts of Sligo. I am standing in the hall, soaking wet and about to head upstairs to put pen to paper, when Moira appears in front of me, blocking my way to the stairs. She puts her hands together as though about to tell me bad news.)

  Moira: Oh, Tim. Wait till I tell yer. You know that leaflet about the restaurant I said to you before, the one I gave to the Americans, well I said they were going to bring me some more so you could have one but, do you know, Tim, they’ve paid up and gone and they didn’t bring me any more leaflets. What do you think of that then, Tim? Oh I don’t know.

  They’re Americans but I think they’re strange. They get up very early in the morning and they go out for the day then they come back and go to bed early. Or they go to a restaurant – I told them about that restaurant Tim, they didn’t know anything about it until I gave them that leaflet, Tim. Have you been to America, Tim? I’d like to go to America. I’ve got friends in America. My sister lives in Australia, though. I’ve been to Australia. Do you like Australians, Tim? They’re very loud, aren’t they? But Americans, they are polite, aren’t they. Those people you met yesterday, the couple I told you about, the ones that didn’t want any biscuits and she didn’t take milk with her tea, they were very nice. I’d rather have nice people staying here than not nice people. We had some people from the north last year, Catholics they were and I’m a Catholic but I don’t really like Catholics from the north they’re very rude. I like Protestants from the North they’re very nice people, very polite and their children are very well behaved but these Catholics they were very loud and they stayed up late one night in the sitting room and got drunk and my husband had to go downstairs to tell them to be quiet and they had a girl with them and he says you aren’t staying here and they says who d’ya think you are, the police, and he says no but the police only lives three doors down I’ll get him for yer. They says no thanks and he says I want you out first thing in the morning and I want you out now he says to the girl and I don’t know, Tim, about all this politics; my husband does but I don’t, Tim, but what do you think about this united Ireland I’m sure I don’t know we don’t really want them down here to tell you the truth because it’s all trouble.

  People want their cultural heroes to say something about the society that spawned them. They also want them to have nice haircuts and look good on TV. So who’s best, W. B. or Daniel? This is the question that will ping around your brain like a mink in a fishtank that’s taken what it thinks is ecstasy but is actually a mixture of rat poison and aspirin, long after you’ve thrown this book in the bin or given it away to someone at work you don’t really like.

  Who’s closest to his mother?

  Yeats not bad but Daniel is the world’s best at mother loving.

  Yeats 6 Daniel 10

  Who’s more in touch with Irish culture?

  Daniel does a few old Irish ballads but Yeats repositioned high culture in the early years of the century.

  Yeats 9 Daniel 5

  Who would be best at running a hotel?

  Yeats a bit up in the clouds, but Daniel is a successful hotelier as well as one of the world’s top singers.

  Yeats 4 Daniel 8

  Who’s better in a blandish country music idiom?

  Yeats tended not to stray into this territory. But it’s Daniel’s favourite genre.

  Yeats 3 Daniel 9

  Who has reinstated traditional Celtic culture into the fabric of Irish national identity?

  This is Yeats’s legacy. Daniel has had some swirly Celtic patterns on his album covers now and then.

  Yeats 10 Daniel 3

  Final score Yeats 32, Daniel 35.

  Daniel O’Donnell is Ireland’s Number 1 cultural hero.

  I sent a message to Daniel to tell him the news.

  Dear Daniel,

  I am currently writing a book based around various journeys I’ve made in Ireland. My travels around Sligo and Donegal led me inevitably to the work of yourself and the celebrated poet William Butler Yeats. It soon became obvious to me that you are in your way just as important in terms of Irish culture as Yeats. A further comparison of both of your bodies of work led me to the conclusion that might surprise you – it could be argued that you have probably had more of a lasting impact on Irish life than Yeats himself. Have you ever recorded any of Yeats’s poetry in the form of song?

  One other thing – could you tell me whether or not the track ‘My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You’ on your album Thoughts of Home was recorded live at the Boston Arms in Tufnell Park, London.

  Yours sincerely,

  Tim Bradford

  PS: Next time I’m up in Donegal I’ll pop into your hotel. I’ve already got one of your postcards.

  No reply from Daniel. Undeterred, I recorded a song of my own composition, entitled ‘The Singing Leprechaun’ (I sent it to a couple of publishers as well).

  Ever since the day I was born

  For the green hills of Ireland I did mourn

  And never will I rest, that I have sworn,

  Until I discover the singing leprechaun.

  Oh the singing leprechaun

  Oh the singing leprechaun

  He isn’t a real leprechaun at all

  And he’s only eight inches tall.

  Still waiting to hear about this one.

  Daniel may be a soft wet blanket who loves his mammy, but I bet he’d have stopped for me when I was hitching on the N15 if he’d heard me killing ‘Forty Shades of Green’ at the top of my inadequate voice.

  The Ian Paisley Impersonators Talk about Weapons

  Derry City Walls

  For several days in Derry I lay ill with flu, sweating and shivering with just a soft blanket and sheet over me. It felt like prison, the bare walls of the hostel, no TV. I couldn’t get hold of any e-mails because the ’net café had recently closed; even most of the phones nearby seemed to have been vandalised. I was cut off. At night I could hear loud club music mixed with rich Northern Irish voices, hallucinations, a nightmare, a new dance record about the Troubles perhaps with cut-ups of McGuinness, Adams, Paisley. I was living solely on the hostel’s greasy breakfasts – saturated fat and troubled dreams.

  I hadn’t really planned to go to the North – it would turn my journey into something else, I feared, something which would mean I’d have to think about politics and history, even though temperamentally I was inclined just to go for walks and hang out with people. It had never really crossed my mind until I was alone on the mountain briefly to leave the cosy confines of the Republic. In Derry, unlike the rest of Ireland, I knew I’d be aware of being English. It somehow felt loaded with meaning. I suppose I knew my illness was psychosomatic all along.1

  I’d had that sickly butterflies feeling in my stomach as soon as I arrived. The reputation of a city gets carried around with you subconsciously – I’d read something dodgy about Quito in Ecuador in a guide book so was always watching my back when I was there; New York; New Orleans
; parts of Brixton; Caistor in Lincolnshire (a rival town ten miles away from where I was brought up) – all have given me that ‘buzz’ at some time. From early childhood I’d heard stories on the TV and radio about Derry (or Londonderry as it was always known). Hearing about pubs being blown up, someone being shot by a sniper, the Bogside and, mostly, Bloody Sunday, when thirteen innocent people were shot by the British army while on a peaceful protest march.

  On my last night I felt better and ventured out – Derry seemed like a mixture of a smaller version of Leeds or Manchester and the sort of medieval walled city that you’d get in Italy or central France. Derry was in fact the last walled town of its type, the most modern in Europe. The walls themselves are in good condition and have immense symbolism for many of the inhabitants – it was here that the Apprentice Boys locked the gates to Catholic King James II’s advancing army in 1692 (one of the reasons why the lads with the bowler hats go marching every year).

  It was a warm, slightly sticky evening. The city was quiet, with just a bit of traffic on the ring road down below. Tucked away just near one of the gates was a little craft village, designed for the tourists who don’t come – even in high season, the restaurants were empty. Or maybe it was just me – everything seemed so much quieter than any other big town I’d been to. I walked around the walls a few times, occasionally stopping to read the little information plaques on the wall. At one section the path opened out into a wider cobbled area with trees, which at one stage was used as a parade ground and where now all you’d want to do was open a bottle of wine, have a picnic and run your fingers through someone’s hair. I looked down to the east at the famous You Are Now Entering Free Derry mural painted on an end terrace wall. A symbol of the Republican struggle, it now stands in the middle of a dual carriageway, the only remains of the street from which it sprang – modern life pouring around it and leaving it looking like a relic. I walked a few hundred yards to the north and noticed another mural, this time for King Billy’s Flute Band, adorned with Union Jacks. As in all wars, these people who live virtually side by side must have so much in common – yet as usual they are the ones, rather than the masters of rhetoric and politic, whose loved ones never came back.2

  You can still see a few remnants of the recent past – barbed wire, a deserted army command post – and from an older time too – various cannons dotted around. Even after all my preconceptions (and I had more cultural and emotional baggage than usual about this visit), all I could see now was beautiful scenery and a view over to the sweeping river as the sun began to go down. Tottering fifty yards behind me I heard a rich Ulster voice nattering away: ‘Ah but in the First World War the Bruttush used Lay Unfailds.’ It was a group of old lads walking round the walls just behind me. They were talking in foghorn Ian Paisley voices – maybe, I thought, it was a branch of the good Reverend’s Fan Club, perhaps visiting from Pretoria or Chicago or Sydney, grown men whose hobby is to sound like their hero and repeat his catchphrases. They started chatting about all the different kinds of shells that would have been fired in various wars, particularly World War Two. They were, of course, Irish, on some kind of reunion trip. I imagined them staggering off a big coach on a geriatrics’ tour of the province.

  ‘Nay Surranda!’ That was his best soundbite. Ian Paisley always came across as a loudmouthed bigot on British TV – though maybe this was just the way his speeches were edited for broadcast, leaving in all the juicy bits – and most people I know held him in contempt for always putting the brakes on any kind of possible peace deal. Yet travelling around in Ireland I’d been surprised by the amount of people who, although disagreeing with his politics, seemed sympathetic towards Paisley, that he was honest and stuck to his principles, and was actually a better man than the caricature on the news broadcasts. This is the trouble when, as an outsider, your views – like mine – are taken entirely from the media, and have already been shaped to some extent by someone else. Yet I’d always had a strange admiration too for one of the leaders of the other side, Gerry Adams, though I thought he was much cleverer and more dangerous than an old blood-and-thunder merchant like Paisley. Weirdly, I got very angry when a journalist friend of mine said she’d met Adams at some function and thought he was ‘sex on legs’. I was somehow outraged at this – I don’t know why I got so irate. Perhaps it was the fear in the cautious sensible Englishman of the dark dangerous Celt.

  I’d been wandering around in a T-shirt, shades, straggly hair and the usual five-day beard. I must have looked like death. My face wasn’t quite as white as usual but the eyes were still gone and each step felt as though it was taking up all my energy. A man said something to me, like, ‘Oyy rayyy oi you’ – one of a pair of middle-aged drunkards sitting on a bench. I turned and walked back towards them. He looked visibly surprised and shocked and I realised it did seem a bit intimidatory. Sorry mate, didn’t hear you, what did you say? He smiled. Ah, an Aussie eh? Spare a bit o’ change, Aussie? Stuff the English, eh? I handed over a quid and decided not to get into an explanation of my roots.

  Most of the shops in the centre of Derry were English, as were the fucked-up phone boxes. I had to keep telling myself that – politically, at any rate – Derry wasn’t another country, it was the UK. I certainly didn’t feel a part of it, though. Yet it was also so different from the Ireland I’d been travelling around in – the people were harder looking, like Limerick, say, but decked out in what I can only describe as Northern English style, buttoned-up shirts and cropped hair for the blokes, girls in short skirts and tight dresses. You won’t get any of your hippy tie-dye mystical Celt bollocks henna tattoos here, Tim, my lad. In the pubs the tensions seemed electric (invented by me, no doubt) where steely-eyed bald old men and their young moustachioed sons sat nursing pints and staring at TV sets on the wall, as blokes do all over the world when there is some kind of football programme on. In Total Jessie Mode, I had a half and glanced at some highlights, not catching people’s eye, as loud club music thudded in from the street.

  In all of these places it would be either Celtic or Rangers. I’ve seen Celtic – Rangers games a few times, and still watch it now and again on TV, though I am always put off by the intensity of the fixture. Tribal roar. We are great and you are shit. The Old Firm, the Tims against the Hun, the green against the blue (or orange), us against them, Catholic v. Protestant. No surrender to the IRA (a cry which is heard increasingly at England matches, bizarrely enough). Each time an Old Firm game takes place it’s like the Battle of the Boyne being re-fought in front of seventy thousand Glaswegians. In real life it’s crap, but you can just about get away with it in football, it’s that sense of theatre that creates what people call atmosphere. If it was all too cuddly the ‘edge’ would go. Can you tell I’m not convinced?

  A few years ago I went round to my friend Mike’s house to watch a big cup game on Sky Sport. Mike is a six-foot-three-inch gruff unshaven Scot with dark Connaught genes and on these occasions a Celtic shirt far too small for him which makes his arms pop out straight like a corkscrew. He’d invited me and a few other oddballs for a night of sectarian fun. One of his friends arrived sporting a brand new top – I couldn’t take my eyes off the proud figure sitting on the back of a rearing horse, his thick hair (or was it a wig?) blowing in the wind. It was the first fluorescent Rave-influenced William of Orange T-shirt I had ever seen. Splodges of bright orange and grey over a white background with a really badly drawn picture of Billy on horseback, the explanatory words ‘King William’ above it (which was just as well, because the character depicted could have been anyone from the Duke of Wellington to the Cisco Kid, or even my great-great-grandfather the Horseperson3).

  ‘That is the most fantastically coloured sectarian garment I’ve ever seen,’ I said to the owner of the shirt, ever so slightly awe-struck, ‘but why is King Billy wearing stockings and suspenders?’ (It’s true. It really did look as though he was wearing the sort of cheap lingerie you get at jumble sales or pre-Christmas everything-a-pound bargain
shops.)

  ‘What?’ He looked at me with eighty per-cent pity and twenty per-cent menace. The lad was a Chelsea fan who supported Rangers as well because ‘It’s the British thing, innit. The flag and that. Patriotism.’

  And I suppose that’s what I have never understood, and still don’t. That these people who, ostensibly, share the same religion as me would have a far more defined idea of their nationalism than I do, though I was born and brought up in England. Yet walking the Derry walls on a sunlit evening, although history is thick in the air you have to believe that in years to come the sectarian rituals will have no more real meaning than a village Morris Dance or pancake race.

  As night fell the hardcore techno noise thudding out from basement clubs was turned up a notch and the loud-voiced lads out and about seemed even more like boisterous squaddies. Except now I could see Man Utd shirts, Leeds shirts too. I popped into a couple of pubs and found none of the themey Oirish style that I thought might have permeated up from the South. I sat down at a table in one (Mad Relation: ‘You’re mad. Completely mad!’), a place gradually filling up with groups and couples, and tried to get a handle again on what this place actually was. I thought of the war-torn community I had heard about on TV as a kid. I thought about the kind of ruthlessness that enabled people to kill their own countrymen and neighbours over an Idea About Life, and decided you could drive yourself mad thinking about the waste.