his friends to Manchester United and to Glasgow Celtic football matches, where he would have spent thousands of pounds on drink and drugs. He also brought some friends on holidays to Mexico, Jamaica, and other exotic locations and again footed the bill. Paddy Armstrong and he took a holiday in Goa, in western India.
One who was not a hanger-on but who was amongst the most prominent people in Conlon’s life in the early years after his release was Joey Cashman – a Dubliner and the tour manager of The Pogues. In September 2015, sitting in an alcove of the Marine Hotel in Dublin’s northside, Cashman raises his glass of vodka and Red Bull and says: ‘To Gerry Conlon – the bollocks!’ The glass does not reach his lips before an irreverent laugh erupts from him. Cashman has long grey hair that flaps over his left eye, a goatee beard, and he is dressed entirely in black, with winkle-picker shoes. ‘I loved the guy,’ he says. ‘Me and him, man, we were best buddies; if I were to tell the stories … I’m off seven drugs, you know: crack, heroin, ordinary coke, weed, uppers, downers – hey, I’m even off nicotine. Got there all on my own. When I go to the clinic, I insist they take a sample every week.’
Cashman brushes the hair away from his left eye, looks around and turns back. ‘Do you think he’s listening in?’
‘Who?’
‘Gerry.’
‘Course he is!’
‘Hey, Gerry-man! You’re still a bollocks!’ Cashman bursts into another fit of unfettered laughter. He is clearly enjoying reminiscing about his buddy. ‘I think, I can’t be sure, but I think I met Gerry for the first time backstage at The Palladium in New York on the day before Saint Paddy’s Day 1990, but I’d only time to shake hands with him and leave it at that.’ Later they met in a pub in London and afterwards went back to Cashman’s house off the Prince of Wales Road in Camden, where they traded stories all night. Cashman smiles when he talks about his friend from Belfast:
We might have had a line or two of coke, but we didn’t need it; we were both speedy people anyway. And me and Gerry, we clicked on so many levels, and then we became totally inseparable, so even when we were at different meetings, we’d still ring up during the day and make arrangements to go out that night. And if I could’ve talked for Ireland, he could’ve talked for the United Nations. But we’d some great laughs that night in my gaff. There was this one story that he thought was particularly funny.23
Joey explained that The Pogues had started working on their third album, If I Should Fall from Grace with God, in May 1977, and one of the tracks on the album was ‘Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six’, written by Terry Woods and Shane MacGowan. The idea for the song had come from Frank Murray, during a conversation with Shane MacGowan, and it was banned by the Independent Broadcasting Authority in April 1988 because it contained ‘lyrics alleging that some convicted terrorists are not guilty and that Irish people in general are at a disadvantage in British courts of law.’ Commenting on the ban, Murray said: ‘The Pogues will continue to write about what they want and we hope every other artist does the same.’ For MacGowan it was a challenge that he was more than willing to take on: ‘Banned for what? It’s straightforward police state repression of freedom of speech and its censorship.’ For the free-spirited Pogues, the ban had to be defied.
On 12 November 1987, The Pogues were playing Queen’s University in Belfast. Joey Cashman recalls:
For some reason, Frank Murray wasn’t with us, so I’m standing in for him. Anyway, I’m in my hotel room and I get a phone call, and a very stern voice says, ‘Are you the manager of The Pogues?’
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