Aengus Fanning, Editor And Music Lover

One evening shortly after his diagnosis, Dad was in his hospital bed. He turned to me and asked, ‘Where would you consider to be your home?’ I was slightly confused by the question as I had lived in the same house since I was born and only in the previous year had moved into a rented flat, but as I felt it was possible that he had forgotten this, I answered that our family home was still home to me.

He didn’t seem to be satisfied by this answer, so I asked the question back to him. He thought for a moment and replied, ‘I’d say... maybe... the Blue Note, in Chicago, around 1958 or ‘59. Guys like Duke Ellington and Count Basie and Benny Goodman would have been around and playing there all the time, there would just be great music every night’. It was one of his great regrets that he never pursued a career as a musician, and music was one of his greatest joys until the end of his life.
He played clarinet, tin whistle, and guitar during his teenage years, but his parents discouraged him on the basis that there wasn’t a steady living to be made in music. I think their lack of enthusiasm was probably one of the main reasons that he encouraged me so much, and allowed me to follow my love of music, even if he felt it would be a difficult life.
There were always instruments around our house and he was delighted when, at the age of ten, I first picked up the guitar. Although he did suggest that I keep up my academic studies to some extent, he would often say, with a sigh of resignation, ‘Steve, I think you’re going to be a musician.’
Dad made no distinction between what some would consider high-brow and low-brow, whether in music or writing or film or art. He was always listening for ‘a bit of magic’ in any music he heard, in Mozart or in Hank Williams. Hank Williams’ voice haunted him.
He listened to everything when he was a child, from rock ‘n’ roll and country and western, to classical music and John McCormack, and jazz. He spoke with regret of his immature snobbishness at the age of around 20 when he first heard The Beatles and dismissed them, believing them to be inferior to the music he was enamored with at the time.
His friendship with Professor Peter O’Brien was one of the most important of his life. Peter, a professor in the New Orleans sense, shared Aengus’ infectious enthusiasm for music and used to invite Dad to come and join him with his clarinet at various gigs in bars, hotels, and restaurants. I would often accompany him and would usually be coaxed up to play along on a song or two with my guitar.
Together, they started the jazz in Birr Festival which happened every August Co. Offaly for several years and attracted international musicians such as Acker Bilk, Stan Greig, Mary Coughlan, Ronnie Drew, Mike Henry and Cara O’ Sullivan.
Peter’s death in 2003 was a massive loss to Dad, and he rarely picked up the clarinet after that, though his desire to play music did return.
Through Peter, he had met many great musicians, and in 2008, he produced Ronnie Drew’s final album, The Last Session: A Fond Farewell, which matched Ronnie with a superb group of jazz musicians. He was extremely proud that Ronnie decided to record a song that Aengus had written called ‘The Last Wave’. He wanted to include me in this project and I was employed as an ‘assistant’, making tea and looking after Ronnie, who was ill at the time, as well as doing other tasks in the studio. I think Dad felt true happiness on those afternoons, sitting in between the musicians, telling stories and enjoying the music, before heading back into the office. Ronnie’s death was another big blow to him but he took great pride in the record that was made and his involvement in it.
In recent years, he took to carrying a tin whistle around in his pocket, and would produce it whenever he was required to speak publicly, or just whenever he felt a situation would be enlivened by it. He was always looking to enliven a situation.
He sometimes said of his job in newspapers that he neither loved it nor hated it, he was just addicted to it. Music was one of the true loves of his life. Music was ‘home’ and we shared that home together.