Complicated Shadows (5 page)

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 poem
⁹
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.

Rusty played eighty-eight gigs in 1972, the year in which Declan could justifiably claim to have first become a working musician. But it was never a band based on a great social bond. ‘We
never did the girl thing,’ says Mayes. ‘I don’t remember him ever drinking. I don’t remember any rock ’n’ roll camaraderie, but then I don’t remember us
ever having an argument, either.’

They played mostly to sympathetic audiences where people would listen, or at least not interrupt, but they quickly became used to a kind of polite apathy. ‘Ninety per
cent of the room when we were playing was full of other musicians,’ reckons Mayes. ‘The only people who weren’t musicians were wives, girlfriends or someone who was a friend of
somebody. There was no one booking us. We’d just go and play for nothing. There was no actual drawing power of people on the street.’ It was essentially background music.

* * *

In the early summer of 1972, Declan sat his final exams and left Campion. He escaped with one A-level in English, insufficient for college or university even if he had shown the
inclination. Virtually everybody who has ever worked with him over the years picks up on his daunting brainpower and ability to assimilate information at an astounding rate; The Brodsky
Quartet’s Paul Cassidy describes his brain as ‘turbo charged’, while composer Richard Harvey even goes as far as to rate him as ‘one of the three or four most intelligent
people I’ve ever met’. Clearly, he would have done better in his exams had he been inclined to put the hours in.

But life was overtaken by music. At the same time as he was enduring his final exams, Rusty secured a weekly Tuesday night residency at the Temple Bar on Liverpool’s Dale Street, which
would have been far bigger news to Declan. The venue became a home-from-home for Rusty, their weekly spots continuing virtually uninterrupted from 6 June right up until Christmas.

The end of school meant the beginning of a greater sense of freedom. Over the Thursday, Friday and Saturday of 13–15 July, he and Allan drove down to London, staying with Ross and Sara. It
was the first time Allan had met Declan’s dad, and he remembers him being ‘off the radar’ compared to other people’s fathers.

‘He had a copy of
Playboy
on the coffee table and loads of LPs and could talk about ‘King Of The Road’. It was
just too bizarre for me. Dads were
supposed to be: “Get your bloody hair cut,” yet this guy was: “Grow your hair, son, and have you heard the new Grateful Dead album?” It was just too weird.’

While in London, Rusty played gigs at the New Bards Folk Club, the Half Moon in Putney and the Troubabdour in south Kensington, supporting Ralph McTell, Bridget St John and Swan Arcade for free.
Significantly, over the same long weekend they also took in an all-nighter in London featuring Lou Reed and Brinsley Schwarz.

In 1972, Brinsley Schwarz had just released their third album,
Silver Pistol.
Their first two records –
Despite It All
and
Brinsley Schwarz
– had been
lumpen, progressive affairs, and the band were looking to change direction and take on board a neater, sharper sound. They were managed by the garrulous, no-nonsense Irishman Dave Robinson, who
worked as tour manager for Jimi Hendrix in the late ’60s. Robinson subsequently went into PR, and ‘masterminded’ the Brinsleys’ disastrous launch in New York in 1970, when a
planeload of British journalists were flown over to watch the band play at the Filmore East and had returned distinctly unimpressed. Despite that blip, in his capacity as manager and a promoter,
Robinson was an essential component in creating the nascent pub-rock scene in London in the early ’70s, helping to turn Brinsley Schwarz into the movement’s leading band and their
singer and bassist Nick Lowe into perhaps its finest songwriter.

One night in 1971, Robinson had stumbled upon a San Franciscan band called Eggs Over Easy playing at the Tally Ho! pub in Kentish Town, north London. In such inauspicious surroundings, they had
shown him the light. ‘It was Eggs Over Easy who I essentially stole the idea of pub-rock from,’ he admits. ‘Here were four guys playing three-minute songs, one after the other,
great singers, great playing, great style.’

Knocked out by what he heard, Robinson whisked the band off to meet Brinsley Schwarz at the group’s communal house in Northwood, Middlesex. Eggs Over Easy played for – and with
– the Brinsleys all night, and by the morning they had passed on the torch. ‘The penny dropped that
here were people who were real musicians, real songwriters and
they could teach the Brinsleys,’ says Robinson. ‘I was doing my best to drag them out of the Stone Age of English prog music. And they did learn. Nick Lowe learned very quickly, and it
came from that.’

Robinson helped Eggs Over Easy build a following at the Tally Ho! and spread the word around town. He began getting the Brinsleys gigs, then another outfit called Ducks Deluxe, until the Tally
Ho! swiftly became the hub of the new scene. In this way, the classic pub-rock prototype of the band who could play a bit of everything that was deemed righteous and good – country, R&B,
blues, rock, funk – was born.

Soon there were hundreds of them, but the rejuvenated Brinsley Schwarz were at the top of the tree. From the goodtime, bar-room piano roll of ‘Dry Land’ through the Hammond-soaked
‘Merry Go Round’ to the final, slipperwearing lilt of ‘Rockin’ Chair’,
Silver Pistol
was a laidback, home-cooked slice of whimsy and charm, very much of its
time. It hasn’t dated particularly well, and yet placed in context its Anglo take on the rural American sound was significant.

For Declan – hopelessly smitten with The Band and the charms of Americana, and looking for something closer to home about which to get excited –
Silver Pistol
was a
watershed. ‘If you really want to know the album that changed Declan’s life, it was
Silver Pistol,
’ says Mayes. ‘We played everything off that album live.’
Indeed. At the final Rusty gig in June 1973, the duo played no less than eight Brinsley Schwarz covers, including four from the record.

The band became Declan’s new obsession. He went to see the Brinsleys whenever he could, both in London and Liverpool, and some time in 1972 he bumped into Nick Lowe, as he was preparing
for a show at The Cavern Club in his favoured fashion. ‘We were playing at the Cavern, and we were in The Grapes across the road, sitting there having a cocktail before getting ourselves
set,’ Lowe later recalled. ‘He came in, and somebody said, “Look, there’s that weird-looking geezer who’s been at a few of our shows.” And I thought,
“Well, it’s about time I bought
him a pint and I introduced myself,” because he never used to come back stage or anything.’
²⁸