Читать книгу Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive? - Tim Bradford - Страница 28

I’m trying to get to sleep in O’Shea’s Hotel, between O’Connell Street and the railway station, while downstairs in the ‘24-hour bar’ a dreadful singer/accordion player is murdering a few classic tunes and I’m praying that he’ll shut up soon. No such luck – ‘Rivahhhssss roon freeeeeeeeehhhhhhrrr’, ‘Dirrdi ooooooohl taaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhn’, ‘Fffffeeeeeeellllzzzzz ovathenraaaiiiiiiiiiiiiii’ etc., etc., come piling one on top of the other. I’d popped in earlier for a quick half.¹ There were a mixture of local people with cold, pinched faces and skint and harassed looking tourists sitting around fondling their itchsome facial hair, their tongues lolling into fizzy yellow pints of lager. Next to me were some lively ‘Europeans’, who seemed to know all the words to all the songs. Their leader, a Eurotourist archetype, was a big-boned man with non-designer stubble, in a Luftwaffe-issue lumberjack shirt and a post-post-post punk hairdo – bald at the front, brown and greasy at the back. He seemed extremely upset by the plight of most of the protagonists of the songs – his face was one of absolute concentration and conviction as he listened to the music. I decided he was called Klaus, even if Greek. The Erinese, the brandy-buttered maudlin sentimentality of it all was too much for me after half an hour or so. It reminded me of a Paddy’s Day in London a few years back, red-faced folk with tears in their eyes bawling out songs – this was Dublin for Christsakes, what had they got to be nostalgic about? I got up to leave and, after a few whispers and hand signals, one of the Eurogroup parked their big, denimed backside in my seat.

‘Noit?’ said the pretty dark-eyed receptionist, meaningfully, as I headed for the stairs.

Back up in my rooms I turned the light out and tried to get some sleep, but the singer seemed to have taken my disappearance as an affront and belted it out louder:

Singer: Let’s put the speakers up in the corridor outside the miserable git’s room, hey ladies and gentlemen?

Klaus the Possibly Greek Eurotourist: Ha ha, yesss, zat iss good johke! ‘Ze Vild Rover’, jah?

I flicked the TV on – the film When Saturday Comes,² starring Sean Bean and Emily Lloyd, was showing. In many respects the singer downstairs was a lot more entertaining than this terrible piece of British cinema.

‘Begorrah Jimmy,’ said Emily Lloyd’s character in a really crap Dublin accent and I just burst out laughing, though they were nearly tears. I wished I was more drunk, then it might seem more entertaining. By the end I realised I am perhaps unique in the world, having now seen the film twice.

I don’t know what happened to Emily Lloyd. She seemed to sort of disappear after being superb as the young girl in Wish You Were Here. Sean Bean was eerily watchable, though. He’s like one of the sleazy blokes who’d stand on the back of dodgems when you were a kid, never smiling, catching girls’ eyes. Perhaps one of his family was a horse person. The balladeer downstairs seemed to have turned it up another notch with Wild Rover (annoyspentarlmaemoo-niaaaahhwehssskkeeeeeunbbbbbeeeeeeeehhhhhhrrr), with the audience joining in now.

Klaus: Und itz no nay never vill I plahh ze vild rover jah?

Finally, as the music fades and the punters wander off to their beds, I drift off to sleep, day-dreaming of the pretty dark-eyed receptionist wearing a bikini made out of an Irish flag, singing the ‘Fields of Athenry’ to me while doing the back stroke in a gigantic pint of yellow lager, while Klaus is chained to some rocks below the surface (‘Help achtung, Englander, I cannot breathe … arrrrggghhhh … blob-babubblblblblbbl’).