was a great system. Pat would phone me up and say, ‘I’ve got such-and-such an album in’, and I’d be excited because it wasn’t due to be out for three weeks. He might only have one copy, so I’d ask him to keep it for me and then get in there as fast as I could. By then I was buying one album per week and I bet I got 80 per cent of them unheard – almost all on the strength of good reviews in the music comics, usually NME or Melody Maker.
The first Roxy Music album is probably my favourite debut album of all time. I was hooked from the first single, ‘Virginia Plain’. It was all about sha-na-na, quiffs and Teddy Boys, which weren’t really my thing, mixed with early 1970s glam rock, which was, the songs were magnificent and, crucially, it sounds as good today as it did then. Pat got copies of their next four or five albums a few weeks before their official releases and called me each time. I was usually in to buy it within the hour.
By the end of my first year at UCD, I was happily settled in to the student lifestyle and having the best time I could imagine – but I also had itchy feet. I fancied seeing a bit of the world and also earning enough money to keep me in albums for the next academic year.
One major perk of being a student was that you were eligible for a J1 visa, which allowed you to work abroad during university holidays – in America or nearer to home. A sizeable number of UCD undergraduates took off to Germany when term ended and in the summer of 1972 I decided to join them. As the term ended, I headed for Gross-Gerau, an industrial town twenty miles south of Frankfurt with my friend James O’Nolan. We had secured three months’ work in a steel-pressing factory that made hinges and various other parts for BMW cars.
This was a hugely intimidating prospect for one very good reason – I had never done a day’s work in my life. Sure, I’d had my early morning paper round for a year or two, but besides that and a week on a farm in Ballivor in County Meath, that was about it. Some kids might have had to clean their house from top to bottom before they were allowed to go and play but that had never been my parents’ style and they’d never really made me do anything I hadn’t wanted to. In truth, I’d had it pretty easy.
So on my first day I was pretty horrified as the factory foreman showed us around the thumping, clanking workplace full of vast noisy machinery. ‘I don’t know why you’re bothering,’ I was thinking. ‘This is a big mistake and I’m out of here.’ I’m pretty sure that James and a couple of others I was with felt the same – young, scared and a long way from home.
Given this trepidation, I felt very proud of myself that I stuck it out. It wasn’t easy. We started work at 6 o’clock each morning, alongside a whole load of other immigrant workers who were mostly Turks or East Europeans. We were working on conveyor belts that turned flat pieces of metal into hinges, and given that each BMW had twenty-four hinges, there was no shortage of work. We’d make thousands of the things every day.
The factory was deafening, there were no earphones and the work was tedious and repetitive, so I survived the long days on the floor by pretending I was giving a concert. In my head, one minute I was Kevin Ayers and the next I was Roxy Music, on stage in Theatre L back in UCD. The foreman used to laugh when he came by and caught me singing my head off but I didn’t care – it was my escape from the boredom.
I suppose it was a bit like Michael Caine as Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File. There is a scene where he is being tortured but he has a screw hidden in his hand. He grinds the screw so hard that it tears his flesh and blood seeps out but it helps him to survive the torture because it is his own pain; he’s controlling it. OK, a bit dramatic, but that was how it felt to me, anyhow.
The four of us stayed in a little house next to the factory and we hardly mixed or learned any German at all. It was our childish way of rebelling against the banality of the whole experience. About the only language I picked up was arbeiten (work), Fabrik (factory) and Förderband (conveyor belt).
We were there to earn money and were so determined not to spend anything that we got into the bad habit of stealing stupid stuff from the local supermarket. I got particularly skilled at nicking coffee. I would walk around the supermarket, come out apparently empty-handed and the other lads would say, ‘Ah, you couldn’t do it today! No worries!’ At which point I would open up my coat to reveal two huge jars of coffee nestling in the lining. I didn’t even drink coffee at the time.
It was ridiculous. We even resented spending five Deutsch-marks on potatoes, so we would go down to some huge local farm after dark and steal them from the field. We were doing that one night and a plane flew over us, unusually low. I somehow doubt the pilot could even see us or, if he could, was not too bothered about a handful of Irish eedjits nicking spuds but I remember yelling, in all seriousness, ‘Hit the dirt!’ and we did. There I was, face down with a mouth full of field and a German plane flying overhead, feeling like a wartime soldier from the Valiant or one of the other comics I used to read.
The best part about the German trip, by far, was that we got to a few major concerts. With Stephen Russell and Donal Foley and about thirty-five thousand others, I went to my first proper stadium gig near Frankfurt. Eighty per cent of the audience were American GI’s, who were all smoking something: joints, pipes, bongs, whatever.
The Spencer Davis Group and Colosseum (with Gary Moore) opened up the show but the main draw were Sly and the Family Stone. They had never meant a lot to me but they were soul-funk legends and it was good to tick them off my list. Sly was pretty notorious for not turning up to shows, so when he appeared on stage the place went crazy. However, he did no more than twenty-five minutes before slouching off, leaving the crowd seriously unhappy. They wanted at least another hour.
Sly wasn’t even the headliner. That was Rod Stewart, who at the time was enjoying worldwide hits with ‘Maggie May’ and ‘Your Wear It Well’ from the Every Picture Tells a Story album. This failed to win over the disgruntled GI’s and I heard one of them grumble to his mate: ‘We want funk rock, not faggot rock.’ Rod and Sly share a surname and a chant soon started up: ‘We want Sly Stewart, not Rod Stewart.’ Rod seemed pretty oblivious to it all and the protest petered out after about twenty minutes.
A week later we were back in Frankfurt to see Frank Zappa, once again entertaining mainly American soldiers. The GIs seemed a pretty demanding bunch and Zappa wasn’t exactly a ‘play the hits’, crowd-pleasing kind of performer, but he had enough authority and charisma to see off any audience revolt and lead them by the hand into fairly experimental areas.
The big-deal show of that summer, though, was the Rolling Stones playing an indoor gig at an ice-hockey arena. They were touring Exile on Main Street and Mick Taylor, Brian Jones’s replacement, was in the band. You could see there was friction going on: at one point Mick Jagger went over to Taylor and ruffled his hair. Taylor looked at him like he wanted to kill him. After the gig we missed the bus, walked the ten miles home, got in at five in the morning and were back in the Fabrik on the Förderband by six.
My merry band lasted six weeks in Gross-Gerau and we couldn’t wait to get back to Dublin and the pampered student life. We got the trains and boats back to UCD saying ‘Never again!’ so of course it goes without saying that I was back in the exact same factory the following year. This time I lasted more than three months – the others all quit and left before then, but things are never so bad second time around, and I wanted to earn as much money as possible. After all, those albums didn’t buy themselves.
I was so fixated on saving money that I would sometimes hitchhike home across Germany and France to save the train fare. US GI’s eager for company would often pick me up. On one journey, a young soldier asked where I was from. When I replied ‘Ireland’, he said: ‘Wow! So have you seen the monster, huh?’ It took me a few seconds to work out he meant the Loch Ness Monster. We then discussed this mythical beast
