Never mind An Bord Snip Nua, the people who can save Ireland from famine, pestilence and Brian Cowen are gathered round an extremely large table in The Central Hotel for what could be the most crucial HP Christmas Summit meeting yet.
What is usually an excuse to get spectacularly jolly at Niall Stokes’ expense is today a sober affair where the only intoxicant is the dizzying power of the participants.

Our saviours of the rock ‘n’ roll nation are:
JOE ELLIOTT: The Def Leppard mainman who elicits the biggest ‘aaaaaah’ of the morning when he reveals that at the age of 50 he’s about to become a daddy for the first time. If he reckons he’s knackered now after five years of virtual non-stop Leps touring, just wait ‘til he’s on nappy-changing duty!
CIARAN GRIBBIN: Also known to the musical public as Joe Echo – he has a gig in the Dublin Academy on December 17, be there! – the Derryman scored a massive worldwide hit in July when up and coming singer Madonna recorded one of his co-writes, ‘Celebration’.
RONAN YOURELL: Sporting a fine Movember lip slug – thanks Joe! – the Delorentos singer and guitarist is preparing for another run round the country in support of the superb You Can Make Sound, which if it hadn’t been for that pesky Shakira would have topped the Irish album chart in October.
SHARON CORR: July’s Ms. Twitter is currently applying the finishing touches to her debut solo album in Windmill Lane Studios whilst also working hard to promote for her Children In Need version of Rosemary Clooney’s ‘Me And My Teddy Bear’, which is out here as a single on December 4.
TIM WHEELER: It was no sleep ‘til Zennor recently when the New York exile and his Ash bandmates embarked on a 26-date A to Z tour of the UK’s most out of the way venues. That’s also the number of singles they’re in the process of releasing at fortnightly intervals through ash-official.com.
TARA McCORMACK: Having previously worked behind the scenes with other artists, the Dubliner made headlines herself this year as the feline lead with Vengeance & The Panther Queen. With an album’s worth of glam pop belters ready to go, 2010 appears to be theirs for the taking.
DARAGH ANDERSON: The Codes lead singer got to tick plenty of boxes in 2009 as his band supported Keane, signed to EMI and recorded their splendid TressDreamInAlgebra album with the Manics’ production pal Greg Haver.
STUART CLARK: Hot Press’ very English Assistant Editor who, remembering the delight with which Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ goal was greeted here, wasn’t overly upset when Thierry Henry did the same thing to the Boys In Green.

STUART: Instead of writing stiff letters to President Sarkozy, shouldn’t Ireland just mobilise its eight boats and 29 planes and declare war on France for what happened on Black Wednesday?
JOE: I think people have to let it go, but only after Sepp Blatter’s been crucified or stuck in the stocks on Stephen’s Green so the Irish public can vent their fury. He’s so buried his head in the sand. “We don’t get involved” – for fuck’s sake, you’re the governing body of world soccer. Everybody on the planet saw this except one man, which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt in my mind that they have to start using video technology. If they’re able to put miniature cameras in cricket stumps, they can stick something on the crossbar to see if the ball’s crossed the line and have a video referee like they do in rugby. People say, “It’ll make the game too stop-starty” but how long were the French players kissing and hugging each other after they scored against Ireland – at least a minute. The video ref would have taken ten seconds to replay the incident and say, “He’s a cheating bastard, don’t give it!”
SHARON: (laughs) Crucifixion? Out of the door, line at the left.
JOE: No, freedom actually!
SHARON: Well, off you go then!
STUART: Thank you Monty Python!
SHARON: Ours was an extremely depressed house last Wednesday. I was tweeting at the time and yawning my way through most of it, which I do normally with football, but I was effing and blinding with the best of ‘em when that happened. It would have completely changed the mood of the country for however many months it is until the World Cup finals.
STUART: For Ireland, I’d say about 57. No, I mustn’t gloat…
RONAN: There were two Delorentos in the Stade de France who did a lot of sorrow-drowning afterwards in the Pigalle. We’re thinking of turning the “Alive alive-oh, alive alive-oh, Stephen Ireland’s two grannies, alive alive-oh” chant into a B-side! I just sat there at home with my mates replaying the incident for an hour and thinking, “How did the officials not spot that?”
DARAGH: My initial reaction was, “This has to be replayed!” – but we’ve really jumped the shark in the past couple of days, with Ministers getting involved and 200 people marching on the French embassy. It’s all a bit undignified.
RONAN: I can understand now why the English got so upset about the ‘Hand of God’.
STUART: From Maradona to Madonna… Ciaran, how did Madge covering one of your songs come about?
CIARAN: It goes back to three years ago when Paul Oakenfold’s manager saw me play live and suggested we do some writing together. Paul’s big mates with Madonna, so when she asked him if he had anything that might be suitable for her ‘Best Of’, he sent round 20 songs minus the vocals including two of mine, which to my amazement she picked. I didn’t actually know this until a month before the single came out because it was so hush-hush and she didn’t want anything leaking on to the internet. The number of doors it’s opened has been incredible. Literally a week later Kylie Minogue’s people phoned; Atlantic Records were on from L.A. looking for me to submit for Missy Elliott, Flo Rida and all these other legendary people; and I’m writing eight songs for the film version of the I Was Bono’s Doppelganger book, which I’m co-producing with Mike Hedges. I had eight years in a band getting nowhere and all this happens overnight – it’s crazy!
JOE: It’s lucky in the meantime that you hadn’t given it to someone else, which has just happened to Britney. She got a backing-track, did her vocals, released it and then discovered that someone else has a version out.
STUART: Joe, did touring with Taylor Swift open a whole new market up for Def Leppard?
JOE: It was a six-week opportunity for 16-year-old kids to go, “Who the fuck’s that old guy up there with her?” It’s a bit like Jagger working with Christina Aguleria like they did on that Scorsese film. You get a little boost in record sales and a lot of press out of it, which is half the battle these days – as long as your face is on the front-cover of USA Today at least once every two years you haven’t reformed! We went through that so many times – ‘Oh, you guys got back together’. ‘Fuck, we never split up!’ I’ve worked every year of my life since 1983. Maybe it’s because I’m not on MTV because MTV’s not a fucking video channel anymore! She was the fan, and put it out in an interview that the only band she’d do the CMT Crossroads show with was us. When you’ve been doing it for 32 years like we have, you need your distractions because everything else becomes routine. Elton John’s played Madison Square Garden 51 times – he’s got the record – and must be thinking, ‘Oh god, not another one. The same old fucking place!’ Remember the thing The Corrs did in Bray, Sharon, with Bono and Ronnie Wood? That’s what you remember as being special.
SHARON: It’s a bit weird when you look around during a song and there’s Ronnie Wood doing the guitar solo. ‘Wooooargh, this is cool!’ One of the things I’ve loved about making my solo album is working with people like Jim Lockhart from Horslips, and Stuart Cable, the former Stereophonics drummer. You learn so much from being in the studio with other musicians.
DARAGH: We definitely learned a lot at the start of the year playing shows in the O2 and the Odyssey with Keane who are really nice, down to earth guys. That’s the first time we’d been around such a big production, and it was fascinating seeing how it all bolted together. It really gave us something to aspire to.
TARA: Two people I’ve learned a huge amount from talking to are Sinéad O’Connor and Mary Coughlan. They’ve taught me that you have to live a song for the three or four minutes you’re singing it. Your voice is an instrument the same as a guitar or a piano is – you have to really work at getting the best from it.
RONAN: It wasn’t playing with Keane or Ronnie Wood, but I had a few days off recently in Clonakilty – which I hope isn’t under water at the moment – and loved immersing myself in the traditional scene there. I don’t think there will be any bodhrans or uillean pipes on the next album, but it makes you think about your own music in a different way.
JOE: Gavin Rossdale lived in Clonakility, didn’t he? Though that’s nothing to recommend it!
STUART: Tim, you must have run in to quite a few famous names in New York.
TIM: Iggy Pop walked past my apartment one day on 7th Street, which was pretty cool, and leaving a guitar shop on 30th Street I walked straight into Harvey Keitel shooting the American version of Life On Mars.
STUART: Is the A to Z series of singles Ash’s way of saying that the album’s dead?
TIM: For us it is. It’s not so much a negative thing, as the opportunity to do something new and exciting. The album’s become devalued from what it used to be. It’s really fun having music coming out constantly rather than releasing a record of 12 songs, which you’re then tied to for the next three years. We’ve got the first 13 singles all mapped out, and then we’ll do the rest in January and February. I can see what people like about the first batch, and then push in those directions.
SHARON: I’m doing the opposite! The Corrs stopped for a couple of years to get our heads showered and have some children, but I was still writing song after song after song and thought, ‘I really want to do my own album’. For me, it’s about producing a beautiful piece of work that I’m really, really proud of. So far I’ve spent about €280,000 on the album, which is just studio time and paying the musicians. It’s not what was being spent 15 years ago…
JOE: That was the food bill on Hysteria!
SHARON: … but it’s still a lot of money. Obviously I’d love it to be a commercial success, but I’m prepared for it not to be. It may turn out to be the loss leader, which enables me to go out and play live, and make the money back from selling t-shirts or whatever. I want to take my kids with me and tour for as long as I possibly can, because that musician’s life is a beautiful bubble to be in.
TARA: For a band like ourselves, an album is still the best way of getting your name out there. It’s also a document of where you are now, and something to look back on in 10 or 15 years time and say, ‘That was us in 2010’. An album is how I judge other artists, so I want to make one myself!
STUART: Daragh, did Codes have any doubts about going the conventional album route?
DARAGH: Yeah, crippling doubts at the start because we financed everything ourselves before we approached the labels. We scrimped and saved in our day-jobs for two years so that we could afford to make an album that did us justice. We put our money where our mouth is because we were convinced other people would ‘get’ our songs.
JOE: That’s the belief system in what you do. You have to think, ‘Well, if I like it maybe someone else will’. Where it all falls down of course is if somebody downloads it for free rather than going into town on the bus and buying it. Lars Ulrich is right – it’s theft. It’s like somebody going into your house every time you’re at work, switching all the lights on and having a bath. Nothing’s missing but it’s costing you a fortune. It’s exactly the same as not being paid for the work you do.
SHARON: I think people have a very inaccurate view of the music industry and how it works. You’ve an engineer, a producer, a band, a plugger, a graphic artist, somebody working the record company switchboard and everybody needs to get paid. They’re always going to go, ‘Oh, the friggin’ U2s and Def Leppards and The Corrs, they’re all loaded’. Fine, but what about all the other people in the music industry who definitely aren’t loaded and are being laid off or having their houses repossessed? I’m waiting for the Digital Economy Bill to be passed because I want respect paid to music and the industry that produces it.
TARA: Sharon’s right, there are a lot of people working in the music industry who earn an average weekly wage – or less – and are having their livelihood taken away from them by piracy.
TIM: It blew my mind when I checked out Pirate Bay one day and found our entire catalogue – 17 years of work – in a folder that someone could download in three minutes. It’s not free to make, so why should it be free to get online?
JOE: We’re going to call our next album Kleptomania!
CIARAN: I think we’re in a transitional period and in that five years time we’ll go, ‘Okay, this is how it’s going to be for the next two or three decades’. We’ll have got our heads round all this new technology.
STUART: The musical year was dominated of course by the deaths of Michael Jackson and Stephen Gately. Some of the media coverage, which ensued wasn’t good, was it?
SHARON: I went to Stephen’s funeral because I’d met him a couple of times, one of them being in Belfast where we both had a couple of drinks on us and had a really good laugh. He was heartbroken that Boyzone at the time were broken up and trying to figure out ‘what next?’ He was one of the innocents in the music industry with open arms for everybody. The funeral itself was very beautiful and respectful – you could feel the love around Sheriff Street. The Daily Mail trying to infer that just because he was a gay man they were up to something deviant… that sort of thinking ought to be long gone at this stage. It’s so wrong and so disrespectful. Had I come back from a bar with my husband and another girl, nobody would have jumped to those conclusions.
STUART: Ciaran, as a former Derry minor football player what did you make of the furore, which greeted Cork hurler Donal Og Cusack’s announcement that he’s gay?
CIARAN: It would have been very awkward when I was playing, for any of the lads to have come out. Yes, it’s all glitz and glamour down at Croke Park on match day, but the grassroots of the G.A.A. still have a long way to come. It’s very set in what Ireland used to be and holding on to some misguided notion of manhood.
RONAN: You played football for Derry?
CIARAN: I wasn’t bad, but then I caught the music bug and it all went out the window. I tore some ligaments in my leg and while I was rolling around the wet grass in agony, I thought, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’. I haven’t kicked a ball since.
JOE: On the subject of Stephen Gately, I think it’s the same all over the place. If you go back to the ‘70s, Elton John and David Bowie got away with it in New York and L.A., but Bowie never played Memphis or Texas because he’d have been hung from a tree. We move in reasonably enlightened circles, but there are still people voting BNP and attending Ku Klux Klan cross-burnings.
SHARON: One of Stephen’s great legacies is that he’s made it easier for young men to say, ‘No big deal, but I’m gay’.
STUART: Where were you guys when Michael Jackson died, and did it affect you?
JOE: I was backstage at a gig in Cleveland and they had the TV on in the catering room. It was TMZ who put fucking football results up wrong, so I thought, ‘This is a load of bollocks!’ Sadly though it wasn’t. I never met the guy but there was a connection through the fact that we couldn’t get to number one in 1983 because his fucking Thriller album would not move. Pyromania was number two behind Thriller for four-and-a-half months. We actually topped him in 1987 when Hysteria was number one and Bad number two. I’ve met people who saw him dancing round in his dressing-room singing ‘Foolin’, which I thought was cute. You can bitch and moan and we all laugh at each other when we trip over a banana skin at some stage, but at the end of the day it’s one of your own that’s died.
TARA: The first album I ever bought was Bad, so I was genuinely really upset when I heard the news. I was in two minds about going to see the This Is It film, but it’s absolutely amazing. The amount of work that was being put into the tour – it really could have been the greatest show on earth. I’d love it if the film was the full-stop on his career, but the muck-raking’s going to last forever.
STUART: Okay, onto the rapid-fire round now. Gigs of the year?
JOE: Mott The Hoople’s Hammersmith Odeon shows were absolutely amazing. Some non-Leppard mates and me put together a band called the Down ‘N’ Outz to support them one of the nights, and had so much fun we’re going to do an album early in the New Year. Muse were the business too – you wouldn’t have got a stage-set like that on Blade Runner – and I’m not ashamed to admit I loved Spandau Ballet who totally rolled back the years. How the fuck do they still look that good? I loved Fleetwood Mac as well for the fact that Lindsay Buckingham is such an incredible guitar player. I had no idea he was capable of doing that on stage.
CIARAN: I managed to get in the pit for AC/DC at Punchestown, which was my first time seeing them and it totally blew me away. Hearing ‘Hells Bells’ for the first time live… it doesn’t get any better than that! The Answer were supporting, and looked totally at home on the big stage.
TARA: Jane’s Addiction. They’re one of my favourite bands of all-time, so when I heard they were getting back together I was beyond delighted. I got a good spot in front of Dave Navarro and just drank it all in. I love his guitar playing, although Perry Farrell was the one I had on my wall as a teenager.
TIM: Leonard Cohen at Radio City in New York. Hearing him do ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’ a few blocks from where it all went down – so to speak – was wild. He’s charming, charismatic, funny… skipping off stage aged 75!
SHARON: Mine’s Leonard Cohen as well, in the O2. I’ve never seen a gig like it in my life – the only word I can think of that does it justice is ‘spiritual’. I’m not hung up on meeting people, but I’d love to be able to tell him how much he moved me.
CIARAN: I know the two English girls, The Webb Sisters, who do backing vocals for him and they arranged for me to meet Leonard in Belfast. A complete gentleman although tiny!
DARAGH: It’s a toss up between Elbow in Vicar St. and Mew in The Academy two weeks ago. Mew’s singer has formed a supergroup with the Coldplay bassist and the keyboard-player from A-ha, which is slightly disturbing!
RONAN: Doves in the Olympia was great. It’s bands like them and Elbow, who are the polar opposite of X Factor, that give me heart.
STUART: What’s the oddest place your music’s surfaced? I’m going to set a benchmark for this one, which is David Kitt telling us a few years ago in that doleful voice of his how he unwittingly soundtracked a documentary on manic depression!
RONAN: I can’t top that, but we had a song, ‘Secret’, that ran over the end credits of the All-Ireland Final this year. I never thought we were a GAA sort of a band, but there you go!
SHARON: The Sopranos, which is one of my all-time favourite TV shows. Meadow comes down the stairs with her iPod on and she’s listening to ‘Breathless’! That was the coolest moment ever.
TIM: I can’t think of any weird ones, but the best was ‘Kung Fu’ playing while they showed all the stunts that had gone wrong at the end of Jackie Chan’s Rumble In The Bronx.
TARA: Rodrigo Y Gabriela, who I was working with, were used on the Superbowl, which is as big as it gets in America.
JOE: They used ‘Rockit’ two years in a row for the Formula 1 coverage, which was kind of neat. The oddest was going to a dentist’s appointment once and hearing some awful muzak version of ‘Animal’ in the elevator. It was an instrumental version of The Clash’s ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go’ going down, so we were in good company!
STUART: Tim, I imagine you’d have been rather more pleased with the version of ‘Shining Light’ that Annie Lennox released recently?
TIM: I got a plane back to New York earlier this year and they were playing it as I got into my seat. I met her at a New York Times event and had butterflies in my stomach talking to her. She’s such an icon.
STUART: Anyone else been star-struck like that?
CIARAN: Yeah, right now sitting next to Joe Elliott. My very first album aged 12 was Hysteria!
JOE: Poor boy!
SHARON: I ran into Neil Finn from Crowded House and actually wasn’t able to speak, which was really embarrassing. All I could think of were these great songs like ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ and ‘Take The Weather With you’. I just stared inanely, it was really sad.
JOE: Our guitarist Vivian did the same thing in Australia when he met Tim Finn in a TV studio. He opened his mouth but no words came out!
STUART: Okay, we’re into the home straight. The albums you’ve been listening to most over the past 12 months?
CIARAN: I loved Doves’ Kingdom Of Rust.
DARAGH: It’s a toss up between Yeah Yeah Yeah’s It’s Blitz and Mew’s No More Stories.
SHARON: I bought Lily Allen’s album, but mostly it’s old ‘70s stuff I’ve been listening to like Nick Drake’s Treasury. I’m loving that album!
JOE: A live Mott The Hoople one that came out two minutes after they’d finished the performance, so consequently there’s a lot of crap on there too. Overdub later! I think it was last rather than this year, but the Fight Like Apes record is great – I can’t stop playing ‘Lend Me Your Face’. And the latest Cheap Trick one, which I swear to god is the album The Beatles would have made in 1971.
TARA: I’ve been listening to a lot of metal and hard rock recently to get away from all the sameness in the charts. Timbaland’s great, but does he have to produce every major American artist? It’s great hearing something like Mastodon’s Crack The Sky, which does totally its own thing. They’re across in February and I’ll be down the front headbanging!
STUART: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you and Happy Christmas!