An Irishman's Diary

UNTIL HE died this week, aged 88, I had never heard of Jim Marshall, amp-maker to several generations of rock star and so-called “father of loud”. But with news of his death on Thursday came the realisation that, for a short period of my life, many years ago, I was the owner of one of his products.

It was bought as part of a job-lot from my school-pal Breifne O’Rourke, a musician who was trading up. For 40 quid – the proceeds of my first summer job – I secured both the amp and a passable copy of a Fender Stratocaster. Which, between them, formed the basis of a doomed attempt to learn electric guitar.

The novelty soon wore off, even for me (it had worn off for my family somewhat earlier). By which time, all I had to show for it, really, was a few isolated chords and the intro to The Ruts’ angry 1979 hit Babylon’s Burning.

But the thing I’ll always remember about the amp is that, perhaps because of some wiring repairs carried out by the previous owner, it also accidentally functioned as a shortwave radio receiver. There was no tuning dial, of course, and it only ever picked up one station. Thus, whenever I turned it on at night, I would suddenly find myself listening to the world service from Radio Moscow.

This was less unusual then than it seems now. During the Brezhnev era, the Russians were well known for having very powerful transmitters pointed at the west, and for using multiple radio frequencies to get their propaganda across. If you’d held up a pair of knitting needles at the time, you’d probably have intercepted one of the signals.

But for all the Soviet Union’s efforts to infiltrate my amp and brainwash me, I struggle now to recall any of the programmes. My main memory is that, in common with most European radio presenters then, their’s had American accents too.

As for the news from Moscow, well, suffice to say it did not dwell on any shortcomings of the communist system. Or indeed on any unhappy events, unless they happened in America, or Britain, or in the “police state” of Northern Ireland.

The latter, which was only a few miles from where I lived (maybe that’s why the signal was so good), featured a lot. Whereas, even after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, reports from Kabul would concentrate on such issues as the start of the “spring sowing season”. The only hint of problems there might be occasional references to the obstruction of Afghan farmers by US-trained “bandits”.

THIS WAS the tail-end of the Cold War era, when the concept of nuclear apocalypse was still a fairly pressing possibility. Indeed, being bombarded with Soviet propaganda by my amp aside, one of the other traumas I had to deal with as a teenager was attending an annual tutorial – run by the Civil Defence, I think – in how to deal with nuclear fallout.

It was my father – a county councillor – who was invited to this. But, apparently because of a rare allergy that prevented him from sitting in a classroom for several hours listening to boring lectures, he always had to send me instead.

So I would sit there and make notes about how to arrange sandbags for maximum home protection, and about the importance of tuning it to the emergency radio broadcasts from Dublin – or wherever the Department of Defence was now hiding – and the need to venture outside occasionally to measure local radiation levels with a Geiger counter.

I still blame my bad Leaving Cert results on the pressure of knowing that I might have to lead my community through a post-nuclear winter. In the absence of counselling, trying to play electric guitar was probably my way of dealing with the stress.

Speaking of police states, I’ve heard since of musicians occasionally picking up police radio broadcasts on their amps. If that had happened on mine, I might at least have learned useful information and maybe got into newspapers earlier. But it was only Radio Moscow I received, and I can’t honestly say that was a good training in journalism.

In my more paranoid moments, I sometimes wondered whether the amp might have a two-way link. If so, the repeated intros of Babylon’s Burning – a song about the terminal decay of western society – may have encouraged false optimism among the eavesdroppers in the Kremlin. I just hope I didn’t thereby prolong the suffering of the Russian people.

In any case, my ambition to become a rock-star soon weakened. It was around then that the US and Soviet Union began their Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), marking the beginning of the Cold War’s end. And maybe the two things weren’t connected. But I like to believe that my decision to decommission the amp was, in its own way, a small contribution to world peace.