Tim Bradford - Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?

Then it happened. Ideas that had obviously been kicking around in my brain for a while decided to join forces. I thought about when I was seventeen, and obsessed with Jack Kerouac, when life seemed full of possibilities, when a car was a symbol of adventure and freedom. 4 I was struck with the idea of heading off like Sal and Dean into the west, except I’d be doing it in this pretty little bright-red girl’s car, with a guitar and a crate of beer in the boot.

I had a feeling my mate Terry might fancy the trip. A knackered-looking handsome Irish raconteur, Terry looks vaguely like Sean Hughes, that knackered-looking handsome Irish raconteur. Which was ironic, as he had bumped into Sean Hughes several times at after-hours pubs and clubs and would invariably try and get into an argument with him. Usually because Terry was about to get off with a girl who thought he was Sean Hughes, then the real Sean Hughes would come along and spoil it. Like a Brian Rix farce, really. Or a Brian Rix farce co-written by James Joyce:

What the Finlan saw a Butler sore her Mother Mary.

(Scene – late nightshite midnight black jean bar under the chip smell tourist choking Tottenhemhem Caught Road. Finoola, Assumpta, Terry in chitchat inebriation)

Terry: Wear you froming to?

Assumpta: To? To? From? Live?

Terry: Chunky fleshy Finoola.

Finoola: The beer-stained sweat of old pine, belly stubble shaved.

Assumpta: Are you Sean Hughes?

Terry: Me funny Sean. Sunny, heavy-lidded sad Sean.

Sean: No me real deal feelme funny Sean. Who are you?

Terry: Doppelganger boy. Johnny Stalker. Johnny Walker.

Assumpta: Double Sean bedfun thrusting, eh Sean?

Anyway, I put it to Terry that the trip might be a good laugh. I said something like, ‘Let’s go off to Ireland for a week or so, try and sell the car, meet people who know the truth, get drunk, stand on mountain tops, go painting, sit in pubs listening to old men’s stories, laugh at and fall in love with mad Irishwomen, shout on the western edge of the world, sing folksongs, cry in the rain, puke in soft green fields, catch a moving statue and put it in our pocket.’

Terry took a sip of his pint and smiled at me. ‘Argh, yeah, why not?’

I regularly wander through Hammersmith and see Irish faces everywhere – heavy-set red-haired women, beautiful dark-haired girls, old guys with lined faces and sad eyes, tiny, grinning leprechauns made of felt who sing ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ when you press their bellies. Hammersmith is an old Irish area. At present around eight per cent of the population of the Hammersmith postal district is Irish born – the figure for London as a whole is four per cent and one and a half per cent for Britain (from the 1991 census). It’s hard to know the figures for second- or third-generation Irish, the fresh-faced youngsters who choose to spend their evenings bashing away on bodhrans at the wonderful and lovely Hammersmith Irish Centre. This hive of Celticity is opposite St Paul’s church, round the back of Marks & Spencer with a good view of the flyover and its dark underbelly and of Coca Cola’s UK headquarters. It’s a yellowy brick building built in the mid-nineties. They run music, history, language and dance courses as well as occasional gigs and Irish music sessions and manages to appeal to the generation who came over after the War with stout and dance-hall music coursing through their veins as well as the kids brought up in the borough on hip hop and alcopops. It’s at the north-west end of what I regard as the Irish village of Finnegania 6 – the spiritual centre of which is a discarded can of Guinness under the flyover which can be reached by crossing over the curve of the A4 and walking round the Apollo Theatre.

Inside the centre it’s very pale and high ceilinged, perhaps in an attempt to be like a church, although the atmosphere is more akin to an English village hall, the world of amateur dramatics and pantomimes, cake stalls and tombola, prized marrows and dollies made of wicker, the tables left over from university seminar rooms. Looking at the group of lads with their great faces and lost eyes, come to hear their grandchildren play the penny whistle or sing a ballad, I couldn’t help thinking that this scene should be a smoky low-slung pub in the forgotten back streets of a midlands Irish country town.

The workshop was a collection of musicians of all ages and talents. Whistle players, people on squeezebox, uillean pipes, banjos, guitars. The music sounded like Irish music yet didn’t really ever get going. The notes were right and the rhythm and speed were there but something was missing. A bloke who looked like Gerry Adams, President of Sinn Féin, was sat at a table surrounded by friends and family. When a jig came on, Gerry started dancing. Do you reckon that’s Gerry Adams? I said to my friends. No they said, it isn’t. Well it looks like him to me. I wonder what he’s doing here. Gerry Adams was dancing away with a baseball cap back to front on his head. Look at him. I’m not sure what the hard-liners of the IRA would think if they could see him now. That’s not Gerry Adams, Tim. You’d think, if he’s going to make a public appearance like this, that he’d have learned to dance properly. Still, I bet he can dance better than Ian Paisley. The music workshop group started to crank it up a bit. Ffaafnaaa nfffnaa twiddleidsleeeeeeeeee ggieee doo deeed didddle dee deee did diddd ddiiiidie dieeeeiieee … pipes and fiddle and accordion, more relaxed this time and my foot started to tap. Then a middle-aged guy took the microphone and introduced a couple of female singers. They did ballads, one in a high-pitched and haunting style about some tragedy or other, then a slightly younger girl did ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsy’ followed by something about Johnny being the handsomest in the village (it’s always Johnny isn’t it, never Tim. How come it’s never ‘but Tim was the tallest and fairest and cleverest and funniest and most talented of them all’? – if there are Tims in Irish folk songs I’m pretty sure they’ll almost always be village idiots or something.) 7

Finnegan’s Wake, 8 just round the corner, is a pub that nobody should go to, some big brewer’s mangled attempt to reinvent the concept of Irish pub-going. It is a brand, a kind of corporate kit pub, except you pronounce the k as in sh . There are several of them dotted around London. I do know what I’m talking about here because I unfortunately am sucked into it from time to time by its possible promise of wild-haired colleens dancing on the tables. And the footy.

This Hammersmith version is like a west-of-Ireland theme park set in a grubby looking thirties building. Two towering slot machines guard the main entrance, like the giants Gog and Magog of the City of London, winking their multicoloured lights at each magical drinking warrior who enters the establishment. There are dark brown wooden floorboards, old newspapers and Irish posters all over the walls and ceilings. A violin case here. An accordion there. Near one of the several TV screens that pump out constant satellite sport is an old brown briefcase with the words MICHAEL O’MALLEY, LEGAL SECRETARY written on it in thick white paint (or possibly thin mashed potato). On the other side of the pub is a wooden shamrock (Is it, I wonder, the magic one ex-President Mary Robinson gave to Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the former head of the UN, to ward off the evil machinations of Boutros Boutros-Ghali?). At various points there are pots and pans and stuff – basically all sorts of ill-thought-out cultural flotsam.

And the clientèle are just too perfect – perhaps they’re actors. A group of raucous red-haired women sit at a table in the middle, carousing and eyeing up the blokes. An old fellow with bulbous red nose and the look of a noble Gaelic poet nurses a pint of stout near the door. Young couples stare into each other’s eyes. A group of young Irish lads in leather jackets and real haircuts crack jokes and stare off into the distance at imaginary Nicole Kidman lookalikes running across a mountain top. The Irishness is suffocating, but it’s a joke, a shell, a thin layer of treacle. I can’t even remember what the pub was like before it was Finneganed, but probably just some nondescript and harmless local boozer.