The Thing is…. Bono

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grooves, had been a loyal servant on a daily basis for close on a decade, but at that second it became no more than an outdated, occasionally cherished relic.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 The Hobbit’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.