Complicated Shadows Read online

  Declan went to see the Brinsleys on so many occasions, that by 1974 he was regarded by the band as ‘a part-time’ roadie. Maybe he was ‘chasing’ Lowe after all. Certainly, following the band at close quarters made him take a long, hard look at his own songwriting. If Liverpool had been a time of melancholy and meandering poetic musings, London brought him back down to earth with a satisfying bump.

  He was trying to write cleaner, crisper songs with a snappier musical accompaniment, moving away from the gentler acoustic sound of Rusty. Following long nights listening to Declan talk a good game in The Three Fishes, Ken Smith was eager to check out his mettle as a musician. He knew little about Rusty. Much as he would remain staunchly guarded about his past when he finally became successful in 1977, Declan was typically cagey with his London friends in 1973. ‘We didn’t really know anything about [Liverpool],’ remembers Ken Smith. ‘We knew he lived there but I never quite got the whole story.’

  Smith first caught up with Declan at Southlands College in Wimbledon, playing a repertoire covering everything from Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Can I Have My Money Back?’ to Hank Williams classics like ‘You Win Again’. He kicked off the set solo, before being joined by Mich Kent and Malcolm Dennis.

  As with many fledgling bands, the music was secondary: finding a name was the most pressing problem. The first gig at Southlands was billed as The Bizzario Brothers. Another mooted name – the even less inspired Mother Truckers, mercifully never used – was soon jettisoned in favour of Flip City. The inspiration came from Joni Mitchell’s version of the Annie Ross song ‘Twisted’, where in the background the listener can hear Cheech & Chong babbling inanely about ‘Flip City’. It was Mary Burgoyne who suggested using it and it stuck. She had good ears. ‘Mary knew what she was talking about as far as music was concerned,’ says Ken Smith. ‘And she was way into the country [music] thing.’

  Although it was one of the few musical forms that he hadn’t had immediate access to as a boy, country music was becoming more and more important to Declan. ‘[It] had never really got into our household,’ he says. ‘So I discovered it for myself.’2

  Allan Mayes has no recollection of Declan having a passionate interest in country in Liverpool; he certainly never saw any George Jones or Hank Williams records in the house. But through his love of The Band, the Grateful Dead and The Byrds, Declan had discovered what could loosely be called Americana, and was gradually tracing a rich seam of musical history back towards its source. Thus, Gram Parson’s involvement on The Byrds’ Sweetheart Of The Rodeo album lead him to the Flying Burrito Brothers’ Gilded Palace Of Sin, and later the first two Parsons solo records: GP and Grevious Angel, released in 1973 and 1974 respectively. These in turn led him back to the even more elemental, traditional music of legends like George Jones, Hank Williams and Merle Haggard. ‘I was curious to find out who these country singers were that these people were covering,’ he later said.3

  What he discovered was not the glitzy, rhinestone-clad kitsch of Kenny Rogers or the faux-authenticity of Boxcar Willie, but raw, powerful music steeped in simple, emotional phrasing. The central tenets of country music – the romanticising of the mundane realities of domesticity; the elevation of the simple man and woman to mythical status; the way that heartfelt and often painful emotions were laid out plainly and unashamedly; the unique mixture of bar-room machismo and bedroom self-deprecation – all appealed to Declan and would slowly start to inform his songwriting. Mary, hailing from a family steeped in the showband culture of Ireland in which country music is revered, knew her Hank Williams from her Hank Snow and would have been something of a kindred spirit along the way. And with Declan and Mary embarking on a relationship which sometimes seemed to echo that of George Jones and Tammy Wynette in terms of its emotional volatility, the music must have made just that little bit more sense.

  * * *

  Flip City continued to progress. By 1974, the band and the friendships within it had developed sufficiently for Declan to leave Ross and Sara’s home in Twickenham and move in with the rest of the group, who were living together at a shared cost of £32 a month in a semi-detached house at 3 Stag Lane, Roehampton, on the fringes of Wimbledon Common in south-west London.

  By now, Declan was working at the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics company on Wales Farm Road, north Acton,14 operating an IBM 360 computer in a small office next to the factory. He was generally left to his own devices, trying to stave off the more dispiriting bouts of boredom the job brought on.

  Although he had slowly become a competent guitar player, especially adept at working out particular parts and sticking to them, Declan was not confident when it came to improvising; the band decided they needed another guitarist to fill out the sound and began holding auditions.

  Steve Hazelhurst had moved to London from Cumbria in 1971, seeking the gold-paved road to rock ’n’ roll glory. He failed to find it, to the extent that he was even passed over in the first Flip City audition. However, when the guitarist initially chosen didn’t work out, the band called Hazelhurst back to see if he was still interested. He was, and with Mich’s workmate Dickie Faulkner also joining on harmony vocals and percussion in early 1974, the five-piece band started to click.

  The vibe Flip City were searching for was a uniquely American alchemy, a laid-back, seamless groove which bands like Little Feat, Clover and The Band could produce with deceptive ease, and of which Brinsley Schwarz were the leading British practitioners. This particular collection of young, pale Englishmen, however, found it somewhat less easy to replicate. They were just one of hundreds of pub-rock bands in London at that time, and their setlist reflected their lack of originality. ‘We totally copied the blueprint of the Brinsleys,’ said Declan. ‘You had to have one R&B song, one country song, a few songs you had written yourself, a Dylan song. It was totally nicked from that.’4

  Under Ken Smith’s guidance, Flip City began finding gigs around London: the North Pole pub in North Pole Road, W10; Southland College in Wimbledon; a street festival in Fitrozvia; even a residency at the highly sought-after Kensington Tavern in Russell Gardens. A true landmark, the Kensington was where future Attraction Pete Thomas first laid eyes on Declan, when he came to see Flip City play at the behest of his friend Ken Smith. The drummer of London pub-rock stalwarts Chilli Willi and The Red Hot Peppers, Thomas walked out after about thirty seconds. ‘I think he came to see our worst-ever gig,’ said Declan.5

  They would often open with ‘Pontiac Blues’ from The Youngbloods Good ‘N’ Dusty LP. ‘Loverman’ by Redwing was also a regular, alongside Clover’s ‘Sound Of Thunder’. More conventionally, there were usually a couple of Sam Cooke songs – often ‘Bring It On Home To Me’ and ‘Another Saturday Night’ – sitting cheek by jowl alongside Dylan’s ‘It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry.’ The songbooks of Smokey Robinson, Mose Allison, Chuck Berry and Jesse Winchester were all plundered; the only overtly country song – played in tongue-in-cheek, bluesy call-and-response style – was Hank Williams’ ‘You Win Again’. There was no image. In keeping with the ethos of the day, it was simply five scruffy working boys in jeans and shirts who wanted to let the music do the talking.

  As well as continuing to immerse himself in the deep well of classic American music, throughout 1974 Declan continued to improve his writing. Very few of the songs that he had played with Rusty had survived the transition; now he was writing with a band in mind, simpler songs driven by smart words, kiss-off sentiments and a tougher rhythmic dynamic. The first MacManus original most of the band recall hearing was an older song called ‘Exile’s Road’, a sparky travelling narrative with a sweet uptempo tune and swift chord changes. Lyrically, it was inspired by his grandfather’s travels and touched on the émigré themes that Declan would later return to in ‘The Deportees Club’, ‘American Without Tears’ and ‘Last Boat Leaving’: ‘My best friend he took a trip/ While playing for his money on a cruising ship/He sailed across the ocean on a big ol’ liner/ All the way to Rio and across
to China.’

  While ‘Exile’s Road’ had its distinctive moments – the pay-off line concludes, ‘You gotta sell the saddle when the horse is dying’ – it didn’t amount to much, glued together by a clunking introductory guitar riff which kept returning to the fray with all the subtlety of a day time game-show theme tune. Nonetheless, it was suitably accomplished in both construction and execution to impress his peers.

  Like Allan Mayes before them, his new band members were immediately aware that Declan’s songwriting talent had already developed far beyond the conventional case of the aspiring singer-songwriter whose ambition heavily outweighed his ability. And indeed, heard next to Flip City’s other original material, such as Steve Hazelhurst’s lumpen, derivative ‘On The Road’, ‘Exile’s Road’ started to shine just a little brighter.

  It was jauntier than the majority of Declan’s more recent material. The hit-and-miss poetic images of the year before were almost entirely gone, and the beginning of a more caustic world view was beginning to creep in. The Springsteen-fronts-The-Drifters groove of ‘Please Mister, Don’t Stop The Band’ was crammed with screeds of words, some of which he managed to assemble into clever lines: ‘They took away all of your paper money/Better learn to laugh if you wanna be funny,’ he snaps, and nearer the end he chides again: ‘Better take your chances ’cos you don’t get many/ Better take your turn or you don’t get any.’ But despite the welcome fuck-you tenor of the lyrics and the tone, the overall result was directionless.

  ‘Sweet Revival’ was better, based around the slick funk riff of Van Morrison’s ‘I’ve Been Working’ and featuring Declan urging the object of his attentions to seize the day: ‘Better do some of your living before you get old and grey.’ The tone is bullying here, rather than cajoling. And later, ‘The only time that you got is the time that you got now.’ There was even a memorably uplifting chorus.

  Other songs written around this period included the rambling ‘Wreck On The Slide’ (containing the line ‘I feel like a juggler running out of hands,’ later to surface on ‘Welcome To The Working Week’), ‘Flatfoot Hotel’, ‘Baseball Heroes’ and ‘Imagination (Is A Powerful Deceiver)’. Furthermore, Declan was already writing the material that would end up on his first two records: ‘Pay It Back’, ‘Miracle Man’, ‘Living In Paradise’ and ‘Radio, Radio’ were all taking shape in one form or another.

  ‘Miracle Man’, which appeared as the second track on My Aim Is True, was originally called ‘Baseball Heroes’, a fast-paced, humourous tale recounting the escapades of a struggling baseball team who are ‘Sitting on the edge of a hometown ledge/Always waiting for that final run.’ ‘Baseball Heroes’ had been suggested as a title by Ken Smith; Declan took it and ran all the way to home base. With wisecracking, Chandler-esque lines like: ‘He pulled a Lucy from a Lucky Strike pack,’ he was happily indulging his love affair with Americana and American English, and the song is a short slice of fun.

  Later, he changed the words completely and announced to the band that ‘Baseball Heroes’ was now ‘Miracle Man’. The opening stanzas are virtually the same, but this time around the mood is darker. Now the tongue-in-cheek scenario of a struggling baseball team has been transposed to signify a struggling relationship (‘I put my best foot forward and fell on my face’). Only the chorus refrain and the line ‘I never knew that so much trouble was resting upon reply’ would survive the final transition to the My Aim Is True version. Alongside the change of words, the song had now been turned into a criminally slow shuffle, a fairly straight imitation of The Band in ‘Up On Cripple Creek’-mode.

  ‘Radio, Radio’, meanwhile, started life as ‘Radio Soul’, a title which again came from Ken Smith, along with a few scrappy lyrics which Declan worked into something ‘singable and meaningful’. ‘Radio Soul’ was as close as Flip City had to a signature tune; people who came to see the band would often identify it as the one song that stood out. It also sums up the basic differences between Declan MacManus and Elvis Costello, and between Flip City and The Attractions.

  Although melodically virtually identical to the ’78 version of ‘Radio, Radio’, the ’74 incarnation of ‘Radio Soul’ is lyrically very different and moves at a gentler pace, with a Spanish-style sway and a rhythmic acoustic guitar underpinning it. More crucially, the early version is a straightforwardly affectionate nod to the wireless, rather than the withering attack it later became: Here, the celebration of ‘the sound salvation’ is distinctly non-ironic. ‘One thing we’ve got too much of/Is trouble, guess you know that’s true/ What we need is a little music/So we’re here to entertain you.’ The music tries to match the sentiments by contriving to conjure up a laid-back, good-time, west-coast feel. All very mellow, very mid-’70s.

  In contrast, the ’78 version is a snarling riot of guitars and organ underpinning Costello’s vehement anti-establishment jibes. This time the band is fighting tooth-and-nail to cut Costello sufficient slack to contain his outpouring of disgust at the fools ‘trying to anaesthetise the way that you feel’. The stuttering, characteristically new wave intro bookends the whole thing for added drama. It is effectively the same song as it was in 1974, only this time very conciously manipulated and choreographed – contrived, even – to tie in with a new public persona and the prevailing mood of the times. And with an absolutely white-hot band behind him.

  It would be an exaggeration to claim chameleon-like qualities on his behalf, but Declan MacManus became very aware of the best way to present his material for maximum impact at each stage in his career. He would later claim to have written songs such as ‘Different Finger’, ‘Watch Your Step’ and ‘New Lace Sleeves’ – all three appeared on Trust in 1981 – in the mid-’70s, although no Flip City member recalls hearing them. It could be that Declan was already consciously compartmentalising his musical life, stockpiling his more sophisticated or genre-specific material and only handing over songs he felt would suit the band’s more straightforward style. If this was the case, it certainly wouldn’t be the last time he kept his choicest cards close to his chest.

  The songs were strong, but still derivative. He was listening to Randy Newman’s Sail Away and Good Ol’ Boy, Van Dyke Parks’s Discover America, Little Feat’s Sailing Shoes and Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, Joni Mitchells’ Blue and Court And Spark, Lee Dorsey’s Yes We Can, Steely Dan’s Countdown To Ecstasy; Allan Touissant, Gram Parsons, John Prine’s epnoymous 1972 album, The Band, Van Morrison and Bruce Springsteen, among many others. Vocally, he had developed a characteristic and highly stylised American drawl, which contained trace elements of Van Morrison and The Band’s Rick Danko15 in particular, both singers who placed the emphasis on soul-baring emotional resonance rather than technique or a detached stand-offishness. ‘“We gotta sound desperate!”,’ Ken Smith recalls Declan saying. ‘He really loved that desperate sort of sound. If he heard it on a record, he’d really pick up on it. I remember one afternoon down at the house, me and him sat and played a load of albums, and we dissed about everybody apart from Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison.’

  Indeed, a live version of one of Flip City’s best original songs, ‘Imagination (Is A Powerful Deceiver)’, recorded at the band’s penultimate gig at the Red Cow in Hammersmith in November 1975, shows the extent to which Declan was apeing Morrison, right down to the extended, declaimed repetition – ‘Turn out the light!’ – at the song’s conclusion, a characteristic Morrison trait which can be heard to full effect on his 1973 live masterpiece, It’s Too Late To Stop Now. At the Red Cow, Declan’s impassioned imitation merely earns him a smattering of polite applause, a fair barometer of the kind of fervour that Flip City were failing to generate.

  He also went to see one of Bruce Springsteen’s now legendary 1975 shows at the Hammersmith Odeon. Joining him was Ken Smith, who remembers how Declan was immediately impressed by the emotional impact of the music. ‘Springsteen started off with “Thunder Road”, and after that first number Declan turned to me and he said, “He’s done it. He’s done it!�
��. Straight away. That was it.’

  Aside from playing and attending gigs, most of the activity centred around the house in Stag Lane, propelled by the kind of intense, late-night arguments common in most shared households. Declan quickly became the in-house agent provacateur on all subjects from politics, abortion, football and – of course – music. He loved to talk, and could argue the rest of the house under the table, but the atmosphere was usually lighthearted. ‘It was a laugh,’ says Hazelhurst. ‘He had a great sense of humour. We always used to joke about Declan’s taste in food. He’d suddenly emerge from the kitchen with a peanut-butter sandwich with blackberry jam with tomatoes on it. Really weird stuff.’

  The behaviour was pretty restrained for a group of young men in their late teens and early twenties living together and playing music, but Declan – along with everyone else – was working full-time and it seems that partying was far from uppermost in his mind. He could never handle his drink, anyway. ‘We used to go out and have a pint occasionally, but it wasn’t an inspiration,’ says Ken Smith. ‘He sometimes used to like drinking Jamesons [Irish whiskey], but he needed watching after that. Drugs I never saw him take. Ever. He was more interested in getting an album by somebody and listening to it. He got quite worked up about Steely Dan at one point.’ Some might argue that this was indulging in an altogether more dangerous pastime than excessive drinking.