Complicated Shadows Read Online Free PDF Page B

sixteen-year-old integrate into whatever was
happening in Liverpool at the time.
    Allan Mayes was one of the boys involved with The Medium Theatre, and much more interested in playing music than getting embroiled in the group’s loftier artistic pretensions. A year older
than Declan, Mayes first bumped into him at one of the band’s get-togethers. ‘I think he was just very uncomfortable; basically his dad had forced him into it,’ he recalls.
    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 songsby 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