were there. My oldest brother, John, was a mad QPR fan, and decades later, one of the proudest moments of his life came when he was about to retire from his advertising agency. John’s favourite poet is Thomas Kinsella – he has even written a thesis about him – and his work colleagues had managed secretly to get hold of Rodney Marsh. At John’s farewell party, they showed him a film of Rodney drinking a glass of wine and saying, ‘Hello, John! I hear you’re retiring!’ Then he read him a Thomas Kinsella poem. Rodney’s rendition from the autocue was somewhat idiosyncratic – I’m not too sure he entirely grasped the nuances and subtleties of what he was reading – but even so, what an amazing retirement present!
Football wasn’t the only TV I watched. Absolutely my favourite programme as a kid was The Avengers. To my young mind, it was on a heightened, more surreal level than everything else on television. Patrick Macnee as Steed was so cool. Every week would start with him going to a big country house to see some retired brigadier-general or other who had a big moustache and would be re-enacting the battle of El Alamein on his kitchen table, moving toy soldiers around with a big stick. Steed would wander out into the garden, then go back in and the general would be lying dead, with an arrow in his head or some such.
I loved the fact that the Avengers had this ace, swinging London sort of flat. The Saint was the same. Roger Moore couldn’t act, and actually still can’t, but that didn’t matter – he just had to look the part and drive his long, phallic-symbol white car. Pretty much every week would end with somebody saying, ‘Thank you for saving my life – who are you?’ And he would raise an eyebrow; that music would start; the halo would appear over his head; and he’d drive off.
As I got older, I was big into Monty Python’s Flying Circus but – probably typically for me – I loved the albums more than the TV shows. There were five different albums, and I’m afraid I’m the sort of obsessive who can quote whole sketches left, right and centre. It’s not something I am particularly proud of, but there you go.
One strange old tradition in Ireland is that a lot of secondary-school students used to go away for about a month to a college where they just spoke Irish. I had been quite proficient in our native language until I was about 12, but after that I lost a lot of it. In my second-last year at Blackrock, in 1969, I went off to an Irish College in Carraroe in County Galway. Jerry and Mel were there with me.
We asked – in Irish of course – if we could have a day off to mourn the death of Brian Jones, the Rolling Stones guitarist who died on 3 July. Our request was denied. While we were there, the three of us also watched on television as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, and we were completely overcome by the sense that, for humankind, this was history in the making. We went out cycling through Carraroe later that night and I remember stopping my bike and just gazing up at the moon and saying to Jerry and Mel, ‘Jesus Christ! There’s two guys up there!’
So I guess I had a pretty normal, happy-go-lucky Dublin childhood, except for one major, glaring anomaly – by the time I was a teenager, I was absolutely obsessed with music, listened to it every waking hour, lived and breathed it and, in truth, cared for little else. It is the all-consuming passion that has dominated my whole life and shows no sign of dimming. Why, exactly, am I so fixated on music? That may be a little harder to explain …
Chapter 2
My parents used to have a piano in our house in Foster Avenue. My mother played it occasionally, but they got rid of it because my two oldest brothers, John and Peter, had not shown enough interest in it. If it had still been there when Gerard and I were old enough to give it a go, it might have been a different story.
Then again, maybe it wouldn’t. I never had any great interest in making music. Unlike a lot of kids of my generation, learning the guitar never held any real appeal for me (well, maybe a little, but I was lazy) and even to this day I can’t play a note on anything. I fell in love with music as an excited, passionate, hugely appreciative listener.
Being the youngest of six kids, there was always music about the house, right from my very earliest years. We had Elvis 78s from as early as I can remember and John had jazz records by people like Duke Ellington, as well as mysterious artists with exotic names such as Dudu Pakwana and Blossom Dearie.
Oddly enough, one of my first musical memories is the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly on 3 February 1959. I had just started infant school, and a teacher told a girl in my class called McCaffrey to sing ‘I Guess It Doesn’t Matter Any More’. She sang it beautifully: at four years old, I was in awe of her performance.
When I was about five, I became aware of the pop charts. It was when Lonnie Donegan was having hits with ‘Tom Dooley’, ‘Battle of New Orleans’ and, of course, ‘My Old Man’s a Dust-man’. None of those were my first single, though – that was ‘Calendar Girl’, by Neil Sedaka. I had asked my mum and dad for it for my seventh birthday.
This was right at the start of the Sixties, at a time when Elvis had left the US Army and was doing crooner stuff such as ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ On the other side of the Atlantic, we had Adam Faith and Billy Fury being pushed as stars, but the biggest figure for us was Cliff Richard.
I guess as a wide-eyed kid I liked Cliff. His debut, ‘Move It’, is still a classic. I believed in him and bought into what he was doing. I remember he had a hit called ‘A Voice in the Wilderness’ and I assumed that he really was lost and wanted help. He sounded broken-hearted and there was a small wee eedjit in Dublin feeling sorry for him.
It was hard to hear new music in those days, but a few things managed to get through. I’ll never forget hearing the Beach Boys’ ‘I Get Around’ during one Bettystown holiday and it just sounding absolutely fantastic. Also the Animals’ ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ – that had a massive, massive impact on me, the first time I heard it.
It was the Top 40 charts that absolutely fascinated me, though. In 1959 my brother Peter subscribed to the New Musical Express (NME), ordering it from Teevan’s newsagent at the top of Foster Avenue. (I took over his subscription when he left Dublin in 1971 and finally cancelled it just after the Millennium, by which time that particular family subscription was into its sixth decade. That has to be some kind of record.)
It’s impossible to explain how important the NME singles chart was to me in the early Sixties. I would devour it every week. Each entry had a bracketed number next to it, showing where the song had been in the previous week’s chart. I would always know if a single was No. 12 up from No. 30, or No. 8 down from No. 3.
When there was a hyphen in the brackets, it meant it was a brand new chart entry. This was such a big deal: I remember in 1962 running in and excitedly interrupting my brother, who was studying for an exam, to tell him that ‘Are You Sure’ by the Allisons had gone straight in at No. 14. The NME would write about these artists in its ‘New to the Chart’ feature, and that was crucial reading.
Peter threw away all his NMEs at the end of the 1970s but he cut out all of the charts and put them in a box. I still have that box at home and it’s fantastic. The charts were on page 4, so on the backs of the cuttings are news stories. I love reading those headlines even today: HANK TO QUIT SHADOWS. CLIFF TO TOUR US. ‘PICTURES OF LILY’ NOT PORNOGRAPHIC, SAYS TOWNSHEND.
Yet rock ’n’ roll was dying back then. Looking back now, it was all about crooning; Elvis doing sentimental ballads; people like Johnny Tillotson singing songs about young men dying in car crashes. In 1960, ‘Telstar’ by the Tornados became the first instrumental to be No. 1 in the US and the UK, and the UK’s No. 1 for the following eight weeks was ‘I Remember You’ by Frank Ifield, which featured yodelling. I guess it was all getting very safe, very nice.
At which
