Tim Bradford - Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?

Hammersmith was fucking cold. Ice had travelled over from Scandinavia, passed across the North Sea like a self-satisfied speed skater 1 and taken the short journey along the quiet, silver river to W6, where it had formed an unhealthy union with heavy metal particles, those noxious clumps of cancer dust that float around the major capitals of the world, but particularly the Fulham Palace Road. Most people would have cheerily admitted that it was no worse than normal. If I’d talked to anyone. But I went through phrases of not talking to anyone, particularly Londoners over fifty, who would, naturally, start to bang on about ‘pea soupers’ and the 1950s and rationing and how the Kray twins were ‘lovely fellas’ really and football teams were much better in those days. They weren’t, I wanted to say, actually. Better. The football teams. I knew this and had already made up an argument for the time when I would be confronted in a dark alleyway by a gang of preposterously nostalgic and assertive football-mad cockneys. Players in the forties and fifties were just a load of unfit brickies with smoking-related breathing problems who hoofed the ball from one end of the pitch to the other.

But despite the pollution, this part of Hammersmith is a beautiful place, full of life and noise and crap buskers and spilling-over pubs and real newspaper stalls (with more Irish papers than you can get anywhere in Ireland) and half-crazed hawkers selling six lighters for a pound (‘Laydeeezz. Lighters, laydeez?’), with Charing Cross Hospital looming over everything in much the same way that St Paul’s Cathedral must have dominated the old city in the late seventeenth century. Though Charing Cross Hospital isn’t quite as attractive. The upside of this is that there are no Japanese and American tourists taking videos of themselves or asking you for the way to the ‘Tower of London, buddy’, which has to be a good thing. People – well, estate agents and puff-piece hacks in the Evening Standard – are always talking about Fulham Palace Road ‘coming up’, getting smartened out and sorted. But all that ever seems to change are the pubs, which are the only things that don’t need changing.

There is nowhere in Hammersmith, to my knowledge, that you can get away from the sound of cars. Sometimes I’ll lie in the bath with the windows of the flat open. I don’t mind the cold. I want the noise. I listen to the traffic. It reminds me of the sea. The noise, the roaring, coughing eternal circle of Hammersmith Broadway, picking up speed towards the A4 and M4. It never stops.

I decided to do my bit for reducing air pollution by selling the car. My girlfriend Annie had bought the Vauxhall Corsa back in 1994 when we’d lived off Portobello Road and she was working in Weybridge. Now she’d been promoted and had headed off to Houston, Texas. What did I want with a car? This was my task, the one thing she’d left in my capable hands. We’d spent a day, back in November, driving around various garages trying to get a decent price. Then I remembered a conversation I’d had with a garage mechanic in Limerick at the tail end of 1992. He’d fixed the breakpads on my brother’s rickety old Ford Fiesta for a fiver, and told us that if we wanted to sell the car we’d get £1,500 for it. We were incredulous. Bearing in mind that the pound and the punt were almost on a par, it seemed like a twenty per-cent markup at least. The thought entered my head that I could drive the Corsa over to Ireland, have a holiday, sell the car and make a good deal. I’m no businessman, but the glamour of this proposition had quite an appeal.

I don’t know much about cars. But I knew I needed an adventure. I had just turned 33. Thirty-three. The Lord of Lords, our Saviour Jesus Christ, had done the business by the time he was thirty-three – had a real relationship with a deity, tried to lead his people to freedom, had arguments with the leaders of an occupying army, been crucified on a big hill in front of crowds of people then reincarnated himself for his friends. I had done none of that (though there was the night of a sixth-form party in Lincoln in 1982 when, after puking most of my innards up, I recovered sufficiently inside Ritzy’s night club to the extent that some people thought it was a miracle. ‘Truly, that man is the son of God’, said some little Lincolnshire disco girl in a John Wayne accent as I forced half a pint of cider down my throat.).

I needed to get away for a while anyway because I was becoming too set in my ways. I’d even stopped my regular habit of giving money to the bedraggled figures in the subway at Hammersmith roundabout. Well, one of them. He spoke in a Yorkshire accent but he could have been Russian, rocking backwards and forwards staring at his palm. Sometimes I used to think, sorry mate I’m just too skint, but I’m not as skint as him no matter how much I’ve pissed away in a pub on Archway Road. I once had to break up a fight he was in – he was about to beat up a skinny frightened guy who was trying to steal his patch. Luckily, I had a microphone stand; I was on my way to a gig in the Tut ’n’ Shive on Upper Street – the British Country & Western revival we called it (‘Brit cunts’, said our friends), so I brandished the mike stand and told them to stop fucking about. Now I was mad at him (and really mad at myself). I was down there once with my dad and brother and was going to tell them about the incident but they were mesmerised by an appallingly drawn picture of Bob Marley that some bloke was trying to pass off as a poster to tourists on their way to see Sir Cliff in Heathcliff at the Hammersmith Apollo.

What really annoyed me was that I wished this bloke was a nice friendly beggar who conformed to genteel ideas of homelessness, like the old Irish fellow further up Fulham Palace Road who stands in a doorway near the shoe shop, and who never wants money, just things to stare at.

My flat is, believe it or not, at the epicentre of old-fashioned tramp activity in the South Hammersmith area. Tramps must be descended from some ancient race that are tuned into ley lines which converge on my flat, or are inexorably drawn here by electromagnetic forces that we house dwellers don’t yet understand. In my more fanciful moments I think to myself that I might be The King of the Tinkers and they have come to claim me as their own. For much of the time I certainly look like a trainee tramp. Hair virtually down to my shoulders, a week’s worth of blotchy, sandpaperish stubble. Crappy old clothes (I’ve only been shopping for clothes twice since 1989).

My aforementioned ‘favourite tramp’ – whose name is Brendan and who comes, originally, from Co. Tyrone – leans against an electrical meter next to the newsagents nearest Fernando’s café on Fulham Palace Road. He patrols from there down to the doorway next to Luigi’s pizza place about two hundreds yards further south. 2 I’ve only seen him away from this area twice. Once on King Street opposite the Living department store (London’s only Third-World shopping experience. They’ve got a couple of items and you never get served because the staff are always on the phone – Now gone as well. A curse!). Brendan forages locally and lives on what he can find – usually some form of superbrew extra-strong lager which, in accordance with the manufacturer’s specifications, turns immediately and magically into urine as soon as it is swallowed.

Once I happened to be sitting on an eastbound Hammersmith and City Line train at the Hammersmith terminus, reading a collection of John B. Keane’s essays and stories in an attempt to travel to Ireland for less than a tenner (I try to save money by applying for those cheap airline ticket offers but they seem to get booked up years in advance). I was reading a chapter entitled ‘My Personal Tramp’ when he – My Favourite Tramp – sat down opposite me. I wanted to say to him – I didn’t know his name then – ‘Well, do you know what? You, Mr Tramp, are my favourite tramp in all the world, and I’ve just found this story called ‘My Personal Tramp’. And here you are on the train with me. Incredible coincidence, is it not?’ I could tell from his worn-out, sad-eyed expression that he would not, in fact, find it incredible, he would simply think I was some ranting nutter and would probably get quietly off the train and move up a couple of carriages. So I didn’t say it. 3 Some facts – tramps’ hair goes thick because the alcohol lowers their testosterone levels. They stand in overcoats staring off into nothingness. Many tramps are like angels and think other people can’t see them.