Dark Streets

Am I a Real Boy Now?

I talked last week about hearing Shane’s voice and the Pogues for the first time and what it did to me all those years ago. I immediately wanted to play the music, but I had no money for instruments, so I just took two strings off my acoustic guitar, tuned the remaining four like a mandolin, and started to learn. By the time I showed up to my Dad’s place and he’d gifted me the promised Christmas Mandolin, I knew 8 or 9 jigs and reels as well as a bunch of Pogues tracks.

But look: the mandolin wasn’t that challenging; when you’re a guitar player, it’s just like learning to pluck a small goofy guitar. But when I finally picked up the accordion a few years later, I was hunting much bigger game. I could hack songs on the piano, but a sideways squeeze-piano where the other side is a hundred incomprehensible buttons? Oof.

But I had to learn. The accordion is the best folk instrument. Everybody knows that. Deep down. Only the knuckle-dragging troglodytes who listen to the Real MacKenzies disagree with that. It is a one-person party, a wedding band and a funeral band all in one instrument. And this is why, over the years, I’ve been grumpy-to-furious at “folk punk” bands who get up on stage and disrespect the genre by featuring an “accordion” player who can barely play chords. That’s a hell of a tradition you’re shitting on there, Brad.

So over the years I’ve slowly but surely gotten better, in small, faltering steps, at playing the accordion. A few months ago, I was sailing about on ye olde internete, and I came across a NYC Pogues Tribute band, “Dark Streets”. Out of the blue I messaged Cait, their bass player, asking her if I could play for them. We made a couple of faltering attempts to find room for me, but given that they have an actual accordion player (as well as a mandolin player) this was going to be tricky. Things fell through and we lost touch.

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Then, last week, Shane died. And tribute gigs needed to be booked ASAP. This was important. After all, Shane often said that New York was his favourite city, and someone around here had to step up and do him justice. Not in eight weeks when some dumb venue was free and the wounds had all healed over. Now. And Dark Streets’ accordion player couldn’t do the first one at Keane’s Irish Pub. And all of a sudden I was in. I had two days to practice 40 songs. And there was no set list, just a list of 40 songs, 30 of which would be played in some random order. FUCK.

Oh did I mention I am constantly taking care of a three year-old and also I have a job? Yeah. So I snuck in a few hours of practice in between teaching a small child to skate and teaching 20 year-olds what an invalid argument is. Yet, to be honest, I was mostly just hoping my instincts would save me.

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Because let me tell you about playing fast instrumental parts on the accordion, live. There are two roads you can travel, the road of joy and the road of pain.

The road of joy is when you manage to stop worrying, turn off the critical part of your mind, get hit a few notes and just let the music flow through you, very much like that cosmic energy from that little-known indie film series, The Force™. The road of pain is when you get nervous, miss a couple of notes, lose your positioning and your bodily posture, start trying to do too much, and end up a dissonant, sweaty mess who has entertained no-one and who is forever stained with shame.

Can you guess which road I have always traveled when playing instrumental accordion live? Yeah. “Out, damned spot! out, I say!” The stain is real. So when I got into the car and started driving to the gig, I was a bit of a wreck. This wasn’t just any gig. This was the first live tribute to Shane MacGowan in his favourite city three days after he’d died. To fuck this up would have been to betray basically everything that I stand for.

And my nemesis song was on the list: Bottle of Smoke. An absolutely magnificent song, one of my top-3 songs, but with an instrumental part that is extremely challenging. Here’s a link to a live version of the song, starting at that wonderful, awful, bastard of a part. Terry Woods and James Fearnley fly around on it but you can tell that even they are straining.

And it didn’t help that the one time I actually went up on stage with Terry Woods and played his “Gartloney Rats” on the tenor banjo with him (in Ottawa in 2004), I’d screwed up a major part and felt shitty about it for weeks.

So I was very nervous. And when I got in the car to drive to the gig, I hit “random” on my chosen Auditory Streaming Service (ASS) and lo and behold, it played “Roll Northumbria (Loud Version)” from our most recent album. I listened along, amused, but when it was done something extraordinary happened. The algorithm kicked in and a cover of that same song of mine came on, by one of my shanty singing heroes, David Coffin:

I had not been aware of this cover and am still gobsmacked. It’s seriously enough to make you religious. My hair stood on end the whole rest of the drive. It was as though the universe itself… or perhaps a cigarette-stained hand from beyond the grave… was reaching out, patting me on the shoulder, and saying, “you’re all right, kid.” I mean I was literally just writing in here about what it means for punk-folkers to have their songs included in the actual folk music world. Confidence, restored.

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So I got to Keane’s full of vim and the place was rockin’. I struck up a convo with the older bartender, and, of course, he’d served Shane many drinks back in the 1980s. Many wild stories I won’t repeat here. And then, as I sat waiting for the rest of the band to arrive, Luke Kelly’s iconic version of A Town I Loved So Well came on, and myself and a bunch of the bar started singing along:

And I recalled that very first Pogues song ever released opens with the following verse:

In the rosy parks of England
We'll sit and have a drink
Of VP wine and cider 'til we can hardly think
And we'll go where the spirits take us
To heaven or to hell
And kick up bloody murder in the town we love so well - (“Transmetropolitan”)

That’s genre continuity for ya.

The band were wonderful and supportive folks, I got up on stage and strapped that monstrosity on, and started to play. And I… traveled the road of joy. Things were fine. My fingers knew what to do. Had a great time with the ballads and easily made it through the classic bangers, Waxie’s Dargle, Streams of Whiskey, etc. In general we sounded a lot like the Pogues and that’s a hell of an achievement for the whole band. Well done, Dark Streets!

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But wait! I know you’re all shouting at your screens. Did you manage to play Bottle of Smoke?

It didn’t show up until the second set, and I was pretty sweaty and I’d just completely fucked the intro to a song (“Sayonara”). The singer called out the song, I pointed to the sky like an NFL kicker lining up a 60-yarder, and I slammed into the opening riff. And once the song kicked in everything was great. I obviously missed a couple of notes in the tough part but fuck it, Fearnley misses notes in that part in the video I linked above. But amazingly, for much of the song I was able to look up from the keys and smile around at the band, just playing those frantic, beautiful notes from muscle memory, enjoying the crowd and the energy. I couldn’t stop smiling.

So thanks to Shane, and thanks to David Coffin, and to Luke Kelly, and to all the other Folk Music Gods who took time out of their busy schedules that evening to guide me through my first proper gig as an accordion player. After all these years of trying, I might finally be a real boy.

Paid subscribers, here’s a badly shot video of us playing Farytale of New York: