Complicated Shadows (4 page)

‘I was fanatical about [football] in those days,’ Declan later recalled. ‘I was always a Liverpool supporter. I suppose my hero was Roger Hunt.’
¹¹

Hunt was soon fighting for heroic status with those other Scouse legends, The Beatles. The first single Declan had bought with his own money was ‘Please Please Me’, released in March
1963.
⁶
It was the beginning of an obsession, and not merely with the Fab Four. Although
With The Beatles
was his first LP purchase and he joined The
Beatles’ fan club in 1965, he was avidly consuming all kinds of pop music.

‘From the time I was eleven to sixteen – only five years, but five pretty important years in your life – I concentrated on pop music and the changing
trends,’
¹²
he recalled. He could afford to be choosy. His taste-buds, already sharpened on jazz and the classic American songbook, were highly
sophisticated for one so young. Initially it was The
Kinks, The Who, Merseybeat and classic Motown sides, rather than Buddy Holly, Cliff Richard or Chuck Berry. In his
mid-teens his tastes became even more refined, encompassing reggae and the songs of Burt Bacharach, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and Dusty Springfield.

Ross’s position with the Joe Loss Orchestra ensured that Declan had access to many record company acetate copies of the very latest singles before they were officially released to the
public. As Declan moved into his teens and became more aware of the inherent
nowness
of the classic pop single, it became a genuinely thrilling experience to get his hands on copies of the
newest sounds a couple of weeks before anyone else, made all the more exhilarating due to his good fortune in being a teenager slap-bang in the middle of the pop single’s peak years.

His record collection was soon far larger than the standard pocket money allowance of a child his age would normally permit, and unlike most people’s fathers Ross knew all the hip songs
spinning on his turntable. Not just the songs, but often the chords and the lyrics as well; he might even have been on nodding terms with the band. It was this innate good fortune that fostered
Declan’s sense of musical superiority, which endured through thick and thin. He didn’t look for – nor did he require – approval for what he was going to do with his
life.

‘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 reading 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.