The Thing is…

He is a mysterious figure, and has metamorphosed over the years. His ‘expose the process’ shtick – and candour on the radio – meant everyone else looked manufactured and crowd-pleasing. Dave was crowd pleasing too. But it was his crowd. And they spoke a different language. They demanded no crap. And when they stopped demanding that he shave his beard, Dave Fanning shaved his beard. Read here about his transformation from the phenomenon that was pirate radio in the early Eighties to launching the first Dave Fanning show on the national airwaves. It felt like revolution because it was a revolution. Ireland was about to crawl out of the primordial mud of its history, and specifically the torpor of depression that was Dublin in the Seventies. Music was an alarm clock for a lot of us. Do-it-yourself bands/radio stations suddenly became do-it-yourself businessmen, economists … a do-it-yourself country emerged. This was not all great, but it was a lot better than we had ever known. Every song released in this time became like a national anthem. When Thin Lizzy played hard rock on Top of the Pops, when the Boomtown Rats got to No. 1 in the UK charts … it was like the Battle of Britain had been won by Ireland.

For a lot of us this was zero hour, when the clock started ticking. And it didn’t really slow down until very recently. Dave’s mate, Gerry Ryan, was the nation’s therapist … through the good times and into the bad times. For a lot of people, Dave Fanning was the Samaritans, the quiet voice, who alone could understand the pain you were in … at having to listen to chart music.

Radio is a not well-understood medium. Its power is its ubiquity; its currency is intimacy. Dave Fanning whispers louder than most men shout. He is all over this island of Ireland and listened to in the furthest corners of the world. The size of his reach is extraordinary, but what’s more extraordinary is his very intimate relationship with people who love music on the radio.

When he chose to move to television, he chose a whole new world – stealing away from the mysteries of radio. This world requires a certain humility – one that’s easily lost in a world where you can see the wires, where you know how the sausages are made, how the figs get into the fig roll. Dave Fanning knows the magician has put the rabbit in his top hat before he walks out on stage – he was standing beside him as he did it. But Dave is still enraptured as the rabbit is revealed. Suspension of disbelief is the key component in the appreciation of all art, high or low.

The Muse often prefers a fresh face, as gauche as a confirmation suit or a pretend safety pin through the nose of a 17-year-old boy. Sometimes the Muse gets bored with the worldly wise and lets curious youth in her window. When our band was 17 and 18, it must have been a source of fascination for Dave, watching the Muse hang out with our band. Is She Really Going Out With Him? But he delighted over it and magnified it to a wider world, as he did with the Undertones and so many others who were just getting started.

Introduction

The Thing Is … you should always get to the point. If there is one thing I have learned in more than thirty years of broadcasting, it is that. People may listen to me on the radio or watch me on TV but it is not because they love the sound of my voice; far from it. They tune in because they want to be entertained.

The Thing Is … you should get to the point, because the many thousands of radio shows I have presented, and articles I have written, and interviews I have conducted have never been about me. They are about the great bands, and unbelievable singers, and fantastic actors that I am lucky enough to get to talk to.

The Thing Is … I used to get to the Point a lot, when it existed, and one particular evening, 1 March 2004, I got there and had one of the best nights of my life – an evening that was so full of surprises, that it is as good a place as any to begin my story.

The Thing Is … I got to the Point that evening when it was still called the Point, before Dublin’s long-time prime music venue succumbed to a major concrete-and-glass overhaul and facelift and became the O2. I was there for the Meteor Awards, which as everyone knows are Ireland’s prestigious main rock and pop awards, dished out annually in front of a live TV audience.

I had been to the Meteors a lot over the years. My job had often taken me there. Two or three times, I had been lucky enough to be voted Best DJ, and I had shovelled out countless gongs as a presenter in the past. This year was different. In 2004, I was being given the Industry Award.

The Industry Award is like any of those Lifetime Achievement Awards that get dished out at such ceremonies. Basically they reward longevity and hanging on in there: they acknowledge that you have done what you do for more years than you care to remember. They are prizes for being a survivor; a recognition that you are still in the game, still doing it and, if you are lucky, you’ve still got all your own teeth.

I’m being flippant here but it was great that the Meteors had chosen to bestow this award on me, and so many highlights from my career were running through my mind as I stood at the side of the stage. Where to begin? There was the rock magazine I had edited on a shoestring … my strange all-night sessions on pirate radio … my twenty-five years on Ireland’s main radio network … my countless trips to London, New York and Los Angeles … hundreds of encounters with all my heroes and the great and the good of the music and movie worlds … Jaysus, I had been lucky, I reflected …

As the awards host, Dara Ó Briain, ran through his slick patter, I self-consciously mentally rehearsed a few words that would thank those kind souls who had helped my career, and my loved ones, while hopefully not boring everybody else to tears. ‘The Thing Is …’ I told myself, ‘… get to the point. Keep it simple.’

Then Dara introduced a film clip. It was new to me. I had never seen it before; did not even know it existed. It was U2, the band whose career I have been inextricably linked to more than any other. They were in the studio to record How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, but the song they were singing now would not be going on the album.

U2 were serenading the Meteor Awards with a song called ‘David Watts’. Originally written by Ray Davies for The Kinks, it is probably better known for the cover version by the Jam. The actual track begins ‘I am a dull and simple lad/Cannot tell water from champagne’, before reaching the chorus of ‘Wish I could be like David Watts’, but those were not the words that Bono was singing that March evening. He had made a few crucial adjustments …

Fa fa fa fa fa FanningFa fa fa fa fa FanningFa fa fa fa fa FanningHe was a pirate on the radio …

Now this was quite something. This I hadn’t expected. U2, the biggest band in the world, had recorded a video tribute to me. That would be quite mind-boggling enough in itself. But they had gone one step further – they had done it in song.

On a four-man couch, Adam was on the right crooning smartly tuneful harmonies with Larry, who was drumming along. Edge sat at the other end and yer man Bono was exactly where he is always is, hogging the camera, giving out, singing …

… He played our songs on every show …

Ha! That was true! Or, at least, sometimes it must have seemed like it to the listeners. I probably had played more tracks by U2 than any other artist in my quarter-century on the radio. Our careers had always been closely intertwined. We hadn’t planned it that way – we had just emerged at the same time, in the same city, with the same drive and the same love of music.

… He was a punk but he kept his beard …

A punk? Was I? Well, I guess I must have been, back in the dogday end of the Seventies, when I was fresh out of college, desperate to avoid the nine-to-five grind, and filling my nights playing new music on an obscure, long-forgotten pirate radio station called the Big D.

As for the beard … well, it had made sense at the time. We all have these skeletons in our closet, don’t we? I mean, didn’t Bono used to have a mullet and wave a white flag?

… People think he’s straight but we know he’s weird …

I had to smile at that. Straight? Well, I had never been a drug addict or an alcoholic, sure, but I had spent twenty years living and breathing rock ’n’ roll, totally oblivious to the things that concerned most people, such as relationships or children or a lovely home. I had criss-crossed the globe; I had done five or six jobs at once; and all for the love of music. Yeah, I guess some people might think of that as weird …

… Wish I could be like Dave FanningWish I could be like Dave FanningWish I could be like Dave Fanning …

Now (as is still there for all to see on YouTube) Edge was joining in, and Larry and Adam, chiming their voices into the chorus. The Point was in hysterics; everybody in the audience was falling about. Bono was giving it his best rock-star face … How on earth was I to follow this?

He was the first man in our audience …

Ah, now this was an interesting one. Had I been the first person in U2’s audience? I had certainly been to enough shows, back in those super-early days, when there were two men and a dog there. But I think they were thinking more of the days on the pirate radio stations. The days when four young Irish kids without even a single to their name had come on to my show, and their lippy singer had talked long and hard into the night about their hopes, and dreams, and how they could maybe even cleave a path to world success 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.