The Thing is…. Bono

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