James Fearnley - Here Comes Everybody

Shane and Shanne. (Justin Thomas)

Shane and James. (Peter Anderson)

Shane at Cromer Street. (Iain McKell)

Jem and Marcia at the Empire State Building. (Jem Finer)

The Wag Club. (Deirdre OMahony)

Behind the Pindar of Wakefield. (Bleddyn Butcher)

The Irish Centre. (Paul Slattery)

Red Roses for Me beer mat

The Office. (James Fearnley)

The Clarendon Ballroom. (Paul Slattery)

Andrew, Jem and James in a hotel room in Munich.
(Darryl Hunt)

Andrew, Darryl and Debsey at Cibeal Cincise, Kenmare. (Deirdre OMahony)

The Boston Arms. (Deirdre OMahony)

On the tour bus. (James Fearnley)

Dirty Old Town video. (Clare Muller)

Reader board. (James Fearnley)

Cait, Frank, Spider and James in Hoboken.
(Photographer unknown)

James and Spider. (Photographer unknown)

Jem, Costello, Cait and Andrew at Tent City.
(James Fearnley)

The Mayor of Derrys office. (Lorcan Doherty)

Joe Strummer and his guitar. (Steve Pyke/Getty Images)

The Palladium, Los Angeles. (Steve Pyke)

Steve Lillywhite, Kirsty MacColl and Joe Strummer at the
Town and Country Club. (Steve Pyke/Getty Images)

The video for Fiesta. (Darryl Hunt)

Corams Fields Nursery. (Marcia Farquhar)

Bullet train in Japan. (Biddy Mulligan)

Danielle and James. (Biddy Mulligan)

Bob Dylan tour backstage pass

Video shoot for Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah.
(Bleddyn Butcher)

Joe Strummer at Rockfield. (Darryl Hunt)

Andrew, Jem, P.V. and Darryl at Rockfield.
(James Fearnley)

One

Shane had gone to his room, stuck phosphorescent planets on the walls and drawn the curtains. Since checking into the Pan Pacific Hotel, on the seafront at Yokohama where we had come to perform at the WOMAD festival taking place in the Seaside Park nearby, none of us had seen hide nor hair of him.

We had arrived in Yokohama from Tokyo the day before, after a brief stopover in London, on our way from a festival in Belgium, the last of a series of European music festivals. Increasingly, our performances had become a matter of determinedly turning a blind eye to Shanes fitful, fickle behaviour on stage. To keep time, we had resorted to foot-stamping. To find out where we were in a song, we had been forced to commit to prolonged, wretched and discomfiting eye contact.

I was adrift with jet lag. Incapable of staying awake any longer, Id been waking up just an hour or two after nodding off, to turn the television on and watch CNN, the only channel in English. In the last few days a hundred thousand people had rallied outside the Soviet Unions parliament building, protesting against the coup that had deposed President Mikhail Gorbachev. The Supreme Soviet had suspended all the activities of the Soviet Communist Party. That the Eastern Bloc was disintegrating seemed apposite to the situation in which we found ourselves.

Yokohama was blazing with sunshine. Against the blue of the sky, the exterior of the hotel was white as sailcloth. It had been a glorious day. I had spent it plying between the hotel and the rumpus of the festival, the hubbub of musicians, techs, drivers, roadies, in the souk of the backstage area, among the caravans and canvas. I adored, in the afternoon sunlight, Suzanne Vega, her hair magenta, accent Californian, pallor Manhattan. I tucked into the crowd with Jem to watch the Rinken Band, a headbanded, muscular bunch from Okinawa. We laughed out loud at their choreography of flexed biceps. They played, to our delight, instruments called shamisens. The thwacks of the plectrum were like firecrackers. It was a joy to spend the day at such a festival, relishing the summer sunlight and the warmth of the evening. I ended the day in jet-lagged, sake-infused awe of Youssou NDour, having forgotten for the time being about Shane. Now, as the afternoon turned to evening, I was waiting in my room for the phone call to summon me to a meeting in Jems room, to talk about what to do. Though there had been no single catalytic event to join our minds and harden our will regarding Shane it was just time.

I pictured Shane up in his darkened room somewhere in the hotel as a freakish combination of Mrs Rochester and Miss Havisham, with The Picture of Dorian Gray thrown in. Whenever I thought of him alone in his room, a feeling of impending catastrophe sank my otherwise buoyant spirits. His solitude had started to symbolise the human condition of disassociation, irreducible loneliness, the separation of person from person. What I imagined him doing up in his room, condemned to wakefulness and watchfulness and a horror of sleep the wall-scrawling, the painting of his face silver, the incessant video-watching made me fear for us all, for humanity somehow, that all we were heir to was eternally unfulfillable desires and the inevitability of death. I was jet-lagged, was my excuse. Jet lag, along with hangovers, beset me with anxieties that loomed larger than maybe they should. I was filled with worry too at the improbability of putting on a reasonable show tonight, let alone the gigs we had coming up in Osaka and Nagoya before going home.

I had had no desire to go up and see him, no compulsion to drop by. I used to before the Pogues started. His flat was situated at a sort of nexus of my itineraries to and from guitar auditions. I had been drawn to the unmistakable, mardy power he had. Once the Pogues started, I entered into near-constant orbit round him, a decade in which the exigencies of life on the road, the cramped minibuses, the confined dressing rooms, studios, rehearsal rooms, enforced our physical proximity.

Over the past couple of years I had found I didnt want to be near him. Mostly I didnt have to be. The Pogues continuing success had done away with the tiny vans in which we used to ply the motorways and autobahns and autoroutes at the beginning of our career. By this stage in our lives together, our success had furnished us with relatively commodious tour buses, with a kitchen, bunks, a lounge in the rear. We occupied single rooms in more or less luxury hotels. We played venues, more often than not with ample facilities backstage, with sufficient space for Shane to find a room for himself. By now, I found myself not so aware of Shanes gravitational pull. I had come to consider myself free of an incumbent responsibility for him, only to be beset by the opposite: a revulsion, a self-protective termination of whatever duty I thought I should have felt towards him, particularly on stage, when the evidence of the torture of his worsening condition over recent years, as he seemed to hurtle to his own self-destruction, had become manifest. I had ended up hating him.

The phone rang. We were to meet in Jems room in half an hour. The occasion for a meeting had become rare enough to be a novelty. It had been several years since we had abandoned our skills at decision-making, suffering as they had from a modicum of success: the hiring of a manager, the signing of a record contract, the engagement of lawyers, an accountant, an agent, the venue for meetings having become the polished desks in lawyers premises or the corporate sterility of record company offices or a melamine table with a tray of water, still and sparkling, in one of the conference rooms of the hotel we were staying in. The cumulative effects of our success seemed to have detached us from the ability to husband our creative source.

I was tempted to get excited about the prospect of doing business, taking our careers in hand and sorting things out. Reminded of the circumstances that had prompted the meeting though, I chastised myself. Summoned to the meeting this afternoon in Jems room, at a time of day when, given the line-up at the festival, and given the almost pristine beauty of the weather, I would probably have been out at the festival site, whatever excitement I might otherwise have enjoyed sitting around in Jems room with my compadres, my brothers-in-arms, my adoptive family, was eclipsed by a feeling of sickness and doom.