MARIANNE FAITHFULL
Singer
THE first record I ever bought (and it's very silly, but it had a tremendous effect on me) was the soundtrack of Gigi. I still absolutely adore it, and whenever I feel blue I put Gigi on; The Night They Invented Champagne and all those things. I learned all the songs and took the whole thing as a kind of ethic for life . . . It was fabulous, and I remember thinking `this is how I want my life to be'.
DICK WARNER
Environmentalist TV and radio producer
THE main problem posed by the 1960s is trying to decide whether it was a wonderfully exciting renaissance of creativity or whether it was just that we were all young. In Ireland the 1960s started somewhere around 1965 or 1966 and ended abruptly in 1973.
In 1965 I walked through the Front Gate of Trinity College, Dublin as a 19-year-old undergraduate wearing a sports jacket and grey flannel trousers with turn-ups, a short-back-and-sides and a bald chin. Musically I was already tiring of the Beatles (I enjoy them more today), committed to a lifelong adoration of the Rolling Stones, had discovered John Lee Hooker and was about to have my young mind blown by James Brown.
The 23-year-old who walked out through that gale in 1969 with a second-class honours degree was a very different person. He had shoulder-length hair and a beard and wore a long black cloak with a gold lining over knee-length black leather boots. The previous year he had married a Californian hippie at a flower-power ceremony. He was listening to Janis Joplin, Country Joe and the Fish, Frank Zappa, the Velvet Underground, Procul Harum, Pink Floyd and ... still the Rolling Stones. His most important baggage was a collection of ideas and values that were to last into the 1990s. He was almost completely a 1960s product.
Much more than music happened in those four years. But music was always there background music, foreground music, music as the primary articulation of a generation that was changing things and was quite aware of the fact that it was changing things. Music was there when Daniel Cohn-Bend it manned the barricades in Paris, when Bernadette Devlin led Civil Rights marches, when we stood outside the American Embassy getting our pictures taken by CIA agents as we chanted "Hey, hey, LBJ ... How many kids you kill today?" Music was there when we drank our pints and smoked our joints, when we debated Marxist theory, made love with our girlfriends on mattresses on the floor, when we woke up and when we went to sleep - even when we meditated.
It wasn't only rock music. Joan Baez sang one night in the Trinity Folk Club and Joe Heaney was a regular, his musical grace opening a new door to an old style.
We were permeated by music and by the conviction that we were the counter-culture. I'm still convinced of this - but today there is a difference of stress. At the time the stress was on "counter", today it's on "culture". Hindsight sees the most remarkable thing about the 1960s as the fact that it was a culture. The music, the politics, the clothes, Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, experiments in free love and communal living, Susan Sontag and Andy Warhol and the mini-skirt - they all integrated into something new and something whole. And the dynamo at the centre threw out an endless series of blue sparks, some of which grew to be serious brush fires. Like the Women's Movement, the exploration of space, the Green Movement, Black Power and the information super-highway - the 1960s invented them all. And the very naivete that was at the heart of it was also its strength.
ANNE ENRIGHT
YOU'RE never too old to rock `n' roll but can you be too young? I was a moral, solemn, pre-pubertal child when my older brother and sister deflowered the new record-player with Ruby Tuesday sung by Melanie and tried to pretend to my parents that the whole enterprise was a respectable one. It was not. There was nothing respectable about it.
What you don't know is all the same. So when your older siblings start finding out about sex and (coincidentally) playing records at the same time, you just look at the sleeves and speculate. Harmless enough. The back of Transformer, a woman in a black corset-like thing on one side, and a man with a something down his jeans on the other. Or rather something across his jeans, like a courgette, with the end of it nearly out his pocket. Not that I knew what courgettes were either. (I saw my first one in Canada in 1980 and it was called zucchini.) Then my brother told me that the woman and the man were both Lou Reed, as if it was some kind of secret joke, and I spent weeks looking at them, trying to find the punchline.
It was a bit like geography homework really: this woman subsiding down the gathered PVC backdrop, like she had forgotten how to stand upright, and what I assumed to be a sailor on the other side, his back unnaturally arched, looking at her. Wasn't her hip-bone too low on her leg? Was that why her too-large hand was placed between men and women - that women have relatively longer legs? I knew it was. But when it came to that courgette I had no thoughts at all. When it came to the courgette, my mind was a mesmerised blank.
It is no surprise, then, that the songs were entirely without social content, they were just themselves, and they made a vicious child-like sense. He becomes she, the perfect day is (not) perfect, the slick little girl comes out of the closet like one of the undead, all is menace and peace.
My only regret is that I did not know it was funny.
Something must have filtered through in the next few months because when Frank Zappa's Overnite Sensation came into the house I learned all the words to Dynamo Him, and sang them at school. Filthy, incomprehensible - I knew they held the key. Somewhere in there was the secret of what people actually did when they actually did It. Because music, and therefore sex, was still a family affair it was no surprise to hear "I checked out her sister who was holding, the bed, with her lips just a twitching and her face gone red." And all that stuff about her drawers and thumbs and sugar plums was interesting enough. But what did they do then? What was an "aura", as in "Kiss my aura, Flora"? Why did he say, "Mmm, it's real angora." Did men have something fluffy down there?
It is impossible to remember the state of ignorance - you can not, for example, forget the taste of olives, or remember what it was like not to know the taste of olives, and the same could be said for courgettes. My first concert was Frank Zappa in Vancouver, mitching from a school 50 miles away. It was some years later but all I had learned in the meantime was how to draw the diagrams. A lot of Canadians waved their lighters in the air. Zappa did not play Dynamo Hum. There was nothing filthy about it.
I did not know that we stayed the night in a brothel, I just wondered why the girl in the doorway opposite stood around like that with very little on. I did not know that the two boys I went with were beautiful, that if I had them in a brothel now, things would be a lot simpler. Neither did I know that one of them was gay, or what gay was, I just knew that the other was "after my virginity" and that was a very serious thing. Or I knew, but I did not know that I knew.
The very brink of knowledge is not a happy place - innocence becomes an effort, a kind of misery. When I realised that I didn't know what my virginity actually was, I found I had stepped, without meaning, over to the other side. It is in this place, between knowledge and action, that the music makes real sense. The anger of knowing but not having. A couple of weeks spent listening to the Rolling Stones and you've convinced yourself you know too much to bother. It's either that or Joni Mitchell. It's either that or love. How many albums does it take to get to sex? And how much sex does it take to realise that the albums are supposed to be funny ...?
MICK HANLY
Singer/songwriter
I RANG Des Kelly's office in the afternoon to find out what time the van was leaving. I was told to be at the Terenure Inn for four o'clock on Friday. I was slow to put the phone down. The answer was too cryptic. I wanted to talk more, even talking to the office was exciting.
The year was 1972. The day was like any other biggest day in your life. I'd had a call from the office a few weeks earlier.
"From someone in Planxty," my mother said.
"Jesus Christ, what did they say?"
"They said you were to ring them back as soon as you can.
"Who was it though?"
"I don't know, someone from Planxty."
Oh, f---. It's Friday evening, seven o'clock, no answer. Saturday, no answer. Sunday, just in case, no answer.
Monday, ten past ten. "The lads were wondering would you be available to do an Irish tour with them in February." I was playing in Slattery's of Capel Street, one night a week for a ten-bob note.
"I'll check, I think so."
On the sixth of February 1972 I made my way to Terenure. I found a pub as near as possible to The Terenure and I stayed there till as long after four as I could bear.
At five past four I sauntered in the door. I was being as casual as I could be. Cool would be today's word but then it still applied to tea and the weather. There was nobody there. No one real. No musicians. No Planxty.
A barman was giving the tables a cat's lick with a cloth. An old man was giving his terrier some crisps and nursing a pint. I got a coke for myself and sat down to wait.
After about 20 minutes I began to suspect that I got the time wrong. They'd hardly be this late going to Sligo. I sat and waited. I watched people come and go, study the racing page, have quick ones. I wanted to be going. This was my first big gig. I was anxious. They couldn't be this late. Sure Sligo is the other side of the country, for God's sake.
A couple who had come in, settled down, had a drink, were now leaving. Jesus Christ they've forgotten to collect me.
Quarter past five.
"Hello, is that Des Kelly's office?"
"Yes."
"This is Mick Hanly."
There was a covering of the mouthpiece at the other end and a far off conversation.
"What's it in connection with Mick?"
"I'm playing with Planxty tonight in Sligo." More hesitation. More consultation.
"I'm sorry, Mick. I didn't know who you were there for a minute. Des isn't here at the moment and the lads have left. They must be on their way over to you." I wanted to burst into tears, but I was too old for that now. The next 20 minutes was like waiting for Santa, despite having been told it was all a cod. At quarter to six Liam O'Flynn arrived. I waved. His first words were, "Are you ready?"
"Yea, just about." I'd been ready for four and a half weeks.
I climbed into the converted Ford Transit. There were two rows of airline seats in the midsection, a wall of plywood which sectioned off three to four feet of equipment space, a few straggly bits of carpet on the walls, no less, and a three-seater seat up front. A palace on wheels. For the record, this wonderful machine housed Christy Moore, Andy Irvine, Liam O'Flynn, Donal Lunny, Nicky Ryan (soundman), Johnny Diffley (driver), and Mick Hanly (support act). All the sound and lighting gear, plus the instruments. I don't think one ever truly appreciates the stretch limo without having sampled the Ford Transit first.
So this was it. The big league at last. The Supergroup. Donal was trying to reassemble the crotch of a very worn pair of jeans with a needle and thread. Andy was stuck in an adventure book on Antarctica and demolishing his nails. Christy, the biggest of the big-leaguers, was looking out the window. I said hello and sat beside him. He said hello, but not much else. He seemed preoccupied. I noticed he was smoking something unusually large. I was familiar with roll-ups but this was a strange variation, more like a badly constructed ice-cream cone. I knew nothing about dope at that time so I. presumed that Christy was just an oddball as well as being a big-leaguer. A minute or so passed while Christy pulled on the cone like a man who had just gone under for the third time. He then took a turn at doing Dizzy Gillespie before a blow out that would have done Orca the Whale proud.
"Would you like a draw a this, Mick?"
"No thanks, Christy, I have my own.
I knew the moment I said it that I'd put my foot in something, because the joint was then passed to Donal, who took it, despite having 20 Rothmans and a lighter among his sewing gear.
Ten minutes later I took out my 20 Players and turned to Christy.
"Will you have one of these, Christy?"
"Bejasus, I will. Fierce strong, these yokes."
I wasn't allowed to forget my faux pas. Anytime there was a yell of "Has anyone any draw?" from the front of the van, Christy usually piped up with, "Jaysus, Mick has great cigarettes there. Break `em out there Mick and we'll all get high as Croagh Patrick."
MARY KENNY
Journalist
WAS too left-wing to be interested in rock music when I was young during the 1960s...
KATHLEEN WILLIAMSON
Musician/song writer, law professor
THE unsuccessful portion of our revolution was embodied at Sinead O'Connor's performance at the celebration of the 30th anniversary of Bob Dylan's first CBS album at Madison Square Garden. She entered the stage prepared to perform a Dylan tune. I heard comradely female cheers, delighted alto and soprano choruses. Then, a slow pianissimo of bass and baritone-pitched booing infected the crowd and crescendoed to the force of a lemming stampede.
I was aghast. Well, well, well... strange bedfellows indeed...
masculinist hegemony waving its freak flag, choosing papist photographs over women's rights to body and expression. When iconoclast Lenny Bruce comically slandered the Pope 30-some years earlier, he was sanctified by the male subcultural elite. And Saturday Night Live, the show on which she had unexpectedly committed the unforgivable sin of papal rejection, had always been sacrilegious in its humour. But no solidarity for Sine ad came from the stage.
For me, even in the shadow of Lennon's passing, that was one of the nights that the music died and, like any religious movement, the so-called counter-culture had to face its own disbeliefs and ironies. I had to finally verbalise the nagging reality that Dylan and the boys never raised their guitar pikes in favour of gender equality.
HUGO HAMILTON
Novelist
WHEN Bob Dylan turned to religion in the early 1980s, it felt like a Stanley knife between the ribs. It was the big betrayal. Up to then, I had spent most of my semi-waking hours listening and muttering along with Highway 61, Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks.
I knew every word that ever made its way out of his goddamn throat. Everywhere, in pubs and flats from Dublin to Berlin, London to Halifax, I met people who spoke or whined the words at random like a ubiquitous text that could be uttered or understood anywhere and in any situation.
There was no need to talk. At parties, all you had to do was to gaze into somebody's eyes and say: "The past is close behind ..." They would nod and whisper "Something is happening..." You concurred wholeheartedly with a blink, and while not wishing to accuse anyone you would add: "But you don't know what that is ..." They would be taken aback a little and you would both pause for a moment, look at each other and together, in perfect timing, say: "Do you Mr Jones?"
PATRICK McGRATH
Novelist
..... It broke my heart when Evie started going to bed with him. I waited outside her house all night once, watching her window. It was a Leonard Cohen sort of a night..."
PAUL MULDOON
Poet
(Muldoon writes about his top 10 albums in verse - including one about U2's The Joshua Tree)
When I went to hear them in Giants'
Stadium a year or two ago, the whiff of kief brought back the night we drove all night from Palm
Springs to Blythe. No Irish lad and his lass were so happy as we who roared and soared through yucca-scented air. Dawn brought a sense of loss, faint at first, that would deepen and expand as our own golden chariot was showered with Zippo-spears from the upper tiers of the stands.