Niall Stokes guides you around the Hot Press Irish Music Hall of Fame as though he's showing you around his new home. He may as well be. Indeed, when Hot Press editor and owner Stokes discloses that the project cost "in excess of £6 million" and that he is one of four partners involved, all of whom put up the same amount of money, you get the distinct impression that far more than just his reputation is riding on the success, or otherwise, of this venture.
Maybe that's why he seems hyper-sensitive to criticism, snapping, at one point: "that's a knee-jerk response to what you've just seen." Then again, perhaps Stokes has every right to be hyper-sensitive. More than a month before the Hall of Fame opened it was attacked by a Sunday paper, dismissed as "unexciting" by a journalist, who, he claims, "didn't even see the exhibit area. Besides, it wasn't even completed at that stage." So is the Hall of Fame unexciting? Not if you love Irish rock 'n' roll. On the contrary. It's an interactive, multimedia, magical mystery tour that costs £6, takes 90 minutes to complete, and brings you all the way from the origins of Irish traditional music to "Ireland's first digital cinema", where you'll see a 20-minute "rockumentary" featuring exclusive interviews with the likes of U2, The Corrs and Boyzone. The memorabilia includes Bono's gold McPhisto suit, Bob Geldof's "unwashed" T-shirt from Live Aid, pages from Sinead O'Connor's scrapbook and guitars once owned by Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher. Even more exciting to rock trainspotters are the royalty cheques, contracts and lyrics "sometimes written on diary pages," says Stokes.
Plus that most precious of cultural artefacts: the dress Dana wore when she won the Eurovision singing All Kinds of Everything. Very sexy! But it is the question of whether all kinds of Irish music are as well served as rock in the Hall of Fame that makes Stokes bristle. Particularly the suggestion that the exhibit area seems to extend the magazine's ethos of "keeping Ireland safe for rock 'n' roll" at the expense of other forms of music.
"The Hall of Fame is about Irish music," he says. "Luke Kelly is as important as any rock star. And even though, for example, there was a lot in the show-band era that doesn't stand up to critical musical scrutiny, it was an interesting part of the cultural history of Ireland so that, too, has to be included. Joe Dolan fans will see his suit and think that's fantastic. People who don't like Dolan will look on his suit in a totally different way. But that doesn't matter. He is part of the story."
Moving through the exhibits, he gradually becomes less defensive and more like the rock fan who started Hot Press in 1977, when he was 25. "Look at this," he gestures. "This is Luke Kelly's sheepskin coat. And banjo. A folk musician stood there the other day and he was in tears because even that coat evokes Luke Kelly to people who knew him. I hope we will give people a real insight into the musicians and the context in which they created their music. But as to what his critics call a stereotypical '70s socialist-turned-capitalist, surely Stokes also wants to see his £1.5 million investment in this project turned into profit?
"One of the key issues is can it work as an enterprise and what will be necessary to make it viable," he says. "There is no point in setting up something like this, and, two years later, it closes down because it hasn't been thought through. So of course, people who get involved want to be paid for their labour. I do, too. But the issue is not `will it make loads of money?' The issue is, can we put together something that works in terms of what it says about Irish music and in terms of appealing to people so that it will stand up as a business. If we can do that, then we've added something unique and potentially important to the Irish cultural landscape."