The Thing is…

My dad sat in his chair, smoked his pipe and read the paper while we played. On the table next to him was a peculiar contraption: a crude, slightly rusty guillotine that he used to cut thin slices of plug tobacco. Barney would ground the slices with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand into the palm of his left, scoop them into the pipe and puff away happily. The whole process used to fascinate Jerry and Mel.

My father loved horse racing and would spend his Saturdays in front of the telly egging on every Irish horse, Irish-owned horse, Irish-trained horse or Irish jockey. I had no interest at all in this, although it didn’t stop me jumping out of my skin when my dad suddenly started shouting as they headed into the home straight.

My dad was very much a homebody. He never really went out, except on Friday nights for a pint with his friend Jack Walsh in Byrne’s of Galloping Green in Leopardstown. Other than that, he didn’t really drink, and I remember when President Kennedy came to Ireland, a few months before he was assassinated in Dallas, my dad was invited to the big reception in Dublin Castle and took some persuading to go and take my mother. It was certainly the only time I ever saw him in a tuxedo.

Of my brothers and sister, I hung out the most with Gerard, who was the nearest to me in age. We shared a bedroom and plenty of adventures and we remain close to this day. I was close to Miriam as well but how many boys hang out with their four-year-older sister? She was also heavily into ballet: she’d come pirouetting into the room on tiptoes, and I’d raise my eyes to heaven and go back to whatever I was doing.

John and Peter had both left home by the time I hit my teens. They had moved to London, which seemed impossibly glamorous to me. In fact, whenever I read about Carnaby Street and swinging London, I felt like my brothers gave me a link to that exotic, tantalising world just across the water, even though I had never been there myself.

One major tradition in my family was the big annual summer holiday. In those days, ordinary families didn’t vanish off to the Algarve or Tuscany, and we always went to exactly the same place: Bettystown in County Meath, about thirty miles from Dublin and five miles from my father’s home town of Drogheda. We would go for about a month, to give him time to catch up with his family, and I loved it.

We’d rent a house right next to the sea with a grassy bank that led straight down to the beach. It would be a proper old-fashioned summerhouse, with wooden walls like a chalet, and we would play on the beach all day long, even if the weather was lousy which, of course, it often was. When the tide was out it was a long way to the sea, the water was bitterly cold, and the totter back up the beach to the house felt like torture.

Movies were always big news in our house. My father would take me to the Stella Cinema in Mount Merrion – which, sadly, is now a furniture shop – and the Ormonde in Stillorgan, which, I’m glad to say, is still open today. The Stella was a grand old-fashioned picture house, with two ornate kiosks to buy your tickets and your sweets, and beautiful sweeping staircases up to the balcony that we hardly ever sat in. I used to love seeing the usherettes walking through the cinema selling ice cream from their trays.

The movies were always screened either Mondays to Wednesdays or Thursdays to Saturdays, with a different bill on Sundays. Normally, there were double-feature screenings and my dad took me to a lot of Westerns. Saturdays would often be comedies, including some really, really bad ones interspersed with Pathé News.

As I got older, I would sometimes go to evening showings that began at 7.30, with friends from school. Sometimes we would be too young to see the films without a grown-up with us, so we would have to wait outside and ask an adult if we could go in with them. They would usually say yes because they knew us from around Mount Merrion, and they weren’t X-rated movies – they just finished at 11 p.m., and unaccompanied kids had to be out of the cinema by then. There would be about ten of us, and once we got in we would make a beeline for the front row.

I have so many memories of wide-eyed nights in the Stella. I saw Wait Until Dark, the famous movie with Audrey Hepburn as a blind girl. Friends who had seen it already told me it had a really terrifying scene. At one stage Alan Arkin, playing a villain, killed one of his own guys by ramming a car into him. I thought, ‘Was that it? Big deal!’ I relaxed – and a few minutes later, Audrey went to close a fridge and a man leapt out of it at her. Mother of Jesus! Thinking of that scene still gives me goose bumps to this day!

I was an avid moviegoer as a kid. Any trailer that I ever saw, I longed to see the film. I was an absolute sucker. I remember when I was slightly older, Jerry Coyle and I went to the Ormonde to see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which had a real effect on me. Even at the tender age of 15, I thought Maggie Smith was brilliant.

Maybe I was always going to host a movie show, because as a kid I would write reviews of every film I saw in a little book that I made from pieces of brown paper stapled together. I would carefully write out the title, the director and names of the stars and then give it a critique and a mark out of ten. I am not sure my critical faculties were too honed back then; the only film I ever gave ten out of ten to was a totally obscure war film called Tobruk, starring Rock Hudson.

I read quite a lot as a kid – my mother made sure of that, and our house was full of books and literature. I was big into Enid Blyton with her Famous Five and Secret Seven and their mad adventures that always ended with farmers’ wives giving them sandwiches and lashings of ginger beer. Her Island of Adventure and Castle of Adventure stories were the best. I was also fond of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books – but when it came to reading, my major obsession was comics.

It started with the Beano and Dandy, with all the characters I can still picture now: the Bash Street Kids getting slippered by the teacher, Little Plum with his feather coming out of his head-band, Dennis the Menace knocking lumps out of Walter the Softie. In one story I particularly remember, Dennis came out of school with a book marked ‘Sums’; Walter’s was called ‘Harder Sums’. My sister Miriam got the Bunty and Judy, and when she got too old for them, I started buying them instead. I didn’t care that they were aimed at girls: the stories in them were just as good, especially the Four Marys, Lorna Doone with her magic dancing shoes, or the unfortunate heroine who would have her saddle loosened by horrid, wicked types who schemed to thwart her chances of winning the local gymkhana.

In my teenage years I took a bit of a step up with the comics, and – yes, I know this is sad – I can still remember the sequence that used to define my week. It was the Hornet on a Tuesday, the Hotspur on Thursday and the Victor on Friday. That was the big one: Friday afternoon, home from school, reading the Victor and eating fish and chips with the weekend ahead was definitely a major highlight of my week. I always sat at the same part of the kitchen table. I’d place the comic in the cutlery drawer, read bits as I digested the food and push the drawer back in when I went to the plate for a little more.

The Second World War stories didn’t really do it for me. I could take or leave Matt Braddock VC or Captain Hurricane and his pint-sized batman Maggot Malone. Captain Hurricane had a ‘ragin’ fury’ every week and would use guns, grenades and his filthy temper to wipe out ‘krauts’ and ‘slant-eyed goons’ – not terms you tend to hear in today’s more enlightened, politically correct world. I much preferred Morgan the Mighty or Alf Tupper, the ‘Tough of the Track’, who always ate fish and chips before and after winning a race.

The Hornet always seemed to me to have the best stories and illustrations. Every week it had a serialised non-pictorial story over three or four pages in which Paul Terhune tried to solve some mystery or other, each instalment invariably ending on a cliff-hanger. As soon as a story finished, after about ten weeks, I would immediately go back and read the thirty or forty pages in one go. My favourite was a rather unlikely tale called ‘Invisible Bullets from Nowhere’ in which Terhune tried to work out why random citizens were being shot but nobody could find the shooter or the bullets. It transpired that a disgruntled employee at the local observatory high above the town had fitted the giant telescope with ice bullets and was taking pot shots at pedestrians he held a grudge against. Well, it made sense at the time.

Just reading the comics was never enough for me. They used to have competitions that I was soon compulsively entering. Quite often, I won. The first time I saw my name in print, I absolutely loved it. My mum used to read the Irish Catholic, and they had a competition asking readers to fill in the missing words in a limerick. I knew the answer because I had heard it before – in fact I can still remember it:

There was an old man quite weird,Who shrieked, ’Tis just as I feared!Four owls and a wrenTwo larks and a henHave just built their nest in my beard.

I sent my answer in to the Irish Catholic and won £3, which was a small fortune to me. I wrote them a letter saying it had been fantastic to win, and they printed that too. The biggest buzz was just reading my name in the magazine: D FANNING, DUBLIN.

Fired by this triumph, I was soon entering all the competitions in my weekly comics. The Valiant asked readers to send in a cartoon, so I got hold of a copy of a religious magazine that we used to have in school called the Word. It had a cartoon of two guys on a pulley hanging off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, too far away to clean the windows, and I traced it and posted it to the Valiant. Let’s face it, it was plagiarism, pure and simple, but the £1 postal order came in very handy.

I had no conscience about how I won the competitions. Once, I copied a joke from the Beezer and sent it to the Topper. I won. The question was ‘What is the definition of a phone kiosk?’ and I said ‘A chatterbox’. They also asked for a definition of an alarm clock and I said ‘Something that scares the living daylights out of you’, which I thought was absolutely hilarious.

I entered and won so many competitions that the people at the DC Thomson offices in Scotland must have been saying, ‘Jesus, not another one from that Irish guy!’ The prize was normally a postal order, but on one occasion the Beezer sent me a walkie-talkie. It was two small hollow pieces of red plastic joined together by a foot of hollow black cord that looked like a piece of liquorice, and it was rubbish. But it was still as much of a thrill as ever to come home from school for dinner and find a parcel waiting for me next to my place at the table.

Like any normal, average young Dublin lad, I lived for music and football. There is much more to come in this book about music, believe me, but for a while in those early years football meant almost as much to me. The first games I ever went to were at Glenamlure Park in Milltown, the home of Shamrock Rovers. Dermot took me there every now and then. The ground was always packed. That was in the days when Mick Leech was the George Best of the Rovers team, and other star Irish players included Alfie Hale at Waterford and Freddie Strahan at Shelbourne. Glenmalure Park is now a housing estate, and many Shamrock fans have never forgiven the board for selling up.

I also saw a few international matches at Dalymount Park. It always struck me how much more physical the game was than it looked on television, how much more sweaty and grunty. You could easily be hit by flying spit. I remember seeing the great Noel Cantwell, who was always known as a true gentleman of football. As I gazed at him in awe, he glanced at the referee, then elbowed the guy next to him in the back of the head.

Yet most of my football watching was via television. I followed the English league closely, and in 1966, during one of our family holidays to Bettystown, I watched the legendary match when England beat West Germany 4–2 in the World Cup Final.

It was so exciting; so incredibly dramatic. We all watched it on a little black-and-white TV. At half-time I walked down to the beach, stared across the sea and told myself, ‘I can see England, where the game is going on!’ Then it was back in the house for the rest of the match. When Webber equalised for Germany and made it 2–2 in the last minute of normal time I thought, ‘Uh-oh, this is going to go wrong!’ Then Geoff Hurst scored that famous goal off the crossbar, which, let’s be honest here, was never a goal. Unlike many Irish people, I had nothing against England winning the World Cup, but they certainly had all the luck.

Forty-four years later, in South Africa in the summer of 2010, again against Germany, Frank Lampard’s goal would have made it 2–2 and kept England in the World Cup, but for the ref who decided that a perfectly good goal wasn’t a goal. England never recovered.

At about 12, I decided that I was a Manchester United fan and followed the Red Devils avidly for the next two years. The Irish newspapers didn’t have the in-depth coverage I wanted, so I subscribed to the Manchester Evening News & Chronicle – but only on the days after United had played. It would arrive in the post a few days after it had been published and I would cut the United articles out and glue them into my scrapbook.

I watched United – who at the time boasted the holy triumvirate of George Best, Bobby Charlton and Denis Law – beat Benfica 4–1 in the European Cup final in 1968. It was so emotional. It was ten years after the Munich air disaster, and Benfica were enormous in those days; they had just beaten Everton 5–0 and 2–0. Charlton scored two goals, Best got that famous one where he cheekily rounded the keeper, and Brian Kidd got the other, on his nineteenth birthday. I’ll never forget it: right after Kidd scored, I went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and my dad shouted out, ‘Jesus, he’s done it again! Exactly the same as the other one!’ I ran back in, looked at the screen, and realised that my dad hadn’t yet got his head around the concept of the instant action replay.

I once actually saw George Best play in the flesh. Manchester United were drawn against Waterford in an early qualifying game for the European Cup and they held the game in Daly-mount Park. United won 3–0, a Law hat-trick, and Best came on at half-time. One little kid got past security and ran up to him while the game was going on, and Best stopped and signed an autograph. He was just so cool.

Oddly enough, after two years I gave up supporting Man United and just followed football in general. The World Cup in Mexico in 1970 was hugely exciting. In those days the organisers didn’t kowtow to European evening viewing times so the games were on live at two or three in the morning. It was school holidays, warm evenings and football in the middle of the night … the muffled, atmospheric commentaries added to the sense of exoticism and novelty that marked that great summer.

One big family ritual was watching The Big Match on Sunday afternoons, hosted by Brian Moore. I will never forget how the programme used to start: Moore commentating and saying, ‘Charlie George, who can hit ’em!’ and George, with his long hair flying, hitting that amazing goal for Arsenal in the 1971 FA Cup final and then lying flat on his back.

Queens Park Rangers used to be on a lot, when Rodney Marsh and Stan Bowles were sexing up football. Marsh always seemed to score a hat-trick when the cameras 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.