Feckers

by John Waters

  And then, one Saturday morning in late January, the Irish people woke up to the announcement that the revolution had been aborted due to difficulties in obtaining a babysitter. In a lengthy article in the Irish Times, the assistant editor of that newspaper, Fintan O’Toole, told the distraught Irish people that he could not lead them after all. Yes, it was true, he and a number of others had been planning to run for election. In the previous few weeks, Fintan confided that, over the previous weeks, he had been considering putting his deposit where his mouth had been by running for the Dáil. It was time, he had resolved, to go beyond the idea that ‘somebody somewhere should do something’. There was, he acknowledged, ‘a very deep hunger for someone (almost anyone) from outside the existing political culture to step into the arena and champion a process of radical change’. Even ‘nice, sensible people’ had been pleading with him to run for public office and save Ireland from itself.

  Having ruled out running for an established party or as an independent, he had, he revealed, joined with David McWilliams and unnamed others in an attempt to launch a movement that would seek to reclaim Irish democracy from the deathly grip of the party system. The idea was for a bunch of candidates with a track record of civic achievement in business, the arts, community and voluntary activity, sport, and single-issue campaigns to get together and seek a common platform. It was to be called ‘Democracy Now’.

  Fintan spelt out once again the many deficiencies he had identified in Irish political culture. He reiterated his belief that the austerity measures being promoted by most of the established parties would be socially and economically disastrous. The Irish people were not arguing. ‘Bring it on!’ they essayed as the toast burned – this was just what the doctor ordered.

  Alas, as they read on, the Irish people would have noted the incremental shift in Fintan’s prose from the present to the past tense and, even more ominously, to the past conditional. ‘The challenge’, declared Fintan, ‘is that the project would have to have a large scale in order to be meaningful.’ It would ‘have to have’ a realistic chance of getting at least twenty people elected. Two things had been clear to them from the outset of this project, wrote Fintan: one was that they had a moral duty to do it; the other was that they had a moral duty not to screw it up. A national crisis was not an occasion for enthusiastic amateurism. ‘An inadequate effort wouldn’t be a noble failure. It would be worse than doing nothing at all because it would raise hopes and then dash them. The last thing Irish democracy needs right now is another reason for despair. If the point of a campaign was to remind people that they do have power, it would be unforgivable to leave them feeling even more powerless.’

  Yes, yes, yes, implored the Irish people, willfully ignoring Fintan’s shift of tense, but the revolution, the revolution . . .

  The revolution, revealed Fintan, was not going to happen. Time, he explained, was against it. They had been expecting the election to be held in late March, not February, and the sudden, ignominious disintegration of the Cowen administration had thrown everything out of kilter. It wasn’t a matter of funding or logistics, but mainly of family and employment issues affecting him and other prospective candidates. As some of these had indicated their reluctance to proceed, the doubts of others had started to grow. The revolution had been stillborn.

  Fintan was aware that he would be accused of chickening out, ‘of climbing up the diving board only to scurry back down the ladder’, but this, he had decided, was not a time for glorious gestures. Having been reminded that analysing the world is a lot easier than changing it, Fintan was returning to the job he was ‘best fitted for’.

  The Irish people scratched their heads – if Fintan and his mates had really believed things were as bad as they had been saying, how could something as banal as the timing of the election have such a critical impact on their decisions? If we were truly, as Fintan had told them, at a moment of unprecedented national emergency, how could he return to his day job with any real expectation that this day job was going to be safe – safer, that is, than any of the thousands already lost as a consequence of the amorality and cronyism that Fintan had so roundly denounced?

  Thus it was that the defining moment of the 2011 general election occurred not during the campaign, on polling day or the day of the count, but approximately a week before the election date was announced. This moment was fateful because, by then, the leaders of the incipient Democracy Now movement had insinuated themselves into the public consciousness as bearers of a new hope that past mistakes and wrongdoings could be overcome. Then, having drawn the hopes and desires of the Irish people to themselves, these men decided – for undoubtedly good, practical and sensible reasons – to withdraw and return to the sidelines.

  By briefly confusing their role of commentating with that of representing, Fintan and his fellow would-be revolutionaries led the people on towards the glimmer of light they indicated somewhere up ahead. And then, by their retreat, they implied something else: either that things were not as bad as they had intimated, or that things were beyond redemption. Nobody could be entirely certain which it was.

  After this, the election became a matter of settling for the safest option: a secure administration to continue the work of the last – free, to an extent, from the shadows and stains of the past.

  Although it did not field any candidates, Democracy Now was the defining force of the 2011 election. It kidnapped the hopes and dreams of the Irish people and subjected them to a controlled explosion in the public square.

  Bill Graham

  When Hot Press emerged in the summer of 1977, promising to ‘make Ireland safe for rock’n’roll’, there was perhaps a weekly total of three hours of pop music on national radio. Coverage of rock’n’roll in the newspapers was arid and dull. Showbizzy magazines, making no distinctions as to quality or wit, came and went. The state of the local counterculture not being what it might, we had been tapping mainly into British pop culture – the NME, the Melody Maker, John Peel and Whispering Bob Harris on the BBC – and to a lesser extent into the American model, courtesy of Rolling Stone magazine. But then, along came Hot Press, from what seemed like nowhere. Although we very quickly slipped into searching for its flaws, in reality it was a thousand times better than we had any right to expect. After years of mediocrity, here at last was something made in Ireland that could deliver writing about Irish music to match anything we had encountered in the wider world.

  From the outset, Hot Press had several writers who immediately stepped into our expanding consciousnesses, alongside people like Mick Farren, Ian MacDonald, Simon Frith and Charles Shaar Murray. There was the editor, Niall Stokes, his brother Dermot, Liam Mackey and, the since deceased genius, Bill Graham. Hot Press hit the floor dancing to a different backbeat, seeming to comprehend that an obsession with interesting noises went beyond the requirements of entertainment or diversion, touching on the vital pulses and impulses of the human state. In the same way that Irish artists like Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy and Horslips were making as much a statement by being what they were as by what their music said or did not say, Hot Press carried a message by simply turning up in the newsagent every two weeks. The Hot Press slogan resonated not just with the musical tastes of the young in those turbulent days of late-twentieth-century Ireland, but with the deeper longings of those who could hear, in the dizzying throb of the new noise, the echo of their own heartbeats.

  Among a number of seminal early Hot Press pieces, there was one by Niall Stokes, the paper’s editor, about Graham Parker and the Rumour, three-quarters of which was an attack on the Catholic Church. This sounds lame and predictable today, in a culture in which the church is being attacked from all sides, but then it was genuinely liberating, making a precise connection between the oppression inflicted by the institution and the balm of the music we bought the paper to read about. At the time, the question of freedom seemed relatively simple: it was to be torn from the grasp of the greybeards who had blighted Irish life with their mis
anthropy and empty traditionalism.

  Given the way the dice were loaded in the Ireland into which Hot Press was launched in that summer of 1977, it was reasonable to expect that it would last perhaps a month or two before going to the wall and into the record books as a plucky but foolhardy attempt to buck the conservative drift of a culture set up to bolster all that was grey and dried-out. It is an extraordinary tribute to the tenacity of Niall Stokes, his wife Mairin and a handful of other key individuals that Hot Press has survived now into its fourth decade, and continues to thrive in extremely parlous times. In that period, Hot Press has boxed well above its weight, contributing in no small measure to the radicalising of the culture in accordance with values associated with youth and a particular understanding of freedom.

  But the problem with Hot Press is that, having contributed to the transformation of Ireland in a certain direction, it has, in common with most other implements of change and progress in modern-day Ireland, tended to follow the logic of its revolution long after its battles had all been won.

  Ireland had changed out of all recognition, more or less in the way demanded by the informal movement of which Hot Press was a part. From the culture of a generation ago, which ignored its young, Ireland has transformed itself into a culture that lionizes everything to do with youth. Countless radio stations play pop and rock around the clock, and the coverage of rock’n’roll in the national newspapers has become indistinguishable from that of Hot Press. The culture has flipped over, and the meaning of the revolution has inverted itself without anyone noticing.

  At the back of these drifts is a failure to recognize that social change can never be the final word, that human happiness depends on deeper callings that are not answerable to ideology or fashion. In the old days, it was a little daring to write the word ‘fuck’. Now, it has become a matter of complete indifference to virtually everyone. There was a time when talk about homosexuality was shocking; now it is merely boring. Once, a campaign to legalize cannabis might have seemed a push for freedom, but nowadays half the TDs in the Dáil boast snickeringly about their exploits with the Bob Hope.

  And yet, this revolution has not delivered the happiness it seemed to promise. One of the as yet unspoken discoveries of those who were young in Ireland through the past half-century is that freedom amounts to something other than the blind pursuit of the diktat of instinct. People are freer, in a certain sense, and yet, in other respects appear more put-upon, less hopeful, than they were. The culmination of the years of striving for freedom, in the drama of the Celtic Tiger, opened up a new set of questions about freedom and revolution, but almost nobody seemed to want to look at these. Instead, those who led the charge sought to pretend that the objectives of their youthful burst for freedom remained unachieved. Rather than looking around at the wreckage of the revolution, which now littered the arena, they climbed daily atop the same old barricades and shouted down the laws and diktats of patriarchs who had died several decades before.

  Thus, the instruments of Ireland’s countercultural revolution gradually came to reveal themselves as preoccupied with a narrow version of freedom. Hot Press, like many instruments of cultural liberation, is today crippled by a shallow neurosis developed in response to the exigencies of a particular moment of conception, resulting in an often embarrassing datedness in its obsessions with sex, political correctness and socialist politics. The reason, of course, is that, in the beginning, defiance against the precise nature of actually existing oppressions made these the obvious battlefields. But things have moved on and nowadays there is nothing revolutionary about confronting Catholic puritanism or so-called conservatism.

  Perhaps this state of affairs, in as far as it relates to Hot Press, can be ascribed to a single event: the sudden death, in 1996, of Bill Graham. After that, Hot Press seemed not so much to lose its way as run on the spot, as though frightened of something. Thus, in spite of his admirable achievement in keeping Hot Press afloat through bad times, good times and then some times that were even worse than before, Niall Stokes must answer the charge that, in keeping Ireland safe for rock’n’roll, he contributed to the cultural sclerosis that besets Ireland at the dawning of the third millennium.

  But Bill must also be indicted for dying when he did.

  Bill was the prince of the Irish counterculture that emerged in the wake of the Lemass years. He had a deep knowledge of virtually every form of popular and roots music. He lived and breathed the music and its history, mystery and meaning. In the din of a club, as a new band shambled through a clumsy set, Graham would stand at the back and shout in your ear about why they sounded as they did, and what they needed to do to make the world listen. He was generous, not merely in his assessments, but in giving his own passion. When he stumbled on something, he wanted everyone to know about it, believing the world to deserve an occasional break from bad taste. It is often said that Bill ‘discovered’ U2. This is untrue. Bill created U2, through his enthusiasm for them. He gave them back a reflection of their own possibilities and they only looked back that once.

  Unlike that of most music writers in Ireland, Bill’s interest was not confined to music, but extended to embrace all the things the music touched. He was the first Irish writer to write about the connection between Irish political culture and Irish rock’n’roll. He heard a noise from a stage and could immediately intuit its trajectory, past and future, through the culture that begat it. Bill, who once memorably described the Soviet Union as being like ‘an entire continent run by the GAA’, was capable of expounding at length on the influence of Czechoslovakian trick-cycling on the policies of Fianna Fáil. He was a philosopher, a psychologist and a political scientist, who transcended ideologies and reached out again and again into the zeitgeist for words to describe the hidden meanings of the screams that emerged from the mouths of the blessed and the broken. And Bill was never ‘cool’ – he could write as happily and as lucidly about Philomena Begley as the Velvet Underground. He knew that rock’n’roll is not just about fashion and diversion, but that it offers a soundtrack for the journey home. He wanted us to understand what rock’n’roll was capable of saying to us about ourselves, where we were, which was Ireland with all its warts and wonders. He was an artist who wrote about music.

  He ought to have looked after himself better. He ought to have drunk less and eaten better food. He ought to have worked out, maybe taken up jogging. Had Bill survived into the Tiger years, it is hard to see that things would have been allowed to get so stupid-ass. Like Padraig Pearse, Bill had a map of the future, a map with all the routes, not just the obvious ones. He knew music and he knew, too, that music is prophecy, and nobody could read rock’n’roll’s raucous rune-tunes the way Bill could read them.

  Rarely in Irish culture has a gift been so sorely missed. We needed him to keep making the connections that might have helped us onwards past the first milestones of freedom to a richer, wiser place.