From Wikepedia
THE SHIPS (formerly The Ships in the Night, formerly The Thrill) was a rock group formed in Luton, England, in 1983, by vocalist Francis ‘Fran’ Mulvey and guitarist Robbie Goulding, with Sarah Thérèse (‘Trez’) Sherlock and her twin brother Seán.
Sarah Sherlock, Mulvey and Goulding met, aged seventeen, at Stanton Polytechnic College. ‘We were three innocent urchins cast into a freak-show,’ Mulvey has written. ‘Outcasts get pushed together.’ Drummer Seán Sherlock, a former classmate of Goulding’s at St Joseph’s Catholic Boys’ School [citation required], was an apprentice electrician and fitter. He remarked in an interview with Rolling Stone in May 1989: ‘They only asked me to join the band because I had a car.’
Fran Mulvey, born in Vietnam (date unknown), was found abandoned in Quang Ninh province aged about ten days. Among a group of child-refugees brought to Britain by UNICEF, he was fostered by an Irish couple in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. His adoptive father was a night watchman at Maltby Colliery, and, following redundancy, worked as a refuse collector for Sheffield City Council.
Robbie Goulding, the band’s guitarist, was born in Dublin. Aged nine, he and his family emigrated to England following the death of his sister in a road accident. Goulding’s father, a keeper at Whipsnade Zoo, played cornet in the Jim Connell Memorial Trade Union Brass Band. Goulding’s mother worked in catering at the Vauxhall Motors plant in Luton.
The Sherlock twins were born in New Cross, south London, in 1963, to an Irish single mother. Aged fifteen, Sarah won the overseas section of the All-Ireland competition for traditional fiddle, as well as the prestigious Royal Academy Scholarship in cello and composition. Her brother’s teenage interest in Jamaican ska music, 1960s Beat groups and especially R and B ‘lit a fire in me, I don’t know why. He’d be coming home from the record fairs with these boxes of scratchy albums: The Small Faces, The Action, The Creation, The Smoke, John’s Children, The Skatelites, the whole ‘Mod’ thing. A lot of it, I didn’t even like. I was mad into classical, and then, you know, the folk. But there’s stuff you put in your head lights no fires at all. The Who gave me something to burn. Like Mahler. Or the blues. When you’re young, you’ve a flamethrower for a heart.’ [citation required]
Following chaotic and poorly attended appearances on the local New Wave scene of the 1980s (‘They opened their set the way dynamite opens a safe’ – Phil ‘the Funk’ Philpot, What’s On in Luton), the Sherlocks and Goulding abandoned college and moved to London, where they were soon joined by Mulvey, then battling a heroin habit. (‘Battling is putting it a bit strongly,’ he remarked in one interview. ‘Perhaps lightly shooing it away with a fan.’)
Their self-released debut cassette The Thrill of it All (And the Worry Afterwards) was praised by influential BBC broadcaster John Peel. His endorsement led to a deal with independent label Johnny Too-Bad Records. A single ‘Glimmertwin Buddy’ was released in August 1984 but failed to chart. Fran Mulvey left the group and moved to Ireland where he worked as a builder’s labourer. Unbeknown to his colleagues, he attended a night course in record production at the Dublin Institute of Technology and began song-writing under the pseudonym ‘Thomas Crawley and Susannah Sambrooke’, penning tracks that would ultimately be recorded by Meatloaf, Tina Turner and Rod Stewart. Some years later, in interviews with the London and New York media, he claimed to have ‘joined the Irish Christian Brothers’ during this time, or to have been ‘living in Warsaw with a painter.’
The remaining trio worked with Jerry Dammers of The Specials as producer on a number of songs and supported U2 on part of their Unforgettable Fire British tour in November 1984. A double A-sided single comprising ‘Angel of the Sweetshop’ written by Mulvey and a cover of the Boomtown Rats’ ‘Neon Heart’ was released and charted at 87 in the UK Top 100. Mulvey rejoined the band but controversy ensued when they refused to mime on Top of the Pops, a decision that caused their label to drop them. The self-released EP, Talking in Bed, proved unsuccessful. (‘A pointless, joyless, braying eructation of po-faced, auto-erotic belligerence’ – NME.)
The group moved to the East Village, New York, continuing to live together ‘like The Monkees in their telly show’ according to Seán Sherlock. (‘Yeah, we got on each other’s nerves. You bet your life. But in them days, I had the patience of Stalin.’) They signed to independent Urban Wreckage Records and began demoing material with emergent rapper Death Row Fever as producer, but the project was soon abandoned.
They toured extensively, playing club dates, support slots and ‘Irish’ festivals. (‘Small towns mainly,’ Seán Sherlock recalls. ‘Plug in your electric toothbrush and the street lights dimmed.’) The group broke up in this period [citation required], but in February 1986 material they recorded over the preceding year was released as the album The Art of Losing. The single ‘Why Can’t You Forgive Me (For Wanting You)’ was heavily promoted by college radio and became a huge hit. The album went on to sell nine million copies, garnering for Sarah Sherlock and Fran Mulvey the coveted Ivor Novello Songwriting Award, and two Grammy awards for the band. They undertook North American, Australasian and European tours, headlining the Glastonbury Festival. On 5th July, 1986, they opened for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at a concert in Central Park for the rededication of the Statue of Liberty. Estimates have put the audience at 800,000. ‘Devil It Down’, penned by Mulvey, was released in October 1986 and topped the American and British charts. In Japan, Ireland, Germany, and Italy, it has been registered as the second-highest-selling single of the 1980s.
But their public appearances became less frequent and increasingly erratic, culminating in a disastrous live interview on British television’s Channel Four, during which Fran Mulvey and a fellow guest, veteran actor Oliver Reed, came to blows. ‘We were in a somewhat literary condition around that time,’ Goulding wrote, in a chapter entitled ‘Shipwrecked’ from an abandoned memoir. ‘Essentially, I hadn’t slept in a year.’
Their third and final album, What Are You Saying? was released in December 1987. Near the end of those sessions, at New York’s Electric Lady Studios, the group recorded a 92 second improvisation, known as ‘Take B-one-eleven’ or ‘Cloths of Heaven Blues’, intending it for the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ but it was not included in the final cut of the movie. A rare test-pressing of the piece is greatly prized by fans and dealers.
Controversially, on the eve of a sell-out world tour slated to kick off at the Bernabéu Stadium, Madrid, in January 1988, the group announced in a two-line press release: ‘’THE SHIPS are over. If they ever existed. Choose your own way of being killed.’
Solo albums from the Sherlock twins appeared, but Sarah Sherlock’s Sure Thing, Bilbo (guest appearances from Annie Lennox, Steve Earle and June Tabor) and Seán Sherlock’s Montauk Sound, featuring vocals by bluesman Taj Mahal and rhythm guitar from ska veteran Jah Jerry Haynes, though garnering warm reviews, sold poorly. Fran Mulvey’s Glitterball Farewell, released under the pseudonym ‘Victoria X’, went quadruple-platinum in the United States, Britain and Japan, the identity of the singer only being revealed to the public a year after the record was released. Mulvey played every instrument and supplied every vocal, in addition to producing, engineering, designing the cover artwork, directing all four animation videos for singles from the album and subsequently writing an orchestral arrangement of nine of its songs for the Kronos Quartet with the Berliner Philharmoniker. The single ‘Your Beautiful Funeral’ reached top five in seventeen countries. Fran Mulvey remains the only male artist to have ever been nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Female Vocalist. A much sought-after producer, arranger and songwriter, he is equally known for his reclusive lifestyle and total shunning of publicity. His foundation is thought to have endowed a Technical College in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India, and has been reported by The Sunday Times as supporting numerous humanitarian projects in Vietnam, but his office makes no comment on this or any matter. He has not granted an interview in almost twenty years.
On July 27th, 2012, Robbie Goulding and the Sherlock twins reunited for a concert in Dublin. They would never play together again.
The Thrill of it All is published by Vintage, priced £8.99.
The series will culminate with a podcast of Joseph O'Connor in conversation with Martin Doyle, Anna Carey and Sorcha Hamilton, which will be pre-recorded in front of a live audience in association with the Irish Writers Centre, Parnell Square, Dublin, on Wednesday, September 2nd, at 7.30pm. The recording will be followed by a Q&A and there wilbe live music. Admission €5, €3 concessions, to include a glass of wine. http://irishwriterscentre.ie/
Competition
The Irish Times has 12 copies of The Thrill of it All to give away. To enter, email your answers to the following three questions to bookclub@irishtimes.com by Tuesday, August 25th. The first 12 correct entries randomly seelcted will win.
1. The Thrill of it All is the name of a song by which real-life band?
2. What is the name of Joseph O’Connor’s debut novel?
3. Ghost Light by Joseph O’Connor is about which famous Irish writer?
