The last night of the Daddy’s Little Girl Tour and your man Del Brogan is headlining at The Shamrock. Look at him, Barney says, drinking before he even gets onstage. Right enough, your man Del Brogan is sat there at a table with a clatter of birds, throwing back the Bushmills and Coke and chasing it with pints of green. Your man Como would never be seen with a drink in his hand, Barney says, never mind chucking it down in full view before the show. We’re standing in the lobby with Jimmy The Grunt, looking through the door at the debaucheries. Doesn’t he have a fucking dressing room he can go to? Barney says. He’s probably skunked out his brain too, he says. There are boys coming over, slapping him on the shoulders and getting their photo taken with him. Who are these cunts? He thinks he’s fucking Frank Sinatra, Barney says, and he was one dissolute cunt, as we all know. What the fuck is dissolute? Frank Marby says. Frank Marby was there too. Mad Frank Marby was on loan from Athlone for a job. I think McManus might have been there too: bellend. Dissolute means that you are dissolved in booze, Barney says. Right, Marby says, right. Dissolute cunt, he says. Como never fucking cursed, Mad Frank Marby says, and a drink was never known to pass the cunt’s lips. Plus he was always faithful to his wife, Barney says. Then Jimmy The Grunt pipes up. He’s standing there behind the merchandise table and for the first time in living history he doesn’t just make this disturbing fucking grunting noise but he actually comes out with a fully formed sentence: youse are talking shite, the lot of youse, he says to us. None of youse have ever seen Como in real life, he says to us. The last time I saw him, he says, he had a fucking glass of whiskey in his hand and he was toasting the crowd, plus and he was half-blocked into the bargain.

Everybody is stunned. Jimmy The Grunt is talking, and he’s claiming to have seen Como in real life, with a drink in his hand, and half-blocked. After a couple of confused seconds Barney shouts him down. Bullshite, when the fuck did you see Como? he says to him. At the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow, 1975, on the tenth day of the royal month of April, Jimmy The Grunt says, and on the occasion the crowd rushed the stage, he says to us, and when Como came back on to calm things down he was wearing a tartan bunnet and toasting the crowd with a glass of whiskey and he was very, conspicuously, half-blocked.

We just stood there: vanquished. Fuck me, Mad Frank Marby says, who knew? You should stick to fucking grunting if all you’re going to do is go around slandering Como, you carnaptious wee bastard, Barney says to him, and the lot of us walk off in a daze. You fucking think you know someone, Barney says, shaking his head and pulling his lips tight like a maniac.