by Declan Lynch
As his colleagues manoeuvred him back to his room, they feared for him. When they had lashed out their own reports in their own rooms, a few of his colleagues went to this man’s room to check on his condition.
They knocked on his door, but there was no answer. They tried to enter the room, but it was locked. So with the help of a concierge with the master key they entered his room, which was now in darkness.
Through the gloom, they could see a figure sitting at a table, apparently fast asleep, slumped over a typewriter. Instantly they knew that they would probably have to do his work for him, at great speed, to rattle out a bunch of clichés in his inimitable style, as the deadline loomed — it was the right thing to do and a sign of the comradeship which prevailed among the press corps at that time.
But he had already written something.
As they approached the slumped figure, they could see that he had indeed been able to type something on the sheet of paper which he had somehow wedged into the typewriter.
‘Last night in the Ta’ Qali Stadium’ ... it began.
And that’s all he wrote.
Joe Elliott of Def Leppard wasn’t the only rock star who was spending time in Ireland in the 1980s. Charlie Haughey’s tax exemption for artists had also benefited various members of Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Spandau Ballet and Mike Scott and the Waterboys and Sting and Elvis Costello and of course the other members of Def Leppard, who were somehow able to cope with life in a buggered economy in which condoms couldn’t be displayed in a public place and where you couldn’t get a divorce and which depended on Europe to do the heavy lifting in dark areas such as the legalisation of homosexuality.
The exemption also helped our own native rock stars to come to terms with the realities of living and working in Ireland. In fact, most of them seemed to be inordinately happy here, for various reasons which demonstrate that there is perhaps more to a country than just getting a good review from the IMF.
I had ‘discovered’ Frankie Goes To Hollywood when they were on the cusp of their phenomenal success with their first single, ‘Relax’ — though in truth, I was not the first to discover them and had never actually heard of them until I was sent by Hot Press to interview them in Liverpool. They were extraordinarily kind to me anyway, spending the day showing me around the city, introducing me to various Liverpool exotics and showing me the new video of the single which would soon be number one in every country in the world in which people have money. And which would make them enough money of their own to bring them to Ireland so that they could pay no tax on it.
They were among the nicest rock stars I have met, especially when you consider that they weren’t actually stars yet, so they had nothing to protect. In fact, singer Holly insisted on seeing me off at Speke Airport as if I were a personal guest of theirs, remarking wistfully: ‘I love airports, lad. You always feel you’re going somewhere ...’ A few weeks later, he was on a one-way ticket to the stratosphere, baby!
But the idea that there was a better world elsewhere would only partly explain their eventual affinity with Ireland and the Irish. Being from Liverpool, they were already Irish in ways that they probably didn’t even realise. So deeply have the Irish embedded themselves in that great football city, you can walk round Liverpool today and see ‘Irish’ things and encounter ‘Irish’ people that you would hardly see in Ireland any more. A lot of this would be in the area of drinking and socialising in general, in a deep but strangely attractive melancholia and an alienation from England in general — and they’ve had a few decent bands, too.
So the Frankies, when they came to the actual island of Ireland, were just coming home — probably to a place that was becoming more fashionable than their own.
In fact, years later I did another interview with the three heterosexual members of the group, who spoke movingly of how they had found themselves for a while living in Co. Kilkenny, where the owner of the local video store had assured them he could get them any amount of hard-core pornography that they needed — ‘the serious fucking donkey stuff’.
Sheffield, too, was a great old football city, but Joe Elliott was discovering the spirit of gracious living which pervaded Killiney Hill, with Bono up the road and maybe Adam Clayton dropping around on his way back to his stately home in Rathfarnham for a rap and a night-cap. And Van the Man was holed up there somewhere.
Joe would also find a girlfriend here, Karla. So despite the various amendments to the Constitution which were causing such a distraction, and despite innumerable letters to the Irish Times arguing about the exact point at which human life begins, about foetuses and zygotes and the morning-after pill, Ireland was now producing women who were acceptable to long-haired men wearing leather trousers, who had made millions out of heavy metal, and who were preparing to stride through the arenas of the United States along with their buddies, singing ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’.
Yes, we have established that sometimes, Paddy can’t make it on his own. But here we are also establishing that there are a lot of folks out there who can’t make it without Paddy. For a Joe Elliott, a season ticket to Bramall Lane and a grand house which used to belong to some Sheffield steel magnate might have its attractions, but there is also a lot to be said for quaffing at the top table in the Pink Elephant after a session in the Dockers, that pub beside the Windmill Lane studios where I had kindly agreed to write Paul McGrath’s autobiography.
And the excellence of the Windmill Lane Studios meant that these men, if they really felt the need, could lay down some tracks in a fully professional environment, before resuming the onerous task of enjoying all the money they weren’t giving to the taxman, thanks to C.J. Haughey and his love of the arts.
——
UB40 needed no encouragement at all to come and to make sweet reggae music at the studio in which U2 had made mega-platinum albums, but it would become increasingly difficult for them to strike the work-life balance. Singer Ali Campbell would later quit drinking that red, red wine. He would also speak wisely about his alcoholism, which had no doubt substantially ‘progressed’ during those happy times in the 1980s in Dublin town.
And the visiting stars were always ably assisted in their endeavours by the local variety, of which there were now many. Every week it seemed that a few local boys had been signed up by a major label, whose A&R men were swarming through the pubs of Dublin looking for the next U2, talking a lot of shit and consuming fantastic quantities of drink and drugs. George Byrne, whose inexhaustible passion for guitar-based American pop is matched only by a wintry eye for rock’s follies, would learn of bands who had slipped a copy of their demo to some visiting record company potentate, along with a small gift of cocaine to help him make it through the night, but which would only ensure that he left the demo behind him in some Leeson Street toilet and that all information pertaining to the band would have entirely vanished from his mind by the time he got back to London, tired but happy.
For the artistes who made it through these trials, there might be a few weeks in which they would be worth a theoretical half-a-million quid. A magical time in which they would be high on the improbability of it all, until such time as the A&R man sobered up and thought better of his lost weekend in Dublin, or until they fired his ass and some other geezer set about the gloomy task of reversing all the decisions he had made.
Still, for a few moments back then, men could dream. They could dream of sitting in the Bailey or the Rajdoot Tandoori rapping with the Frankies, or hanging out in the Pink with Gary Kemp. Or maybe Sting. Drinking Harvey Wallbangers in the middle of the night with half of UB40 and thinking that it must be their turn next.
Suddenly there were things in Ireland that had never been seen before, such as folks arriving over here to view the graffiti on the wall of Windmill Lane and to add their own insignia. And there were things being done that were never done before, such as ‘house-sitting’. Around this time I heard that someone had a job which entailed living in the house of a rock star in South
Dublin while the rock star was away on tour.
Ireland had acquired its first house-sitters.
It was a way of life we had associated only with the ridiculously rich of American showbusiness, yet there were now Irishmen and women who were gainfully employed living in other people’s mansions, most of them in the general direction of Killiney Hill. There were men living like rock stars who were not themselves rock stars, doing all the good stuff that rock stars do in their jacuzzis and their vast four-poster beds with the mirrored ceilings and their Maseratis, and doing none of the bad stuff, like trying to write songs for the new album when they’d prefer to be out enjoying themselves, or disgracing themselves at the MTV awards.
I mention these things to question again the accepted narrative of the 1980s in Ireland, that this was a time of almost uninterrupted bleakness, a line that has been asserted so often that it just can’t be completely true. I have even been known to assert it myself.
Yet if we get beyond the received wisdom, we can see that the bleakness wasn’t uninterrupted. In fact it was interrupted quite a lot, which would perhaps make the bleakness seem all the more stark when it resumed. But which should be remembered regardless.
We were moving from the darkness to the light, and back to the darkness all the time. And while the light was coming from some strange places, it was football, the old Republic, which had brought us a night as dark as it gets without anyone dying.
I refer to that night in Brussels in 1981, Belgium v the Republic, which seemed to set the tone for much of the decade to come, an occasion of unparalleled ugliness, not just for the brutal nature of the defeat, but in the light of what was subsequently learned by Paul Howard, then a journalist with the Sunday Tribune. In 2002, in his piece ‘I Wanted Ireland to Win this Game’, Howard felt compelled to revisit those terrible visions of thunder and lightning and incessant rain when the referee gave the Belgians a dodgy free-kick with three minutes to go, which they scored, to keep perhaps the best Irish eleven we ever had out of the 1982 World Cup.
And while that image of Eoin Hand with his head in his hands has defined that night, we tend to forget the earlier and more appalling injustice when a clearly legitimate Frank Stapleton goal was disallowed for offside by the Portuguese referee, one Raul Nazare.
For the purposes of his Tribune piece, Paul Howard tracked Nazare down to his home in Lisbon, where he was living comfortably in retirement — or at least he had been, until the Howmeister came to call with a video-tape of the match in question and a burning need to ask this Raul Nazare how in the name of God he could have done this to us?
It would break your heart.
In fact, Nazare remembers the Republic striker Mickey Walsh, whom he knew from Portuguese football, going to him after the match and saying, ‘the hearts of the Irish people are crying’. Actually, Walsh called him a cheat. Then Liam Brady asked Walsh what the Portuguese word for thief was and confronted him with that.
Eoin Hand, who gave his personal copy of the video to Howard, recalls saying to Nazare: ‘You’re a disgrace. You’ve been paid off. You’ve robbed us.’
So, 21 years later, Nazare accepted Howard’s invitation to look again at the video, to watch it on the television in his own apartment and to explain what he did to us that night.
At first Nazare is adamant that Stapleton was offside and that it was the linesman who made the decision. Then something else occurs to him. ‘I remember now that I had blown the whistle before Stapleton touched the ball. So technically, you see, I did not disallow the goal, there was no goal to disallow.’
The two men look at the tape again, now joined by Nazare’s daughter Elsa and her husband, Antonio. Ireland have a free-kick on the edge of the penalty box. Brady is standing over the ball, Stapleton loitering around the penalty spot. Just before Brady chips the ball into the box, Stapleton makes a run for the near post, beats the goalkeeper to the ball and side-foots it into the net. He is a mile onside. The whistle is blown after the goal is scored.
Nazare, as though disbelieving what he is seeing, asks to see it again.
He looks at it a third time, his eyes now six inches from the screen.
Clearly the linesman does not signal at all until a good three seconds after Nazare himself disallowed the goal, at which point he guiltily raises the flag.
‘I think I made a mistake when I told you it was offside’, Nazare concedes, but now he claims he had given an indirect free-kick and that the goal was disallowed because Brady scored direct.
Except it is clear that the ball changes direction on its way into the net, due to Stapleton hitting it.
Awkwardly for Nazare, his own daughter tells him that he couldn’t be right about that — though her husband Antonio is sticking with the old man, Antonio being in the business of selling slow-motion technology to TV companies and thus an expert on this sort of thing.
Eventually they find a smaller TV in another room, but now it is even clearer that Brady did not score direct.
Then Nazare remembers something else. He reacts as if he can’t believe he had forgotten this — ‘the ball hits off me,’ he declares. ‘It hits off my back and goes into the goal.’
So now he’s saying that the ball changes direction because it hits him, not Stapleton. In fact, when the kick is taken, he is running backwards towards the six-yard box and collides with the centre-half Walter Meeuws.
Howard believes it is doubtful that Nazare even saw the goal, and his most charitable suggestion is that he may have instinctively disallowed it because he had hampered Walter Meeuws.
By now the four of them, in the apartment in Lisbon, are choreographing the scene and Nazare is still working on his defence: ‘I’m in the penalty box, where I shouldn’t be,’ he says. ‘Frank pushes me and he turns me. And when I turn, the ball hits off my back and it goes into the goal. I remember now.’
Ah, it would break your heart.
Perhaps it was this crushing sense of disappointment, of our old friend failure, that ultimately bred the success which Paul Howard now enjoys as Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, one of the most celebrated creations in the history of Irish publishing.
Nonetheless, if perchance your heart wasn’t totally broken by that meeting with Raul Nazare, I am told by my friend Dion Fanning, now a leading sportswriter, that he was nine years old when that match was played and that he has a clear recollection of angrily tearing a picture of the by-now-infamous Nazare out of a Sunday paper and ripping it to pieces. He planned to assemble the pieces into an effigy, and burn it. But he couldn’t find a box of matches.
The kid had made his point. But the result stood, and we would not be going to Spain in ’82.
It is tempting to see that episode as the defining narrative of Ireland’s misfortune throughout the 1980s, when it seemed that we had been excluded from life’s feast. Perhaps we are also drawn to it because it has a terrible injustice at its core, giving us the feeling that it wasn’t our fault, that we were done down by the badness of others. Which we know was not the truth in the case of all things that went wrong for us at that time, but which somehow consoles us.
And astonishingly, nearly thirty years later, we were still getting done out of the World Cup. Indeed Frank Stapleton, scorer of goals-that-were-disallowed-for-no-reason-at-all, would testify that the 2009 Thierry Henry episode was not even the first time we had been done out of it in Paris. You could say it was actually the third time in Paris alone, if you counted a 1-0 defeat to Spain in a play-off for the 1966 World Cup which was held in Paris because the FAI apparently took the Spanish shilling and gave them what was effectively ‘home’ advantage.
But let us be rigorously honest: when France cheated us out of that place in the 2010 World Cup, many of us were privately fearing that they would have second thoughts and agree to play us again, in which case they would most certainly beat us out the door and take away our only consolation, the ecstasy of victimhood.
——
So this is an endlessly recurr
ing theme, one that isn’t exclusive to the 1980s. And there was further consolation back then, because it wasn’t all bad anyway. I went to the Bruce Springsteen concert in Slane in the back of a van with a Hot Press crew that included lay-out man Leo Regan, who would later compile a stunningly courageous book of photo-journalism about white nazis in England and make award-winning TV documentaries, but whose main cultural contribution on the day was to introduce me to the music of The Pogues.
Yes, it was in the back of a van on the way to Slane, on a dazzlingly sunny Saturday morning in the summer of 1985, with about three beers already on board, that I first heard ‘Streams of Whiskey’. It was a piercingly beautiful moment and almost everyone who went to see Springsteen that day remembers such moments of their own.
But not entirely unpredictably, many of those memories are polluted by something that Springsteen himself noted, something of which he spoke privately: the amazing amount of drinking he witnessed among the Irish.
Ah, even on that long, long day of almost supernatural lightness, the darkness was never too far away from us.
——
Dermot Morgan, more than any other figure of that time, seems to me to personify this constant drifting between the darkness and the light and the darkness again.
Dermot always seemed to be living in the moment, and living well. He always behaved in a way a successful entertainer was supposed to behave. You would not see Dermot driving an old banger or keeping his hand in his pocket in the pub just because he had no income, as such. It was impossible to be in his company, and not to be greatly entertained.
Yet I got to know him at a time when there wasn’t much going on in his career apart from recriminations with RTÉ over an infamous TV special which was supposed to have been a full series, but which had been chopped down to a one-hour special for reasons which Dermot found outrageous: essentially RTÉ types were saying that they knew what was funny better than he. We have no way of knowing how wrong they were, or if indeed they were wrong at all.
