every other kid alive, I had never heard anything like the Beatles. They electrified everything, and they electrified me. I was eight years old, and from the very first time I heard them, I was totally into them. It wasn’t that I knew they were going to be big – I didn’t know anything back then! I just loved them.
It started with ‘Love Me Do’ in 1962. I could not have been more excited than I was to see it in the NME chart at No. 17, with a hyphen in the bracket. (I still have that chart: Paul McCartney signed it for me when I met him decades later.) I remember sitting in the family car as my brother Peter was driving, near the shops on The Rise in Mount Merrion, when ‘Love Me Do’ came on the radio. I just looked out of the window thinking, this is wonderful.
Then along came ‘Please Please Me’, and the Beatles pretty much killed off all the good-looking boys with quiffs that were being pushed at us by impresarios back then. They saved rock ’n’ roll. Being nearly ten years old when Beatlemania was exploding was a life-changing experience, and no mistake. John and Peter bought the very first Beatles albums, Dermot got Rubber Soul and Help!, and I was listening to them all avidly.
For my part, I bought every Beatles single and devoured the NME for every word about them. I joined the fanclub and got the posters and the Christmas flexidiscs every year through to the end of the decade. It got slightly easier to keep up when RTÉ launched television in Ireland in 1962. There wasn’t much music on TV, but I loved what shows there were, such as Thank Your Lucky Stars and Juke Box Jury. Occasionally you’d get novel little filler items on the news: David Dimbleby saying ‘She’s only 16, but she’s walking back to happiness in the pop chart!’ and there would be a picture of Helen Shapiro walking through the school gates for the last time, much to the envy of all her classmates. Or Dimbleby would say, ‘He may be better known as a jazzman but Georgie Fame hits the top of the hit parade this week with a song called “Yeah Yeah”,’ and there’d be Georgie – a poster of a gig at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club on his kitchen wall – making a cup of tea at home Even little things like that were exciting at the time.
Because we were so starved of access to music in the media, it is impossible to overstate the importance of Top of the Pops when it launched at the start of 1964. Suddenly, here they were – all the bands I was slavishly reading about in the NME every week, beaming out from our TV screen! It was almost too good to be true, and it was not to be missed.
Every Thursday night was a sacred routine. After tea it was Top of the Pops at 7.30, followed by The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Get Smart – and Top of the Pops was by far the most important of the three. It may be a cliché, but it’s true: Top of the Pops could change the way you walked through the world. In the school playground the next day, it was all that anybody talked about. At least, it seemed that way.
Top of the Pops could be totally overwhelming. I remember one instance when I was 13 and we rushed in from playing football for our weekly fix. Because the tennis was happening at Wimbledon, the BBC had reduced the show from its normal thirty-five minutes to twenty, which I thought was an outrage, but even though it was a shorter show than usual it contained one piece of magic that blew me away. Procol Harum were on, playing ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, and to my teenage ears it was unique, a brand new sound that nobody had discovered before. When Top of the Pops finished and we ran back outside to carry on playing football, I played ten times better. I just felt like I was George Best – and all because of that powerful rush, that sudden fix of brilliance.
If Top of the Pops was the highlight of the week, the Christmas Top of the Pops was one of the most crucial programmes of the year – which always caused me major angst on Christmas Day. The problem was my father. Barney might have been one of the most easygoing men in the world but he had his routines and one of them was that a friend of his would always call round on Christmas Day and give him a present of a book about horse racing. I don’t think he ever read one of them.
My father would have a glass of Christmas whiskey – which was the only time I’d ever see him drink in the house – then turn off the television and put on the one record that he owned. It was Brendan O’Dowda Sings the Songs of Percy French and it was packed with old Irish songs such as ‘Delaney’s Donkey’ and ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’.
We’d have to listen to these gems, then it would come time for Christmas Top of the Pops and we’d plead with my dad for us to watch it. Like everyone else, we only had the one TV, and he thought it was better that it stayed off while his friend was there: he knew we loved the show, but I don’t think he’d realised quite how much it meant to us. These occasions were the closest I ever came to a proper row with my dad. He seldom relented, so every Christmas Day, when we should have been reliving the year’s biggest hits, we were enduring ‘Up the Airy Mountain, Down the Rushy Glen’.
Like most households, we had one record player in the home and it was virtually never silent. Frequently we were queuing up to use it. When I got my turn, maybe when my mum and dad were watching some TV show like Seven Days in the other room, I would carefully line up nine songs to play in that forty-five minutes. My vinyl changeover time was super-quick – and each song had to be listened to with the lights out.
As a kid I was all about the pop charts and singles, but as I moved into my teens the idea hit me that I should be getting more concerned with albums. Luckily, my brothers were all seriously into music as well, so a lot of their taste trickled down to me, even if I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time.
John had moved to England years ago by then and become my link to Carnaby Street and swinging London. It seemed a million miles away to most people, but the fact that John was there made me feel like it was on my back door. John was walking down Savile Row in 1970 when the Beatles played what turned out to be their last-ever show on the Apple HQ roof. He said you couldn’t actually see anything from the road; everybody was just wondering what all the noise was.
Peter’s tastes were more inclined towards folk music, and he had a Woody Guthrie box set when I was about eight. Bob Dylan was his big thing though. He was into Dylan from the moment his career started. In later years I got massively into him myself, and now he’s right up there as undoubtedly one of my favourite artists ever, but as a kid I was annoyed when Peter was monopolising the record player with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan or The Times They Are A-Changin’ because it meant I couldn’t play my chart singles.
Yet, over the years, I came to be grateful for Peter’s liking for singer-songwriters. He was my portal to Joni Mitchell, one of my all-time favourites, and brought her Song to a Seagull and Clouds albums into the house. Leonard Cohen followed behind: Dermot and Gerard were the big supporters there, Gerard due to his love of poetry.
Gerard was a massive music fan, and although he was only two years older than me his tastes were very different from mine. I naturally got indoctrinated into a lot of things that he liked, even if I didn’t realise it at the time. So many things that I love now I was indifferent to when I first heard them.
I wouldn’t say Gerard was a hippy but that was the music he went for. He was hugely into the Incredible String Band and Van Morrison right from the off. As a chart tart, I only knew Them because ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ and ‘Here Comes the Night’ had been hits, but there was Gerard listening intently to Astral Weeks and Moondance and really getting them.
Through people like Randy Newman and John Prine, Gerard later went on to more folky things like Martin Carthy and Bert Jansch, not to mention Planxty and the Bothy Band. He took up playing the uilleann pipes and joined an Irish pipers club. They’d sit round in our kitchen playing their pipes all night. I’d love to say he was great at it, but he was pretty awful.
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