Sunday, October 31, 2010

Standing On A Green

You know the feeling you get? It’s eleven o’clock on a bright summer’s day. You’re only rolling out of bed. The bedroom window has been slung open all night long. You’re just turned thirteen so the room isn’t filled with the fug from the night before, so in reality there is no need to have it open. There’s calmness to the air. But there’s a buzz too. People are out in their back gardens doing things that people do. Mowing the lawn, having a blazing row, kicking a ball against a wall over and over and over. You’ve nothing much to do and all day to do it. It’s magical this stillness. Feels like heaven. So you get up, get showered and have a bowl of tasteless cereal. The cricket is still on terrestrial television so you watch a bit of that. You poke your head out through the venetian blinds to see what’s going on in the street. Maybe the tasty new Spanish student girl will stroll on by? In the summer, in the city. You check the teletext to see if United have bought someone less injury prone than Neil Webb. You slip into your track suit, for this is Broadford. Tuck it into your pristine white socks and cover them up with runner boots. This is the Nineties, man!... This is the Nineties. All that has to be invented has been invented. Days like this are sweet. Your Mam starts nagging you, your brother starts annoying you, your sister is watching a ‘Care Bears’ video for what seems like and probably is the ninety first time, “I wanna be a Care Bear!, I wanna be a Care Bear!”You leave. With a flick of the V’s to a sliding porch door. Feels like heaven. This is heaven.

 Ireland have just been in the World Cup. They were knocked out in the quarters by some fucker who looked like a bullet with pop out eyes. But so what? Your old man is mates with Andy Townsend. He’s been in your house. You’ve been cheeky and told him you’re not exactly proud at being Irish. Proper little Dunphy, you. You bought yourself a Leeds shirt for a fiver on a football club trip to Blackpool. Does it matter? Who the fuck  are Leeds anyway? They’ve always been in the Second Division as far as you are concerned. Johnny Giles? Didn’t he used to play for Vancouver Whitecaps? Fuck it.
You’ve gelled your hair beyond reason. You’ve applied some Old Spice to your baby’s bum-like face. You can’t fail can you?...Yes you probably can and most definitely will. The girls unbeknownst to yourself are just as nervous around you as you are of them. They’re more interested in fucking Bros or someone of their ilk than made- up-to-look-like-someone-out-of-Brother-Beyond-in-a-tracksuit-you. You used to be able to talk to girls before you started in all all-boys school. You used to have that ring of confidence until you started in that all-boys school. You were a medium sized fish in a medium sized pond until you went to Benildus. Now? You’re the equivalent of a rather rubbish sea urchin on a rock that doesn’t want you to stick to it. Inside, you are floundering. You are Calamari waiting to be cooked by a lecherous Greek bloke who will end up shagging the bird you will be mad into on holiday when you’re eighteen. Plate smashing bastard that he was.

You take a stroll down to the Green where you used to play football every day with the boys on your street. You’re on your own. The boys are all still snug in bed or failing that, watching ‘Swinging On A Star’ because the girl in it is tasty as fuck. You’ve discussed it with them at length. All are in agreement on that particular score.
Even Gero, the giant-of-a-man bloke you looked up to, couldn’t be arsed getting down onto the Green until at least seven, purely because he couldn’t be arsed. It’s a right quandary you find yourself in.  A pickle if you will. There’s nothing to do and all day to do it. Seemed fine earlier on didn’t it?

Then out of the corner of your eye you spy a dark-clothed gaggle sitting on the wall. One of them is brandishing an acoustic guitar. Upon closer inspection this wannabe Jimmy Page is one of the fuckers off your Broadford Rovers Under 13 football team...and sat beside him in Gothic dress is your first ex-girlfriend. Okay, you were only ten when you ‘went out’. Still though...At least four of them are wearing ‘The Cure’ tee-shirts. So you walk up and go “Alright?”. A muffled response. You don’t belong in their gang. You know that anyway. And you don’t pretend to ingratiate yourself with them. You’re wearing a fucking tracksuit after all. Then you pipe up with “So what’s your favourite Cure album then? ‘Pornography’ or ‘Standing On A Beach’?” And you are met with blank looks all round. So you fucking do one, knowingly. And you get home and you flick the V’s and you open the sliding porch door and you wait for the nagging Mam, the annoying little brother and the ‘Care Bears’ film on constant rotation and you thank the Lord that you are just like Catherine Zeta Jones in being reliant on the older lads to get ahead in life. There’ll be a match on the Green at 7 and the ‘Cure Heads’ will have long since dispersed. Feels Like Heaven.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Someone Somewhere In Summertime-Viva Hate Part 2

The autumn and winter of 88/89 spelt a sea-change in my life. The previous summer, the class I’d grown with since 1981 were disbanded and sent to the four corners of the Attractas sixth class corridors. Fifty kids per class whittled down to sixty-six. Made no sense then and it doesn’t now. And we had four teachers during our sixth class term. Four. We were the great unwanted. It was like being at Atletico Madrid with Miss Hosty the principal as our Jesus Gil (look it up on Wikipedia, Gil that is...not Hosty). It was unsettling to say the least. I found refuge down the back of the class sat next to my neighbour Thomas ‘Skippy’ Kavanagh. We whiled away the days pea-shooting at an ever more disgruntled Alan ‘Lynchie’ Lynch whilst a trainee teacher called Miss Collins fucked with our minds. Even the nicknames smacked of a football dressing room but I certainly don’t remember either of us nailing his shoes to the floor whilst he was doing PE.

My mother must have realised the effect all this was having on me because The Doobie Brothers album was loaned out to my Auntie Vera, never to return. In its place came Shakatak and George Benson. From the rubbish to the utter ridiculous. I’d needed something to fill The Beatles void. To turn off my mind, relax and float downstream if perhaps you might. INXS did the job for a brief period. ‘Need You Tonight’ primarily. Santy brought me their album ‘Kick’. I played it on loop. ‘New Sensation’ and ‘Mystify’ were particular favourites too. I quickly bored of it, as I suspect so too did Michael Hutchence.

One evening in spring ’89 I was sat watching Top Of The Pops as I was want to do, trawling my way through Yazz & The Plastic Population and any Stock Aitken & Waterman creation you could care to imagine when the number one song in the land, not our land, their land was announced and on came the video. Two magnificently coiffured Scotsmen standing on a hill overlooking the Harland & Wolfe shipyards in Belfast came into view. A brave move, particularly in 1989. Jim Kerr, Charlie Burchill and their mates. Simple Minds. The song was ‘Belfast Child’. Seven minutes of an Irish trad song (‘She Moved Through The Fair’) set to guitars and keyboards coupled with their own lyrical take. Magnificent. It built and it built to a crescendo and then came back down again. I had to buy the album.

By this time my old man had gotten tired of funding my musical whims. “Save up your money and buy it yourself, you’re twelve now” was the response I got for asking would he pick it up for me.
I was not disheartened for my Confirmation was on the horizon. I tried taping ‘Belfast Child’ off the radio but Larry Gogan and Simon Young were not forthcoming with the tunage. Young and cohorts had a particular talent for sporting country and western style string ties with silver buckles, but as far as their musical tastes, well, let’s face it; it was rammed right up their arses.
I waited til that fateful June day having to stand there in a fucking stupid cardigan, cream chinos and wine slip-on shoes all so it could just be the following Friday when me and my new, yet brief, classmates tootled off down to Nutgrove to spend our winnings. I returned with the album ‘Street Fighting Years’ and the full United away kit and about twenty pence change. Skippy had picked up the yellow Celtic away shirt at the same time which he ended up wearing in the Confirmation class photo shoot. He refused to take it off. And why would he? I bet he still wears it underneath his doorman’s uniform.
 I’d been dragged off down to Wexford and missed said photo thus erasing myself from existence. A bit like ‘Back To The Future’ but with no need to get my Mam and Dad to have a smooch.

Wexford broadened my Simple Minds song cannon. My older cousin Geoff for some reason had an album of theirs called ‘Sons And Fascination’ in a cassette holdall along with Queen, Dire Straits and Pink Floyd. ‘Fuck that lot’, I thought to myself. Upon a summers morn he taped ‘Sons And Fascination’ for me and suddenly I was a fifteen year old at twelve. I probably had more luck with the ladies as a result of hanging around with him, my cousin Colin and his mates at twelve than I ever did at fifteen. Then again I’m probably in possession of rose tinted spectacles. Spectacles were something which I thankfully had consigned to the cloakroom in Attractas at this stage.

My Mam couldn’t understand why I was listening to ‘that racket’. But it was sublime. It had been recorded in 1981 but even now it sounds current. Song titles like ‘Seeing Out The Angel, ‘In Trance As Mission’, ’70 Cities As Love Brings The Fall’ did not sit with what other pre-pubescent geezers were listening to. Sure, we played football every day until we dropped but I’d grown up, if only by a little bit.

We had called down to my Dad’s mate in Kilmuckridge. He had a son called Jason who was about eight years older than me. We were kicking a ball about but the ball was as flat as a witch’s tit. Jason struck on the idea of hopping in his Renault 18 and driving up to pump the ball up. On the way he asked what music I was into. Panic on the streets of Wexford. “Oh, eh, I like Simple Minds a bit, I suppose”...”Really? Well listen to this!” He popped in a tape and turned it up. Fucking loud. ‘Once Upon A Time’ rattled the speakers. To a kid in 1989 it was manna from fucking heaven. Little did I know that Jason Bushe was the biggest Simple Minds fan known to man? Street cred with the older lads turned up a notch.

We called around to his Mam and Dad’s the following Christmas Day. I had started in Benildus by this stage but was already being written off as what the chess-loving, bullshit-spouting, Doc Marten wearing brigade termed a ‘Soccer Head’. (It’s called fucking football lads, just a point I think needs making). I played up to it. I kept my musical counsel. I can’t remember what Santy had brought me as I found it quite strenuous to keep the pretence up as I had a sister eight years my junior and a brother who was nine. But I do remember receiving a gift that day that ranks as high as any gift I have ever been fortunate to be presented with.

Jason, massive Simple Minds fan that he was and still is, handed me vinyl copies of every Simple Minds album recorded to date. “Now. Bring them home. Tape them. And give them back”. Sure, yeah, no problem. “Oh. And every one of them is signed by Jim and Charlie. Even, look! Brian McGee the original drummer.”. FUCK. I carried them home in the old man’s car like someone coming home pretending to be sober at three in the morning to a waiting narked wife. I listened to them for days. And I gave them back unharmed. I couldn’t sleep for the worry that my little sister might use them as a Frisbee. Happy fucking Christmas and a Happy New Decade. I returned to Benildus in the New Year as a man of musical wisdom. Thanks Jason.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Viva Hate-Part 1

Kings Of Leon have just been on the radio. It was their new single. ‘Radioactive’. How apt. Judging by the sound of it, to think it is in any way good you had to have been in close proximity to the reactor at Chernobyl in 1986 with a walkman on and its batteries running down. Truly, a painful experience. Try telling that though to the dozen of kids hanging around outside country town chip shops up and down Ireland sporting their  ‘Metal-like-a’ tee-shirts and mulling over whether they should throw their chips in the bin and head off to the pool hall because it’s pissing rain and there really is fuck all else to do.
 Nothing ever changes in small town Ireland. Twenty years ago just insert Guns ‘N’ Roses into the above instead of Kings Of Leon and the same scenario unfolds. Kings Of Leon have that particular market cornered now. And good luck to them.
Riding on their coat-tails however are Arcade Fire. The modern day Bon Jovi if you will. Similarities drawn are not musical but are due to the fact that they are both a bit rubbish and both having been taken to the bosom of culchiedom. Somehow, those chancers got to headline Oxegen whilst in every other festival in every other country they sweep up and make the tea for the likes of Echo And The Bunnymen, who themselves are found well down the bill. It truly is a strange little country this. And country town chip shop chips are generally reheated Birdseye efforts which hardly endear them to anyone’s heart either, may I add.

My first musical experience was listening to Neil Diamond’s ‘Hot August Night’ through a set of earphones about three times the size of my head. ‘Soolaimon’ was my favourite, judging by an audio cassette recently discovered adorned with a toddler’s dulcet tones. My old man who was only about twenty eight at the time, had records by the likes of Jim Reeves and Tony Christie alongside The Buggles ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ and Adam Ant. My Mam was more into the fucking Doobie Brothers and ABBA (as was my Dad but he always maintains it was purely because of the blonde one’s arse). I honestly cannot listen to either of the latter today without breaking into a cold sweat. I think it was a form of brainwashing. I truly had empathy with Paul Rudd in the 40 Year Old Virgin who snapped after hearing Michael McDonald (A Doobie Brother) warble and drone on for the umpteenth time. Michael McDonald sounds like a Bassett Hound who’s run off with somebody’s microphone and got his knackers caught on a barbed wire fence backed by middle-of-the-road piano based guff, in case you’ve missed him.

Attractas brought The Police. I purely liked them because Warren Gillan and I were absolutely mad into ‘ChiPS’ and I thought it was Jon Baker and Frank Poncharello’s band. Dad bought me my first single ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ which I played to death. Top Of The Pops became a staple of a Thursday evening. Music was going through a weird phase at that point where the men dressed as ladies and played synthesizers (my Nan, God bless her, would be up in arms at the spectacle. My mother would be in the kitchen listening to the fucking Doobie Brothers).Weird fashions, wonderful music though. I remember crying myself to sleep and then waking and screaming some more one Thursday night having seen The Stranglers ‘Golden Brown’ video and thinking the drummer had no eyes.

One such Thursday evening came an epiphany. For me, anyway. Nan was probably giving out about it I’d imagine. On the screen was this girl I fancied in an eighties kind of way, sitting there leafing through a magazine in a cafe. All of a sudden the characters in the magazine came to fucking life! A bit of a row followed with her and her comic book beau taking on a few hard geezers wielding spanners. She ended up lying beside a bin in a kitchen looking a bit worse for wear. The object of her affection, a certain Morten Harket then stumbles in presumably drunk. He subsequently went on along with his A-Ha band mates to smash The Doobie Brothers stranglehold on the family stereo as a result. Oh how right The Buggles were. I think Miriam Bulman taped ‘Hunting High And Low’ for me. I listened to nothing else until A-Ha released ‘Touchy’, which was the equivalent of aural murder. Dizzying highs to frightening lows. The phase had passed. ‘Help’ by The Beatles took the place of the original revelation in the tape deck. I think it was ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ which got me hooked. Melancholy in a Scouse drawl set to acoustic guitar and a tambourine. Worlds away from A-Ha and their synthetic assault. My school pal Roy McDermott and I got incredibly obsessed with all things Beatles. We traipsed up to Herman’s in Superquinn Ballinteer to get Beatles-bowl haircuts one afternoon. My mother said upon my return home that I had ‘a face like a full moon in a fog’. Charming, especially coming from the woman who used to cut my hair with an industrial size scissors in front of the fire of a Saturday night, rendering me helpless for a month looking like someone with a crooked fringe from Deliverance with glasses. Coupled with a pair of flares bought in Tomas Funge’s in Gorey, I looked a right tit.
This was the year before The Stone Roses made the flared trouser fashionable again. Well, at least in Manchester. Me and Roy were the 80’s equivalent of Noel and Liam. And my Dad had the talk that someone should have had with Noel Gallagher before he wrote ‘Be Here Now’. “Its Beatles this! Beatles that! You talk about nothing else! Cop on!”  I could see it pained him. He loved The Beatles. And for that I felt a small pang of betrayal. And at the back of my mind there was of course the omnipresent worry that the fucking Doobie Brothers would soon be back hogging the stereo.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

When I was a little child....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmxHIklXnQUMy first abiding memory is of my Dad and his mate Gerry Keogh sitting in the front room drinking beer and shouting at a box emitting flashing colours and strange accents in the corner of our front room in Broadford. One minute they were knocking over their cans of Harp(adorned with scantily clad ladies on the tin),jumping for joy and hugging each other.The next they were prostrate on the ground on the verge of tears. For a two year old it was all too much to take. I ran out into the kitchen and hid underneath the crappy fold-down formica table hanging off the wall and cried out of fright. My Mam picked me up,hugged me and told me everything was alright. How wrong she was. For I had witnessed United coming back from two goals down to draw level at Wembley in the Cup Final against Arsenal with five minutes left on the clock.Only for a bubble-permed Alan Sunderland to score six yards out from a cross from Liam Brady to win the Cup. The date was 12th May 1979(I looked it up).I was two years and one hundred and sixteen days old.Welcome to the world of football.It might take twenty minutes or twenty years but ultimately the team you support will disappoint you.

That same wooden-panelled television set taught me a lot down through the years. It taught me never ever to marry Gail Tilsley because inevitably you'll wind up dead, never put your faith in an RTE produced comedy because inevitably it will be shit and you'll kick yourself for not seeing it coming and most importantly,never enter a fancy dress shop.Once you get in that changing room they will induce you with mind-bending drugs and you'll end up in a mystical land dressed as a fucking Indian chief. Fuck Attractas and Benildus that is where education was at. And I live my life by those rules. They are the fucking rules. Oh yeah.

Don't get me wrong. I didn't spend my entire childhood sitting in front of the telly. Broadford Drive was a great place to grow up. Sure,there were the fistfights usually brought on by someone calling me 'specky four eyes' and my stupid little temper. But the vast majority of the time it was bliss. Long before PlayStations and the humble PC ripped kids imaginations out of their heads, we were left to create our own worlds. When the World Snooker Championship was on telly, we had the Broadford Snooker Tournament. Barry Dunne's front room was 'The Crucible'.Wimbledon?We had the Broadford Tennis Tournament replete with copious amounts of match-rigging that saw plucky little six year old Rob Bulman somehow knock twelve year-old Paul 'Gero' Geraghty out in the quarter-finals. On Finals Day,we had a sale of work on the grass verge overlooking Skippy giving me a good hiding on Centre Court. Four squares of concrete and the truth. There was the Tour De Broadford but sadly no Ashes series. There were inter-road matches between the Drive and the Hill or the Lawn or the Park or the Avenue.We always seemed to win.And no match-fixing has ever been proven with regards to that. At least, thank the Lord we never resorted to playing GAA. That particular code,after all,requires no imagination.

Why the reminiscence I hear you ask? Two fold really. I took my little one on a walk down to the Green pictured above recently. It was unscarred by any signs of any football code whatsoever.Three trees now stand were the Phone Box End jackets-cum-goalposts used to lie. The kids just sit in getting rotund. It's sad. For every eight year-old me that used to run around on that grass believing in his head he was Bryan Robson,there is an eight year-old glued to a PlayStation actually being Wayne Rooney. Prostitutes,luckily,are not included.
Now while Robson might have once been caught in a ladies toilet up to no good with a Sky Sports anchorwoman, he at least waited until he was at Middlesbrough and their manager at that to get involved in scandalous ways. He didn't do it on my time,oh no.When mega-rich Italian clubs waved their lira at him,he cocked a massive snook in their direction and stayed loyal to the 'romance' of a not particularly good United side which was even worse than the current rabble.

Wayne Rooney has no excuse. He's in it for the money. And he isn't man enough to admit it. It's all about the filthy lucre. Myself and thousands like me would have happily signed over their right testicle to even get five minutes on the hallowed turf at Old Trafford or Goodison or Anfield (delete where applicable) but were nowhere near good or lucky enough. The passion of football is dying. My passion for football is dying.And thus,a part of my childhood is dying.Christ alone knows I cling on to it.Just ask my wife.
How can anyone relate to these grossly overpaid morons is beyond me.Modern football is rubbish. Ever get the feeling you're being cheated? I do.