Avenue. Sometimes in life the easy decision is the right one, and as there was nothing else I wanted to do at that time, I went along with it. I was to study English and Philosophy: I had the right qualifications for it, and it made as much sense as anything else.
But before I started at UCD, I took my first trip to England. My brother John was getting married to his girlfriend Kaye in London, and Dermot and I caught the boat over to Holyhead and then got a train down to London. We were there for about five days and I took advantage of the trip by going to see a few films such as Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange that were banned in Ireland back then. It’s easy to forget what a strange, priest-riddled society we were – and in some ways still are.
When I started at UCD, I happily continued on my trajectory of being academically relentlessly average. This didn’t mean I hated the course; far from it. Some of the texts made an impact. I loved and even memorised some of the classic phrases from Dickens, and for some reason Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge had a major effect on me – this strange tale of a poor eedjit who sold his wife to somebody and had his actions come back to haunt him when he became the mayor. I sat down by a roaring log fire to start reading that book at 10 o’clock one night and had finished it by seven the next morning.
I can’t pretend, though, that I worked hard and came out of my English degree with a devout appreciation of the poems of Robert Frost or even a burning love for literature in general. When it came to the academic side of things, I did what I had to, and no more, which was reflected in my reliably ordinary exam results. For me, university was mostly about social life, girls, fun and freedom – and that was fantastic.
I had an absolute ball at UCD. Life was great, and exciting, and I felt like I was exactly where I should be. Having always been a fairly gregarious character, I found that I made loads of friends and there always seemed to be something to do, and somebody to do it with.
Obviously, with the arrogance of youth, I thought I was super-cool at college. Looking back, I clearly wasn’t. I was always pathetically dishevelled, deliberately so, and a typical day would find me mooching about with my wispy beard and duffle coat, a copy of Solzhenitsyn or The Hobbit sticking meaningfully out of a pocket, quoting the NME’s The Lone Groover cartoon strip at every opportunity. Pretentious? Moi?
My hair was a source of great angst for me. The early Seventies was an era of being defined by your long hair and, sadly, my long hair was hopeless. Instead of growing straight down like Lennon it was curly and corkscrew and would stick out at ridiculous angles. My beard was even worse. My goal was to look as cool as Let It Be-era McCartney. I looked like Catweazle.
I lived at home all through my time at UCD. It never occurred to me to move out. This might have seemed strange to some of my college mates, whose sole ambition was to rent a flat that they could take women back to, but I was perfectly happy staying at home, where the atmosphere was looser, madder and freer than in any campus hall of residence.
I couldn’t take girls back to spend the night but that was never really an issue. They weren’t exactly queuing up – maybe it was the Catweazle beard that was the problem? Even so, our house in Foster Avenue soon became a major social centre for everyone to pile back to after we had spent the night putting the world to rights over a leisurely pint in the student bar.
My mother loved having my friends round at any time of the day or night. In no time, our house was more like a student flat in Ranelagh or Rathmines than a middle-class south Dublin home. Everybody would troop in, have a friendly word with Annie as she greeted them with homemade biscuits, then we’d all head into ‘my’ stereo-room to play records. My own late-night culinary skills were always appreciated – tins of salmon and beans on toast!
Even today, nearly forty years on, I meet people who claim to have been back to my house during their years at UCD. I once read in Hot Press the Irish justice minister, Dermot Ahern, saying that he went to Dave Fanning’s house to listen to Pink Floyd. I am sure he did, but I have absolutely no memory of it whatsoever.
Friday and Saturday nights were always about going to a party, or trying to find one to gatecrash if you weren’t invited to one. The routine was always the same – listen out in the student bar or the pub, try to get an address and a name, then just turn up as if you were expected and it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘I know Dave! No, I mean Paul! Er … Pete?’ You would always be waving a six-pack of beer on the doorstep to show you were a good guest, but once you got inside you’d seldom put it in the fridge – it’d be gone in a second. Instead, you opened the first can and hid the rest in a secret place. Duffle-coat pockets were always good for that, even if it meant Solzhenitsyn or The Hobbit’s pages getting bent or wet.
My UCD years were not too dissolute but everybody smoked stuff they weren’t supposed to and I was as enthusiastic as the next man. The first question at any gig you went to, to anyone you met, was always, ‘Have you got any skins?’ Sometimes it was relentless, and any paper or card in our path – beer mats, magazines, book covers – was in danger of being ripped up to use as roach papers.
Yet for all the enjoyable distractions, music remained my be-all and end-all, and university gave me more chances than ever to wallow in it. The Belfield student bar had cheap nighttime gigs with free ones at lunchtime in the Theatre L in the Arts building, and in my three years at UCD, I hardly missed one.
Mainly, it would be local bands that were starting out, although I did see Paul Brady in his folk-inclined, pre-Hard Station era, and thought he was great. I also remember a band called Frruup from Belfast, who had just released a debut album called Future Legends, which I thought was brilliant. I saw one of them in a bar and had a bit of banter with him: ‘I bought your album!’ ‘Oh, you’re the one that bought it!’ – that sort of stuff. That was interesting, because even then, I came away thinking, ‘I can do that – I can talk to musicians …’
Outside of college, I was still going to plenty of gigs. Horslips were the big local draw, and Rory Gallagher’s gigs were rightly the stuff of legend. I saw Blodwyn Pig supported by Skid Row at the Stadium, and got very excited when Pink Floyd were due to come to Dublin, although in the end they never did, for some reason.
I went to a lot of gigs with Jerry and Mel and any number of others and, by now, Mel had got himself a Morris Minor car and had the four symbols from the cover of Led Zeppelin IV painted on the doors. His father owned a place in Clara Vale in Wicklow and Mel, Jerry and I would frequently spend weekends there, listening to my compilation cassettes on the way down and then playing albums on some cheap, tatty little record player that we took with us.
When it came to buying records, I had moved on from Golden Discs in Stillorgan to Pat Egan’s Sound Cellar in Nassau Street, on the corner of Grafton Street and opposite Trinity College in the heart of Dublin. Sound Cellar was fantastic. You went through a tiny door that you would easily miss unless you were looking for it and then down two flights of stairs into a dingy, tiny little cellar. It had these great bargain bins and I would find some brilliant oddities and rarities in there.
Rummaging through those bins, I would come across Caravan, Gong, Weather Report, Todd Rundgren, J.J. Cale, Jackson Browne, Mahavishnu Orchestra and hundreds of others. There were some truly weird bands on the Harvest label and some excellent major-label samplers. CBS’s Fill Your Head with Rock compilation was pretty cool as was Island’s Nice Enough to Eat, which featured Quintessence, Free, King Crimson, Mott the Hoople, Nick Drake, Ireland’s Dr Strangely Strange and Traffic, whom I still regard as one of the greatest English bands of all time.
Pat was eight or nine years older than me and seemed incredibly cool. He had been involved with weird underground bands on the Irish ‘beat scene’, which was slightly before my time, and as he and his mate and assistant Tommy got
