Complicated Shadows (8 page)

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.

In stark contrast to the subsequent Stiff-styled image of the tweed-suited, horn-rimmed, eight-stone weakling who’d had not just sand, but an entire beach, kicked in his face, Declan was
actually a keen swimmer and still a fanatical football fan, physical interests none of the other members of the band shared. He had shed the excess weight of his Liverpool days and now had an
athletic physique, favouring over-sized denim dungarees and sporting medium-length hair with small, rimless glasses.

Into this fraternal atmosphere, the arrival of Mary at Stag Lane began to cause some serious inter-band conflict. According to both Ken Smith and Steve Hazelhurst, Mary was a fixture in the
house by early 1974, but at some point broke off with Declan and starting having a relationship with Mich Kent, who was also living at Stag Lane. Then in April 1974, Mary fell pregnant.
‘There was this thing going on with Mich which was all a bit hush-hush at the time,’ recalls Hazelhurst. ‘Then Declan and Mary got together again, and she became pregnant. Mich
and Declan were thick as thieves, but there was this triangle, and it ended up with Dec the victor and the father of the child.’

Some time after these emotional upheavals, Declan wrote his most heartfelt song to date, the pained ‘Imagination (Is A Powerful Deceiver)’. A clear attempt to write a ballad that
would do justice to The Band, it was his most straightforward effort to date to write from the soul, a stark look at a three-way love affair which – as
would soon become
common – portrayed Declan in the role of the embittered victim. Evoking himself as the man who got ‘caught up in a whirlwind’ and ‘got blown right out the door’,
‘Imagination’ seemed to be a pointed reflection upon the tangled relationship between Declan, Mary and Mich.

The song was also the first clear manifestation of the themes that would become more and more prominent as Declan MacManus moved towards becoming Elvis Costello. ‘I’m Not
Angry’ from
My Aim Is True
takes the same dark, domestic territory as its direct inspiration. Given that Mary was Declan’s first serious relationship, the mother of his child,
and later his wife, an argument could be made that his weary view of relationships and his antipathy towards particular women (as opposed to women in general) as expressed in his early records
could reasonably be said to stem from the events of 1974. With Mary, it would simply never be an easy relationship. ‘They used to have pretty strong arguments,’ recalls Ken Smith.
‘She had a pretty strong temper, as did he.’
¹⁶

The somewhat inevitable end result of the pregnancy came on 9 November, 1974, when Declan Patrick MacManus and Mary Martina Burgoyne married at St Margaret’s Catholic Church in
Richmond-Upon-Thames. She was nineteen, he was twenty. The groom listed his occupation as computer operator, the bride as airline stewardess. Bizarrely, Mich Kent was best man, all previous
differences apparently forgotten, and the rest of the band also attended.

Mary was nearly seven months pregnant on her wedding day. For two young Catholics in the early ’70s, a termination had probably never been a serious option. Indeed, Declan was vocally
opposed to abortion and has remained that way.

By the time their son Matthew – named in honour of
Declan’s grandfather, whose middle name he shared – was born at Queen Mary’s Hospital in
Roehampton on 21 January, 1975, the newlyweds had moved into the flat below Declan’s father’s house; Ross and Sara remained at 16 Beaulieu Close, while Declan, Mary and Matthew occupied
No. 15. Around the same time, Flip City made their second foray into the recording studio.

The band’s studio debut had been back in the summer of 1974, when one of Ken Smith’s music biz contacts had got them some ‘downtime’ at the BBC’s Maida Vale
studios. They cut through three MacManus originals – ‘Baseball Heroes’, ‘Radio Soul’ and ‘Exile’s Road’, as well as Steve Hazelhurst’s
‘On The Road’ – under the auspices of a well-heeled BBC engineer, decked out in a bright orange shirt and cravat, who would count the band in with a click of the fingers and
‘OK boys, let’s take a trip! One, two, three!’

Heard today, the tapes of the three MacManus songs illustrate clearly both his individual strengths and the weaknesses in the component parts of the band’s sound. The voice is instantly
recognisable: strong, expressive, perhaps slightly more nasal than it would become but containing the same idiosyncratic stylings as the one that kicked off
My Aim Is True
three years
later.

With the benefit of hindsight, there’s no particular gulf in the standard of his songwriting between 1974 and 1977; although lyrically he would develop considerably, Declan was already
gifted and confident enough to be making records. However, unlike many other artists who make a rapid and definable creative leap between their early amateur days and a professional career, his
artistic arc would be a steady upward ascent rather than a steep and sudden climb. The reason for this was almost certainly Flip City. The band was ragged, enthusiastic but amatuerish. They sounded
like what they were: a pub band playing for drinks and kicks.

As a means of getting the band gigs, the BBC demo tape was certainly adequate, but by the time they ventured into the studio above the Hope and Anchor pub in Islington in early 1975, Declan in
particular was looking for much more. ‘He was absolutely dead serious about what he was
doing,’ says Steve Hazelhurst. ‘He wanted the band to be
successful.’

The Hope was a regular stop in Flip City’s London itinerary. On the afternoon before a Saturday evening gig, Ken Smith had managed to secure some studio time from proprieter Dave Robinson,
who in between inventing pub-rock, managing bands and promoting gigs, ran a makeshift studio there.

Having helped Robinson move a piano up to the top floor, Flip City were rewarded with the chance to put down three tracks. Original drummer Malcolm Dennis had now left and a replacement had yet
to be found for the drum stool, so Flip City recorded with a long-forgotten session drummer from a band called Phoenix, whose talents were supplied by Robinson. The results – ‘Pay It
Back’, ‘Imagination (Is A Powerful Deciever)’ and ‘Radio Soul’ – were intended to showcase Declan’s prowess as a songwriter as much as present the band
itself as an entity.

In any event, the former aim was probably better realised than the latter: driven by enthusiastic but rudimentary saxophone, a driving soul beat and a structure clearly pinched virtually
wholesale from Van Morrison’s ‘Domino’, ‘Pay It Back’ was lyrically and structurally very similar to the later version that appeared on
My Aim Is True,
but
entirely different in feel. Lacking the album version’s loose-limbed swagger, the band instead attempted a fluid blue-eyed soul swagger in an early Springsteen style which they couldn’t
pull off, and which sat awkwardly against the vengeful sentiments of the song.

The assured – if slightly plodding – recording of ‘Imagination (Is A Powerful Deciever)’ was more successful, and can be heard on the bonus disc of the
My Aim Is
True
CD reissue. It was Declan’s finest song to date, and Ken Smith remembers an attempt to get the American blues singer and songwriter Bonnie Raitt to listen to it, with the aim of
persuading her to record it.

‘We went to Browns Hotel in Kensington with this reel-to-reel tape, but she had a cold and couldn’t come down, so we left it with the clerk at the desk with a strong promise that he
would give this to Bonnie. [The tape] might have
had other tracks on it, but it certainly had ‘Imagination’ on it, because that was the one we were trying to
sell.’

If Raitt ever did get the tape, she made no use of it, but it’s clear that Declan saw his future career as a songwriter as much as a performer, with ambitions and a drive which far
exceeded what he was doing with Flip City. From an early age he would have been fully aware of the financial rewards of song publishing, not least because both his parents were well versed in the
intricacies of the music business. The final track recorded at the session was ‘Radio Soul’. It remained both melodically and lyrically strong, but the band were still searching for the
right musical setting. It would take The Attractions to find it.

As Flip City continued to gig into 1975, it became more and more apparent that Declan’s attitude and improving songwriting was increasingly at odds with the laid-back, happily amateur
philosophy of the rest of the band. He knew what he wanted – and it wasn’t Flip City.

‘They were just the weirdest fucking band,’ recalls Dave Robinson. ‘I booked Flip City because I liked their manager Ken – very eager, very keen – but the band
couldn’t play at all. They never actually played as a unit ever, and you didn’t have to play that great in those days for people to feel it was all right. They were just musically
dyslexic.’

The inability of the band to adequately express his ideas teased the hostility out of Declan. During one live rendition of ‘Pay It Back’, Steve Hazelhurst’s light-hearted
introduction – ‘This is a song for all you thieves in the audience’
¹⁷
– was cut dead in its tracks by the furious singer: ‘He
just looked at me with this glower on his face. Obviously I’d said the wrong thing.’

Another case in point was ‘Flatfoot Hotel’, a set regular, and a long, labyrinthine and less-than-melodic trek through some obscure personal preoccupation: ‘And there’s
no forgiveness/And there’s no relief/’Cos I start off as the good guy and I end up as the thief.’ The end result sounded like a cross between ‘Hotel California’ and
something by Santana, only even less appetising than that sounds. It even
featured a drum solo. Declan was obsessed with getting the song absolutely right, but the band had
little enthusiasm for the track and never really got to grips with it.

Apparently based on real life characters at either the Three Fishes pub in Kingston or the band’s household at Stag Lane, it’s tempting to read the line: ‘So you came looking
for sweet romance/Did you find out what you were missing?’ as a dig at Mich Kent. The song piled allegory upon allegory until its eight-minute trek became not just tedious, but effectively
meaningless.

The numbing qualities of ‘Flatfoot Hotel’ were utilised to full effect on the night that Flip City played a private party at an expensive house in Purley in London. The partygoers
were a young, well-to-do media crew, merely looking for an excuse to dance and have fun. In other words, the kind of people that Declan instinctively mistrusted. In a typically single-minded
– or simply contrary – mood, he started the band off into the long trawl through ‘Flatfoot Hotel’. ‘It was always a set closer, but for some reason he wanted to start
the set with it, to shock the people who were all waiting to party,’ says Ken Smith. ‘I looked at people’s faces and I was worried about whether they were going to pay
us!’

Declan had no intention of being dismissed as another run-of-the-mill pub rocker, filling in time before promotion and a paunch set in. If the audience didn’t recognise his talents, then
he certainly wasn’t going to pander to them. ‘The attitude was already there,’ says Steve Hazelhurst. ‘It was like a stage persona, but it was more than that. The word
entertainment was anathema to him: “I’m not an entertainer. I’m not here to entertain people.” He used to go on and on that the whole world was full of apathy. He’d
say things like: “My ambition is to shake people out of their apathy. I want us to be so good that we scare people!”. I don’t think you could quite call it punk, but it was very
fortuitous the way it all came together.’

While the original Hope and Anchor tape was primarily an exercise in showcasing Declan’s talents as a songwriter, the band decided to reconvene on the fourth floor
of
Dave Robinson’s Islington studio in the late spring of 1975 with humbler aims: to put down the staples of their live set in order to secure more gigs. This time there were no heavy musical
instruments that needed moving, so they paid the priapic Robinson something along the lines of ‘£20 and a bottle of port’. With new drummer Ian Powling in place, the tape was a
live, first-or-second-take bash through four MacManus originals and four covers.