The Thing is…. Bono

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.

      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 Christmas Top 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