Incentivos aplicables en el Sector Turístico

“So you headed down south Left your old hometown

Relocated so far away from the real world But where is the real world?”

I STARTED GOING down to New Orleans more often after the 2001 tour. The tree-lined streets like

Esplanade and Chartres reminded me of North London, where I grew up. The community seemed liberal and friendly, unlike the America that had frightened me when I first started touring there with the Kinks in the ’60s. On a later trip I watched the Mardi Gras parade, with its superb marching bands, and the floats, with their outrageous costumes and dazzling choreography. On one occasion, Nicholas Cage was on the float that led the parade because, like many of his Hollywood compatriots, he had invested in property in the city and was a frequent visitor.

I originally went to New Orleans partly for songwriting inspiration and partly for a holiday. An old girlfriend once said to me, “You have a career as a songwriter, you can live anywhere. The world is in your head anyhow,” because she wanted me to make New Orleans my base. Yet I could not commit to living with her in the way she wanted. Touring relationships are fine when the hotels take care of the housekeeping, but once you check back into the reality motel the dust appears on the furniture, the laundry piles up, and there is no room service to clear away the dirty dishes.

When Rory had once driven me around small-town America in her beaten-up Chevy, she gave the impression that she was a “travel anywhere” wild romantic with a spirit of adventure, but deep down she was the normal American girl; I got the impression that she needed the pension plan, health plan, and, more than anything else, needed to pay off her student loan—something that looms over most American college graduates. I was beginning to wonder where I fitted in as part of that package.

“Hoping I can find my dream

In New Hampshire or New Orleans Find a place where I can stay

And once I’m there I’m never going away so

Hey hey hey

From Portland, Maine, to San Francisco Bay All across America

Along the Great Highway.”

Rory was bright with looks to match, but like so many others she had become attracted to the fake world of nightclubs away from reality. J.J. was a seasoned clublander, and was fortunate to have landed a good gig working in a decent club. Rory, on the other hand, might not endure the club scene

so well. She personified the blind innocence of the American dreams I’d always had. She was optimistic and forward-looking, the opposite of the pessimism I felt in the UK at that time.

“And even if the dream goes wrong

Still stay for the last song, another night another day One more chance to throw it all away still.”

Whenever I had a day off on the road before going down to New Orleans, we would sometimes drive around the particular city we found ourselves in, and I would fantasise about moving there. Maybe my life was being dictated by my songs and I didn’t know it. In my head we were the two characters riding along “The Great Highway” that was taking us somewhere—we didn’t care where.

“Bright eyes like wishing wells, Instamatic kiss and tell Optimistic self-belief, college girls with perfect teeth Technicolour realism in 20/20 vision

Animated multi-raced and always out there in your face Ooh la she can be cruel if you upset her

And life is not a road movie so wake up to reality.

Hey hey hey I’m driving on the interstate

All across America, along the Great Highway …

The great illusion it may be But always something else to see Always some little hick town

To pick you up when you are down Another day another shake

Melted with a slice of cake. At a jukebox in a smoky bar A girl stands looking at the stars

She’s dressed in denim wearing shades And outside is the Great Highway She sips a Coke walks away

It’s just a second in a day But all her culture’s on display She might be a dreamer

But maybe I’m a dreamer too Hey still searching for America Living the dream in America Along the Great Highway.”

That was the dream. Now I was living in a fake world, driving down a dead-end street, and if it continued this way I would be on a collision course with the real world.

THERE ARE ALWAYS TEMPTATIONS ON THE ROAD . When you’re in the spotlight onstage it makes you

seem special and invincible, which can attract people to you, but it’s not until they find out that you are an ordinary person with the same problems as everybody else that the lustre starts to fade. The concept of the road is freedom, and that very word implies a certain amount of cavalier behaviour, but being on the road in America is governed by one overriding factor: the distance. The sheer size of the landmass, the networks of freeways and interstate highways make it seem that there is no way home. Certainly in the pre-mobile phone era, the distance was an irresistible, unmovable reality. In England, traffic jams aside, there is no place that’s more than four or five hours’ drive away, but in the United States you are looking at up to five days.

My own father travelled in the course of his work and had an eye for the ladies on occasion, particularly after he had a few beers. Once, when my brother and I were infants, my mother knew my dad was having a beer with a certain woman; she put me and my baby brother into a pram, wheeled us into the pub, plonked the pram right between the buxom floozy and my dad, and exclaimed, “’Ere you are, darling, you take over and get on with it.” Reprisals on cheaters are easy when you live a street or two away from the offence, but they’re much more difficult when you are on another continent and subject to a time change. After a while, relationships that were once precious and cherished seem to lose their focus. Some guys on the road spend all day looking at family snaps and talking about their loved ones, to the ever-increasing boredom of their compatriots. Other tour members deliberately shy away from the family guys just to get a break from their own thoughts of the loved ones they miss back home.

Certainly in the generation I came from you would be considered sexually suspect if you never paid any attention to women. I am by no stretch of the imagination a pretty guy. I might write pretty songs, and I hope some of it rubs off on me as a person, but generally speaking, women don’t clamour to be with me. Met a girl once who stayed with me on the road for a week just to “see how you do it,” only to discover that the “it” she wanted to know about was writing songs. I had to disappoint her, because writing songs is much too personal.

So that’s the way it happened. It was not a case of me saying, “I am married: stay away.” In the modern age, with Google and other search engines, it is relatively easy to find out whether someone is married or not. Everybody has the ability to find out anything they want about whomever. The biggest handicap on the road is loneliness.

As Oscar Wilde once said, “Each man kills the thing he loves.” We all destroy; and I did but it had nothing to do with any woman. It was more to do with my accumulative errors. Mostly though, it was because of overwork.

I KNEW MY MARRIAGE BREAKUP IN 1998 was a mistake; the truth is that I never thought I would bond so

much with my daughter Eva while my marriage was falling apart. The day her mother left with her to live in Ireland, something fell apart inside me, even though I tried to keep on working as if it had never happened. I decided not to lose touch with my infant daughter and flew to Ireland to see her as often as I could. This went on for nearly three years and added to the work stress, but I tried to stay buoyant and remain an upbeat dad. When I returned to my empty house, my work gave me little or no consolation. I wrote a song called “Messages from the Republic” about my daughter trying to leave messages from the Republic of Ireland on my answering machine.

Now, my daughter was reaching pre-school age, and I was as determined as ever to stay in contact with her. More than anything else I wanted her to remember me as being a good dad. When possible, I would fly over to Ireland, pick her up at the airport, and then bring her straight back to England on the

next flight. We would stay in Surrey, where I would work, keep her entertained with DVDs, cook her food, and then read her bedtime stories. She was developing a slight Irish brogue, so I found myself putting on an exaggerated Cockney accent, which she would start to pick up after a few days. I was playing Professor Henry Higgins in reverse. This prompted Eva’s mum to complain that our daughter had returned to Ireland with a pronounced Cockney accent. I would drive Eva around the countryside while playing early rock and roll on the stereo, particularly Chuck Berry, whom Eva referred to as “Mr. Chuck.” As she bopped around in the back of the car, she screamed with delight, “Mr. Chuck is so funny, Dad; would I like him if I met him?” I thought about the great man’s reputation and pointed out that while his music is great and was inspirational to me, it would be best if she didn’t meet such a controversial rock and roller as “Mr. Chuck.” We also played Cajun classics, which Eva loved, probably because the violins and accordions resemble Irish traditional music.

Then during my next transatlantic flight I was half asleep and started to hear a voice in my head repeating over and over: “You have a career as a songwriter, you can work anywhere.” Nice thought. I could work anywhere, that was true, but I also needed to live somewhere. I needed to settle down. It wouldn’t be New York—the city was still in shock from 9/11. The Upper West Side of Manhattan was becoming less blue-collar, and corporate people were moving in. My next-door neighbour had been a window cleaner when I first stayed there; now his apartment was occupied by an investment banker.

Now I was literally living my life like a sightseeing tourist with a video camera, taking handheld shots of pretty local curios and sites of interest, while out of view there was a murder or a bank robbery or a police car chase in progress. I was oblivious to the big picture, only focused on what I wanted to see. I was carrying a small video camera at this time and filming everything I saw. I did shoot my shadow as I walked down the street with some friends one day, a sequence that turned out to be quite symbolic when I played it back. My shadow was there, but I was not. It was as though my whole life was in limbo without any sense of time or space, putting me almost in a fugue state. Nevertheless, I continued on my mission to discover the Crescent City. The streets of New Orleans bore names that evoked colour, romance, and musical history—the very things that attracted my band when we first toured America. The country that symbolised freedom and opportunity. How wrong we were.

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