Rock in a hard place

It's been a long time in the offing, but finally Irish rock music is to get an historical overhaul on TV. After several false starts, a couple of books, a double CD and lack of finance, David Heffernan has directed the six-part series From A Whisper To A Scream - the title suggested by the Elvis Costello song of the same name - and acted as co-executive producer. A long-time music fan, Heffernan says (somewhat disingenuously, as if he hadn't thought of it before) that the idea for the series was "mentioned in passing" and that this acted as the initial germ for it.

Heffernan wrote a draft plan and took it to RTE - who provided access to essential archive material. He then began raising finance, a major headache, as the performing and mechanical rights for all the artists concerned had to be cleared. At a cost of more than £1 million, From A Whisper To A Scream, says Heffernan, is one of the most expensive music series that's come out of Ireland.

"That was two years ago," says an audibly tired Heffernan from the foyer of the Majestic Hotel in Cannes, where he is trying to sell the series to various territories around the world (New York-based film and television distributor Fox/Lorber will distribute the series worldwide). "The approach I decided to take was that the series needed to be as much a chronological one as possible, and that I wanted to get the artists to provide the narrative."

Documentary series of this kind normally rely on (rarely cohesive) voiceovers to link events. Heffernan thought this "slightly impersonal and an easy way out", and decided to let the artists tell the story - but quickly realised that standing in the way of a rolling, chronological and engaging narrative is the fact that memory can be very subjective.

He had discussed the project early on with Niall Stokes, editor of Hot Press magazine and one of the shareholders of HQ Hall of Fame, with the synergic idea for a book of the series. Together they worked on Heffernan's draft schedule. The end result was that the artists (including Bono, Edge, Bob Geldof, Sinead O'Connor, Neil Hannon, Paul Brady, Van Morrison, Donal Lunny, The Corrs, Dolores O'Riordan, Barry Devlin and Gavin Friday) predominantly drove the narrative, while Niall Stokes sketched in the pertinent social history.

"David was aware that I was looking at a lot of this stuff in relation to the Hall of Fame," says Stokes, who, at the time of this interview, is groin-deep in research for the book, which will be published under the Hot Press imprint. "The history of Irish rock music over the past 30 years had been fairly well researched and documented in that context, so we saw that what I was doing would be useful to him and, potentially, vice-versa. In the first place I've lived through an awful lot of this stuff, and having a real passion about what's been happening in Ireland not only in musical but social terms is the cornerstone of the series. I had never thought about it in tele-visual terms, but once David and I sat down and talked about it, I saw the potential for that kind of treatment and also the opportunity to do a book."

The series principally tells the story of Irish rock in terms of an evolution from the early 1960s to the present day, picking out the key moments. With the teen appeal of the show-bands lurking in the background, moments featuring Them and Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, Planxty, Thin Lizzy, The Radiators From Space, The Boomtown Rats, and U2 are all caught.

"It wasn't until U2 came along that people reckoned they might just be able to make a career or make a living in Ireland and not to have to go away," says Heffernan. "Part of our job was to make a context to explain that."

The major appeal of the series is its combination of interviews with the major players and its wealth of archive material. From Bob Geldof barking "They were crap" at the show-band ethos in the first programme and Gavin Friday admitting that Dana inspired him to go on stage in the second, to Sinead O'Connor saying that her main aspiration was to "get to the point of surrender" in the fifth, there are neat sound-bytes aplenty.

Throughout the series, Bob Geldof provides the most focused, impassioned and articulate commentary, driving the narrative in a far more emotive manner than Niall Stokes's orderly if necessarily self-explanatory talking-head text. Tellingly, Geldof (along with Bono and Paul Brady) is used the most - a propulsive force in the midst of weaker links from the likes of Van Morrison, Ash's Tim Wheeler and The Cranberries' Dolores O'Riordan.

"It was relatively easy to get people," says Heffernan. "There were not as many obstacles as you might imagine, because they had a sense this was a story worth telling. They were very giving of their time. When you start out to make these projects, you really don't know whether you'll get the sort of artists you'll need. For other projects I've worked on in the past, negotiations to get artists to agree to commit take a lot of time. For this, people saw what we were trying to do and felt a sense of confidence in what was actually a compelling story."

So no Van Morrison stories to tell to add to the collection, then? "There were no complications with him at all," says Stokes. "Quite literally, the request was put in, he looked at it and said yes."

As for archive material, says Heffernan, it was difficult to get material from RTE from before the early 1960s, "because there wasn't much in existence. The National Archive was sourced and we got material from there. It took a bit of a trawl to get material that people hadn't seen before. We had fewer people shooting a social history, let alone a music history, so there were obstacles in terms of the amount of material that we could access."

That said, there is definitely enough to tell a good story: black and white footage of Planxty, classic footage of Gilbert O'Sullivan (the hair!), and riveting material from show-band one-nighters which articulates the excitement that existed for them in the 1960s and reconnects with the present, Irish-dominated boy/pop band phenomenon, which is also featured.

"Someone was looking at the showing of the programme in Cannes, and asked was it The Beatles on stage, such was the level of hysteria that existed for The Royal Showband at the time," says Heffernan. Other choice items to look out for include Father Brian Darcy saying of the 1980s: "this is a pop generation" (of course, Father), the Virgin Prunes frightening the life out of a Late Late Show audience (who by the looks of them didn't know whether to applaud or put on their coats and race out of Donnybrook) and Bono describing his then home, the Ballymun/Finglas/Glasnevin area, as a "lower middle-class ghetto of non-culture".

Does From A Whisper To A Scream get it right? For the most part. At just over 21/2 hours, there isn't enough time to cover everything, and although the content mostly speaks for itself, some may find it too mild. If you want someone to tell you how woeful your least favourite Irish rock act is, you'll have to look elsewhere.

"I didn't set out to distinguish between making negative comments about one and favourable comments about another," explains Stokes. "It was as far as possible to give a balanced and coherent sense of how we got to where we are. I have a broad view anyway, in that I'm very comfortable listening as much to traditional music as I am to My Bloody Valentine or David Holmes. Between those two areas you have a whole spectrum of more or less mainstream rock music.

"The idea is to tell the parallel stories and try to understand it all. That said, if there wasn't some great music in the series, it'd be quite a lousy one. The music is extraordinary and revisiting it in this way you get a strong sense of why it's something worth dedicating your life or work to."

From A Whisper To A Scream runs on RTE 1 from next Tuesday for six weeks, at 8.30 p.m.