Days of Heaven (13 page)

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
U
2 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
U
2 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
U
2 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.

Generally at that time if McQuaid expressed disapproval of anything, it would be studiously avoided by all members of the ruling class and anyone else who knew what was good for them, but a
crowd of 22,000 turned out that day, giving out a great roar of Dublin working-class defiance of the ogre McQuaid, or anyone else who would deny them the great joy of their lives that was
association football. And turning a predictable 4-1 defeat into a great day for Ireland.

Dermot loved that story, but he couldn’t drum up enough interest in making a movie out of it, or a
TV
drama or whatever. So he continued on, constantly trying to
get something started, rounding up anyone in Dublin with any sense of humour at all, meeting in hotels and making big plans.

Though it would be whispered that he was ‘unprofessional’, in a larger sense he was perhaps the only true professional in a place full of amateurs.

Like the Republic he kept getting the bad breaks, but there was something different about Dermot, something that the football team probably doesn’t have to this day — he would never
be content with the moral victories. He really felt that there was a million bucks out there with his name on it, and that he was going to get there eventually. Unlike the Republic, the lads who
would turn back so many times at the gates of the promised land, when the time came, he would be able to take that extra step. He wasn’t afraid of it.

T
hey say that politics and football don’t mix, but of course that is twaddle. In fact, if we know nothing else about this world, we know that
politics and football mix, all the time.

Yet at the time of Jack’s appointment, so sad was the state of Irish football and of Ireland in general, that politics and football genuinely weren’t mixing. In fact, far from mixing
with it, few politicians would care to recognise the existence of the game, because there was really nothing in it for them.

This hadn’t always been the case. We have already alluded to the roaring 1950s’ controversy over the visit by communist Yugoslavia — which may seem like a religious matter,
though of course at the time religion
was
politics: religion was just about everything. But traditionally the Church favoured Gaelic games, with the Archbishop of Cashel and Emly throwing in
the ball for the All-Ireland hurling final and the minor football final, and the Artane Boys Band entertaining the crowd at Croke Park with their march medleys, with no mention of the fact that
Artane was one of the institutions run by the Church and the State in which poor children were routinely abused physically and sexually. At Dalymount Park we preferred the music of the free men of
the St James Brass and Reed band.

Admittedly, there has been a suggestion of bad politics in the legend that the Republic was the first country to offer to play Germany after the Second World War, which is allegedly the reason
that the ‘away’ strip of the Germans is green — a sort of tribute to Paddy for reaching out to the fallen Fatherland. It is a lovely story but, as far as we can ascertain, it is
not true. Switzerland was actually the first country to play Germany after World War 2. Though it has to be said that a reasonable percentage of people in Ireland at that time would have been proud
to have the Germans wearing the green, both home and away.

In the ‘modern’ era, until Jack started getting a few big results, for a long time, one of the few Irish politicians who would openly be associated with the Republic’s football
team was David Andrews. As you waited for the kick-off in Dalymount, reading the official match programme, you would see Andrews’ name as Patron of the
FAI
. It would
look quite impressive — Andrews, after all, was the scion of a leading Fianna Fáil family, a distinguished-looking cove.

But if you looked a little bit closer, you would realise that Andrews’ association with the
FAI
did not necessarily mean much in the greater Fianna Fáil
scheme of things. He was, after all, marginalised on the ‘liberal’ wing of the party, opposed to the leadership of Charles Haughey for all sorts of reasons, not all of them good, and to
complete the stereotype, he represented the borough of Dun Laoghaire, which, in the eyes of many of his colleagues, would make him a West Brit and thus the right man to be endorsing the garrison
game.