The Thing is…

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 point, two things happened that changed my world – the Beatles, and the arrival of television in Ireland.

Like 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 ChristmasTop 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.

Yet the Beatles were still my big love, and the first album I ever bought – I’m not saying this just to try to be cool – was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. For an impressionable 13-year-old music fan, this was not a bad place to start.

The purchase was quite a palaver. I knew Sgt. Pepper was due to come out in the summer of 1967, so that January I went to the local record shop, Golden Discs in Stillorgan, and put down a deposit on it. This was the mighty sum of ten shillings, which I had saved from my Christmas present money.

I bought all my singles at the time at Golden Discs so the guy behind the counter knew me a little by then and was just as excited as me by the whole thing. I already knew a few of the song titles from the album because I had read about them in the NME, and had spent many hours wondering what ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’, ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ and ‘Within You, Without You’ would sound like.

The five-month wait for Sgt. Pepper’s release was intolerable, but eventually 1 June came round and I parted with the rest of the thirty shillings: a fortune for me, whose only income was an early-morning Irish Times paper round on St Thomas Road in Mount Merrion. Holding the album in my hands was overwhelming – it had lyrics written on the back, the songs all ran into each other and there were cardboard cut-outs of Sgt. Pepper’s band. It was all too much for me – so much so that I didn’t even rush home and play it straightaway. In fact, I think I even let Gerard play it first.

Even today, while it probably isn’t the Beatles’ best album, Sgt. Pepper sounds to me like a stone-cold classic, so you can only imagine the effect it had on me back then. Even my clueless teenage mind could tell they were opening up new possibilities in the studio, and the pre-Pepper ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ single is the one song I’d take to a desert island with me. The Beatles were changing everything in those days; they were instigating a massive cultural shift and I was desperate to be part of it.

By my early teens, one whole wall of the living room had been taken over by albums. There was no couch or shelf in the room and the piano had long gone. Albums were encroaching like a tidal wave of vinyl; there must have been at least five hundred propped up in stacks against the wall and I would constantly flick through them.

The other main source for hearing new music in those days was Radio Luxembourg and its dodgy, crackly broadcasts. I’d listen in late at night to DJs like Alan Freeman or Jack Jackson and all the bizarre sponsors’ messages. They used to play one advert to death: HORACE BATCHELOR, DEPARTMENT ONE, KEYNSHAM, SPELT K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M, BRISTOL. To this day, I have no idea what Mr Bachelor was selling.

Kid Jensen was the main man on Radio Luxembourg late at night and one week he interviewed a Dublin band, Skid Row, on his programme. The name didn’t mean a lot to me but it was still great to hear a local band talking on Luxembourg. I remember the Kid asked them all to introduce themselves, and when he asked Nollaig Bridgeman where he came from, instead of saying ‘Dublin’, Nollaig said ‘Dorset Street’ (with the emphasis on the ‘set’) in his thick Dublin accent. Don’t ask me why, but I loved hearing that. Another night, the Kid returned from the Isle of Wight festival and said the band who blew everyone away was Taste. That again meant a lot: the festival had boasted a line-up of heavyweights, yet the Rory Gallagher-led Irish trio were the talk of the town.

In 1970, Kid Jensen made a big deal on Luxembourg about the fact he was premiering the next John Lennon album. I waited up to 1 a.m. to hear the first track, which was ‘Imagine’, and the Kid messed up – he said, ‘John Lennon, “Imagine”’, and nothing happened. Then he just said, ‘Music’, and the track started. I was taping it on a cheap battery-operated tape recorder and I played it twice down the phone to Jerry Coyle the next morning. I must have listened to that crackly tape a hundred times over the next six weeks until the song came out as a single, and even today, whenever I hear ‘Imagine’, I think of Kid Jensen’s messed-up intro.

When I wasn’t getting new music from Top of the Pops, Radio Luxembourg or my brothers’ record collections, I was talking about it with my two best friends. Both Jerry and Mel were by now as hooked on music as I was, and we did little but try to get our hands on as much of it as we possibly could.

Our resources were not the same. Mel and Jerry often had a little more disposable income than me so, to be honest, I would try to coerce these guys into buying the records I craved but didn’t have the money to get.

Every week I would scour the NME or Melody Maker and tell Jerry which albums I thought he should buy. Yet Jerry’s big thing was buying records because he liked the cover. This led to a few dodgy purchases, particularly in the 1970s. He figured the first Black Sabbath album must be great simply because the sleeve had a picture of a mysterious veiled woman standing in a graveyard.

Jerry’s tastes were eclectic and usually visually driven. He’d get seduced by the sleeves and buy albums by groups such as Gracious, Bakerloo or Piblokto. Mel bought the Fat Mattress album purely because the cover opened up into four big covers of the band sitting on a tree. Or maybe it was the fact that a former Jimi Hendrix Experience member was in the band. It was lucky the sleeve was striking, as the music wasn’t up too much. Mel had more straightforward tastes as the Sixties ended – he was all about Cream, Jethro Tull and, obsessively, Led Zeppelin.

Mel and Jerry were also my company at the first gig I ever attended. Bands had started coming to Dublin in my early teens but I was just too young to go and see the Beatles or the Stones, both of whom played the Adelphi. Naturally, I memorised the reviews of the shows. Years later, I met Bob Geldof again and he told me he’d been to both of the gigs. Even decades later, I was still jealous.

The Adelphi was also the venue for my first gig, but the artists were of a different strain completely: the Bee Gees. It was just after they had a big hit with ‘Massachusetts’, which appealed to my chart-loving side, but they were also releasing albums with psychedelic covers. They were up there with the best pop music. Gerard had bought the debut album, 1st, and they had released great singles – ‘New York Mining Disaster’, ‘World’, ‘To Love Somebody’. The gig was full of screaming girls.

The support bands were also interesting: Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, who played their hit single ‘The Legend of Xanadu’ with Dave Dee jumping around stage with a sombrero and a whip. I’d remembered reading about Dave Dee. He used to be a policeman, and in 1960 had attended the scene of the car crash that injured Gene Vincent and killed Eddie Cochran. The other band was Grapefruit, one of the few bands that John Lennon ever signed to the Beatles’ Apple label. We bought posters and sat upstairs and I absolutely loved the whole evening.

There weren’t many gigs in Dublin at that time but we would go to anything we could get tickets for. The Stadium was where most shows of any size happened, and that was where Mel and I went in March 1971 to see his all-time favourite band, Led Zeppelin, touring the Led Zeppelin IV, or ‘Four Symbols’ album.

The band had played in Belfast the night before and played ‘Stairway to Heaven’ live for the first time, which was obviously a very big deal. While they also played it in Dublin, of course, I don’t remember too much about it. The show was cool and I remember Jimmy Page playing his twin guitar with a bow and John Bonham banging his big gong. It was the songs from Led Zeppelin III that did it for me though, and it’s still my favourite Zeppelin album.

Gigs were grand, yet for me albums came first. Every penny of my pocket money and my paper-round wage went on them. Each Christmas I would give my parents, brothers and aunties a list of the twenty records I’d most like, and hope for the best. One Christmas, through a mixture of presents and money saved, I hit the jackpot with big ones like After the Goldrush by Neil Young, Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd and Layla by Derek and the Dominoes. I also acquired craved-for obscurities like Shooting at the Moon by Kevin Ayers; The Madcap Laughs by Syd Barrett; Loaded by the Velvet Underground; Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicus by Spirit; Fire and Water by Free; Little Feat’s self-titled debut album; Lick My Decals Off, Baby by Captain Beefh eart & the Magic Band; In the Wake of Poseidon and Lizard by King Crimson; 12 Songs by Randy Newman; Lennon’s stark, masterful Plastic Ono Band; and, maybe, two of the very best in Soft Machine’s Third and Dave Mason’s Alone Together. There was also a great Island sampler called Bumpers in there. That really was a great Christmas.

If I had to pinpoint just one album which took me from the Sixties into the Seventies it would be Blind Faith, only album of the supergroup bearing the same name. Fifteen minutes were taken up by an awful Ginger Baker song but the other five numbers, including a Buddy Holly cover, combined to make this not just a great album, but an extremely important one for me. It single-handedly bridged the gap between the constant glory and magic of Sixties pop and the new world of progressive, album-orientated rock that was springing up all over the place.

It’s hard to explain to kids in these days of constantly accessible websites and downloads, but just physically holding a vinyl album was half of the thrill for me. I would get a new purchase home, eagerly ease the record from its outer and inner sleeve, then spend hours mulling over the sleeve image and lyrics as it played.

Sometimes the inner sleeve had a Jolly Roger skull-and-crossbones and the sombre legend ‘Home taping is killing music’. Personally, I thought nothing could kill music. I happily ignored the Jolly Roger’s exhortations by recording hours and hours of music onto my own carefully selected ‘Various Artists’ cassette tapes. Mel, Jerry and I would play them, and always had a pencil or pen to hand, to carefully wind the tape back onto the spools as it inevitably collapsed in the tape deck. The ‘Home taping is killing music’ argument never convinced me. I just figured, how could I make these tapes without having bought the albums in the first place? I was killing nothing! I was never happier than when compiling yet another ‘Various Artists’ classic to take its place in the cassette-storage case I had got for Christmas.

To me, Various Artist compilations were an art form. There were no rules; you had to just feel your way to getting it right. A great cassette might have three classic reggae tracks, a very early curio by David Bowie and then a complete curveball such as ‘Cottage In Negril’ by Jamaican singer Tyrone Taylor. The tracks had to be obscure, brilliant and work together. I named my favourite instrumental self-compilation Atmospheric and was delighted when loads of my friends loved it. Sadly, I then betrayed my lack of imagination by naming its two eagerly awaited follow-ups Atmospheric II and Atmospheric III.

By the time I was at Blackrock College, my Irish teacher, Mr O’Shea, had taken to calling me Fear Na Ceirnini – the Man of the Records. I was always bringing albums into school, or he would see me out of school hours, walking up to Jerry’s house with records under my arm. I was now a pretty fixated character. If I saw somebody in the street, even a complete stranger, with a record bag under their arm, I couldn’t help going up to ask them what was in the bag. If it was Wishbone Ash, chances were they were pretty cool. If it was Brendan O’Dowda, well, maybe not.

Once an English guy came to live in Foster Avenue, in a house across the road from us. Somebody told me that he worked in the Irish office of Atlantic Records – I had never even known record labels had an Irish office. I used to watch him in awe as he drove off to what sounded to me the hippest job ever. I never dared to talk to him, but a neighbour did and got me Yes’s Time and a Word at 25 per cent discount – nearly ten bob off!

Yes, the Fear Na Ceirnini was a very obsessed soul at this point, and his condition was about to get worse. I was already deeply in love with music – but I was poised to discover that it could sound even better and richer than I had ever imagined.