The Thing is…. Bono

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.

      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