The day wore on with tea being made by boiling the kettle on the same heater, and soon it got dark. We continued to chat about the streak and eventually one of us came up with the next bright idea; that we would modify the long streak to a shorter and much more exciting one. Anthony would now have to begin his run in a laneway right in front of the Catholic Church then run diagonally across the street into the relative safety of Fowler’s house. I was again to act as official photographer, and the only other condition was that the run had to be timed to take place when the church goers were leaving the evening religious service. Again, to our surprise, Anthony agreed to do it while still shivering naked in Fowler’s kitchen. It was pitch black as Hayes drove Anthony around the back lanes of Buttevant, ending up on the one right across from the church as planned while Fowler and I waited for a signal across the street. Jerry Hayes was to flash the lights on his van when Anthony would make the run and I would run to him to take the picture. They waited for the people to pile out from the church and then the signal came as the first of the congregation passed us on the street. Anthony let out a wild Tarzanian yell, threw off the coat, and with arms spread he began dashing across the road for Fowler’s door as I dashed towards him with my camera at the ready. There was a traffic island in the street in those days and Anthony and I reached it at the same time as a car. I took the picture and a big bright flash lit us all up, with Anthony’s nakedness being the main attraction. The approaching car almost crashed into the island as the driver’s head shot around in amazement and disbelief at what he saw. There was also consternation among the old women on the street. In my run I saw hands fly up to mouths, hands pointing at us and others were just frozen in shock at what they were seeing. We ran in slamming the door behind us, leaving poor Anthony outside banging on the door and jumping up and down with both cold and fear. We soon let him in, and after Hayes arrived we began the congratulations with lots of handshakes and praise being heaped upon him. Then we waited for the ‘proof’ of his run to develop before our eyes, and it did. There he was: Buttevant’s one and only streaker, complete in all his nakedness with arms outstretched, whizzing by the traffic island to the amazement of the people of his hometown, and all this was happening in front of the Holy Catholic Church. A hero was born that night, but he never joined our gang, and all his great run achieved was to finally convince everyone that we were definitely all on drugs of the worst kind.
Anthony used his photo to create a mystique about himself which he well deserved. I know that he was not shy about showing off his physique as one day when I got on a bus, he arrived on his motorbike and parked it by the side of the bus. The bus was loading its passengers and I had sat down on the outside of a very nice quiet local girl. As we chatted I heard his motorbike race its engine again and again. Looking out the window I saw his (or should I say my) picture slowly creep up the window just inches from the head of the shy girl. He had seen me get on the bus and was up for devilment. Fortunately the girl didn’t look round and soon the bus took off, being chased up the street by Anthony still waving his photo. The girl didn’t see it, but almost everyone else on the bus did, and I saw a lot of smirking and pointing going on as I tried to pretend I didn’t know him. Over the years I have met him on and off and he is still as charismatic as ever, but I have never enquired about the famous picture. For all I know it’s been framed on his bedside table.
Probably about nineteen seventy three or so the four of us decided that we should make our own entertainment based on a new phenomenon called Disco. I’m sure it was Hayes’ idea, and how it actually came about is now a mystery to me. I would have been about twenty three then and had been working for a few years in a television shop in Mallow with a man called Larry Anderson, of which more anon.
Our disco would be called ‘The Liberation Disco’; a name I disliked, but that was what we were going to be known as. Hayes would do any art work needed, and basically he drew everything, including our handmade posters. I would build all the electronic gear, the amps and the lighting control units. The other two lads would build all the woodwork needed to contain our ‘equipment’. I had by then developed a sound to light electronics system, the first of its kind in the world I believe, and I think it was while showing this to Hayes and Fowler that they got the idea of making ‘the world’s first real’ disco. Without a single penny of capital, we borrowed or stole the wood from Hayes’ father and I was to convince Big Kyrl to let us use his dance hall for our testing. He reluctantly agreed, asking me how much electricity it would use. I said, “Sure tis only a few flashing bulbs Kyrl, how much could that use”. It was much more like a few hundred bulbs though, but I felt it was wiser to keep that fact to myself, for a while at least.
We began building away goodo, but we needed a wooden base to hold the turntables and the amps, and that was becoming our biggest problem. Hayes’ dad Kieran had nothing that we could steal that would do the job, so we were at a standstill. Fortunately my mother had persuaded Nannie to get Tadgh Hurley (Joe Hurley’s dad and owner of the furniture store) to sell her a new table. This was delivered and was stored in the front of our house, waiting for a decision on the best place to put it. I noticed that it would be a perfect fit for what we needed, so we stole it and carried it up the street to Fowler’s shed, which was our ‘factory’ for gear building.
Rather than have a big row over the theft, I told mother that evening that we just needed to borrow it for a few days to try out our new moneymaking idea, and that she would get it back perfect with a financial bonus as well. This pleased her at the time and the next thing we did was cut two huge holes in the table so that we could sink the disco decks and the amps into it. As we sawed through the new table, Hayes was having some doubts, fearing a backlash from the mother. We all agreed to buy her a new table from the first money we made, and because that made us all feel better, we then sawed off the legs as well and put the table on top of a tar barrel as a kind of plinth for good effect. Hayes later painted this barrel black and white in a zebra style. There was no going back then, and she was never getting that particular table back.
Next we built the light boxes which were made of a wooden frame containing bulbs placed inside car headlamp reflectors. The front of the light box was covered in a plastic that Hayes had also painted in a psychedelic pattern. Jerry Hayes really was a great artist.
Our speaker columns were also made of wood, and initially these had just two big speakers; one that we bought and the other we stole from Big Kyrl’s hall and replaced with a radio speaker so he wouldn’t cop it. Later still I began to rob speakers from old radios at work and soon we were ready for our first tests in Kyrl’s hall.
The night he gave me the keys, he told me not to burn the place down and wished us luck. We excitedly began to set up our gear on his stage; we were in the entertainment business at last. It was all so very exciting as it came together and I think the first record played was Dearg Doom by Horslips, an Irish Celtic rock band that we loved. The hall exploded into coloured light which exactly followed the music. It was awesome to see and we stared at it in awe as the music blared into the empty hall. The flashing lights began to attract the teenagers outside, as by then the whole town knew that we were about to launch a whole new idea in Buttevant. Soon a few people arrived in for a look, and later a lot more arrived and we had to shut the show down or ruin it as a surprise for our debut. We reluctantly turned it all off and cleared the hall, but the word spread. Over the next few weeks we refined the play list and the lighting and I added a series of switches that I would play like a piano to turn the lights full on, overriding the electronics. This was a great addition to the show, and later the lads would mock me because of the way I would go insane with my fingers flying across the switches following the music to a tee. It’s important to also add a point of information here because when I was sixteen, I used to wire houses illegally. I had no qualifications then, but I worked cheap and had a vague idea of what I was doing. I had covertly begu
n a small electrical business in which customers asked me to add on an extra socket or light bulb here and there in their house or farm. I made a nice bit of money doing that work, but the wire was costing me a fortune. When Big Kyrl found out about it, he asked Kyrle and me to rewire his dance hall for him, and we agreed as long as he bought the wire. I felt that we could save a lot of his heavy wire by putting the cheap light stuff above the ceiling and not tell him about it, and we did just that. To fool him, we would run some heavy wire up the wall to a junction box hidden above the ceiling and then run the cheap flex across the roof until the cable came down the wall to the fuse board. Our view was that anywhere he could see the wire, we would use good wire, but for all else we ran the cheap stuff. He examined the work and passed it all and paid us. I believed that he would never go up into the ceiling area, nor would he suspect that we would cheat him either, but he was wrong on the cheating. Later I wired many a house using Big Kyrl’s good wire and did it without a smidgeon of guilt. In my mind I was following his mantra that the end always justified the means, and I was just getting even with him for paying us pittance over the years.
Returning to the disco days, our first disco night was announced with a flood of Hayes’ posters being placed all over the town. We knew that we were going to have a packed hall full of teenagers and even adults looking on to see this new light phenomenon. Big Kyrl had officially hired the hall to us, and at about midnight I took his rent down the town to his house and paid him proudly. He was genuinely delighted with his nephew’s success and wished us well while also agreeing to keep renting his hall to us at a cheap rate. Then as was his custom, when I was about to leave, he walked me to the front door for the ‘final chat’, and we looked up the town to see his hall. We could see it alright and he saw it in a new way too, as did I. He always had a few rows of bulbs running up the front walls and around a kind of overhang that he had built across the main door. It was a nice feature, and because one could see it from the entire main street, when it was lit up, it signalled that a function was taking place in Kyrl Cahill’s hall. That was how it normally worked, but on our disco night all of those outside lights were also flashing in time to the music. Even I knew that the only way that could happen was because the wiring was completely overloaded and the wires, especially those above the ceiling, had to be getting red hot. Big Kyrl spotted it too and went into an immediate panic, demanding to know just how much electricity I was using. I had no idea, but calmly I told him that I had made those outside lights flash on purpose so as to attract in even more people to the hall, and that seemed to calm him down. I was dreading that he might suggest a visit up to check, but he didn’t. I could not wait for him to go inside so that I could run back up to the hall and turn off half the lights, preventing yet another fire in the history of the Cahills.
Our disco was a huge success; the whole town was talking about it except for those who saw it as ‘a place of sinful intentions’. History has since shown that the very same Church that railed on against us and our morals had priests that were doing far worse to the youth than our flashing lights and darkened hall ever could. Still, this Church persevered in demanding that parents would not allow their children to go to our gigs, and Catholic Ireland ultimately won. We continued for a while with our crowds dwindling more and more until in the end we had no choice but to stop playing in Buttevant. Rather than be defeated by them, we took to the road. We then had Ireland’s second ever mobile disco. ‘The Liberation Disco’ became ‘The Liberation Mobile Disco’. The first one was in Dublin and soon would go bust, and by a twist of fate I would actually work on it in the distant future.
To become mobile and get wheels, Hayes would use his father’s driver’s licence illegally to hire a big van from Kennys Van Hire in Cork and drive it like a lunatic to Buttevant. There we would load all our gear and head off to Dungarvan, our regular gig every Saturday night. It was brilliant; incredibly exciting, and also very dangerous. Two rival gangs were our main punters. The bouncers would disarm them literally at the door, keeping the weapons in two separate boxes, and returning them to their owners at the end of the gig. There would be chains, knives, and knuckledusters, and I once saw a hatchet in the box. We had no stage either and only a barrier we made from long seats separated us from the gangs, but to their credit they never once harmed us. They did not need to, as after each gig they fought each other all the way round our van while we loaded our gear. It was a crazy, crazy, fun, happy and mad time, and we acted and felt like rock stars with the only thing missing being the groupies.
Our fame was growing also, and one night we were contracted to do a gig in a small village for a youth club somewhere near Mitchelstown. When we got there I was sure we were either in the wrong place, or it was going to be a disastrous night because the whole area seemed so quite. We began to set up when the first bus arrived. About a hundred kids piled out and lined up to pay. Then more busses arrived soon after, and in a short time a huge line had formed with hundreds and hundreds of teenagers all excitedly waiting to hear The Liberation Mobile Disco. Perhaps the name was not too bad after all.
Fowler, our lead DJ, began the main part of the show with the classic ‘Brown Sugar’ from the Rolling Stones, and I saw magic happen. I believe it was our best gig ever, and one could feel both the excitement and enjoyment of almost one thousand kids in the hall that night. They danced and danced and loved every song we played. Fowler was never better, and Hayes and I worked the lights like demons while Joe Moroney had opened the show and whooped up the crowd to a great frenzy at the start. In the middle of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’, a piece we used to specialize in, all of the main lights suddenly came on and immediately the atmosphere died. I’ll never forget it. This had never happened to us before on a gig, and I ran off down to try and get them turned off while the crowd looked on in amazement. In the box office the local priest, who I believe was a trustee of the hall, had decided like the Buttevant gang that we were corrupting the morals of the youth, and the show would only be allowed to continue if the hall was fully lit. This was totally unacceptable to us and no amount of pleading from us, or from the people hiring us, was going to change his mind either.
Fowler told the crowd of fiery young teenagers what was going on and first the booing began, then bottles were thrown at the windows inside the hall, and when that didn’t work, some chairs were broken. Very quickly a riot almost happened. It was looking like the kids would wreck the hall. We stood and waited, and finally the old priest capitulated and the lights went out. We were back in business with ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ being blasted out to the cheers of the kids. It was a great night and we were on a huge high as it ended. It was a night when we would easily be able to pay the mother back for her table as well as buy a lot of new gear, but we were counting our chickens far too soon.
When we had loaded our gear and went into the box office for our take of the door, the caretaker informed us that the ‘priest had taken the takings’ and we were not going to be paid any money. Our share was supposed to be used as compensation for the ‘damage’ done in the ‘riot’. It looked like my mother would have to wait for her money.
We left dejected, disgusted, angry, and broken-hearted if the truth be known. Catholic Ireland had won yet again. I think we gave up on our Liberation Disco soon after that, because it’s the last memory I have of those wonderful days. For the record, mother never got paid for her table, and for years after she would rise me about it. The only regret I have from those days was that we took the beating from the priest far too easy that night. Today a solicitor’s letter would have settled his case quite quickly. That incident left me with a bitterness that I never forgot or forgave. The disco days were great fun, but we were all about to move on with our lives, and had grown into even older adults by the time they ended. We drifted apart and only meet far too rarely these days, but when we do, it’s like as if forty years have not passed by at all and the laughter begins all over again.
He better get sunscreen.
In about 1967 a man called Larry Anderson called to fix the mother’s TV set. She had it on rent for three shillings and six pence a week; the equivalent of less than twenty cents a week today. It was always in danger of repossession as she didn’t always have even that amount of money to pay for it, and it did get repossessed on a few occasions. The father loved it though as did we, and it was the greatest of pleasures to be sitting in your own home watching ‘Lincoln Vale of the Everglades’, ‘Mr Ed’, or some other exciting or funny programme. It was definitely a lot better than standing in the cold outside Tadgh Hurley’s window with the others who could not afford the magic box of light. The TV sets that were made in those days were very unreliable, and fixing them was like a black art. If you could fix a television set you were considered a kind of God, or at the very least a genius or magician. Those TV sets used valves or ‘tubes’ as the Americans called them, and these valves only had a limited lifespan. Each TV set had as many as twenty valves, all different sizes and costs too. Therefore they were always breaking down because the valves would burn out. If you were trained as a TV engineer, it looked like you were made for life, and as a late teenager I was about to go into that very business.
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