It was 25 years ago today

Andrea Corr

It’s strange to think about it, but when hotpress was launched 25 years ago I was only two. I don’t remember anything very clearly from that far back, but as a young child, I do recall being constantly with my sister Caroline – and her looking after me.

There was only a year between us. Normally, it’s assumed that makes it really hard for the other child because they’re taken off the knee and another baby’s put there – some children can react quite jealously. But Caroline just took me on as her baby. That’s what she called me, “baby”, and everything she got, she’d ask, ‘What about baby?’ Of course there were advantages for her: I remember she stole the chocolate Jim had saved up for Lent – she was able to say that she took it to give to me, even though she had chocolate all over her mouth.

I wouldn’t have been aware of the way in which music was changing at that time. My parents were into The Beatles, The Carpenters, Simon and Garfunkel – not quite punk rock! I know songs from those years. I remember the words of them even now – but then we were constantly surrounded by music.

By the time we got to our teens, Caroline and I were in different classes at school and so we weren’t inseparable in the way that we had been. Each of us had our own friends. Overall I was happy going to school and studying. It’s not very cool – but I was lucky because I had great fun as well. My best friend from Dundalk is still my best friend and we had a brilliant time – and yet our schoolwork didn’t seem to suffer that much.

Not that it was all a bed of roses. Dundalk suffered immense poverty then. In certain estates, if I remember, something like 80% of the homes had absolutely no income coming in, except the dole. Dundalk’s quite small and of course I had friends who were in the middle of all that. I remember one girl, a friend of mine whose circumstances, I discovered later, were particularly difficult. But people had a lot of pride and they didn’t tell, so you didn’t know it at the time.

In a lot of ways, Dundalk was a really good place to grow up. In some respects it was a typical Irish town – in others it was quite different. The fact that it was close to the border with Northern Ireland definitely affected its character. I remember daddy telling me how in 1969, something like 800 Catholic homes had been set on fire in the North. An awful lot of people fled to Dundalk and Dundalk took them in. That was a wonderful thing about Dundalk. It responded then in the way that you would hope people would respond to refugees now.

But because they had been displaced, there were groups of people living there who had a lot of anger. People kept that hidden. But we became aware of it because there was a particular incident in our school. This guy was the caretaker and we loved him. We’d go to school early and play every morning. Then it was discovered that he had stored arms for the IRA in the roof of the school. That was a real shock because, in our experience, he was a great father, a great man, and a lovely person.

Caroline was very good at sports, but I wasn’t. I was terrible actually. I remember once, on Sports Day, when they said, ‘Go’ I ran straight to my mum and dad! I was always more into music and drama. I did school plays, and some in town as well.

Your family is all-important when you’re young – that is life, that’s all it is, especially because we were so close. And you kind of don’t see beyond that. I was just 15 when the band started so I did really just go along. I was singing lead and writing – but I didn’t actually feel that I sat down and made a decision that this was what I was doing with my life. It was a natural thing to do.

The first time we played in Dundalk was at The Fairways. It held about 700 or 800 people, but not that many came. Were they sceptical of us in Dundalk? They were – as they would be anywhere in Ireland. I know that people thought that our parents were out of their minds – that whatever about young people having this dream of being in a band, the idea of their parents advocating that and supporting that, rather than getting them to apply to universities or whatever, was weird.

I remember a guy said to me once, a friend of my father’s, “You know, I adore my daughters. I just can’t believe your parents aren’t making you go to university. I would never let my daughters miss out on that opportunity.” And I responded to him and said, “Well, listen I really understand that, because if I had your daughters I certainly wouldn’t advocate them not going to university either and starting a band.” And he laughed because he had a good sense of humour. I got him. And subsequently, years later, he did turn round and said, “I’m sorry that I didn’t get it back then.”

The next time we played Dundalk, Forgiven Not Forgotten was a hit album in Ireland. We did a tour that included De Laceys in Dundalk and we were so nervous about it. Of course, we knew we would be looking down on our friends, people we knew well, and that made it hard.

I guess right from the start, I was bold enough to believe it was possible, that we would be successful. But I never imagined that it would develop in the way that it has. I felt that to be big in Ireland was being a star, which it is! But I never imagined the whole world getting involved in the way that it has.

There have been so many high points over the past decade. For a start, just seeing your album completed and in a shop is a really weird feeling. It’s fantastic. Then, hearing one of your songs for the first time on the radio.

I guess the first times are always the best. Playing our first tour in Ireland, on the opening night, I think it was in Ennis, I had laryngitis and when it came to ‘Forgiven Not Forgotten’, I couldn’t sing. I felt really bad. And instead the whole audience sang it – and the disbelief of that moment, all these people singing the song was unforgettable.

Our Lansdowne Road show was definitely another high point. And the VH1 Special that we did recently was an incredible experience.

It had a real, genuine, organic feel. It was just about making music, which kind of gets lost along the trail of promotion and everything like that. You can easily forget why you’re actually doing it.

To do this concert and have Ronnie Wood come up and play guitar with us and to have Bono sing – I grew up looking at these people on TV, so on that level it was amazing. And then the whole idea of looking around and I’m up there on stage with people I love. And the music felt really good. That’s what it’s all about really. That’s why we started in the first place.

Paul Cleary

We played our first gig as The Blades in a small hall in Ringsend, as a five-piece. At the time, hotpress gave us some encouragement. Obviously we weren’t going to be reviewed in the likes of the NME and Sounds and so on because we were just playing small gigs. I was only 17 so it was very encouraging. Especially Bill Graham and Karl Tsigdinos, in particular, gave us great encouragement. To be fair to Bill, The Blades weren’t his favourite band but he still gave us some good reviews because he thought we had potential. It was a local music paper so you could almost chart your progress through the review pages. I remember reading some great stuff – Bill Graham’s retrospective on Bowie and Springsteen. I also wrote for hotpress, so they were my bread and butter too when I gave up being a musician around ’89/’90.

I played a few gigs last year to promote my solo album Crooked Town, in the Olympia and Vicar St. and South in Waterford, and what I found to be a big surprise was that myself and the band members were actually treated like human beings. There was some food and drinks and all that laid on. Facilities were non-existent when we started out and the roads were poor so a journey down to Cork would take you four years there and back. We felt like we were, in some small way, pioneers because it was the time of punk and new wave so there would be some like-minded people in every town. It would be heartening to go somewhere in the back of a transit van and meet at least 10 or 20 people who were into The Jam or The Clash or whatever was going on at the time. That’s what kept us going because the people who were there were full-blooded and totally behind you.

Dave Fanning

Twenty five years ago, I remember a Rory Gallagher gig in Macroom in August ’77. In July, I started off with Radio Dublin and there must have been literally twenty people listening. By March ’78 there were a few stations raided, so everyone was listening. I remember all the new music coming in, the cover of Melody Maker with Johnny Rotten being questioned by the police as he walked down the street and those kind of things. I never saw the Bill Grundy thing on TV when it first came out, but I was coming back from Germany where I was working in a factory and I read all about it the next day in Ostend or Dover or one of those places where you’d get a boat coming back to Ireland.

The very best of all the music in terms of what really turned me on to it all wasn’t Elvis Costello or the Buzzcocks or the Pistols. It wasn’t even The Clash – it was The Ramones and their second album The Ramones Leave Home that did it. It was just a new musical revolution that was happening.

Apart from that, I always remember the Dandelion Market in Dublin. I did see The Clash in Trinity College that year and absolutely hated it, you’re supposed to say you loved it but I thought the hall it was in was appalling. It was probably very punk in that you couldn’t hear it! But I loved the album and later on probably the best gig I ever saw was The Clash in the Top Hat (Dun Laoghaire).

2FM, hotpress and U2 all seemed to rise up around the same time in the late ‘70s. You could get 24 hour a day pop radio, or at least 16 hours. hotpress was the magazine for everyone. You could get Scene or High Times but this was the big one. These days, I think more things are the same as they were then than people would like to admit. I don’t think it’s a necessarily good, bad or indifferent time, but I think there is more really good music out now than there ever was. Look at Q magazine now where they boast on the cover “over 300 albums reviewed”. In twelve months that’s 3,600 albums and at least 50 or 60 released in the States that you’d want to check out that you never even hear about. Of all those, you’d have your 20% of Chris De Burghs and so on that you wouldn’t go near with a bargepole but there would be a good 20% you would want to check out and 50% you’d definitely like to hear. So what chance do you have when there are 17 albums a day you wouldn’t mind keeping or listening to or falling in love with or whatever? You just have to go with the flow and find your own music. We all give out about the boy bands, but it takes three minutes to find great music. You don’t have to go with daytime pop radio or the charts. There is great music out there of every type.

John Rocha

In 1977, I was in my last year of college and I was doing a show for my diploma. I came to Ireland in 1978 and I’ve been here ever since except for two years when I was living in Italy. It’s been a long journey and there have been a lot of ups and downs, but I am now where I wished to be 25 years ago. When I left college I was very green and I didn’t really have the vision of what I’d like to do as a fashion designer. I never thought I would get as established as I am, or achieve anything like that. I never thought I’d be branching into other areas like product design, interior and those things I have ended up doing in the last few years.

There have been lots of surprises. In 1993, I won the British Designer of the Year Award, which was amazing. Then in ’95 I did my first show in Paris, which was wonderful because if you are a designer you always want to do a show there.

There are so many highlights – launching Waterford Crystal in ’97, the opening of the Morrison Hotel, through the years there have been all sorts of exciting things. And then to end up in Ireland with a beautiful Irish wife and a few beautiful Irish children!