Days of Heaven

by Declan Lynch

  Dermot loved football so much, in the League of Ireland he supported UCD — ‘I don’t like crowds’, he would explain. And we might even suspect that his affinity with the garrison game had gone against him or at least made it easier to dismiss him — his portrayal of a mad hurler jumping out of the studio audience to remonstrate with Pat Kenny would have made traditionalists feel uneasy. But it was certainly worth talking about, on the record, to the injured party. Apart from this dark episode with RTÉ, there was a sense that Morgan’s predicament said a lot about the country in general, how Ireland had a way of dumping on anyone who was any good.

  I would look at the likes of Paul Hogan, the Australian comic who was then becoming an international star, who was clearly not as talented as Dermot but who had got himself to a place where the talent he had could be released. Why the hell couldn’t Dermot Morgan do that, too, instead of wasting his time and his energy arguing with RTÉ, with bloody civil servants?

  Dermot picked me up outside Blackrock DART station in whatever fine motor he was driving at that time and drove up the hills to the Blue Light pub in Barnacullia, which would later become internationally known as the place in which Adam Clayton was busted in the car-park for possession of dope — Adam would later acknowledge his addiction to alcohol and other substances, but at the time, like so many of us, he was just working on it.

  Dermot, who oddly enough was free of all the usual addictions, drove up there entirely in the character of Eamon Dunphy. He was a deeply, deeply funny Dunphy, and given his obsession with football, he was particularly exercised at the time with an interview I had done in which Dunphy had monstered some of his sports-writing colleagues, calling them ‘scabrous wretches’. He would later characterise them as ‘the fans with typewriters’, but ‘scabrous wretches’ was better, and Morgan loved it. ‘Scabrous wretch! Scabrous wretch!’ he would holler at every possible opportunity.

  Yet while he was riffing anarchically, Dermot would also ask you not to smoke in the car. Probably for health reasons, possibly because he was ahead of his time — back then in Ireland even if the driver was on the point of death due to emphysema, he would be reluctant to ask you not to smoke. He wouldn’t want to upset you. He would prefer to die than to interfere with your enjoyment.

  Dermot didn’t subscribe to that particular sort of moral cowardice. And he was also quite proper in other ways, which are usually described as middle-class. For example, he was one of the few men in the history of Ireland to send thank-you notes. Then again he might ring you up and frighten you by pretending to be some dreaded individual such as a bank manager, intoning something about your expenditure getting out of control and concerns at head office — you got the impression he had been on the receiving end of a few such calls himself, so convincing was the style.

  Like Dunphy, he was full of contradictions, but the contradiction that most concerns us here is that Dermot was a public performer who, in his youth, had allegedly suffered from agoraphobia. Usually agoraphobia is described as a fear of open spaces (again one thinks of the terraces at UCD) but as Dermot described it in the Blue Light that day, it was essentially a fear of leaving the house.

  But when I raised the topic, Dermot asked me to pause the tape-recorder and to talk about it off the record. He was afraid of how it might look and maybe he was afraid that it would vindicate those in RTÉ whom he felt had damaged him — they could claim that the man was now admitting that maybe he had a few screws loose, that he was ‘difficult’.

  Maybe it was just a general fear of people knowing things about him that were really none of their business. Whatever the source of the fear, it was strong enough to keep the old agoraphobia off the record, for the time being at least — when he felt the time was right to talk about it, I would be the first to know. Maybe when he was a massive star, and they couldn’t get him any more. Or maybe when Ireland was free.

  It is truly extraordinary that in Ireland at that time a bright and sophisticated man would be afraid of such things, especially when you consider that we now live in a time in which men would be boasting loudly of such an ailment. Indeed they would be prepared to invent a spot of teenage agoraphobia to demonstrate how far they have travelled and the terrible obstacles that were in their way, how they had once been afraid to leave the house and now they were standing in front of 3,000 strangers telling funny stories.

  They might build an entire career on the back of it.

  But Dermot, who had the moral courage to ask passengers not to smoke in his car, was still spooked about the prevailing attitudes towards issues of mental illness. You could sense that deep fear in him, of the creepy forces that could destroy his fragile existence on a whim, that army of the Irish night, and the more mundane tormentors he would describe as ‘the suits’, permanent and pensionable.

  That dead hand had touched so many in this country. It could even reach out and touch those who had escaped and made it to the other side, like John Giles. Back in the 1970s, when Giles was the most influential player in the most successful club side of the time, Leeds Utd, he would be routinely traduced as a man who regarded playing for his country not as a signal honour, but as a tiresome duty. And on the rare occasions when he deigned to play for us, his heart allegedly wasn’t in it.

  This was terrible bullshit, but it seemed to come naturally to the suits of football — the blazers to be exact — who found it reasonable for the players to arrive over from England on the boat the night before an important international match, having played a full match for their club the previous day, and to be grateful for the opportunity. Representing his country, supposedly the highest honour known to football man, a player would encounter conditions in which no serious professional should have been expected to work, and having created that morass, when the results were somehow poor, the suits and blazers would do what suits and blazers and other such respectably dressed men have always done — they would blame the talent.

  Mercifully they were powerless to do serious damage to Giles, who had already made it. But if you were Dermot Morgan, in the late 1980s, the dead hand could destroy you, and he knew it.

  Ah, if only he could have a bit of what they had, if only he had — a job. It was said by Anthony Cronin of Patrick Kavanagh and it can be said of Dermot Morgan, too, that all he really needed was a job.

  Perhaps he was too scatter-brained to work with in the 1980s, too undisciplined for the fantastic levels of precision needed in TV comedy. Perhaps he was ‘difficult’ or perhaps his hammering of the Provos made him a tricky proposition for the light-entertainment department. But even if they had given him all the professional help they could, in the most empathetic creative environment, they didn’t give him the one thing that would have liberated him from so much grief — they didn’t give him any sense of security. By this I don’t mean the six-figure salary for life and the pension that they themselves would be on — I mean, let’s not be silly here — I just mean some assurance that he could pay his bills for the vaguely foreseeable future, that he would be employed to produce comedy until such time as he got it right. By which time he wouldn’t need them any more. Along with Gerard Stembridge, Pauline McLynn and Eoin Roe he would present them with a radio hit, Scrap Saturday, but in the end they didn’t really want that either.

  Dermot was not to know, in the depths of his own struggles, that the emigration of a generation would yield a massive result for him: it was Graham Linehan leaving for London and persuading Arthur Mathews to join him from which all else followed. I wish I could have told him that day in the Blue Light that I had these friends, who would one day write him an international hit, that it would all turn out great.

  But Arthur and Graham themselves were still in the dark about that one.

  ——

  A character called Father Ted Crilly was starting to form in Arthur’s head and was being developed by himself and Graham and Paul Woodfull, the other lay-out man in the Hot Press at that time, in the context of a group called the Josh
ua Trio. It was being formed late at night during production weekends at the magazine, these insane work-marathons which as late as the late 1980s, would go something like this: you would get a few galleys containing an article and you would proof-read them, using a blue marker to highlight any wrong spellings. You would write these corrections on a sheet of paper and then you would walk down three flights of stairs to the typesetter, usually Jack Broder, a lady with a superb Mullingar accent, a typesetting wizard who was greatly in demand for her speed and her vast capacity for toil. Which may explain why she was starting to get other work, including a job typing up a first novel called The South by a journalist called Colm Tóibín.

  Having given the corrections to Jack, you would walk back up the stairs to do some more proof-reading, maybe a few headlines and captions, before walking down the stairs again to collect the corrections, and walking back up the stairs to commence the task of cutting them out individually with a scalpel, applying cow-gum to the back of the sliver of paper and sticking the correction down on the page which Arthur or Paul had laid out. And you would do this, every second weekend, for most of the day and most of the night, the sessions broken up when a certain number of pages had been finished, enough for our leader Niall Stokes to lash together a package and run like the wind to his car in the hope of catching a van bound for the printers in Kerry.

  Sometimes one of us would go with him, to keep him awake if the chase started stretching beyond Dublin, perhaps on into Munster. Hence the story of how Liam Mackey ended up running through Newbridge at three in the morning with his shoes in a biscuit tin.

  It was all terribly simple really.

  In hot pursuit of the van, Niall’s car had run out of petrol in Newbridge and Liam had this idea of going to the garda station to ask for a container into which he might put petrol when he got to the petrol station further up the road. The gardaí gave him a biscuit tin.

  As he ran towards the petrol station he found that his nice new white slip-on shoes kept slipping off, slowing him down when speed was of the essence. So he had the bright idea of taking off his nice shoes and putting them into the biscuit tin as he ran to the petrol station.

  And that is why Liam Mackey was running through Newbridge at three in the morning with his shoes in a biscuit tin.

  ——

  It is also worth reflecting on the fact that we were regularly passing comment on the somewhat backward approach of Jack Charlton’s Ireland, while we ourselves were still living in an Ireland in which we stuck our corrections down with glue. We were questioning Jack’s strange attachment to the primitive methods of Mick McCarthy at centre-half, while at the cutting edge of the new media we were interviewing people using tape recorders which were as big and heavy as the average refrigerator and which didn’t work half the time because the batteries were dead.

  And at all times, like everyone else who had the best interests of Irish football at heart, we feared for the health and well-being of Paul McGrath, as we sat downstairs in the International smoking incessantly and drinking pints, night after night.

  In this working environment, it seemed unthinkable that a fully-formed magazine could appear once a fortnight, every fortnight of the year. Yet the Hot Press not only survived, it is still there after more than 30 years, and unlike In Dublin or Magill it has continued uninterrupted for all that time. Even when the country was being destroyed again in the 1980s, on the football field and in every other field, you had at least three high-class publications describing how it was being done and who was doing it and what should be done to them.

  Again I say that success breeds success, but failure also has its part to play.

  Hot Press was in at the start of the biggest Irish story of the time, on about forty different levels — the U2 story — while Magill was covering the old, dead culture peopled by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. And in their spare time, Hot Press even did the best political piece of the decade, John Waters’ interview with Charles Haughey. It was also the only publication that Paul McGrath would talk to for a long time. So it was ahead of the game in seeing this synergy between ‘pop culture’ as it is disparagingly known and football, recognising the fact that many of us were as devoted to our club and country as we were to our record collections. And that these things mattered more than most things in this life.

  It was as natural for George Byrne, Arthur Mathews, Damian Corless, Ian O’Doherty, Liam Mackey, Niall Stokes or myself to be talking about Jack’s deployment of Maurice Setters as it was for journalists closer to Leinster House to be talking about the composition of the shadow cabinet. We spoke routinely of fabled FAI characters such as ‘Big Dinners’ and ‘Little Dinners’, and we knew exactly what Ray Treacy meant when he said, ‘I got forty-three caps for Ireland, probably about forty of them against Poland’ — apparently the FAI had lucked in to a superior brand of hospitality offered by the Poles and so we kept playing them, especially away, often to no apparent purpose.

  ‘Myself and Tomascevski were like blood brothers and most of the players knew each other by their first names’, Treacy recalled in Paul Rowan’s fine book, The Team That Jack Built. ‘We’d kick in down the same end before the match.’ As Rowan explained, Poland was a great place to buy cheap cut-glass, and one council member of that time used to buy ladies’ underwear in bulk from Poland, for sale back in Ireland.

  This stuff was just as important to us as the new Graham Parker album, and it all got into the magazine somehow, ensuring that it wasn’t just an information sheet for musos, it had — to reduce it to the simplest analysis — a bit of everything.

  Informed above all by rock ’n’ roll music, in this Hot Press was broadly in touch with the Irish character, which has a remarkable affinity with both the music and the spirit of rock ’n’ roll, to the extent that it is one of the few areas of life in which we can honestly claim to be world leaders. But the paper was also touched by genius from the beginning, and perhaps that is what made all the difference.

  Bill Graham was the name of the genius in question, and there was no-one of Bill’s calibre at In Dublin or Magill because there was no-one of Bill’s calibre anywhere. He was a deeply original thinker and an inordinately civilised man who could make the most apparently ludicrous connections fit together — Spandau Ballet ... The RTÉ autumn schedule ... Headage payments!! You might get it, if you thought about it for twenty minutes, but Bill seemed to make these connections effortlessly, with a great knowing grin and a loud Northern exclamation: ahahhh! He would wait for your acknowledgment of how right he was, as if he had just made a childishly obvious remark about the weather.

  Flann O’Brien has been described as ‘myriad-minded’ and that would describe Bill, too. His brain was wired differently to the rest of us, and to be dazzled by its splendour from an early age was a joy, a challenge and a privilege. That a man of Bill’s intellectual prowess had devoted himself mainly to writing about ‘youth culture’, and the Irish variety in particular, should tell you all you need to know about what was important at that time, and what was not.

  Even now, in the midst of some national trauma, people who knew Bill try to imagine what he would have made of it, what shard of original thinking he would produce — he remains a sort of posthumous Supreme Court, to whom we go for the final verdict.

  He was convinced that most Irish musicians needed to have better record collections, that they just hadn’t been exposed to enough of the right influences. And rather than simply pointing this out from his lofty critical perch, he would meet them in bars and give them his own albums, which had been played on his own primitive Dansette — Bill wasn’t a man for admiring the way the sound of Pink Floyd filled the room with quadrophonic glory, he was listening for the raw essence.

  A big man in a blue corduroy jacket with a wild look reminiscent of Jack Nicholson, he thought he was the greatest dancer, though the beat he was following seemed to exist only in his own head.

  He was one of about three men in Ireland with a deep
knowledge and a love of black music.

  A large section of the music business simply thought him mad, but I would remind you that there were at least five of these people who would always listen very carefully to what Bill said — these would be the four members of U2 and their manager, who were brought together by Bill.

  In fact, if there is one thing above all others which marks them out as superior beings, it is the sincere regard they had for Bill. And when he died suddenly on the morning of the Cup Final in 1996, they came over from Miami to pay their respects. And Gavin Friday sang ‘Tower of Song’ in the church in Howth, which was also a bit special.

  ‘The night will not be the same,’ Gavin said.

  There is not a lot of great writing about the Tiger years, but there would have been if Bill had stuck around. And for those who were growing up in the 1980s, reading Hot Press, Bill provided this service: he improved your mind. And he also drank pints of Guinness a fair bit, on borrowed fivers, and was late with his copy when it all got too much for him, which could cause further complications at the layout desks and in the proof-reading department.

  So in this working environment, deep into the night, there would be singing. It was extraordinarily like those scenes in movies in which men start singing a negro spiritual, except here the lonely cry of the human heart would come from Paul Woodfull or Arthur perhaps working on a lounge-music adaptation of a U2 song for the Joshua Trio. They were starting to do these numbers in public in the Baggot Inn, interspersed with various musings from this guy Father Ted Crilly, played by Arthur.

  But it would be a long time yet, before the connection was made with the man who was still paying his own dues on that day in the Blue Light.

  Dermot’s big idea at the time — one of them, anyway — was actually a story of how Irish football had brought the best out of the people in a dark time. But it didn’t happen in the 1980s, it was a story from the 1950s of how the omnipotent Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, had expressed his disapproval of the proposed visit to Dalymount Park of Yugoslavia, a team which, in the eyes of McQuaid, represented the forces of a communist regime which was persecuting Catholics and should therefore be spurned by all Irish people.