Do you remember the first time?

It is no exaggeration to say that Ireland was barely functioning at all, when hotpress was launched in 1977.
There we were, complete innocents starting out on what we felt would be a great new adventure. We had set ourselves a target of being on the streets two and a bit weeks in advance of the first ever Irish open air rock festival, with the great Irish bluesman Rory Gallagher headlining at Macroom. That would mean working over the June Bank Holiday weekend, but what was that to us? This was going to be fun!
For the first 10 days of our new mission, we gathered in the flat in Earlsfort Terrace, where Bill Graham lived with his mother Eileen, commandeering the phone to do whatever business we could. She tolerated us, with great good grace. Eventually we secured an office on Upper Mount Street to rent and immediately applied for phones. Getting the desks, chairs, filing cabinets, typewriters and layout boards organised was easy. But the phones, they were a different story…
“There are no lines available in the area. It’ll be 18 months before they can be installed,” the Department of Posts and Telegraphs informed us. The news hit us like a thunderbolt. How the hell are we going to organise interviews in the meantime? Or sell advertising? Or talk to our mammies? In mortal fear that, its revenue source stifled at birth, the whole enterprise might be sunk, we crowded into every available public phone box and acted like professionals as best we could while tapping the numbers for ad agencies. “Hello, we’re starting a new magazine, would you like to take an ad for Guinness?” our ad manager Justin Phelan enquired, the sound of buses grunting and revving furiously in the background cutting across his tragic attempts at light-hearted sales banter.
We were fucked and, as the alleged capo del tutti capo of the revolution we had been planning, I knew it. Right and royally fucked.

As it happened, there was a General Election impending, the outcome of which we wanted to have a say in. This, in part at least, was what hotpress was about: letting the spiritually bankrupt degenerates of the anti-happiness league in Ireland know that they no longer had it all their own way. The death rattle of the gruesome Cosgrave-led Fine Gael/Labour coalition of the ‘70s was already audible, but the Fianna Fáil alternative was unlikely to have much more to offer. We were for the independents and the outsiders and wanted to let people know.
Every new day, we sweated and grappled with an avalanche of problems. The launch date was beginning to close in and we were still using – and abusing – people’s home phones and public coin boxes to make whatever calls we could. Disaster stared us in the face. One morning, over a cup of coffee in Bewleys of Grafton Street, which had become our second office, I was looking through the morning papers when a news piece caught my eye. It was one of those slightly breathless stories that marvel at the sheer enormity of the numbers: “Fianna Fáil are to have 12 temporary phone lines installed in their head offices in the run-in to the general election, and Fine Gael are to have 10,” it said. A light bulb went on. Both of the major political parties had offices on Upper Mount Street. So did we. They were just 15 doors down the street from our place, for God’s sake. If they could get phone lines at the drop of a hat, then why should we have to wait? It was an outrage. A goddamn outrage! A high horse came up to the table. I climbed aboard it and headed for the office.
Back at base, letters were drafted and delivered to both political parties, and to the local TDs. Trying to start a business, in a climate where unemployment was running at close to 20%, we were being told that there were no phone lines available. Yet over 20 lines were on tap, in the same street, for the offices of the political parties.
They understood. It was a potential headline grabber. Within a matter of days, we received the letter that we needed, more than anything in the world, right then. The Department of Posts and Telegraphs were giving us three lines. THREE LINES! We were in business! We really were in business.

We had our staff. We had our printers. We had our phones. We had extracted a few albums from record companies to review. The ads were beginning to trickle in (two of them). It looked like we might actually be onto something here! The cover story had been commissioned. We had successfully lined up an interview or two – ok, they were with some of the lesser lights of the moment, but what did that matter? We were up and stumbling.
I suspect that we didn’t have a clue what the word ‘target’ meant (something to do with archery?), but we still knew that you had to have a smattering of ads at least, to make any magazine look half respectable. Justin was banging away on our newly installed phones like a trojan on a mission to infiltrate the enemy’s fortress, but he wasn’t getting a lot of joy, and the gorgeous blonde with the smoky voice that we had drafted in to support him was taking a while to find her feet (they were underneath the table). As the person nominally in charge of the mayhem that was beginning to engulf us I was worried. Very worried.
Only five short days to go (I don’t know why the days seemed shorter than usual but they did. They really did). After lunch I figured I’d drop into the ad room to see was there any light at the end of what was proving to be a very long tunnel indeed. Immediately I opened the door, I knew there was something strange afoot. On top of (almost literally, I swear) the two guys on the ad team, and the, ahem, circulation manager that between them constituted our business engine, I was confronted with the sight of five additional bodies – all male. They were grouped attentively in a semi-circle with their necks craned in the direction of something on the floor.
A rat, I thought. They had skewered a rat! Not so. As I pushed into the room, I realised that our chief layout artist, Joe, was at the centre of the group. “It’s far out, man,” a voice said. “It’s beautiful,” another one chimed in. There was, I could see now, a massive piece of ‘art’ on the floor. I pushed forward to get a glimpse: maybe it was a mock-up of a prospective cover for the launch isssue. That was the kind of thing we wanted to see: a bit of initiative!
It was… a painting of the Guru Maharaji. “You did that yourself?” a voice asked. “I did,” Joe responded, hitting a note of extraordinary pride.
I couldn’t believe my ears. Joe was a devotee of the Guru! Holy shit! Beelzebub be damned! How had I failed to divine it, in the three months or whatever it was that I’d known him? It was like discovering that we’d been infiltrated by the Special Branch (and they were mean bastards in those days, believe me). The fucking Guru! He was due in that weekend – or maybe it was the one after – for a Smile-In, in Trinity College or the RDS. The strange creatures who had been going around town claiming that they had “the knowledge” – they they had “seen the light” – were on the point of collective orgasm. Now I knew that Joe was one of them.
What to do? I was flummoxed. The best I could think of immediately was to engage the hapless Justin in a loud conversation about how many ads he had secured, in the hope that it’d make Joe’s hangers-on sufficiently uncomfortable that they’d vamoose. Pronto. He, I figured, could then get back to the layout board upstairs. After all, there were pages to be done: we had an issue to get to the printers. I may have thought followers of the Guru (who was 15 years old, or was it less?) were three aces and two jacks short of a royal flush, but we could worry about having a devotee of the dreaded cult of the Divine Light in our midst later.
I watched, transfixed, as Joe ceremonially rolled the painting around a long cardboard tube. At every step it was perfectly aligned. Wonderful (now, would you hurry up?). Satisfied that it could come to no harm, he took it in his hands carefully and the fivesome trooped out and clumped down the stairs like a regiment retreating. I thought: thank Christ for that. They’re gone. Justin was sweating profusely. I opened the window behind him and left him to it. He needed a bit of space. I’d have a word with Joe later about having some consideration for his fellow staff members.
Or to tell the truth, I wouldn’t. When Joe hadn’t returned to the office by 5 o’clock, and the galley proofs were beginning to turn into a pile on his layout desk, I started to wonder might some ill fate have befallen him. By seven we’d given up on him for the day and figured we’d see him on Friday. There were too many other things to worry about to get upset.
When he didn’t show the following morning, we started to panic. We got on the phone. He was nowhere to be found. We drove around the city, scanning the footpaths to see if we might spot a familiar figure. No dice. We got back to the office and phoned again. No reply. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero.
We never saw Joe again. He had vanished. Gone. Left us completely in the lurch, without a goodbye, apology or by-your-leave. With four days to go to our final deadline, and bugger-all in the can, our layout man had done a bunk! Once again, we were fucked. Right and royally fucked. This time, there could be no reprieve.
That night we trawled the pubs of Dublin looking for someone – anyone – who had experience of magazine layout. It was a rareified skill (we hadn’t any). We probably looked like complete wasters, slithering up to people and engaging them in conversation before rapidly changing the subject. You wouldn’t happen to know any designers, would you?
For a long time, there were no takers. I had been on the phone to my poor beleaguered father Maurice, and he came back with the first positive word: a well known printer, Micheál O Loinsigh, who was an acquaintance of Maurice’s from the Irish Sovereignty Movement, would do a stint on Saturday afternoon. Our art director Willie Finney twisted the arm of a colleague in RTÉ, who agreed to do another half day. Tom came on board. So did Dick and Harry. They’d do an hour here and another two hours there. It wasn’t ideal but damn it, we were desperate. We said yes Tom. Yes Dick. Yes Harry. T.P. came as well.

It’s a minor miracle that the first issue ever hit the streets. The deal with the printers was that we’d have spot colour (the technology!) on the logo. But our art director had conceived of an ambitious Sgt. Pepper-style image for the front and who was I to disagree (ok, ok, maybe it was my idea, I just don’t remember, ok)? To assemble it required about a hundred bromides, as they were called, to be carefully sized and shot, before being cut out individually with a scalpel and arranged meticulously to create, in a single image, a collage that would say precisely what we wanted to say on our momentous, first-ever front cover.
This was a big ask. A hard task. The intrinsic difficulty of sizing, cutting and pasting convincingly was compounded by the fact that the machine for shooting the bromides was in a building three miles from the office. Willie could sneak in and use it – but once he was out of there, that was it. If a picture was too big, well there was no way it could be made smaller. I remember he arrived back at the office with what looked like hundreds of scans, two or three versions of some of the cast of reprobates we had identified as potential cover fodder included. Somewhere in the background a countdown had started ominously: he wouldn’t even be able to sort through all the bits of still sticky photographic paper, every one of which had been individually processed, in the time available.
We had assumed we’d finish late in the evening, but as the June Bank Holiday Monday wore on, it became increasingly obvious that we were in for a long one. I raced up and down to the typesetters, who were based in Kilmainham, to get copy set and a million corrections typed. We had an interview with a band called Racing Cars (no we don’t remember what their hit was either) but no pic. Hey presto: a photo of an old fashioned racing car – something that would have looked at home in Le Mans – filled the hole. Anything to get the job done!
Working on the cover, Willie was wielding the scalpel like a man possessed, but he was trying to create the rock’n’roll equivalent of the friggin’ Sistine Chapel in a matter of hours. Not easy.
The music blared on the makeshift stereo we had installed in the production room. People took turns making coffee. The more inveterate of the crew had an attack of the munchies and biscuits were provided. It was two o’clock on Tuesday morning. Then it was three. Bleary-eyed journos cut tiny words from long strips, lathered cow gum on the back and stuck them in place. Four. Often crookedly. Five. Crookedly. Six. Willie was still spraying and sticking, cutting and adjusting. Seven. The cabinet were around the table. The reprobates were lined up around them. Rory was in the centre. Eight.
We had a headline. “It’s Only Rock’N’Roll…” It wasn’t exactly original, but set against the image it felt like it the Big Statement (we were tired). Liam Cosgrave, who had voted against his own Government’s contraception bill a few years previously was in the centre, at the bottom (appropriately). The rest of the members of the most abject cabinet in the history of the Universe ranged around him. Richie Ruin! Conor Cruise O’Brien! Brendan Borish! And all the rest of the squad that had turned a blind eye to the activities of the Heavy Gang. And on the table, in the foreground, cocking a snoot at the lot of them, a pig. The Whole Hog!
We had a headline – now someone had to Letraset the goddam thing. Nine. It was, we thought, a cracker. The image took final shape. Geldof was in there. Philip Lynott. Patti Smith. The Radiators. Graham Parker. Lou Reed. Keith Richards. The McGarrigles. Bob Marley. Mary Robinson. (Mary Robinson? In 1977? Bizarre!). All of these and more. Too many more to count. 10. And hovering above, centre-stage, the inspirrational figure of Rory Gallagher. It’s only rock’n’roll – but we like it.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes we doooooooo!

Too late. We’d stayed up all night and finished the pages – all 32 of them! The plan had been to put the parcel of layouts on the bus, but that had long gone. There was only one thing for it. No sleep till Ballyjamesduff! I clambered into the banjaxed Vauxhall Viva – a large V impressed on the front where I had levelled a road sign the a couple of years previously, but that’s a different story – and headed north. One of the cohorts in the passenger seat beside me, boot to the floor, we set off for Cavan, where we were due to be printed at 10 in the morning. Speed limits didn’t matter a damn in those days and we gunned it. It was the best possible way of staying awake, naked fear sending the adrenaline shooting through the system (and that was just me).
We beat the world land speed record or that was the way it felt. By the time we got there, all the same, a full-blown crisis had erupted. The boss man met me, suitably grave of countenance. They’d pull out all the stops to get the job done – but the spot colour would have to go!
You can’t imagine how bad that felt. For this, our launch issue, the original flame logo – which had been intricately designed by Tim Booth – would not be lit. Our sex appeal undone in one foul veto. It stuck in the craw almost enough to make an already broken man cry (that was the other fella), but if we wanted to get the issue out, there was only one option. It was black and white or bust.
We told them to press the button – and we were finally, truly, up and running. Well, walking...

And so it’s 2007. To everyone who worked on that first issue, and to those who came on board since – some briefly, others for many wonderful years – and to anyone and everyone who did time in the trenches with us, in one form or another, and to the brilliant people who worked up to and on this, the 30th Anniversary issue of hotpress – to all of you, a huge thank you. No words can…
Ooooops, I guess that might be a little bit over the 800 word mark now. Is it?
The Editor