For the Good Times by David Keenan

Author:David Keenan [Keenan, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780571340538
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2019-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

Did you ever hear of lagging? Lagging. It’s a musical thing. Rebel Songs, is what The Swan says to us. Tonight, my friends, we’re going to get us some right old Rebel Songs, he says, and he tells us about the basement of this pub run by The Boys (God’s Boys, he calls them, and he winks at us), where they play this new style of song, this new style of music that came out of The Maze and Her Majesty’s pleasure, and that was sung into bowls, into drainpipes and toilets and along echoing corridors, late at night, this music of longing and of sad sufferation, The Swan says to us, this music of fading and of lagging, he says, sure you’ll love it, he says to Tommy, did you never hear the Irish psalm-singing, he says to him, but Tommy says that he just cannot imagine singing Como down a toilet bowl.

The pub is on the Prince of Wales Road, it has changed its name, but back then it was called The Butcher’s Hook. We head down the stair, into the basement, and the place is filthy and smells of pish. There are thick black curtains hanging down, blocking off certain areas. This is the fucking orgy scene forever, I says to Tommy. Only there are no birds, Tommy says to me. I hadn’t noticed that before, but it was all men (it was fucking ominous) and at the end of the room there’s a DJ set up, a dark-skinned guy with the dreadlocks name of John The Gun.

Fuck me, Tommy says, it’s Bob Dylan. The master of ceremonies, is how The Swan introduced him. Sure, how did you get your name, Tommy says to him, and John The Gun’s face is all covered in sweat, and the sweat is glistening on his dark skin, and the bright white of his eyes, and he says to Tommy, my weapon, that’s all he says, and Tommy is just stood there, like that, as the music kicks in, and John The Gun starts with these sounds, like the crackle on an old Como record, coming out of the past, he has an old tape recorder that he is playing Rebel Songs on and making them repeat in strange rhythms and next to him there’s an old guy in a bunnet playing the accordion and the first man up is an old Irishman with a circular scar around his head, all covered in rashes and wearing an old brown suit, he takes the mic and starts to sing, there are thirty or forty men in the room, all stood right in front of the stage, the Irish diaspora, they call them, boys as down on their luck as any of us, with their battered hats and their stained suits and their echoing, lamenting music, and now he is singing of place names, and it is like seeing Bethlehem written in letters on a road sign in the Holy Land, it is

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