Mad Dogs, Rock Chicks And Smut Peddlers

“You can’t print this,” says Olaf Tyaransen – again – and launches into a story I’d love to repeat if it weren’t for those pesky libel laws. Somewhat surprisingly, these titbits are not all tales of excess – more than a few involve relationships gone awry – and the attendant heartbreak. Unfortunately, Olaf promised the people involved that the revelations would be kept off the record.

Luckily, there’s still plenty of meat in the tales that were fit to be printed. Many of these will be familiar to regular Hot Press readers and have been gathered in Tyaransen’s latest book, Selected Recordings: 2000 – 2010. The collection includes some remarkable and controversial interviews and subjects – Courtney Love, Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, Ron Jeremy, Tommy Tiernan and Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair to name a few.
Talking of heartbreak, we are sitting in Dublin’s Central Hotel and it was here, in the room next door to the Library Bar, that Damien Rice told Tyaransen about the end of his relationship with Lisa Hannigan.
“The curtains were drawn and it was very dark and cold. That’s at least part of the reason he was able to open up to me. He wouldn’t have said what he said had there been anyone else in earshot. I only realised afterwards that we’d created a confessional type of environment.”
Tyaransen attributes the ability to encourage people to reveal themselves to a combination of luck, empathy and the fact that his star sign is Aquarius. Astrology? Really?
“I only believe in it when it suits me,” he laughs. “The worst interview I ever did was with Sharon Shannon when her first album came out. It was a yes/no scenario. ‘What’s it like to have the new album out?’ – ‘It’s great.’ You need more than that! A drunk came into the bar and tried to sell me a watch and that became the focal point of the interview. But I’ve done interviews where I felt I didn’t nail the person, political interviews more than anything else.”
Johnny Adair seems like a slippery character.
“Well, I felt I nailed him. It’s not my job to judge him; it’s my job to paint a portrait of him. Maybe he got off on it, maybe he didn’t. I don’t think he came out of the interview very well but that’s not something you can prejudge.”
At this stage, Tyaransen has interviewed most big-name musicians at least once. His wish-list of subjects include the reclusive author Thomas Pynchon, Barack Obama and Tony Blair. He’s interested in those who, for better or for worse, have changed the cultural landscape.
“Hefner was hugely influential in the way people viewed sex and publishing. Flynt was at the other end of the scale – he was a smut peddler. I love meeting guys like that. They wouldn’t be heroes of mine, but I love people who change the culture and the thinking of their time.”
The interview with Flynt led to Tyaransen’s headline-making revelations from Courtney Love.
“The interview was meant to be twenty minutes but it went on a lot longer because I asked him about sexually molesting his daughter. She’d accused him of it. He really brightened up because he prefers to have a row. After the interview he invited me to a talk he was giving at UCLA in the evening. I went with him and his wife and his bodyguards. He took me to the Four Seasons for dinner afterwards. We were chatting and he said, ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ I’d been trying to get an interview with Courtney Love for some time. She played his wife in the movie, so I said, ‘Can you give me Courtney’s number?’
“I rang Courtney. It was bizarre. Courtney just talks like nobody else. We spoke for an hour or longer. Then she took to calling me at all sorts of weird hours and sending me these weird text messages. In all the conversations I had with her – there weren’t that many, maybe three or four but they were long conversations – I’m not sure she even knew who I was. I was someone to talk at.”
While Love had mentioned having an affair with a supermodel on the Howard Stern Show, she had named Kate Moss to Olaf during one of these conversations, a subject he revisited when he met her in Glasgow last year.
“She said other things in the interview but we had to take them out because of libel. One difference with Kate Moss is that Kate Moss was on the front page of the newspapers snorting coke. The way libel works is – has your reputation been damaged? She’s a known Class A drug user so she can’t fall far in the eyes of so called right-thinking people. But more importantly you have to ask: is it true? And if you believe it, you then try to figure what the impact will be. Our view was that Kate Moss would be perfectly capable of taking it in her stride. Besides: is there anything wrong with having a lesbian fling?”
Talking of controversy, Tommy Tiernan’s infamous Electric Picnic interview is included in the book and Tyaransen vigorously defends the comedian in the introduction.
“My feeling is it’s comedy, where everything is fair game. The reality is that everybody in the Hot Press Chatroom on the day fell over laughing when he did that. Not because they are racist, not because they are anti-Semites but because it was funny. It was the energy that went into it and the madness in his voice.”
Why include it if there is a risk it might not work out of context?
“Because it was big news, it was international news... As bad as it was for Tommy, there was no going back once it had become a news story. Much better then to have the complete context of the interview available so that people can get beyond the sensational headlines.”
Given that scandal can make a journalist’s name to the detriment of their subjects, where does Tyaransen draw the line between what to reveal and what to conceal?
“Nine times out of ten you just have to reassure somebody that you are going to treat what they’ve told you with respect.
“I’ll give you a good example,” he says, and he does. It’s also a rather interesting story, but again, I can’t tell you any names. Damn!
Olaf Tyaransen – he’s a consummate interviewer and one hell of a gossip.

Selected Recordings: 2000-2010 is out now.