Hot Press 40th Anniversary: Cultural Events That Changed The Face of Ireland (10 - 1)

10. It Started with the Trip to Tipp
For many a youth in the early ’90s, The Trip To Tipp for the annual Féile festivals in Thurles was their first sampling of three-day music festival culture. Since then we’ve had a dizzying array of similar events to choose from, including Witnness, Homelands, Oxegen, Indiependence, Longitude, Body & Soul and Forbidden Fruit. In 2017, Electric Picnic is by far the biggest festival– and there are Croke Park, Aviva, Malahide Castle and Trinity gigs to add into the mix. Forty years on from Rory at Macroom, Ireland may well be the greatest country in the world for live music.

9. Louis Walsh: From Boyzone to X-Factor
When Boyzone arrived on The Late Late Show in 1993, heralded as stars of the future, a disbelieving audience witnessed a remarkably shambolic performance. The rock cognoscenti promptly dismissed the band’s manager, Louis Walsh, as deluded. To say that he had the last laugh is to put it mildly. Under his tutelage, Boyzone become the hottest pop act of the era, racking up six UK No.1s and 18 top ten hits; selling almost 30 million record;s and spawning an equally successful solo career for Ronan Keating. Louis repeated the trick with Westlife only moreso: they have sold upwards of 50 million records. Louis himself has since become a major UK TV star as a panellist on The X Factor. It is, by any standards, an extraordinary success story.

8. 2fm Came At Us
When Hot Press launched in 1977, there was one legal English-language radio station in the Republic. The government finally succumbed to pressure from the public and the music industry, and in 1979, 2fm (then Radio 2) was born as a second RTÉ station. Its success brought a younger breed of informed DJ (notably Dave Fanning, Mark Cagney, Gerry Ryan and Pat Kenny) to the fore. When Billboard, the US music bible, examined the success of Irish music on the international stage, they named Hot Press, U2, Windmill Lane recording studios and 2fm as the main catalysts.

7. The Sad Death of Philip Lynott
Arguably Ireland’s quintessential rock star, the death of Philo in 1986 came like a hammer blow for anybody who cared about rock music, especially in his home town of Dublin. Yes, I know we still have the music, but sometimes it’s not enough.

6. It Started on the Late Late Show
Bob Geldof brought disaffected Irish peeps together in 1977, when he had the chutzpah to say out loud on the country’s flagship TV programme what the rest of us were thinking. As another of our favourite writers Joseph O’Connor put it: Bob shambled on like an evil, bedraggled wino and sneered his way through Gay Byrne’s interview, expressing his loathing for the Catholic Church, Blackrock College and his father. The audience gasped while the rest of us laughed at the outrageousness of it all. But then, the disapproval of middle Ireland has always seemed like a badge of honour. Back in 1979, the Virgin Prunes shocked the audience with their atonal screaming, delightfully obnoxious cavorting,cross-dressing and men wearing make-up. Sure, what kind of a Christian name is Guggi anyway? The Pope was in town around the same time. Much later, in 2005, RTE received over 300 complaints, when viewers apparently took offence at Tommy Tiernan’s use of expletives and his negative comments about the Catholic Church.

5. The Commitments
The Commitments began life as a book by Roddy Doyle in which a band was formed from a musicians contact ad in Hot Press. Its colourful use of the Dublin vernacular made it a huge hit. A major film followed, which spawned a touring band. A hit musical, penned by Doyle, arrived in 2013. The book also set Doyle on the road to literary stardom. He bagged a coveted Booker Prize in 1993 with Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. and has ten novels to his credit– and lots more besides.

4. Riverdance Wins Eurovision!

Bill Whelan’s Riverdance had its genesis as an interlude for the 1994 Eurovision at The Point in Dublin. It spawned a hit single and a hit show. And then, as the trad police fumed, under the guiding hand of producer Moya Doherty and director John McColgan, it became an unstoppable record-breaking international extravaganza. It made Michael Flatley and Jean Butler into dancing stars. They left and it got even bigger. With two shows on the road at least some of the time, by 2015 there’d been more than 11,000 performances, and 25 million tickets sold, topping $1 billion in revenues.

3. Christy Moore Gets To The Point
Few Irish performers have had the courage to embrace music as a channel for political change and social comment, as Christy Moore has done. His headlining concerts against the planned nuclear site at Carnsore Point from 1978 onwards won a rare victory for the people. His 1985 song ‘They Never Came Home’, about the Stardust tragedy, ended with the courts insisting he remove it from his album Ordinary Man. He has stood defiant since, writing powerful songs, making extraordinary music and playing magnificent live shows. He remains one of Ireland’s stand-out voices.

2. Rory Gallagher at Macroom
In 1977 we had what has since been dubbed Ireland’s first rock festival in Macroom. It truly was a pioneering event, which coincided with the launch of Hot Press and the rise of The Boomtown Rats. That summer was a seismic one, which changed the course of music in Ireland – and arguably of Irish society – and Rory Gallagher was at the centre of it all. Recognised as one of the gresatest guitar players in the history of rock, he continued releasing superb records – ‘Philby’ from Top Priority in 1979 is an all-time Hot Press favourite – through the 1980s. His shock death on June 14, 1995 stole from us the ultimate peoole’s champion, a man who wass deeply loved by rock fans all over the world, but especially at home in Ireland.

1. Dermot Morgan and the Success of Father Ted
Forty years on from Hot Press’ first edition, the late great Dermot Morgan seemed like the perfect choice to take up the Rory Gallagher mantle, in the iconic central position on the front cover, looming over our Sgt. Pepper-style collage of cultural heavyweights. After all, it would be hard to pick a single musician. Christy Moore. U2. Bob Geldof. Sinéad O’Connor. Enya. Snow Patrol. Glen Hansard. Hozier. Van. Rory. Philo. Imelda. They – along with many of the other outstanding artists we have known and loved over these past 40 years – would all make good choices. But on this occasion, we wanted to do something that was less than obvious. And to have a bit of fun. Besides, Father Ted was written by ex-staffers Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, who met while they were working in Hot Press. Indeed, Matthews first performed an early template of the titular character as comic relief during HP’s long production nights in the late-’80s. Thirdly, well, the clerical sitcom is, simply, one of the greatest sitcoms of all time. And fourthly, and equally importantly, in so many ways its star turn Dermot Morgan embodied the maverick spirit of the magazine: his anarchic sense of humour, in which the sacred cows of Irish society were routinely lampooned, chimed precisely our outlook on the world.

For all his natural comedic gifts, the Dublin performer didn’t always enjoy the enormous success and acclaim he received on the back of Father Ted. A graduate of UCD – where he was a contemporary of Hot Press editor Niall Stokes and larked around in the satirical band Big Gom and The Imbeciles – he first surfaced on RTE with his celebrated Fr. Trendy character, before going on to co-create (with Gerry Stembridge) the wildly popular political comedy series Scrap Saturday, a major radio hit.

Despite – or perhaps because of – its status as a bitingly funny piece of political satire that took no prisoners, Scrap Saturday was eventually axed by RTE. In addition, several other projects developed by Morgan came to nought. Burdened with a feeling that he was a prophet ignored in his own land, in the early ’90s he commenced work on Father Ted in London, where it was being funded by Channel 4. The rest, as they say, is history.

Many who spent time in Dermot Morgan’s company report that he was a comedic whirlwind, capable of seguing into virtuoso riffs on a variety of topics in a manner reminiscent of Peter Cook. It’s a characteristic that comes through strongly in several Hot Press interviews, which even all these years later make for frequently hilarious reading. Take, for example, this quote, given to Joe Jackson as part of an interview that took place just as he commenced work on Father Ted.

“No, I’m not fucking on cocaine!” he stated. “And unlike Bill Clinton when I smoked dope in college I did inhale... But I never touched acid or speed because I really do find it hard enough to keep my fucking sanity at the best of times.”

As he recounted on another occasion, Morgan found rich inspiration in the Irish political milieu.

“The level of fucking buffoonery in our national and political life is frightening and it’s on a scale you don’t find anywhere else,” he said. “You know yourself, senators with bad wigs, sneaky showband managers in shiny suits, apemen who think and speak like something that crawled out from under a stone in The Land That Time Forgot.”

Hot Press’ Declan Lynch once asked Dermot what he found most satisfying about performing comedy.

“When you have people corpsed on the floor,” he responded. “You’re fuelled by that. You feed on that, and then you go further until you can get them crying with laughter. That’s it. The coup de grace. It’s finished then. It’s so satisfying. If you give me the choice between being in The Beatles, having young girls screaming at me – taking off their undies and sitting on my face (oh! that’s wrong! cut that out!) – I’d go for the comic option. There’s a certain level of attention-seeking in it, but more than that, when sufficient madness has built up inside you, it has to come out.

“I made a decision that if I didn’t do it professionally, I was in danger of being in a situation, looking back in X, Y or Z years, and saying, ‘well, I can always tell a gag at the office party’. That would be so awful. I’d sooner become humourless. I really wanted to do it. And to do it in a way that you get credit for it.”

Sadly, Dermot Morgan would pass away in 1998, aged only 45, just as the final series of Father Ted was about to air. In his abbreviated career, he proved himself to be one of Ireland’s greatest ever comedic talents. But the genius of Father Ted is also down to the one-time Hot Press duo of Linehan and Mathews. To them, we say: saluté. You created something immortal.