Complicated Shadows Read online

  ‘He was a big dreamer,’ recalls Myers schoolmate Dale Fabian. ‘All he was interested in was his beloved Liverpool FC and becoming a famous musician. This didn’t ever seem likely to his classmates, who frequently ridiculed him.’

  The jeers of his classmates would not go unfelt or unforgotten, but the sense of otherness wouldn’t distract Declan from his vocation; indeed, it fuelled him over and over and over again. ‘When it comes down to it, they don’t know what I know,’ he would say years later. ‘It sounds arrogant, but that happens to be the way it is.’13

  The transition into secondary education coincided with Declan beginning to take a much more serious interest in playing music. Initially, he toyed with the school’s formal music classes, but found them stifling.

  ‘The music teaching was laughable. I could sing, so I sang in the school choir, but then my voice got too loud and they threw me out. Then I became an altar boy because of the solemn face, but I got thrown out at fourteen for laughing, because the priest used to mumble everything except the church plate takings.’14

  Perhaps understandably, the lack of spontaneity and excitement in these mundane experiences would put him off formal music training for the best part of twenty-five years. Instead, he started to get to grips with things on his own terms. He had had an acoustic guitar since he was nine years old, a gut-stringed Spanish guitar his father had bought him; it had all but been ignored until his early teens. Now he began tinkering, and despite an initial reluctance to follow in Ross’s footsteps, he quickly came to the conclusion that this was his calling; he also realised, with typical self-assurance, that he was potentially very good at it. ‘I knew I had a career when I was fourteen,’ he later claimed. ‘It just took a long time for me to work out how to do it. But I knew exactly what I wanted to do.’15

  Although he was far from a natural on the guitar, he worked around his limitations with characteristic determination, and began writing his own songs straight away. The first one was called ‘Winter’, a cheery little number kicking off in E-minor. It has long since been consigned to the dustbin of musical history.

  * * *

  Life was changing. The final two years of the ’60s saw the security and assurance of family life begin to break apart. Already something of a loner with a growing awareness that life could be a melancholy experience, Declan became even more self-sufficient, and a little more cynical.

  ‘I wouldn’t say I was raised on romance,’ he would sing just a few years later in ‘Pay It Back’, a rueful nod back to the events of 1969 when his parent’s marriage reached the end of the road. Around the same time, his father fell in love with a singer called Sara Thompson, many years his junior, which marked the final and most significant of all the changes Ross had made to his life. He had left the Joe Loss Orchestra in 1968 after fourteen years’ service, finally ready to go it alone. From then on, he effectively became a solo cabaret artist, continuing to make a very comfortable living by singing and playing the trumpet all over the country, augmented with regular TV and radio work.

  Ross had already scored a No. 15 hit in Germany in 1966 with the self-penned ska tune ‘Patsy Girl’, backed by The Joe Loss Blue Beats. Later, he caused a minor stir with a version of The Beatles’ ‘The Long And Winding Road’, released under the name Day Costello, the surname taken from Ross’s maternal grandmother. But the staples of his solo career were themed albums concentrating on one particular genre or artist: these included Ross MacManus Sings Frank Sinatra; Day Costello Sings Elvis Presley’s Greatest Hits; and Ross MacManus Sings Roy Orbison. Predictable fare, perhaps, but at last he was getting the opportunity to map out his own career.

  Meanwhile, Declan was laying the foundations for a solo career of his own. During these domestic upheavals he had continued to persevere with the guitar, writing and improving with typical fortitude. There was even the odd appearance – including one at Archbishop Myers – with his dad, usually consisting of him sitting in unobtrusively on guitar while Ross played his set.

  Both Ross and Lilian had been full of quiet encouragement, despite understandable misgivings. ‘My parents were aware of the dangers and pitfalls and disappointments of [the music business],’ said Declan. ‘But they never discouraged me. They were very conscious of not putting me off it.’16

  An important part of their level-headed support was allowing their son the time to find his feet. They had little choice. Declan heavily discouraged Ross and Lilian from attending his first-ever solo public appearance, which came early in the summer of 1970. The Crypt at St Elizabeth’s in Richmond was a fixture in the London folk scene, with a welcome lack of ceremony. ‘If you played acoustic guitar you could basically get up there,’ Declan recalled. ‘It was very open.’17

  The Crypt became a weekly outing for Declan during the school summer holidays, first to watch a parade of folk talent and then later to play. The night of his first appearance he happened to perform in front of Ewan MacColl, the author of such folk standards as ‘Dirty Old Town’ and a rather austere presence by all accounts. MacColl wasn’t necessarily impressed with Declan’s set of ‘little sensitive teenage songs’.18

  ‘He sat there, head bowed all the way through my set,’ he recalled. ‘I’m sure he just nodded off. I had a traumatic first appearance; [it] was pretty crushing.’19 However, he remained undeterred, and spent the remainder of the summer confirming over and over again what he already knew in his heart: that this was what he wanted to do with his life.

  * * *

  At the end of the summer he moved to Liverpool. ‘It was question of going home, really,’20 he later claimed. ‘I was born in London but I was christened in Birkenhead. My mother’s from Liverpool and my father’s from Birkenhead. I went to school in London for most of my life, but all my holidays were in Merseyside.’21

  This was putting a brave face on things. The notion of ‘going home’ was rather fanciful. In reality, Declan may have felt he had little option but to leave London. He had just turned sixteen, and planned to go onto sixth form at school and complete his final two years of education. And although Declan had great affection for Liverpool and knew the city and Birkenhead well, living there was a different proposition: as an only child he was pained by the break up of his parent’s marriage and the enforced separation from his father, his musical mentor and friend, as much as a parental figure. He felt the absence keenly.

  Declan and Lilian moved to the West Derby area of Liverpool, only a stone’s throw from where the now-defunct Channel Four soap opera Brookside was filmed. As an added boon for Declan, West Derby also bordered Anfield, home of Liverpool FC, and he would take every available opportunity to go there, often alone. The house was new, a semi-detached brick building in a neat suburban area that was neither upmarket nor dowdy. Although relations between Lilian and Ross were understandably distant, Ross and Declan’s close relationship survived the marital strife.7 His father was a frequent visitor to Merseyside, to see his son, naturally, but also to visit his own mother in Birkenhead, and to play the odd gig at British Legions and similar venues.

  On occasion, Declan would join the band and play a little guitar, once venturing as far afield as Blackpool. It afforded him a low-key but tempting taste of the professional musician’s life.

  Liverpool would be Declan’s home for over two years. In late August 1970, he started at Campion School in Salisbury Street, Everton, a lay Catholic school previously known as St Francis Xavier Bi-Lateral School and still often referred to in Liverpool as SFX. He entered the sixth form to sit his A-Levels, and found the atmosphere entirely different from his experiences in the capital.

  ‘It was very much two years behind London,’ he later recalled. ‘I’d gone to school in Hounslow, and you had to like Tamla and reggae otherwise you were dead. But then I went [to Liverpool] and you didn’t dare say you liked Tamla, you had to like Deep Purple or something.’22

  Ross was going through a psychedelic phase in his early forties, growing his hair long and read
ing Herman Hesse. Perhaps in sympathy, Declan adopted the Grateful Dead as his personal group. ‘Nobody else liked them and you had to have a group that you liked,’ he remembered. ‘I used to sit at home going, “Please make me like the Grateful Dead!”.’23 He eventually talked himself into it.

  Declan made little effort to integrate socially, and as a result had few friends, mainly by choice rather than design. A stubbornly independent youngster, he began to devour books and newspapers, forming the rather idealistic social consciousness typical of many intelligent teenagers. He also drew increasingly close to his immediate family: his mother in Liverpool, his father in London, and his grandmother in Birkenhead.8 He was a frequent visitor to her house, and the area made a permanent imprint on his brain, providing the geographical location for many of his songs: the shipyards of Cammell Laird in ‘Shipbuilding’; the ‘sedated homes’ of ‘Little Palaces’; the departing émigré of ‘Last Boat Leaving’; and the enduringly affectionate tribute of ‘Veronica’ are but four examples of dozens of lyrical snapshots which have their emotional heart in the tight terraced streets and docks around his grandmother’s house in Conway Street.

  Football and music were the twin cornerstones. Aside from going along to watch Liverpool play on the odd Saturday, Declan busied himself by making tentative forays into the less-than-happening local music scene. The Merseybeat boom had long gone, the demise of The Beatles a symbolic sign that times had changed. Now it was heavy rock and folk music. However, the more progressive, intuitive folk culture which Declan had tentatively dipped a toe into in London was made of much grimmer stuff up north, and he was floundering in his attempts to find a foothold in a music scene which was all but moribund. ‘I found a scene dominated by Jacqui & Birdie and sub-Spinners people and it was like running into a brick wall,’ he said. ‘It was horrendous.’24 The clubs wanted folk music of the most traditional kind: Ralph McTell’s ‘Streets Of London’, Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’, the usual crowd-pleasers. There was little appetite for original songs and it was a harsh, unforgiving atmosphere for anyone who wanted to play contemporary music or try something individual.

  Aware of Declan’s frustration, Ross tried to help his son by introducing him to a rock band/art collective called The Medium Theatre, who also ran a poetry magazine called Medium. Well, it was the early ’70s. Ross had some vague Liverpool links with members of the band and had also donated something along the lines of £10 to the magazine to help with publishing costs. The members of the group were slightly older than Declan, and his father hoped that they might help the sixteen-year-old integrate into whatever was happening in Liverpool at the time.

  Allan Mayes was one of the boys involved with The Medium Theatre, and much more interested in playing music than getting embroiled in the group’s loftier artistic pretensions. A year older than Declan, Mayes first bumped into him at one of the band’s get-togethers. ‘I think he was just very uncomfortable; basically his dad had forced him into it,’ he recalls.

  It proved to be a blind alley, but Declan slowly sought out the right places to be seen; sympathetic environments such as Thursday nights at The Songwriter’s Club in Broad Street, and the Remploy or Lamplight in Wallasey.

  If he was playing at all during this period it was infrequently, but he was continuing to write. Perhaps influenced by the local beat-poet boom which was still going strong, he became involved with the school’s sixth form magazine throughout 1971, contributing the occasional poem9 and helping out on the editorial side.

  But still Declan was having trouble finding his musical feet – until he bumped into Allan Mayes again at a party at mutual friend Zinnie Flynn’s house on New Year’s Eve, 1971. Mayes arrived at the party clutching his guitar and bumped into Declan, clutching his. Mayes had left Medium Theatre earlier that year, over what he rather grandly remembers as musical differences. ‘I wanted to be Crosby, Stills and Nash and [Medium Theatre] were still arty-farty,’ he recalls, so he left and took the bass player with him, forming a drumless three-piece with bassist David Jago and harmony singer Alan Brown, labouring under the name of Rusty. Mayes began gigging around Liverpool, sometimes playing solo gigs in folk clubs, but more often working up a set with Rusty that included original material and cover songs by Crosby, Stills and Nash, Neil Young, Van Morrison and Bob Dylan.

  It was the same kind of music that Declan had grown into. Having tentatively discovered country-flavoured American music via his rather reluctant immersion in the Grateful Dead’s two 1970 albums – Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty – he was growing to love The Byrds’ Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, a record which would lead him to the door of Gram Parsons and untold country music riches. He was also feeling his way into The Band’s Music From Big Pink, the debut offering from Bob Dylan’s erstwhile backing band and an object lesson in the enduring musical arts of harmony, mystery and simplicity. ‘When I was about eighteen, The Band were it for me,’ he would later say. ‘It was like receiving a letter from the other side of the world, a world you couldn’t possibly understand, let alone visit.’25

  Declan also loved Neil Young’s debut album; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Deja Vu; Van Morrison’s His Band And The Street Choir; Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Perhaps the most obscure – and downbeat – records on his turntable at the time were David Ackles’ The Road To Cairo and Subway To The Country, both of which had a profound influence on Declan; he later rated Ackles as ‘the greatest unheralded American songwriter of the late ’60s’.26 More conventionally, he favoured some of the less whimsical singer-songwriters of the time such as Randy Newman, Loudon Wainwright, Jackson Browne, Jesse Winchester – whose eponymous 1970 album had been produced by The Band’s Robbie Robertson – and even James Taylor. It was either that or glam rock, and Declan had neither the physique nor the eyelashes for that.

  The Medium Theatre encounter, though awkward and brief, served as an ice-breaker between Mayes and Declan, before the two got down to business. ‘It was a matter of “Oh, here’s a guy with a guitar who knows two Van Morrison songs”,’ says Mayes. ‘“He’s my new best friend and to hell with drinking cider and chasing women”.’ As Declan later admitted, this ‘wasn’t the carousing crowd’.27

  Instead, the two new friends ushered in 1972 sitting in an unoccupied bedroom for three hours, playing Neil Young’s ‘Heart Of Gold’ ‘a hundred times’ and most of the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album. According to Mayes, almost every sentence they uttered started with ‘Do you know?’ ‘“Do you know ‘Brown Eyed Girl’?” “Do you know anything off the first Neil Young album?” “Do you know ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’?” We weren’t trying to impress anybody, we weren’t trying to impress each other, it was just the fact that we had each found a soulmate.’

  At the end of the night, the two swapped telephone numbers. Keen to keep the momentum going, Mayes called the next day to make arrangements to meet up again. This time, Declan was introduced to David Jago and Alan Brown, and Rusty had a new member.

  Declan’s guitar style may have left more to luck than chance, and his flirtation with open tuning was simply disastrous, but he and Mayes found they could harmonise instinctively. Like any young man trying to find his voice – both literally and figuratively – he was trying on different hats as both a vocalist and songwriter; his style would change from week to week depending on who he was listening to. ‘He had all the Americanised phrasing,’ says Mayes. ‘He could sing like Robbie Robertson and Neil Young.’

  Just three weeks into the New Year, on 21 January, 1972, the new Rusty line-up was unveiled at the Wallasey Lamplight. They played eleven songs, including Bob Dylan’s ‘The Mighty Quinn’, ‘Dance Dance Dance’ by Neil Young, and Van Morrison’s ‘I’ve Been Working’, as well as some original Rusty material written before Declan joined the band. They also played a new song by Declan, called ‘Warm House’, and took home £7 between the four of them.

  It was the beginning of a concerted onslaught on the less glamourous venues
of the north-west of England. Though Declan was still in sixth form, the band naturally claimed precedence over his academic work, but not everyone shared his view. Within a few months, both David Jago and Alan Brown left for college and Rusty became just Allan Mayes and Declan.

  They weren’t necessarily the greatest-looking duo on earth. Declan was still noticeably overweight, with scraggly long hair and a bizarre misunderstanding of what constituted style. ‘He was always pretty geeky and even then he dressed like shit,’ says Mayes. ‘None of us was exactly snappy, but he dressed to the point where we’d both be laughing at him; these terrible chequered jackets and red shoes, big red Doc Martens.’

  The duo played bars, clubs, schools, libraries, hotels, community centres, colleges, arts centres and even a cathedral; anywhere that would have them. Their packed schedule wasn’t really a reflection on their talents. The local scene was more the 1970’s equivalent of karaoke: virtually anybody could walk in with a guitar and play a few songs.

  Declan didn’t drive, so Mayes would pick him up. Mostly it was Liverpool, but there were regular visits to Birkenhead, and occasional trips out of town to pubs in Widnes, Wigan, Manchester and even London. If they were playing at a poetry night, their musical intervention was tolerated as long as they didn’t play anything too poppy; gentler numbers by The Band, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Randy Newman, Simon and Garfunkel and Loudon Wainwright were the order of the day, interspersed with original songs from both Mayes and MacManus and usually topped off with their showstopping version of the Crosby, Stills and Nash classic, ‘Wooden Ships’.

  If they were playing somewhere like the Crow’s Nest Hotel in Widnes or the Fox and Grapes in Birkenhead, a slightly less sensitive side would be required. On these occasions, Allan and Declan included songs that people recognised from the charts and could sing along to: a Slade or a Rod Stewart number, or a ’60s favourite such as ‘Happy Together’ by The Turtles.