SOUND MAN

The roadies' world of rock and roll contrasts starkly with the on-stage images of glamour and pomp associated with rock stars and projected to an over-eager audience. Your perspective on things is radically different from behind a mixing desk or from the arse end of a tour bus . . .

Joe O'Herlihy, sound engineer with U2, has been involved in the rock game at every level for over fifteen years. O'Herlihy has seen success first-hand, having toured with Rory Gallagher at the height of his popularity and subsequently of course having worked with U2. He has also paid his dues however, having laboured through the hard times, when roadies were treated with disdain. He recalls sleeping in the Cork and Kerry mountains when the van broke down.

The list of bands he worked with while running his own stage sound hire company reads like a 'Who's Who' of Irish and British rock during the seventies; he casually lists off bands like XTC, The Bishops, The Cimarons, The Damned, The Undertones, The Radiators and The Stranglers, among many others. He's a hugely experienced and widely respected operator in one of the most difficult and demanding roles in the entertainment business. There's a lot to be learned about the nature of rock'n'roll from the O'Herlihy story . . .

So what got Joe O'Herlihy involved in the music scene in the first place? "The music industry is the biggest narcotic going! My first involvement was with a band called Chapter Five and my involvement was through Johnny Rice who was the bass player and a personal friend who I got on really well with. He was the guy that kept me in the business, because in those days the importance of a roadie was unheard of - absolutely!"

At least the situation has improved somewhat . . .

"I think the position and importance of a roadie advanced as technology advanced - almost 100 years overnight. I remember in the very early seventies writing away to people like Charlie Watkins of WEM asking how this works and how that works and you were talking of a five-channel mixer-amp which was absolutely ginormous! Sorry, a five channel mixer that didn't have an amp inside it - that was totally new!

"In the days of Chapter Five we had things like Hurley's crazy boxes and a Philips amplifier that weighed half a ton. You're talking '68 to '70 and into '71/'72/'73 when Chapter V and another band, Gaslight, split up, that heralded the arrival of Sleepy Hollow - a band that at the time had a hell of a lot of good things going for them. They had a good manager (Denis Desmond, now of MCD Promotions) and a good organisation."

So what age were you then?

"About eleven or twelve," he lies gleefully and grins from ear to ear. When Joe O'Herlihy smiles one almost expects Christmas lights to shine in his Z Top style beard - a trademark which is almost as well known in Cork as Shandon! He smiles also when he remembers his first lighting rig, proudly unveiled in Blackpool Community Centre many years ago . . .

"I had a piece of chipboard with six deep, and I quote deep, Jacobs biscuit tins - about two or three times the size of the ones you get today. I put different coloured Philips floodlamps into them and, wiring the whole thing up using doorbells as connections, I had my first lighting system!"

What a rig!

"What a rig indeed. They flashed on and off and it worked very well and of course it was a new concept in those days. You must remember that this was, like, the psychedelic era and people in this country were just catching on. It was a groovy time . . . man. It was a groovy period in time (laughs).

"That was around the time we fell madly in love and got married, wasn't it?" The apparent non-sequitur is directed to his wife Marion, who's busy making hot lemon drinks in the background. Their love and commitment to one another has helped to keep Joe - almost - sane in a mad, mad world.

"After my son Mark was born, I realised that man does not live on bread, love and affection alone. What I was doing wasn't considered a job. Your mother always clattered you round the back of the head and told you to go and get a real job down in Dunlops or Fords. Ironically, the way the music industry has gone since, as soon as kids are born these days their mothers go out and buy them guitars for a secure job. More secure than a job for life in Dunlops or Fords!'

Meanwhile Sleepy Hollow were proving reasonably successful, getting better gear and better gigs. Their first single was called 'Come On Joe' (Guess who?) and was so outrageously powerful that it was chosen to represent Ireland in European Pop Jury - and came in a fabulous second on the night! Nostalgia time again . . .

Cork certainly looks after its own and this was borne out by the fact that Cork's most famous rock export, Rory Gallagher, always chose Sleepy Hollow as support for his Irish Tours. This goes some way towards explaining Joe's involvement with the Rory Gallagher team.

"While working with Sleepy Hollow on the tours I suppose you could say that they were sounding me out," he chuckles. "On one tour one of the Gallagher crew got a burst appendix or some other medical vibe and Donal Gallagher, Rory's manager, asked me to look after the backline when our set was finished. Then he asked me had I got a passport. I said no. He said to go to Dublin and get one. Next thing I know I'm in London. Next thing I'm arriving in Chicago!

"No one in the States had a fucking clue what I was saying," he recalls. "I was singing the vocab: 'Move that thing over dere outa de way boy'. The Americans hadn't a clue."

He was taken aside and told 'This-is-how-one-speaks-when-one-is-over-here.'

In fact working with Rory was a vital break into the big time, for Joe.

"Oh Yeah, jesus yeah! The break was totally unexpected," he recalls. "I just got the gig. I was in at the deep end but for me it was realising an ambition. Trying to get out of Cork is difficult enough for a musician but for someone who's technically-inclined, it's virtually impossible. What's a crazy young fella from Cork got to offer the world of rock and roll?"

A lot, as it happens. Joe toured with Rory Gallagher from 1973 to September '78. At that stage he had graduated to becoming sound engineer and has also set up his own sound company - Stage Sound Hire, building up a system each time he came back from tour. Tim Buckley (another member of the notorious Cork Mafia) now with U2, ran the rig while Joe was touring.

"Working with Rory was a great apprenticeship," Joe adds, "the values that Rory instilled were quite spectacular. He worked 48 hours a day and eight days a week. He was a man that had the utmost respect for his audience. He had a wonderfully genuine relationship with his audience. Where I left off with Rory I took up with Bono. That communication is one of the most outstanding things about U2."

JOE at this stage realised that his family were growing up around him. "When I'd go away they'd be babies with bottles and when I'd come back they'd be young fellas with hurleys," he says. Having graduated to Sound Engineer with Rory - a cherished ambition - he decided to leave. It was a tough decision, and one he hated having to make. "I'd say Rory felt cheated, and I'd understand that - after all, he had spent four or five years training this guy. But it was a bit late in the game and I had to move on."

Joe's sound systems were in regular use by visiting bands at the time. One of the key venues was The Arcadia Ballroom or the Downtown Kampus in Cork and it was here that Joe's relationship with U2 began.

What were his first impressions of U2?

"To be perfectly honest, I thought they were fucking raving lunatics! The musical content was nil. They had to play their own music because they couldn't play anyone else's! This was during the punk thing. Remember I came from a serious upbringing - The Blues. It took a long time for it to sink in for me - it really did."

For someone of Joe's background, the change in the music was difficult to handle.

"It was actually. I fought it a lot - there had to be a way to make this sound right in context and at the same time not take away from the originality of the sound. There's no point in cutting off the creativity. At that time too there were further technological advances to contend with - advances in keyboard technology, amplifier technology and speaker components.

"In studios these days it's incredible what you can do. The on-the-road techniques are advancing accordingly - they have to. There has to be some sense of dynamics and emotion about a live gig, that extra bit of magic that you don't get at home - yet the technology has to be of a high enough standard to maintain a reasonable reproduction of the recorded sounds."

Joe dismisses the argument that technology is taking over.

"The audience of today have got a seriously more educated ear," he argues. "They take certain things for granted. They go into a gig and they know a song, they know the intro, they know the lyric, they know the chorus, they know the whole lot word for word - verse for verse, and they expect to hear that coming off the stage. Technology can do a lot for a band but one always has to remember that the input from the humanoid is what makes technology work."

What distinguishes a good sound engineer from a mediocre one?

"A good engineer has got to understand what the band want to reproduce - but at the same time to know his or her own surroundings. If you go into a hall where you've got a particularly ambient sound you know that you've got to take control of what's going on on stage. The band are playing away and they've got a wonderful sound in their own four foot space and when it leaves that four foot space it's mush. An engineer has to be strong enough, and close enough to the band, to be able to tell them 'you've got to turn the bass down because it's fucking things up'. The band has to understand that what you're saying is in their best interest because you're the guy that's out there listening to what the punter is listening to."

And what is it that defines a good road crew?

"It depends on the level you look at. It's very important for bands in general to have somebody around them that they're comfortable with. When you're starting off, that's usually a fella that's one of the gang but that doesn't play an instrument. That's basically where people start and it goes on from there. At the garage-band stage, it's basically down to commitment and with a 'roadie' it's a labour of love really - I mean it's not rewarding in the sense that you get up on stage like a musician - it's a different scale of involvement, a different scale of enjoyment.

"The scale of events in a very big concert is astronomical really," he adds, "where a band are touring the arenas in America say, you could have up to fifty people involved for a four or five piece band - and that's down to someone that presses the band's clothes before they go on stage to a truck driver that drives them from A to B everyday. Everybody has their integral part to play and if they don't do it, then it doesn't happen.

"The important thing for a young band starting off is that they themselves have to know about their equipment and if they can get any young fella at all and teach them 'This is how it sets up, this is how you take it down' and things like that, it takes a whole load off their mind and they can concentrate on the job at hand - which is to play good music and enjoy it."

HAVING earned a reputation as one of the best sound engineers in this country, Joe continued to do sound for U2 in the Arcadia, in the car park at Gaiety Green and in the Baggot Inn. His memories of Paul McGuinness, U2 manager, are fond ones.

"He was affectionately known as 'The Baron' and it was like getting blood out of a turnip trying to get paid!" he jokes. "One always got paid, I must say that, but it could have been a week later or a month later. He was good with finance!"

So how and when was Joe's first involvement with the band formalised?

"My first serious involvement was in the G.B. tour of 1980. I gave them a price for doing the tour and they wouldn't pay me the money. We had a fierce argument and I told them to fuck off - that was it. They basically had three and six to spend - I had a sound system worth thirteen and six and they wouldn't pay! In the course of the band doing the tour, they went through approximately five different engineers in the space of a ten-day tour, so I was called up to go and work somebody else's equipment. I went."

After this came gigs in the Marquee and support to Talking Heads in London and Paris.

"You basically got one microphone and your chances," Joe recalls. Then it was off to the Ritz Club in New York for U2's first American tour. Joe has been a constant fixture in the team since, playing a vital part in achieving the unique 'live' sound of the band.

"It's more than a job to me," he reflects, "more than a job ever could be. It's a feeling of involvement. I don't know if it's being creative or not but if the band have a bad gig, I feel bad. The relationship I have with the band - it's intense at times. You've got to live, eat and sleep it. People are going to say 'this is a manic motherfucker, what's he going on about?' - but that sort of commitment and that sort of involvement is the reason why my relationship with U2 has flourished."

Looking back on old diaries and seeing some of the tour dates also gives an insight into the disruptive effects of touring on family life.

"Ah, the Boy Tour, the 17th, 18th, 19th or 20th of July - Room 28 of the Bradford Hotel," Joe recalls wistfully and I wonder why Marion is getting embarrassed. "Sarah, my daughter, was conceived courtesy of U2 and was born while the band were in the States. I can safely say that not being there was one of the most disappointing events of my whole existence."

One of the most memorable events for Joe was the historic 'Lark By The Lee' last August in Cork where U2 turned up to repay their debt to Cork in splendid fashion.

"I'd seriously say it was my sort of homecoming. I was in tears at the gig for fucksake. I had a tug in my heart for days before the gig and when I went to the airport to pick Edge up - he was on holiday in Switzerland - like if he wasn't there it was fucked, gone! But he was and we went back home for the oul' bacon and cabbage for Sunday Dinner and waited for the others to arrive from Dublin. I felt it was as important a gig for U2 to do as Croke Park or Madison Square Garden y'know and the band themselves were determined to do it.

"Cork means so much to U2 because Cork was the first city to accept U2 as a band - and obviously the Cork Mafia had an involvement too. The Lark was the last leg of the Unforgettable Fire Tour and the outcome was unbelievably successful."

AT U2's request the quintessential Cork rock'n'roll sideman is moving to Dublin to be nearer the band, as they prepare to record a new album. "To some extent I am forced to go to Dublin and it breaks my heart to leave - but I have a career and a family to consider," he says.

But it's also obvious that Joe O'Herlihy would do anything for the band who've given him security as well as good times and great music. It may be rock'n'roll, but these things matter too . . .