Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. For an impressionable 13-year-old music fan, this was not a bad place to start.
The purchase was quite a palaver. I knew Sgt. Pepper was due to come out in the summer of 1967, so that January I went to the local record shop, Golden Discs in Stillorgan, and put down a deposit on it. This was the mighty sum of ten shillings, which I had saved from my Christmas present money.
I bought all my singles at the time at Golden Discs so the guy behind the counter knew me a little by then and was just as excited as me by the whole thing. I already knew a few of the song titles from the album because I had read about them in the NME, and had spent many hours wondering what ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’, ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ and ‘Within You, Without You’ would sound like.
The five-month wait for Sgt. Pepper’s release was intolerable, but eventually 1 June came round and I parted with the rest of the thirty shillings: a fortune for me, whose only income was an early-morning Irish Times paper round on St Thomas Road in Mount Merrion. Holding the album in my hands was overwhelming – it had lyrics written on the back, the songs all ran into each other and there were cardboard cut-outs of Sgt. Pepper’s band. It was all too much for me – so much so that I didn’t even rush home and play it straightaway. In fact, I think I even let Gerard play it first.
Even today, while it probably isn’t the Beatles’ best album, Sgt. Pepper sounds to me like a stone-cold classic, so you can only imagine the effect it had on me back then. Even my clueless teenage mind could tell they were opening up new possibilities in the studio, and the pre-Pepper ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ single is the one song I’d take to a desert island with me. The Beatles were changing everything in those days; they were instigating a massive cultural shift and I was desperate to be part of it.
By my early teens, one whole wall of the living room had been taken over by albums. There was no couch or shelf in the room and the piano had long gone. Albums were encroaching like a tidal wave of vinyl; there must have been at least five hundred propped up in stacks against the wall and I would constantly flick through them.
The other main source for hearing new music in those days was Radio Luxembourg and its dodgy, crackly broadcasts. I’d listen in late at night to DJs like Alan Freeman or Jack Jackson and all the bizarre sponsors’ messages. They used to play one advert to death: HORACE BATCHELOR, DEPARTMENT ONE, KEYNSHAM, SPELT K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M, BRISTOL. To this day, I have no idea what Mr Bachelor was selling.
Kid Jensen was the main man on Radio Luxembourg late at night and one week he interviewed a Dublin band, Skid Row, on his programme. The name didn’t mean a lot to me but it was still great to hear a local band talking on Luxembourg. I remember the Kid asked them all to introduce themselves, and when he asked Nollaig Bridgeman where he came from, instead of saying ‘Dublin’, Nollaig said ‘Dorset Street’ (with the emphasis on the ‘set’) in his thick Dublin accent. Don’t ask me why, but I loved hearing that. Another night, the Kid returned from the Isle of Wight festival and said the band who blew everyone away was Taste. That again meant a lot: the festival had boasted a line-up of heavyweights, yet the Rory Gallagher-led Irish trio were the talk of the town.
In 1970, Kid Jensen made a big deal on Luxembourg about the fact he was premiering the next John Lennon album. I waited up to 1 a.m. to hear the first track, which was ‘Imagine’, and the Kid messed up – he said, ‘John Lennon, “Imagine”’, and nothing happened. Then he just said, ‘Music’, and the track started. I was taping it on a cheap battery-operated tape recorder and I played it twice down the phone to Jerry Coyle the next morning. I must have listened to that crackly tape a hundred times over the next six weeks until the song came out as a single, and even today, whenever I hear ‘Imagine’, I think of Kid Jensen’s messed-up intro.
When I wasn’t getting new music from Top of the Pops, Radio Luxembourg or my brothers’ record collections, I was talking about it with my two best friends. Both Jerry and Mel were by now as hooked on music as I was, and we did little but try to get our hands on as much of it as we possibly could.
Our resources were not the same. Mel and Jerry often had a little more disposable income than me so, to be honest, I would try to coerce these guys into buying the records I craved but didn’t have the money to get.
Every week I would scour the NME or Melody Maker and tell Jerry which albums I thought he should buy. Yet Jerry’s big thing was buying records because he liked the cover. This led to a few dodgy purchases, particularly in the 1970s. He figured the first Black Sabbath album must be great simply because the sleeve had a picture of a mysterious veiled woman standing in a graveyard.
Jerry’s tastes were eclectic and usually visually driven. He’d get seduced by the sleeves and buy albums by groups such as Gracious, Bakerloo or Piblokto. Mel bought the Fat Mattress album purely because the cover opened up into four big covers of the band sitting on a tree. Or maybe it was the fact that a former Jimi Hendrix Experience member was in the band. It was lucky the sleeve was striking, as the music wasn’t up too much. Mel had more straightforward tastes as the Sixties ended – he was all about Cream, Jethro Tull and, obsessively, Led Zeppelin.
Mel and Jerry were also my company at the first gig I ever attended. Bands had started coming to Dublin in my early teens but I was just too young to go and see the Beatles or the Stones, both of whom played the Adelphi. Naturally, I memorised the reviews of the shows. Years later, I met Bob Geldof again and he told me he’d been to both of the gigs. Even decades later, I was still jealous.
The Adelphi was also the venue for my first gig, but the artists were of a different strain completely: the Bee Gees. It was just after they had a big hit with ‘Massachusetts’, which appealed to my chart-loving side, but they were also releasing albums with psychedelic covers. They were up there with the best pop music. Gerard had bought the debut album, 1st, and they had released great singles – ‘New York Mining Disaster’, ‘World’, ‘To Love Somebody’. The gig was full of screaming girls.
The support bands were also interesting: Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, who played their hit single ‘The Legend of Xanadu’ with Dave Dee jumping around stage with a sombrero and a whip. I’d remembered reading about Dave Dee. He used to be a policeman, and in 1960 had attended the scene of the car crash that injured Gene Vincent and killed Eddie Cochran. The other band was Grapefruit, one of the few bands that John Lennon ever signed to the Beatles’ Apple label. We bought posters and sat upstairs and I absolutely loved the whole evening.
There weren’t many gigs in Dublin at that time but we would go to anything we could get tickets for. The Stadium was where most shows of any size happened, and that was where Mel and I went in March 1971 to see his all-time favourite band, Led Zeppelin, touring the Led Zeppelin IV, or ‘Four Symbols’ album.
The band had played in Belfast the night before and played ‘Stairway to Heaven’ live for the first time, which was obviously a very big deal. While they also played it in Dublin, of course, I don’t remember too much about it. The show was cool and I remember Jimmy Page playing his twin guitar with a bow and John Bonham banging his big gong. It was the songs from Led Zeppelin III that did it for me though, and it’s still my favourite Zeppelin album.
Gigs were grand, yet for me albums came first. Every penny of my pocket money and my paper-round wage went on them. Each Christmas I would give my parents, brothers and aunties a list of the twenty records I’d most like, and hope for the best. One Christmas, through a mixture of presents and money saved, I hit the jackpot with big ones like After the Goldrush by Neil Young, Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd and Layla by Derek and the Dominoes. I also acquired craved-for obscurities like Shooting at the Moon by Kevin Ayers; The Madcap Laughs by Syd Barrett; Loaded by the Velvet Underground; Twelve
