like no Irish band had ever done before them.
Chances are U2 were thinking of the days before I transferred to RTÉ and Ireland’s first legal music station, Radio 2, where I interviewed them on five consecutive nights as we let our listeners choose their first single. Well, the connection was made – so much so that their manager, Paul McGuinness, now made sure that every U2 single was played on the Dave Fanning show on 2FM before anywhere else in the world.
… He never finished a sentence …
Were they saying I have a motormouth style? Yeah, probably guilty as charged, to be honest. Let’s face it, there is so much to be said, and only so much time to say it in.
… He mumbled along about Slaughter and the Dogs …
I had; it was true. And about Irish bands like the Vipers and the Outcasts and the Blades and a thousand other bands that were emerging from Ireland’s towns and cities in those exciting post-punk days when it seemed as if the world was changing and everything was possible. See, mythology has it that I loved U2 from the second I first heard them and made it my mission to lift them to the top, but it wasn’t like that at all. When I had first heard them, I thought they were OK; no more. I liked them as people but the music didn’t blow me away. Truth be told, I was more interested in the Undertones (they had an album!) or the second Boomtown Rats record.
… But he kept his hat for when he kicked his clogs …
A long way off. No towel was about to be thrown in, no bucket about to be kicked … we’ve only just begun.
… Wish I could be like Dave FanningWish I could be like Dave FanningFa fa fa fa fa fa FanningFa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa …
The song faded out and the Edge, always a law unto himself, bizarrely began to strum the chords to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ as Bono stared deep into the camera and delivered his valedictory message with apparent sincerity:
Dave, it’s impossible to describe what you mean to this group and impossible to forget what you did for us. Incredible things like … incredible stuff like … I remember when there was that time … er …
Ah, well, Bono had always been a grade-one piss-taker – why should he change now? But it had been a grand message that I knew I would never forget, and as I stepped up to receive my Industry Award from Larry Mullen my mind was in a whirl, the notion of a carefully prepared acceptance speech long gone.
U2 were right. I was having a mad buzz being Dave Fanning and the madness and the adventures were showing no sign of abating. I had been insanely lucky but, yeah, ‘Wish I could be like Dave Fanning’? It was true: I certainly couldn’t think of many ways in which my life could be improved. So, how had I come from the Dublin suburbs and being a somewhat impecunious punk-era music fan to this? As Talking Heads once asked, how did I get here?
Well, it had been a long story – and unlike many rock ’n’ roll memoirs, it had started with a blissfully happy childhood.
Chapter 1
Many people who sell their souls to rock ’n’ roll hate their upbringings. They endure their childhoods, hightail it out of the family home as soon as they are able and set about reinventing themselves as rebels without a cause. I may have lived my life for music – and just how much will become clear as you read this memoir – but I was never anybody’s idea of a rock ’n’ roll rebel.
How happy were my early years? Maybe this will give you an idea: I loved my family home so much that I lived there for twenty-eight years.
I was born in mid-winter in the mid-Fifties, the youngest of six children. Or, strictly, of seven: my parents’ second-born son, Brian, had died at the age of six months. It must have been hard on them but it had not put them off having a typical big Irish family and so my oldest brother John, Peter, my sister Miriam and the two brothers nearest to me in age, Dermot and Gerard, all knocked around together in the house that was to be my home for close on three decades.
The house was No. 54 Foster Avenue in Mount Merrion, right next to University College Dublin, and my parents bought it in 1943 for less than a thousand pounds. Foster Avenue links the Stillorgan Road, the main drive route south out of Dublin, with places like Dundrum. It was about five miles from the city centre, which was considered such a long way out that when my parents bought it, all their friends asked why they wanted to live in the countryside.
My father, Barney, was originally from Drogheda but moved the thirty miles south to Dublin when he met my mum, Annie. When they met she was working as a teacher in Clontarf in the north of the city. My folks weren’t the sort of parents who’d regale us with soppy tales of how they met, but I know my dad proposed in Sneem, a lovely little place in County Kerry. I’m guessing their courtship would have been more like the nineteenth century than the 1940s.
With me being the youngest of six, my parents were oldish when I was born. My dad was 46, and my mum 44. I guess some kids might have found this age gap a problem but I hardly ever had a cross word with my family. I remember lots of playing with my brothers and sister around the house and in the big garden at the back with its apple, pear and plum trees.
My dad worked for the Board of Works in their office on Stephen’s Green for forty-seven years. He was a senior civil servant and he was involved with the preservation of state buildings and monuments around Ireland. Once he had to organise the unveiling of a statue of Thomas Davis, the legendary Irish freedom fighter, at Trinity College. The Irish president was to unveil it and our family joke was that if the president keeled over with a heart attack on the day, it would be Dad whipping the cloth off.
I guess my dad was pretty old school, as you’d expect from a man born at the start of the century. He liked – although he never demanded – his tea on the table every night and he never boiled an egg in his life, but he was so laid-back that you could only have a good relationship with him. We all called him Barney, and his easygoing nature was one reason I was able to live at home for so long.
He had an old white Ford car with Al Capone-style boards at either door. There were many cold mornings that it wouldn’t start and my dad would take the gas heater from the kitchen, stick it by the front grille and try to start the engine by cranking it up with one of those Victorian-looking iron-bar contraptions. As I recall it, he usually gave up and took the 64 or 46A bus into town, then walked through Stephen’s Green.
I don’t remember my dad ever missing a day’s work – a trait I have inherited, as I’ve never had one day sick in my thirty years at RTÉ. Every evening he would bring home reports and memos and read weighty Dáil parliamentary reports as we shared a table. He would help me out as I struggled with my homework. This was a good system, as Maths was his forte and, quite frankly, it never was mine and never will be.
On Sundays my dad would often take me up to Phoenix Park. He knew the caretaker there, a man called Mr Barry, who lived in a gorgeous house that always had a big roaring log fire going. Mr Barry was a happy-go-lucky guy who looked like Santa Claus, and we’d collect chestnuts from the park. They came in handy for conkers at school. Not that I played it much. I always thought it was a daft game and preferred marbles.
Nothing ever fazed my dad and I don’t think I ever argued with him about anything – except for Christmas Day Top of the Pops, but we’ll come to that later. But if he was at heart a quiet and retiring soul, my mum, Annie, was anything but. She was everything in our house, the matriarch and the patriarch, and I can safely say that she was the most inspiring person that I have met in my entire life.
Everything
