The Thing is…

My father retired from his job at the Board of Works in 1972, after forty-seven years in the post. Unsurprisingly, his colleagues were keen to buy him a fittingly lavish retirement present, and my brothers and I, bored of our tinny mono record player, begged him to ask them for a stereo system.

Typically amiable and easygoing, Barney agreed. That shows the kind of father he was. He knew he would hardly ever use it, except maybe for the traditional spin for Brendan O’Dowda or Slim Dusty’s ‘The Pub With No Beer’ on Christmas Day, but he also knew how much it would mean to Gerard and me. So our music room (that’s what it was called by now!) in Foster Avenue received delivery of a state-of-the-art stereo record player – the only real litmus test for an album, as far as I was concerned.

By then I had listened to thousands of albums in that same room in the family home, but I’ll never forget the day I set up the new system, with one speaker on a board balanced on the radiator and one on the dining-room table. I had waited for this moment for a very long time and in my head an excited little noise was nagging me: ‘This is going to be my future for the next few years; it had better be good!’

The very first track I played in this brave new world was ‘Carry On’, the opening song on Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Déjà Vu. I COULD NOT BELIEVE THE DIFFERENCE. Obviously I had heard stereo systems before but never here, in my family home where I listened to and assessed all my music. It opened with a flurry of fast, acoustic guitar, then swept into an amazing vocal harmony that segued into a keyboard change – and it was like being blown away by a gust of wind on top of a mountain.

This was perfect! The dodgy old mono player, with the arm that creaked over, stopped in mid-air and clumsily plonked itself on to the crackly vinyl grooves, had been a loyal servant on a daily basis for close on a decade, but at that second it became no more than an outdated, occasionally cherished relic. Now I had a reason to revisit every album I owned and hear them exactly as the band and the producer had meant the music to be heard.

My parents and our warm-natured next-door neighbour, Mrs Maloney, scaled new heights of tolerance over the next few years as my listening routine developed. I would sit precisely between the speakers; the volume edging its way towards 11, with the curtains closed whatever time of day it was. I tried to unscrew the light-bulb, and when I failed, I accidentally-on-purpose broke it. I needed darkness, and top volume.

You may think this behaviour sounds extreme or even mildly disturbed, but to me it never felt that way. I was just indulging my life force, my all-consuming passion. I worked my way through all of my favourite Sixties albums again, with the Beatles and Dylan getting particularly forensic revisits, but Yes and Blind Faith also benefited from these intensive listening sessions.

I would sit between those two carefully balanced speakers for six or seven hours, my bum numb but my ears alive. I would have all the tracks on each album I wanted to listen to lined up in advance and never took more than ten seconds to jump up, take the needle off, put the album back in its sleeve, replace it and be back on my seat by the time the music began. I worked with pit-stop precision and it was always, always very loud.

My friends never even bothered to ring our doorbell any more. They simply knocked on the window. The telephone was in a cupboard at the bottom of the stairs but I never heard it ring, let alone answered it, although more often than not it was for me. It was a strange twilight existence, all alone, playing the music that I loved. You could almost say it was a future DJ doing some intensive career training.

Chapter 3

In 1971, it came time to leave Blackrock College and I had a major decision to make. Except, of course, that it would be no decision at all. I would go to university because that was what my family did. Annie had only ever wanted two things for her children – for us to be happy, and to be educated. Every one of my siblings went to university except Dermot, and ironically he has worked as a porter at University College Dublin for over four decades. He wasn’t alone – my sister Miriam worked in the UCD library for twenty years.

There was no doubt that I would be following John, Peter, Miriam and Gerard’s footsteps to UCD. The university’s Belfield campus was just across the road from our house in Foster Avenue. Sometimes in life the easy decision is the right one, and as there was nothing else I wanted to do at that time, I went along with it. I was to study English and Philosophy: I had the right qualifications for it, and it made as much sense as anything else.

But before I started at UCD, I took my first trip to England. My brother John was getting married to his girlfriend Kaye in London, and Dermot and I caught the boat over to Holyhead and then got a train down to London. We were there for about five days and I took advantage of the trip by going to see a few films such as Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange that were banned in Ireland back then. It’s easy to forget what a strange, priest-riddled society we were – and in some ways still are.

When I started at UCD, I happily continued on my trajectory of being academically relentlessly average. This didn’t mean I hated the course; far from it. Some of the texts made an impact. I loved and even memorised some of the classic phrases from Dickens, and for some reason Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge had a major effect on me – this strange tale of a poor eedjit who sold his wife to somebody and had his actions come back to haunt him when he became the mayor. I sat down by a roaring log fire to start reading that book at 10 o’clock one night and had finished it by seven the next morning.

I can’t pretend, though, that I worked hard and came out of my English degree with a devout appreciation of the poems of Robert Frost or even a burning love for literature in general. When it came to the academic side of things, I did what I had to, and no more, which was reflected in my reliably ordinary exam results. For me, university was mostly about social life, girls, fun and freedom – and that was fantastic.

I had an absolute ball at UCD. Life was great, and exciting, and I felt like I was exactly where I should be. Having always been a fairly gregarious character, I found that I made loads of friends and there always seemed to be something to do, and somebody to do it with.

Obviously, with the arrogance of youth, I thought I was super-cool at college. Looking back, I clearly wasn’t. I was always pathetically dishevelled, deliberately so, and a typical day would find me mooching about with my wispy beard and duffle coat, a copy of Solzhenitsyn or The Hobbit sticking meaningfully out of a pocket, quoting the NME’s The Lone Groover cartoon strip at every opportunity. Pretentious? Moi?

My hair was a source of great angst for me. The early Seventies was an era of being defined by your long hair and, sadly, my long hair was hopeless. Instead of growing straight down like Lennon it was curly and corkscrew and would stick out at ridiculous angles. My beard was even worse. My goal was to look as cool as Let It Be-era McCartney. I looked like Catweazle.

I lived at home all through my time at UCD. It never occurred to me to move out. This might have seemed strange to some of my college mates, whose sole ambition was to rent a flat that they could take women back to, but I was perfectly happy staying at home, where the atmosphere was looser, madder and freer than in any campus hall of residence.

I couldn’t take girls back to spend the night but that was never really an issue. They weren’t exactly queuing up – maybe it was the Catweazle beard that was the problem? Even so, our house in Foster Avenue soon became a major social centre for everyone to pile back to after we had spent the night putting the world to rights over a leisurely pint in the student bar.

My mother loved having my friends round at any time of the day or night. In no time, our house was more like a student flat in Ranelagh or Rathmines than a middle-class south Dublin home. Everybody would troop in, have a friendly word with Annie as she greeted them with homemade biscuits, then we’d all head into ‘my’ stereo-room to play records. My own late-night culinary skills were always appreciated – tins of salmon and beans on toast!

Even today, nearly forty years on, I meet people who claim to have been back to my house during their years at UCD. I once read in Hot Press the Irish justice minister, Dermot Ahern, saying that he went to Dave Fanning’s house to listen to Pink Floyd. I am sure he did, but I have absolutely no memory of it whatsoever.

Friday and Saturday nights were always about going to a party, or trying to find one to gatecrash if you weren’t invited to one. The routine was always the same – listen out in the student bar or the pub, try to get an address and a name, then just turn up as if you were expected and it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘I know Dave! No, I mean Paul! Er … Pete?’ You would always be waving a six-pack of beer on the doorstep to show you were a good guest, but once you got inside you’d seldom put it in the fridge – it’d be gone in a second. Instead, you opened the first can and hid the rest in a secret place. Duffle-coat pockets were always good for that, even if it meant Solzhenitsyn or TheHobbit’s pages getting bent or wet.

My UCD years were not too dissolute but everybody smoked stuff they weren’t supposed to and I was as enthusiastic as the next man. The first question at any gig you went to, to anyone you met, was always, ‘Have you got any skins?’ Sometimes it was relentless, and any paper or card in our path – beer mats, magazines, book covers – was in danger of being ripped up to use as roach papers.

Yet for all the enjoyable distractions, music remained my be-all and end-all, and university gave me more chances than ever to wallow in it. The Belfield student bar had cheap nighttime gigs with free ones at lunchtime in the Theatre L in the Arts building, and in my three years at UCD, I hardly missed one.

Mainly, it would be local bands that were starting out, although I did see Paul Brady in his folk-inclined, pre-Hard Station era, and thought he was great. I also remember a band called Frruup from Belfast, who had just released a debut album called Future Legends, which I thought was brilliant. I saw one of them in a bar and had a bit of banter with him: ‘I bought your album!’ ‘Oh, you’re the one that bought it!’ – that sort of stuff. That was interesting, because even then, I came away thinking, ‘I can do that – I can talk to musicians …’

Outside of college, I was still going to plenty of gigs. Horslips were the big local draw, and Rory Gallagher’s gigs were rightly the stuff of legend. I saw Blodwyn Pig supported by Skid Row at the Stadium, and got very excited when Pink Floyd were due to come to Dublin, although in the end they never did, for some reason.

I went to a lot of gigs with Jerry and Mel and any number of others and, by now, Mel had got himself a Morris Minor car and had the four symbols from the cover of Led Zeppelin IV painted on the doors. His father owned a place in Clara Vale in Wicklow and Mel, Jerry and I would frequently spend weekends there, listening to my compilation cassettes on the way down and then playing albums on some cheap, tatty little record player that we took with us.

When it came to buying records, I had moved on from Golden Discs in Stillorgan to Pat Egan’s Sound Cellar in Nassau Street, on the corner of Grafton Street and opposite Trinity College in the heart of Dublin. Sound Cellar was fantastic. You went through a tiny door that you would easily miss unless you were looking for it and then down two flights of stairs into a dingy, tiny little cellar. It had these great bargain bins and I would find some brilliant oddities and rarities in there.

Rummaging through those bins, I would come across Caravan, Gong, Weather Report, Todd Rundgren, J.J. Cale, Jackson Browne, Mahavishnu Orchestra and hundreds of others. There were some truly weird bands on the Harvest label and some excellent major-label samplers. CBS’s Fill Your Head with Rock compilation was pretty cool as was Island’s Nice Enough to Eat, which featured Quintessence, Free, King Crimson, Mott the Hoople, Nick Drake, Ireland’s Dr Strangely Strange and Traffic, whom I still regard as one of the greatest English bands of all time.

Pat was eight or nine years older than me and seemed incredibly cool. He had been involved with weird underground bands on the Irish ‘beat scene’, which was slightly before my time, and as he and his mate and assistant Tommy got used to me being in the shop all the time, they’d call me up and tip me off about new releases.

It was a great system. Pat would phone me up and say, ‘I’ve got such-and-such an album in’, and I’d be excited because it wasn’t due to be out for three weeks. He might only have one copy, so I’d ask him to keep it for me and then get in there as fast as I could. By then I was buying one album per week and I bet I got 80 per cent of them unheard – almost all on the strength of good reviews in the music comics, usually NME or Melody Maker.

The first Roxy Music album is probably my favourite debut album of all time. I was hooked from the first single, ‘Virginia Plain’. It was all about sha-na-na, quiffs and Teddy Boys, which weren’t really my thing, mixed with early 1970s glam rock, which was, the songs were magnificent and, crucially, it sounds as good today as it did then. Pat got copies of their next four or five albums a few weeks before their official releases and called me each time. I was usually in to buy it within the hour.

By the end of my first year at UCD, I was happily settled in to the student lifestyle and having the best time I could imagine – but I also had itchy feet. I fancied seeing a bit of the world and also earning enough money to keep me in albums for the next academic year.

One major perk of being a student was that you were eligible for a J1 visa, which allowed you to work abroad during university holidays – in America or nearer to home. A sizeable number of UCD undergraduates took off to Germany when term ended and in the summer of 1972 I decided to join them. As the term ended, I headed for Gross-Gerau, an industrial town twenty miles south of Frankfurt with my friend James O’Nolan. We had secured three months’ work in a steel-pressing factory that made hinges and various other parts for BMW cars.

This was a hugely intimidating prospect for one very good reason – I had never done a day’s work in my life. Sure, I’d had my early morning paper round for a year or two, but besides that and a week on a farm in Ballivor in County Meath, that was about it. Some kids might have had to clean their house from top to bottom before they were allowed to go and play but that had never been my parents’ style and they’d never really made me do anything I hadn’t wanted to. In truth, I’d had it pretty easy.

So on my first day I was pretty horrified as the factory foreman showed us around the thumping, clanking workplace full of vast noisy machinery. ‘I don’t know why you’re bothering,’ I was thinking. ‘This is a big mistake and I’m out of here.’ I’m pretty sure that James and a couple of others I was with felt the same – young, scared and a long way from home.

Given this trepidation, I felt very proud of myself that I stuck it out. It wasn’t easy. We started work at 6 o’clock each morning, alongside a whole load of other immigrant workers who were mostly Turks or East Europeans. We were working on conveyor belts that turned flat pieces of metal into hinges, and given that each BMW had twenty-four hinges, there was no shortage of work. We’d make thousands of the things every day.

The factory was deafening, there were no earphones and the work was tedious and repetitive, so I survived the long days on the floor by pretending I was giving a concert. In my head, one minute I was Kevin Ayers and the next I was Roxy Music, on stage in Theatre L back in UCD. The foreman used to laugh when he came by and caught me singing my head off but I didn’t care – it was my escape from the boredom.

I suppose it was a bit like Michael Caine as Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File. There is a scene where he is being tortured but he has a screw hidden in his hand. He grinds the screw so hard that it tears his flesh and blood seeps out but it helps him to survive the torture because it is his own pain; he’s controlling it. OK, a bit dramatic, but that was how it felt to me, anyhow.

The four of us stayed in a little house next to the factory and we hardly mixed or learned any German at all. It was our childish way of rebelling against the banality of the whole experience. About the only language I picked up was arbeiten (work), Fabrik (factory) and Förderband (conveyor belt).

We were there to earn money and were so determined not to spend anything that we got into the bad habit of stealing stupid stuff from the local supermarket. I got particularly skilled at nicking coffee. I would walk around the supermarket, come out apparently empty-handed and the other lads would say, ‘Ah, you couldn’t do it today! No worries!’ At which point I would open up my coat to reveal two huge jars of coffee nestling in the lining. I didn’t even drink coffee at the time.

It was ridiculous. We even resented spending five Deutsch-marks on potatoes, so we would go down to some huge local farm after dark and steal them from the field. We were doing that one night and a plane flew over us, unusually low. I somehow doubt the pilot could even see us or, if he could, was not too bothered about a handful of Irish eedjits nicking spuds but I remember yelling, in all seriousness, ‘Hit the dirt!’ and we did. There I was, face down with a mouth full of field and a German plane flying overhead, feeling like a wartime soldier from the Valiant or one of the other comics I used to read.

The best part about the German trip, by far, was that we got to a few major concerts. With Stephen Russell and Donal Foley and about thirty-five thousand others, I went to my first proper stadium gig near Frankfurt. Eighty per cent of the audience were American GI’s, who were all smoking something: joints, pipes, bongs, whatever.

The Spencer Davis Group and Colosseum (with Gary Moore) opened up the show but the main draw were Sly and the Family Stone. They had never meant a lot to me but they were soul-funk legends and it was good to tick them off my list. Sly was pretty notorious for not turning up to shows, so when he appeared on stage the place went crazy. However, he did no more than twenty-five minutes before slouching off, leaving the crowd seriously unhappy. They wanted at least another hour.

Sly wasn’t even the headliner. That was Rod Stewart, who at the time was enjoying worldwide hits with ‘Maggie May’ and ‘Your Wear It Well’ from the Every Picture Tells a Story album. This failed to win over the disgruntled GI’s and I heard one of them grumble to his mate: ‘We want funk rock, not faggot rock.’ Rod and Sly share a surname and a chant soon started up: ‘We want Sly Stewart, not Rod Stewart.’ Rod seemed pretty oblivious to it all and the protest petered out after about twenty minutes.

A week later we were back in Frankfurt to see Frank Zappa, once again entertaining mainly American soldiers. The GIs seemed a pretty demanding bunch and Zappa wasn’t exactly a ‘play the hits’, crowd-pleasing kind of performer, but he had enough authority and charisma to see off any audience revolt and lead them by the hand into fairly experimental areas.

The big-deal show of that summer, though, was the Rolling Stones playing an indoor gig at an ice-hockey arena. They were touring Exile on Main Street and Mick Taylor, Brian Jones’s replacement, was in the band. You could see there was friction going on: at one point Mick Jagger went over to Taylor and ruffled his hair. Taylor looked at him like he wanted to kill him. After the gig we missed the bus, walked the ten miles home, got in at five in the morning and were back in the Fabrik on the Förderband by six.

My merry band lasted six weeks in Gross-Gerau and we couldn’t wait to get back to Dublin and the pampered student life. We got the trains and boats back to UCD saying ‘Never again!’ so of course it goes without saying that I was back in the exact same factory the following year. This time I lasted more than three months – the others all quit and left before then, but things are never so bad second time around, and I wanted to earn as much money as possible. After all, those albums didn’t buy themselves.

I was so fixated on saving money that I would sometimes hitchhike home across Germany and France to save the train fare. US GI’s eager for company would often pick me up. On one journey, a young soldier asked where I was from. When I replied ‘Ireland’, he said: ‘Wow! So have you seen the monster, huh?’ It took me a few seconds to work out he meant the Loch Ness Monster. We then discussed this mythical beast for the next half-an-hour, during which I never had the heart to tell him it actually lived in Scotland.