The Thrill of It All Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Joseph O’Connor

  Praise

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Part One: Ships in the Night 1981–1987

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Two: A Day in the Life

  November 2012

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  At college in 1980s’ Luton, Robbie Goulding, an Irish-born teenager, meets elusive Fran Mulvey, an orphaned Vietnamese refugee. Together they form a band. Joined by cellist Sarah-Thérèse Sherlock and her twin brother Seán on drums, The Ships in the Night set out to chase fame. But the story of this makeshift family is haunted by ghosts from the past.

  Spanning 25 years, The Thrill of it All rewinds and fast-forwards through an evocative soundtrack of struggle and laughter. Infused with blues, ska, classic showtunes, New Wave and punk, using interviews, lyrics, memoirs and diaries, the tale stretches from suburban England to Manhattan’s East Village, from Thatcher-era London to the Hollywood Bowl, from the meadows of Glastonbury Festival to a wintry Long Island, culminating in a Dublin evening in July 2012, a night that changes everything.

  A story of loyalties, friendship, the call of the muse and the beguiling shimmer of teenage dreams, this is a warm-hearted, funny and deeply moving novel for anyone who’s ever loved a song.

  About the Author

  Joseph O’Connor was born in Dublin. His books include seven previous novels: Cowboys and Indians, Desperadoes, The Salesman, Inishowen, Star of the Sea, Redemption Falls and Ghost Light. Star of the Sea became an international bestseller, winning an American Library Association Award, the Irish Post Award for Fiction, France’s Prix Millepages, Italy’s Premio Acerbi and the Prix Madeleine Zepter for European Novel of the Year. His work has been published in forty languages. He received the 2012 Irish PEN Award for outstanding achievement in literature and in 2014 he was appointed Frank McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.

  Also by Joseph O’Connor

  NOVELS

  Cowboys and Indians

  Desperadoes

  The Salesman

  Inishowen

  Star of the Sea

  Redemption Falls

  Ghost Light

  SHORT STORIES

  True Believers

  Where Have You Been?

  THEATRE/MUSIC/SPOKEN WORD

  Red Roses and Petrol

  True Believers

  The Weeping of Angels

  Handel’s Crossing

  My Cousin Rachel

  Whole World Round (with Philip King)

  Heartbeat of Home (concept development and song lyrics)

  The Drivetime Diaries (CD)

  ‘O’Connor writes with such passion, such precision, such beautiful sentences, with such an ear for language and with such knowledge and hilarity that this book could only come from an extremely gifted rock ‘n’ roll obsessive. BRILLIANT’

  Bob Geldof

  ‘A novel about music, family and friendship... Truly memorable’

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘Joseph O'Connor's The Thrill of it All uses layered narrative textures with both serious skill and engaging lightness so that the core drama emerges with clarity and wit’

  Colm Toíbín, Observer, Books of the Year

  ‘Brilliantly conjured’

  Mariella Frostrup, BBC Radio 4

  ‘This book is a must’

  Daily Express

  ‘As with all of Joseph O’Connor’s novels, it brims with wonderful turns of phrase, humour and the kind of observations that stop you in your tracks… A love song to popular music’

  Irish Examiner

  ‘A brilliantly conceived and touching novel’

  Sunday Mirror

  ‘Hugely entertaining. A vivid joy… Ultimately, this is a book about love: love for friends and family, and always and forever, for music’

  Sunday Business Post

  ‘This is O'Connor at his playful and narrative best. The book is shot through with electricity, packed with sentences that send you spinning, full of joy and sadness and swerve… This was a book to make my tired heart soar. Of all the Irish writers working today, O'Connor speaks better than anyone of what is genuine, what is necessary, and what is ennobling. A thrill indeed’

  Colum McCann, winner of the National Book Award and the IMPAC Award

  ‘A valentine to that endangered species, the rock and roll band’

  Irish Times

  ‘The perfect soundtrack to your memories of the 1980s’

  Belfast Telegraph

  For Philip Chevron

  1957–2013

  The Thrill of it All

  Joseph O’Connor

  Way I see it myself, there’s only one reason for art: to make you appreciate that you got a spin on the planet. Picasso, the great writers, the poets, the musicians. If you can listen to the Beatles doing ‘She Loves You’ and not be a little bit glad you’re alive, you’ve got an answering-machine for a heart.

  FROM FRAN MULVEY’S FINAL INTERVIEW

  Preface

  MY NAME IS Robbie Goulding. I was once a musician. For five years in the 1980s I played guitar with the Ships. This memoir has been long in the making.

  Commissioned in the opening months of the twenty-first century, it appears – at last – more than a decade late. Time is an editor, altering outlooks, italicising certain memories and blue-pencilling others, unearthing chronologies you didn’t notice while living them. And the book, like its author, has changed with the years, increasing in size, now slimming, now regaining, surviving the recalibrations and unnoticed evolutions collectively known as Fate. At one point, it was angrier, out to settle a few scores, then it morphed into an assertion of lost friendship. It seems to have become the book I wish someone had given me when I started out in rock and roll. Had that happened, it would be a different book indeed.

  For reasons that will become obvious, I don’t remember every part of this story. So, here and there I’ve relied on the reminiscences of my former bandmates, who speak in their own words, drawn mainly from interviews. Inevitably there are moments when those recollections differ from mine, but life would be thin if we all sang the same notes or noticed the same goings-on. My thanks to Sky Television’s Arts Channel for permission to quote Trez Sherlock, to Seán Sherlock for agreeing to be interviewed (by my daughter) for this project, and to BBC Television/Lighthouse Music Ltd for permission to quote Fran Mulvey’s last interview. A brief passage comprising my daughter’s own perspective is included in the narrative. She recorded this for personal reasons, essentially as a diary, and it appeared as a blog on various music-related websites in the winter of 2012. We inhabit the age in which everything is public, especially, of course, the private. When young myself, it was the other way around. Bowie sang to a public who knew nothing about him. Mystique, it was called at the time.

  Some characters you’ll meet in these pages are no longer with us. My late mum, Alice Blake, from Spanish Point in County Clare, bought me a guitar for my fourteenth birthday. More even than this, a life-changing gift, she tolerated the endless m
urderings of ‘Johnny B Goode’ that occurred in our home as a result. Greater love hath no woman than to endure ‘Stairway to Heaven’ morning and night for two years, with ‘House of the Rising Sun’, ‘The Sound of Silence’ (‘if only,’ Dad said) and further notables of the apprentice repertoire. Mum went on to survive the emergence of punk. I have memories of the September evening I spent learning the chords of ‘Anarchy in the UK’ at the kitchen table as she ironed my soccer kit for school. Beside her among the Angels of forbearance is the noble shade of a proud Brooklynite, Eric Wallace, founder of Urban Wreckage Records, whose belief kept the Ships from sinking.

  I thank my daughter Molly Goulding, for editorial assistance, and her mother, Michelle O’Keeffe, from Athens, Tennessee, for more than any love song could convey. I would have liked to write at greater length about Michelle in this account, but she has insisted on the privacy that she has always valued, and I respect and understand her wish. My father Jimmy and brother Shay are princes. I thank them for uncountable solidarities.

  All errors and lapses – well, most – are my own. Nothing in the book is fiction.

  Engineer’s Wharf,

  Grand Union Canal, London,

  Winter 2012

  PART ONE

  Ships in the Night

  1981–1987

  One

  LET ME TELL of someone I first saw in October 1981 when both of us were aged seventeen. An exasperating and charming and fiercely intelligent boy, the finest companion imaginable in a day of idleness and disputation. His name was Francis Mulvey.

  So many symphonies of inaccuracy have been trumpeted about Fran down the years that I find myself reluctant to add to the chatter. Unauthorised biographies, a feature-length documentary, profiles and fanzines and blog sites and newsgroups. My daughter tells me there’s talk of a biopic movie with the Thai actor Kiatkamol Lata as Fran, but somehow I can’t see that working. She wonders who’d play her daddy. I tell her not to go there. Fran wouldn’t want me included in his story any more. And he’s lawyered-up good, as I know to my cost.

  These days my former glimmertwin is private, characterised by the media as a ‘reclusive songwriter and producer’, as though ‘recluse’ is a job description. You’ve seen the most recent photograph available – it’s blurry and five years old. He’s with his children, attending the first Obama inauguration, sharing a joke with the First Lady. I barely recognise him. He looks trim, fit and prosperous, in a tux that cost more than my houseboat.

  But the boy Fran, in his heart, was a demi-monde figure, more comfortable in a second-hand blouse rummaged in a charity store in Luton, the town where the fates introduced us. Thirty miles from London, in light-industrial Bedfordshire, boasting an airport, car factories and a shopping centre under permanent reconstruction, it had also, my brother joked, a time zone of its own, ‘clocks stopped around the second lunar landing’. I think of it as my only home town, the place I grew up, but by literal definition we were immigrants. I was born in Dublin, the middle child of three. In 1972 – the year I turned nine – we moved to England following a family tragedy. Luton’s housing estates, built after the war, were identikit, perhaps, but there were parks and further fields that my brother and I enjoyed. My parents were fond of our neighbours on Rutherford Road, whom I remember as tactful, welcoming people. It wasn’t Thrillsville, admittedly, but every country has her Lutons: places notable for points of indisputable interest, one of which is the fact that they are thirty miles from somewhere else. You will find them in Germany, northern France, Eastern Europe, by the thousand in the United States. I’ve never seen one in Italy but I know they must exist. Swathes of Belgium seem one vast Luton. The best to be said for ours is that it was good at being Luton, in a way that, say, Malibu could never have managed. I had happy times and tough ones. There was a lot of non-event, as we marched to our own little humdrum. I tend to divide my youth into before and after Fran. The former I recollect as a series of monochromes. Luton got colour when he came.

  I’m told he no longer wears make-up, not even a dusting of rouge. When I first encountered Francis, in college in the eighties, he would pitch up for lectures sporting more lip frost and blusher than Bianca Jagger at Studio 54. Apart from on television, he was the first male I ever saw in eye shadow, a weird shade of magenta he sourced by trawling theatrical-supply shops. ‘They use it for murderers and whores,’ he’d explain, with the insouciance of one on terms with both.

  I became aware of him during my first month at Poly. Let’s face it, he would have been difficult to miss. One morning I saw him upstairs on the 25 bus, asking the loan of a compact-mirror from the unsmiling conductress, a Jamaican lady of about fifty who was not a believer in light-touch regulation when it came to Luton’s scholars. Supplying the mirror, she was then beseeched for a tissue, on to which he imprinted a lipstick kiss before handing both items back to her. It’s a mark of Fran’s innocence, which expressed itself as vulnerability, that no one kicked his teeth down his throat.

  Who was this wraith? Whence had he come? My classmates traded theories about his birthplace. China was a candidate, as were Laos and Malaysia. Oddly, I don’t remember anyone ever suggesting Vietnam, his long-departed actual motherland. What was certain was that he’d been adopted in South Yorkshire as a child, looked fabulous and didn’t talk much. Many regarded his habitual silence as a form of attention-seeking and determined to look the other way. The Poly had students and faculty of different ethnicities, as any college near a large English town would, but in several respects Fran was unusual. You had the feeling he was aware that there was only one of himself, a threatening signal to transmit to any group. It must also be unnerving to the transmitter, I imagine. The peacock may be flaunting through angst or plain boredom and would rather you just buggered off. What Fran had wasn’t confidence. It was a million miles from flounce. The closest I can come is ‘dignity’. And you want to watch out when you’ve dignity in England because it can look like you’re taking yourself seriously.

  I can’t say I recollect offensive remarks. That would rarely be the form things took. But there would be that certain tentative chuckle and a rolling of the eyes, particularly among the boys, who were not exactly hostile, but who wanted you to notice that Fran didn’t look like you, in the unlikely event you hadn’t noticed already. Fran didn’t look like anyone.

  He lived in a room, though no one knew where. Leagrave, perhaps. Farley Hill. He was rumoured to have friends at Reading University, and this, by itself, gave him an urbanite’s exoticism. We, at the windblown outposts of my town’s Polytechnic, felt outshone by the Flash Harrys of Reading. They galumphed about their town quaffing hock, snogging doxies and shooting mortarboards off each other with a blunderbuss – huzzah! – while we fumed on the banks of the Lea.

  Theatre, Film and English were Fran’s courses at the Poly. Sociology and English were mine. Dad accused me of selecting Sociology in order to annoy him, and he wasn’t entirely wrong. In addition I’d registered for Greco-Roman Civilisation, since it was required of all first-years to ‘do’ three subjects, and I reckoned, having twice seen the movie Ben Hur on telly, that I’d a fair bit of groundwork dug. Also, I couldn’t think of anything else. The college offered Musicology but this wouldn’t have occurred to me. I’d been banging on a little Ibanez Spanish guitar since my fourteenth birthday, was workmanlike in the plunking of a Beatles riff or two, but studying the mysteries of music seemed to me pointless, dingbat that I was in those days. I adored the Patti Smith Group. They hadn’t a degree between them. It was hard to picture Patti telling herself the key signature of C-sharp minor contains four sharps. Why would she need to know?

  My hobby became Fran-watching. There are worse pursuits. I see him yet in the 300-seater lecture hall, always at the back, often smoking. There was a girlfriend for a while, a mournfully gorgeous punkette. They’d spend afternoons in the student bar – ‘The Trap’, we called it – wordlessly gazing at art books, the pair of them ordering ‘crème de me
nthe frappé’, not a common undergraduate’s drink in Luton. Paddy, the obliging barman, would gamely produce the crushed ice that beverage requires by filling a supermarket bag with chunks from the freezer and stamping his hobnail boots on it. But by Christmas the girlfriend was no longer around, at least no longer paraded. When the college reopened in January, there was another at Fran’s side, a soul-girl said to be studying Mechanical Drawing. You saw them hand-in-hand on the soccer fields at dusk, two blackbirds in the snow that lay for weeks on the campus. Then there was a boy. Predictable murmurings began. My experience of the young is that they can be intensely conservative and easily disconcerted, far less accepting than the old. If Fran was a loner, it wasn’t entirely by choice. And I’m no one to judge, for I didn’t approach him myself, preferring to be intrigued from a distance.

  He contributed articles to the Students’ Union newspaper. I found them odd, enticing and very, very bold. Joy Division released the compilation album Still not long after their vocalist Ian Curtis took his life. Fran’s review termed the sleeve ‘corpse-grey’. I felt that was close to a boundary but not the right side of it. He went through a thankfully brief phase of signing his pieces ‘Franne’, attracted, I think, by the Elizabethan connotation. Evidently he loved the melancholy ballads of Dowland and Walter Raleigh, for an article on that subject appeared beneath his name. An unusual, clever boy, he’d endured a childhood of savagery. I don’t know how he was alive. Many years after I met him – in what turned out to be the last television interview he’d ever give – he made public some of the biographical details.

  From Fran’s Final Interview,

  Michael Parkinson Show, April 1998

  Yeah, I’d rather talk about boxing, any night of the week . . . I love Herol, man . . . That’s my idol . . . Herol ‘Bomber’ Graham . . . From my part of the world, and yours . . . Up Sheffield.