VOYAGE AROUND THE EIGHTIES
Joseph O’Connor paints a convincing portrait of an era in his chronicle of The Ships, a band with Irish roots who go from small-town hostility to megastadium success
O’Connor superbly evokes the struggles of a naive and yet determined band to survive on the road
The Thrill Of It All
Joseph O’Connor
Harvill Secker €17.95
As a town, Luton is not with historical significance. Not only was the Irish footballer Liam George born there on the Marsh Farm Housing Estate, (his mother from Dublin, his father from Saint Lucia) but as a reserve player with Luton Town he made an indelible mark on Irish soccer in the 1998 UEFA Under 18 Youth Championships. In a penalty shootout against Germany he scored the decisive penalty to give Ireland a victory that – for all the hype – remains the highest ranking official tournament Ireland has ever won.
While other teammates like Richard Dunne flourished, this penalty kick proved as good as it got for Luton’s Liam George – a gentleman who endured a succession of injuries while drifting into non-league obscurity. Life hasn’t been much kinder to Luton Town F.C. – a club Roman Abramovich would never buy, because oligarchs rarely fly Ryanair and therefore remain unaware that Luton exists.
But Luton is an inspired location by Joseph O’Connor to start his chronicle of four young musicians – of various degrees of Irish descent or inclination – who embark on a chaotic, alcohol-and-creative-curiosity-fuelled odyssey that takes them across several continents on musical and personal journeys of self-discovery: a voyage they could never have imagined when three of them first meet amid the unlovely corridors of Luton’s Polytechnic.
There is Robbie Goulding – the book’s narrator – who for five unforgettable years played guitar with The Ships: a Luton quartet as close and quarrelsome as any family who know each other’s secrets. There is Trez (real name SarahThérèse Sherlock) the beautiful and humanely astute cellist, whose future as a bookish, warm-hearted academic is hijacked when she befriends Luton Poly’s two greatest misfits. There is her indispensable, indestructible twin brother, Sean, who – throughout the band’s existence – never bothers to officially join it but pretends to simply fill in as their drummer (in between fixing electrical appliances with his uncle) until his sister’s crazy mates find a permanent drummer.
Finally there is Fran Mulvey – the least Irish biologically and yet, in some ways, the most possessed of certain Irish traits – a Vietnamese refugee transported to Britain as an orphan who was disastrously fostered by a West of Ireland couple. He has few memories of the Vietnamese orphanage and as his sole happy childhood memory is of being welcomed by locals during a visit to Cong in Mayo, in some interviews he playfully gives his nationality as ‘Viet Cong’.
Fran is the J.D. Salinger (or any other fabulously rich, obsessively private recluse you wish to name) of this book. O’Connor skilfully allows us to glimpse him twice in the opening pages of this, his eighth novel.
We see him firstly in an expensive tux, as an honoured guest at Barack Obama’s inauguration. Then we glimpse him as the penniless 17-year-old misfit who Robbie Goulding befriends at Luton Poly: a deliberately provocative cross-dressing waif, coated in mascara, vulnerable and yet hardened from the boxing ring, already using silence as his first ring of protection.
Robbie and Fran are drawn together by unorthodox, experimental musical tastes; by a desire to embrace every illicit elixir available anywhere that isn’t Luton and by buried traumas they never talk about.
In Robbie’s case it is the death of his young sister, which brought his working-class family from Dublin to Luton to escape from painful memories. In Fran’s case, it is not just his violent past with his foster parents but his absence of a past: the fact that he exists in a void which only his imagination can fill.
His imagination and his mesmeric, contradictory and inflammatory personality are not the sole forces behind the almost accidental rise of The Ships to international fame. Each member has also brought their sweat, insight and musical guile to create the sound of The Ships. But it is Fran, as front man and chief lyricist, who comes to personify the band and who abruptly brings its existence to a halt, by revealing new sides to his personality – a passion for litigation and absolute control, an entrepreneurial streak to out-tiger the Celtic Tiger and an ambition to become a global solo superstar, unencumbered by his former bandmates and one time soul-mates.
O’Connor’s book brilliantly captures the grim world of 1980s student politics and the tentative attempts of friends to create a sound: the first steps where busking is more terrifying than playing sellout stadium tours later on.
He superbly evokes the struggles of a naïve and yet determined band to survive on the road in Britain and
America, sleeping four to a van and playing to tiny and hostile audiences. Robbie’s Irish parents are convincingly drawn and though bewildered by the homeless bisex- ual waif whom their 17-year-old son brings home in Luton, they still make room for the teenage Fran with instinctive kindness. Therefore if this novel is about music (and music buffs will enjoy its myriad musical references) it is also about family and friendship. While the brief voyage of The Ships is wild, it is the longer and deeper lives of the former bandmates and their families that truly flesh out this convincing portrait of an era. This novel is shot through with humour, patois and all the human contradictions that make characters truly memorable. Don’t just buy the book: petition the publishers to release a soundtrack.