The Boys Are Back in Town

My sixty-minute tape ran out a while ago, but we're upstairs in the Ha'penny Inn and Ghost Of An American Airman's Alan Galbraith and Dodge McKay are reminiscing about Alan's first guitar. If memory serves me, they were eleven, it was plastic, and Alan's Mom was less than thrilled.

Up until now, you see, Alan had gone through the yearly must-have phases so predictably that you'd have thought Dr. Spock was slipping him a few quid on the sly. Mom didn't mind the electric trains at all, and didn't even mind when the enterprising young Alan gathered all his once-prized possessions together and hocked them to fund his weekly 75p guitar payments. She just figured the guitar, like everything that had come before it, would be replaced by another whim next year.

Mom was more than a bit concerned, however, when the following year he replaced it with a better guitar (that wasn't hard!), and did the same thing the year after, and the year after that . . . The fact that he would later replace it with a bass was little consolation.

"I wanna, I wanna, I wanna," the fully-grown Alan whines, mimicking his former self. "That's how all this got started."

Alan had the good fortune of being neighbours with Thin Lizzy's Eric Bell and also of being a presumptuous enough kid to make a proper nuisance of himself. Bell taught Alan how to tune a guitar and play his first chords, and today Bell's former pupil is astounded by what must have been admirable patience on Bell's part. From the sound of it, young Alan was no Mozart.

"When the day comes that Eric Bell is telling this story," he says today, "I'll know I'm getting somewhere . . .

Of course, Ghost Of An American Airman are already getting somewhere. It's just that they're getting somewhere, well, somewhere else. Now signed to American label Hollywood Records after the dissolution of a deal with Chrysalis that wasn't worth the paper it was written on, according to the band, they have been touring the US - predominantly the mid-west - for most of the last year. So while crowds in Wichita, Kansas - one of the places where the band have developed a particularly strong following - are buying the band's latest album Skin, and singing along at gigs, punters here in their homeland are kinda bemused.

"Years ago when we were doing the whole Belfast band thing," Alan explains, "trying to either hit England or hit Dublin and get a record deal and all that stuff that everybody wants and nothing was happening, our manager basically said 'let's go to the States'. So we managed to go and we actually got a publishing deal and went back again and got a record deal."

"Everytime we went from then on," singer Dodge adds, "something seemed to happen. It was always another step up as opposed to treading the boards all around England and Ireland and coming up against a brick wall."

"It's an old rock'n'roll cliche, I know," Alan adds, "but everybody wants to do something at home, so as much as anything else that's why when we saw that it was possible to do gigs here, we thought we should. I don't know if it will be as good as it should have been, meaning that I don't know how well things will come together on such short notice. But we've got good people putting it all together and we're looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to playing the Rock Garden tonight even though there'll be nobody there at half twelve!"

Indeed, a Tuesday night late-night gig by a band whose name a lot of people haven't heard in years, is unlikely to pull the same kind of crowd the band are used to getting in the States. When they tour America this fall, they'll be playing in clubs with capacities of a thousand and up.

"Last year we toured there for nearly five months non-stop," Alan explains, "and what we tried to do was every four or six weeks go back to the same club and what we saw was crowds genuinely doubling each time.

"In general, Americans don't take as long to come around. They make their mind up dead quick. In the first few songs of the set they'll decided whether they like you or don't, and if they like you they'll go for it."

Later that night, as if to prove Alan's point, a typically sceptical Rock Garden audience will tap their feet through Ghost Of An American Airman's set, while ten to twelve people who turn out to be Americans and Canadians take it upon themselves to dance fervently up by the stage.

"American audiences seem to have a greater sense of loyalty as well," Dodge adds, having already mentioned that earlier in the evening he was approached by a guy from Wichita who happened to be in Dublin and had seen the band four or five times in his hometown. He said he would be attending the gig that night. "Irish audiences tend to forget," Dodge continues. "Well they probably forgot about us anyway."

Then to my tape machine, tauntingly: "Helloooo, we're baaack!!"

"Lock your windows," Alan adds, laughing menacingly.

Seriously though, unless you're a Winnebago, you're free from threats of bodily harm at the hands of Ghost of An American Airman. Cruising caravans, on the other hand, beware! The band's six months on the road were spent in one particularly unfortunate Winnebago which they returned in far from pristine condition.

"We did a Blues Brothers thing," Alan says laughing, "and gave it back to the rental company totally fucked."

"The guy sort of walked around it and said 'ah, a few scratches here and there'," Dodge explains proudly, "and as soon as he was going to look inside we bolted for the car and spilt!"

"It wasn't that we actually trashed it or anything," Alan qualifies, "it was just that there had been up to eight of us living in it at any time - cause we picked people up and stuff, the old American thing, all of a sudden you end up with this hanger-on for a week or two."

"That's one thing about this band that I think is really good," Dodge proclaims, "We're weirdo magnets. We attract so many weird people it's amazing."

A particularly notable weirdo first encountered the band when she strode past their Winnebago in typical business woman gear. She was pretty. They noticed. That should have been the end of the story. But later that night, after the gig, there was an ominous knock on the Winnebago door.

Alan laughs in anticipation as Dodge tells the story: "It's the same girl but she's all like a rock chick this time. And we're thinking 'oh my god', and she comes in and says (in his best American) 'Are you guys going to a paaarty?' and we're like 'no'. Then she says 'Hold on, I've just got to get something from my hotel room', and she comes back with a bottle of Jack Daniels and says 'Let's goooo!!'"

"In the course of the drive to where we were staying that night," Alan takes over, "she went from being like 'let's party' to singing these Patsy Cline songs in this terribly wobbly voice and showing us tatoos she had on all these weird places on her body.

"It was really funny. It wasn't tongues hanging out stuff. It was like this woman is seriously deranged. She's getting scary. She looks like the kind of woman who's going to go for the kitchen knife.

"As you said," he turns to Dodge, "weirdo magnets."

Ah, yes, those wacky Americans. Europeans just love to talk about them.

"Stories from everywhere are always the extremes," Alan says, "They're the ones that stick in you head, so you're right - if we sit here and we tell you five or six stories from being on the road in America, they'd probably all be about wacko Americans. But that's because when you come back they're the only ones worth telling. The other ones are like 'well, there were 453 dead normal Americans who didn't really do anything'."

Come on, let's hear about the normal Americans.

"Well, they stood around and drank a lot," Alan humours me, "and they applauded and enjoyed the gigs which is what was important to us at the end of the day."

To their credit, neither Alan or Dodge remember the image that was actually tatooted on the American's mammary glands, just that the sight was rather unpleasant.

"She'd just got them," Dodge says, wincing, "so they were all bruised and it was like uckh!"

"She probably got them between walking past in her suit and coming back for the party," Alan surmises, laughing. "Maybe she thought it would help, I don't know."

Still, let's be frank here. After five months on the road, thousands of miles away from home, is taking comfort in the arms of a woman with bruised tatoos and a wobbly voice that horrible an option?

"Oh well, you have to sleep with them all," Alan says non-chalantly. "You're obliged to. You'd be going against the whole spirit of rock'n'roll if you didn't."

Then more seriously for at least a second, "I think that's a bit of a myth. I mean at least for us because we're dead ugly and stupid. The only women who ever give any indication of throwing themselves at us are the scariest women in the world.

"Maybe I'm in the wrong band," he says, faking worry. "Does that happen to other bands?"

I nod.

"I've been hanging around with the wrong people," Alan says disappointedly, but buddy Dodge offers some consoling words: "You see, it's just that they're chick magnets. We're weirdo magnets."

Aside from their Northern accents making them particularly popular with the ladies, Ghost of An American Airman's Belfast origins have given them a leg up on young American bands playing the same circuit. Their origins, however, only carry them so far, since the band aren't especially keen on letting political discussions dominate their American existence.

"All we can say," Alan explains, "is that anybody who wastes their time caring about such things is doing just that, wasting their time. And anybody who is actually doing anything physical and active about it is just a wanker who should fuck off and leave the rest of us alone. And as far as I'm concerned, I just want to play in a wee band and see if anyone likes us. I don't know anything. I was just born there. My mother just gave birth to me in Belfast."

And mine gave birth to me in New York. Thus, as an American in Ireland, I've always found the partisan, calculated violence that dominates headlines here harder to handle than psychos with machine guns opening fire in fast food chains. Have the band had the opposite experience?

"I actually find that random violence easier to comprehend as well," Alan says, "only because what you've got is some complete fucking psycho who just went off the rails. It's totally abhorrent but it's not hard to fathom. To me it's a lot harder to fathom somebody going home pleased with a day's work of killing people."

Therapy?, also from Belfast, are going about conquering America in a similar fashion and Ghost... have bumped into them on numerous occasions. "We sit around and talk about ridiculous things like 'Look at us, isn't this a laugh? Some other asshole is paying for us to come here and lounge about thinking we're good. And long may it continue'."

And long may people pay me to sit around and talk to people who I think are good.

"Hey, nobody paid us any money to come here and talk to you!," Alan exclaims, excited enough now that he bangs into the table. "I knock your tape deck over in disgust," he says, echoing Monty Python then setting my walkman back to its upright position.

"We're huffing now," he says, "We want money for this."

"No we don't," Dodge asserts unconvinced, "we've got things to tell the world."

"Yeah," Alan offers, "drink lots and fall over."