“How’re you doing?”: The crazy experience Guy Garvey had with Willem Dafoe
Tom Waits once said, “New York, of course, is to be in endless surreal situations”. On his very first trip to the Big Apple, Mr Waits aficionado and Elbow singer Guy Garvey found out just how true that statement can prove to be.
Arriving in New York for the first time in 2002 on his 28th birthday, Garvey found himself experiencing his own series of surreal situations. Remembering his first bite of the Big Apple in a 2014 conversation with Pete Paphides for Mojo, Garvey recounted the story, “It’s 6am in Chinatown, and I’m jet lagged to fuck. Me and Pete [Turner, Elbow bassist] are sharing a room. I go outside, look at the buildings and my head’s mashed with how impressive it is. Even the fire escapes look amazing”.
“So I hail my first cab, get in, and I say, ‘$15 that way, please.’ I don’t remember where he dropped me off but as I get out, the first thing I see is a drunk Willem Dafoe in a leather jacket, careering down the pavement with a big grin on his face, and he sees me and he’s like, ‘Hey! How’re you doing?'” At this point, Garvey suggests that the Spiderman-era Dafoe hit him with a couple of finger guns to go with the big grin before carrying on his way.
“So, my mind’s blown already,” Garvey continues. “Then I start walking back and there’s a coffee shop, so I’m thinking, I’d better go in and write some of this down. As I sit there by the window, a truck pulls up opposite, like a flat-back little truck, and it’s a scab hunter, a one-man portable picket line. And I’m watching in astonishment as this guy inflates a 30ft rat outside a bank that sacked a woman for being pregnant. Then he gets out a megaphone and starts explaining why he’s there.”
Undeterred by the situation and intrigued by the unfolding events, Garvey decided to engage with the man: “So I went across the road and asked him if I could buy him a coffee and find out a little more about this situation, and he came back to the cafe with me. So I had my first friend. Straight away, I sort of had confirmed what I suspected after I’d read Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. You could live here your whole life and never really know the place.”
This wasn’t the only experience Garvey had with New York City that inspired him to stop and write down what he experienced there.
Ten years later, on a 2012 trip to the city, he kept a diary of his time there, which he later used to write the Elbow song ‘New York Morning’. Explaining the song in a segment on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon – recorded at the iconic Radio City Music Hall in the heart of New York City – Garvey said the words in the song “describe the New York skyline in quite a lot of detail; talks about pillars, posts, signs and rusted water towers. Lots of geographical features” and that the piano and horn line that permeates the song, and which rises and falls at irregular intervals, was developed to represent the various heights of buildings along the New York skyline.
Unfortunately, there are no references to Willem Dafoe’s finger guns or any giant inflatable rats to be found in the song, but there is still time for Elbow to create that masterpiece.
