self-titled debut album; Lick My Decals Off, Baby by Captain Beefh eart & the Magic Band; In the Wake of Poseidon and Lizard by King Crimson; 12 Songs by Randy Newman; Lennon’s stark, masterful Plastic Ono Band; and, maybe, two of the very best in Soft Machine’s Third and Dave Mason’s Alone Together. There was also a great Island sampler called Bumpers in there. That really was a great Christmas.
If I had to pinpoint just one album which took me from the Sixties into the Seventies it would be Blind Faith, only album of the supergroup bearing the same name. Fifteen minutes were taken up by an awful Ginger Baker song but the other five numbers, including a Buddy Holly cover, combined to make this not just a great album, but an extremely important one for me. It single-handedly bridged the gap between the constant glory and magic of Sixties pop and the new world of progressive, album-orientated rock that was springing up all over the place.
It’s hard to explain to kids in these days of constantly accessible websites and downloads, but just physically holding a vinyl album was half of the thrill for me. I would get a new purchase home, eagerly ease the record from its outer and inner sleeve, then spend hours mulling over the sleeve image and lyrics as it played.
Sometimes the inner sleeve had a Jolly Roger skull-and-crossbones and the sombre legend ‘Home taping is killing music’. Personally, I thought nothing could kill music. I happily ignored the Jolly Roger’s exhortations by recording hours and hours of music onto my own carefully selected ‘Various Artists’ cassette tapes. Mel, Jerry and I would play them, and always had a pencil or pen to hand, to carefully wind the tape back onto the spools as it inevitably collapsed in the tape deck. The ‘Home taping is killing music’ argument never convinced me. I just figured, how could I make these tapes without having bought the albums in the first place? I was killing nothing! I was never happier than when compiling yet another ‘Various Artists’ classic to take its place in the cassette-storage case I had got for Christmas.
To me, Various Artist compilations were an art form. There were no rules; you had to just feel your way to getting it right. A great cassette might have three classic reggae tracks, a very early curio by David Bowie and then a complete curveball such as ‘Cottage In Negril’ by Jamaican singer Tyrone Taylor. The tracks had to be obscure, brilliant and work together. I named my favourite instrumental self-compilation Atmospheric and was delighted when loads of my friends loved it. Sadly, I then betrayed my lack of imagination by naming its two eagerly awaited follow-ups Atmospheric II and Atmospheric III.
By the time I was at Blackrock College, my Irish teacher, Mr O’Shea, had taken to calling me Fear Na Ceirnini – the Man of the Records. I was always bringing albums into school, or he would see me out of school hours, walking up to Jerry’s house with records under my arm. I was now a pretty fixated character. If I saw somebody in the street, even a complete stranger, with a record bag under their arm, I couldn’t help going up to ask them what was in the bag. If it was Wishbone Ash, chances were they were pretty cool. If it was Brendan O’Dowda, well, maybe not.
Once an English guy came to live in Foster Avenue, in a house across the road from us. Somebody told me that he worked in the Irish office of Atlantic Records – I had never even known record labels had an Irish office. I used to watch him in awe as he drove off to what sounded to me the hippest job ever. I never dared to talk to him, but a neighbour did and got me Yes’s Time and a Word at 25 per cent discount – nearly ten bob off!
Yes, the Fear Na Ceirnini was a very obsessed soul at this point, and his condition was about to get worse. I was already deeply in love with music – but I was poised to discover that it could sound even better and richer than I had ever imagined.
My father retired from his job at the Board of Works in 1972, after forty-seven years in the post. Unsurprisingly, his colleagues were keen to buy him a fittingly lavish retirement present, and my brothers and I, bored of our tinny mono record player, begged him to ask them for a stereo system.
Typically amiable and easygoing, Barney agreed. That shows the kind of father he was. He knew he would hardly ever use it, except maybe for the traditional spin for Brendan O’Dowda or Slim Dusty’s ‘The Pub With No Beer’ on Christmas Day, but he also knew how much it would mean to Gerard and me. So our music room (that’s what it was called by now!) in Foster Avenue received delivery of a state-of-the-art stereo record player – the only real litmus test for an album, as far as I was concerned.
By then I had listened to thousands of albums in that same room in the family home, but I’ll never forget the day I set up the new system, with one speaker on a board balanced on the radiator and one on the dining-room table. I had waited for this moment for a very long time and in my head an excited little noise was nagging me: ‘This is going to be my future for the next few years; it had better be good!’
The very first track I played in this brave new world was ‘Carry On’, the opening song on Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Déjà Vu. I COULD NOT BELIEVE THE DIFFERENCE. Obviously I had heard stereo systems before but never here, in my family home where I listened to and assessed all my music. It opened with a flurry of fast, acoustic guitar, then swept into an amazing vocal harmony that segued into a keyboard change – and it was like being blown away by a gust of wind on top of a mountain.
This was perfect! The dodgy old mono player, with the arm that creaked over, stopped in mid-air and clumsily plonked itself on to the crackly vinyl grooves, had been a loyal servant on a daily basis for close on a decade, but at that second it became no more than an outdated, occasionally cherished relic. Now I had a reason to revisit every album I owned and hear them exactly as the band and the producer had meant the music to be heard.
My parents and our warm-natured next-door neighbour, Mrs Maloney, scaled new heights of tolerance over the next few years as my listening routine developed. I would sit precisely between the speakers; the volume edging its way towards 11, with the curtains closed whatever time of day it was. I tried to unscrew the light-bulb, and when I failed, I accidentally-on-purpose broke it. I needed darkness, and top volume.
You may think this behaviour sounds extreme or even mildly disturbed, but to me it never felt that way. I was just indulging my life force, my all-consuming passion. I worked my way through all of my favourite Sixties albums again, with the Beatles and Dylan getting particularly forensic revisits, but Yes and Blind Faith also benefited from these intensive listening sessions.
I would sit between those two carefully balanced speakers for six or seven hours, my bum numb but my ears alive. I would have all the tracks on each album I wanted to listen to lined up in advance and never took more than ten seconds to jump up, take the needle off, put the album back in its sleeve, replace it and be back on my seat by the time the music began. I worked with pit-stop precision and it was always, always very loud.
My friends never even bothered to ring our doorbell any more. They simply knocked on the window. The telephone was in a cupboard at the bottom of the stairs but I never heard it ring, let alone answered it, although more often than not it was for me. It was a strange twilight existence, all alone, playing the music that I loved. You could almost say it was a future DJ doing some intensive career training.
Chapter 3
In 1971, it came time to leave Blackrock College and I had a major decision to make. Except, of course, that it would be no decision at all. I would go to university because that was what my family did. Annie had only ever wanted two things for her children – for us to be happy, and to be educated. Every one of my siblings went to university except Dermot, and ironically he has worked as a porter at University College Dublin for over four decades. He wasn’t alone – my sister Miriam worked in the UCD library for twenty years.
There was no doubt that I would be following John, Peter, Miriam and Gerard’s footsteps
