A man who defined post 1960s culture in Ireland

I HEARD the news today, oh boy

I HEARD the news today, oh boy. I think Bill Graham would have appreciated the tact that I heard it on Raidio na Gaeltachta, and understood only too well. The journalist Bill Graham was after dying in Dublin. For an instant I allowed myself to relax a little.

For almost as long as I can remember, there have been at least three Bill Grahams, and the one - I had known personally for a decade and a half was the least likely to be dead. Perhaps my still limited vocabulary was playing tricks on me. But then the newsreader mentioned Hot Press. It was true. There are certain deaths, I have noticed all my life, which seem to happen beyond the ring of optimism in which we have, for the most part, managed to remain. As you grow, you pluck certain meanings from the world, certain narratives which drive you onward towards something blurred and intangible.

Without knowing what it is, you manage to attach a rough sort of plot to this vague aspiration. You do not recognise it as such, but it is a sort of drama of optimism, peopled by characters whom you take largely for granted. You see them, acknowledge them, but do not focus for long enough to understand their full meaning to your scheme of things. At the back of your mind you have fine plans for them, but it is not something you think about in the everyday. You assume they are going to be around for a long time. One day, you imagine, it will all begin to make sense.

But then, on a day that is not the day you were thinking of you awake to hear that someone whom you then recognise as having being central to this drama is no longer here. You had this cloudy idea that it was still Act One. Instead, the whole play is falling apart. The death of Bill Graham, like that of Rory Gallagher last year, is that kind of death for me.

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When we were growing up, we snatched our intellectual stimuli from what sources we could find. The state of the local counter culture not being what it might, we tapped at first into the British one - the NME, Melody Maker, John Peel and Whispering Bob Harris. Then, almost 20 years ago - can that be right? - Hot Press came from what seemed like nowhere.

Although we very quickly slipped into searching for its flaws, in reality it was a million times better than we thought we had any right to expect. After years of mediocrity, here at last was something - which could stand with the best there was, which could deliver writing about Irish music as powerful as that which existed for British and American.

There were several writers who then stepped into our expanding consciousness alongside people like Mick Farren, Ian MacDonald, Simon Frith and Charles Shaar Murray. There was the editor, Niall Stokes, his brother Dermot, P.J. Curtis and Liam Mackey. And there was Bill Graham.

I DO NOT, at this moment an hour after hearing of his death, recall specific pieces which Bill wrote in those early days. My Hot Press files are stashed away in boxes and I haven't the heart to root through them now. What matters is that these pieces had an impact far beyond their superficial content.

In the same way that Irish artists like Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy and Horslips were making as much a statement in being that they here as by what their music said or did not say, Hot Press, and particularly Bill Graham, carried a message by simply existing, turning up in the newsagents. There was something about the look of it that said it meant the kind of business that was the business.

Nobody will disagree, never mind me saying, that Bill Graham stood out. He was a man of profound intelligence and passion. If you wanted to talk music with Bill, there was only one way of doing it: admit your ignorance and listen hard.

He had, of course, a deep knowledge of virtually every form of popular and roots music. But that was only the start of it. He could make connections nobody else would dream of. He would dazzle you for half an hour and top off his thesis. with a triumphant "Aha!", which meant "You hadn't thought of that, had you?" You would not have thought of it.

He was, too, a gentle man. He would talk long and loud and passionately, but he was never rude or unkind, either personally or in print. Bill never put pen to paper until he had understood everything. It wasn't that he flattered - he didn't but that he took seriously the intent behind the work, and tried to say why it had succeeded or failed. He was honest and fair. There was no or old boys' clubbery. He told it like he saw it, and he always had a point. And then he could look you in the eye.

He was generous, not merely in his assessments, but in his giving of his own passion. When he stumbled on something he wanted the world to know about it, because he was the kind of man who believed the world deserved an occasional break from bad taste. You will read in these few days that Bill "discovered" U2. This is untrue. Bill created U2 through his enthusiasm for them. He showed them a reflection of their own possibilities and they only looked back that once.

But Bill's importance went further. Unlike many rock writers, his interest was not confined to music, but extended to embrace all the things - that music is about. Bill was interested in everything. He was capable of expounding at length on the influence of Czechoslovakian trick cycling on the policies of Fianna Fail. He was a political man who transcended ideologies and reached out again, and again for words to describe the true meaning of the screams that emerge from the mouths of truthful human beings.

He was the first Irish writer to write about the connection between Irish political culture and Irish rock n roll. Before him, the best we had was writing about the connections between Irish rock n roll and the imported kind. Bill was never "cool" - he could write as happily about the significance of Philomena Begley as the Velvet Underground.

I MET him in the street about 10 days ago. I felt a little guilty because I have an armful of his albums at home that I've been meaning to give back to him for more than six months.

We spoke briefly about something I'd written and I promised to ring him in a week or two. Perhaps it is this fleeting meeting in Fleet Street that bothers me so. Its sense of postponement seems to resonate with the nature of Bill's wider significance in Irish public and cultural life.

Because he wasn't particularly famous, this may be underestimated. Bill was the prince of the Irish counter culture that emerged in the wake of the Lemass years. The entire thrust of that generation was one of promise, promise and more promise.

You had this sense of going somewhere, of reaching some kind of promised land where there might, perhaps, be a stage and a drinks marquee, or greeting old friends and remembering the hard days of battles now won.

I suppose what I'm feeling as I write this on Sunday morning - for what I think is the first time is that this place is not of this world.