Читать книгу The Thing is… - Bono - Страница 8

Chapter 1

Many people who sell their souls to rock ’n’ roll hate their upbringings. They endure their childhoods, hightail it out of the family home as soon as they are able and set about reinventing themselves as rebels without a cause. I may have lived my life for music – and just how much will become clear as you read this memoir – but I was never anybody’s idea of a rock ’n’ roll rebel.

How happy were my early years? Maybe this will give you an idea: I loved my family home so much that I lived there for twenty-eight years.

I was born in mid-winter in the mid-Fifties, the youngest of six children. Or, strictly, of seven: my parents’ second-born son, Brian, had died at the age of six months. It must have been hard on them but it had not put them off having a typical big Irish family and so my oldest brother John, Peter, my sister Miriam and the two brothers nearest to me in age, Dermot and Gerard, all knocked around together in the house that was to be my home for close on three decades.

The house was No. 54 Foster Avenue in Mount Merrion, right next to University College Dublin, and my parents bought it in 1943 for less than a thousand pounds. Foster Avenue links the Stillorgan Road, the main drive route south out of Dublin, with places like Dundrum. It was about five miles from the city centre, which was considered such a long way out that when my parents bought it, all their friends asked why they wanted to live in the countryside.

My father, Barney, was originally from Drogheda but moved the thirty miles south to Dublin when he met my mum, Annie. When they met she was working as a teacher in Clontarf in the north of the city. My folks weren’t the sort of parents who’d regale us with soppy tales of how they met, but I know my dad proposed in Sneem, a lovely little place in County Kerry. I’m guessing their courtship would have been more like the nineteenth century than the 1940s.

With me being the youngest of six, my parents were oldish when I was born. My dad was 46, and my mum 44. I guess some kids might have found this age gap a problem but I hardly ever had a cross word with my family. I remember lots of playing with my brothers and sister around the house and in the big garden at the back with its apple, pear and plum trees.

My dad worked for the Board of Works in their office on Stephen’s Green for forty-seven years. He was a senior civil servant and he was involved with the preservation of state buildings and monuments around Ireland. Once he had to organise the unveiling of a statue of Thomas Davis, the legendary Irish freedom fighter, at Trinity College. The Irish president was to unveil it and our family joke was that if the president keeled over with a heart attack on the day, it would be Dad whipping the cloth off.

I guess my dad was pretty old school, as you’d expect from a man born at the start of the century. He liked – although he never demanded – his tea on the table every night and he never boiled an egg in his life, but he was so laid-back that you could only have a good relationship with him. We all called him Barney, and his easygoing nature was one reason I was able to live at home for so long.

He had an old white Ford car with Al Capone-style boards at either door. There were many cold mornings that it wouldn’t start and my dad would take the gas heater from the kitchen, stick it by the front grille and try to start the engine by cranking it up with one of those Victorian-looking iron-bar contraptions. As I recall it, he usually gave up and took the 64 or 46A bus into town, then walked through Stephen’s Green.

I don’t remember my dad ever missing a day’s work – a trait I have inherited, as I’ve never had one day sick in my thirty years at RTÉ. Every evening he would bring home reports and memos and read weighty Dáil parliamentary reports as we shared a table. He would help me out as I struggled with my homework. This was a good system, as Maths was his forte and, quite frankly, it never was mine and never will be.

On Sundays my dad would often take me up to Phoenix Park. He knew the caretaker there, a man called Mr Barry, who lived in a gorgeous house that always had a big roaring log fire going. Mr Barry was a happy-go-lucky guy who looked like Santa Claus, and we’d collect chestnuts from the park. They came in handy for conkers at school. Not that I played it much. I always thought it was a daft game and preferred marbles.

Nothing ever fazed my dad and I don’t think I ever argued with him about anything – except for Christmas Day Top of the Pops, but we’ll come to that later. But if he was at heart a quiet and retiring soul, my mum, Annie, was anything but. She was everything in our house, the matriarch and the patriarch, and I can safely say that she was the most inspiring person that I have met in my entire life.

Everything in the house went through my mum. She was just an astonishing woman. She loved being at the heart of the hustle and bustle of a big family and always welcomed any friends we brought round, whatever time of the day or night it was. She was tall and slim and beautiful and somehow always well-turned-out. I’ve no idea how she found the time.

Annie was fun and she was gregarious. She’d have these phone conversations that lasted for hours, and then whenever people called round, she would sit in the kitchen holding court. Locally, she was well known for doing that – and for her homemade biscuits that she dispensed to all-comers. There are probably still people in Dublin who drool like Pavlov’s dogs at the phrase ‘Annie’s cookies’.

For my family, money was fairly tight, but my mum was so skilled at budgeting and making do that I don’t remember ever having to really go without. Annie cut our cloth well and knew how to count pennies without making a meal of it. She would do her weekly grocery shop in one supermarket, then think nothing of crossing a busy road to go to a different store a few hundred yards down the road just because the butter was five pence cheaper there.

My mum was a voracious reader. She belonged to two libraries, the Royal Dublin Society and the Pembroke, and I am certain she was the best customer in both of them. She always had three or four books on the go at once – I can still picture them now, stacked up in a little pile on top of the radiator. Each of them invariably had one page with the top right-hand corner turned down, to remind her how far she’d got.

When she wasn’t reading, Annie was usually writing. She would sit down at her desk, take out her pad of Basildon Bond and compose these twenty-page letters to her friends. She had a lot of correspondents, but top of the list was Mrs Rohan, her lifelong friend who owned a chemist shop in Cork.

A lady called Mrs Mooney, known to me as Moo, came and helped my mum out a few times a week with whatever needed doing around the house. Because I was the youngest, she also looked after me and sometimes took me to her house, a lovely flower-covered cottage straight out of Beatrix Potter, opposite the Terisian school on the Stillorgan Road that is now the site of RTÉ’s admin building.

Moo’s husband, Mick, was the chief groundsman there. RTÉ – there was actually no ‘T’ in it at the time, as Ireland still didn’t have television – was moving from Henry Street in the centre of Dublin to its current location and the masts were going up ready for the launch of TV. It’s ironic that I spent so much time there when I was young, given how interwoven my life has since been with RTÉ.

My mum was a very religious woman. While, like most others, I was a good little Catholic boy, by the time I reached my later teens I had actively decided against the Church, but she never made it an issue between us. She just followed her own lights, which in her case meant walking to Mass every single morning for thirty-seven years. I guess it must have rubbed off on me a little in my impressionable early youth, because I spent a number of years as an altar boy in Mount Merrion Church.

I will never forget the trauma of my first day at school. It was such an intimidating experience. I remember standing inside the door of Mount Merrion National School, holding my mother’s hand, and staring in horror at scenes of bedlam. There were so many kids running around and screaming and throwing things, and I just wanted to turn around and run away back home.

Your first school day is extraordinary. I don’t remember one thing about being in the classroom, but I will never forget the chaos of the playground and cloakroom, with all the coats chucked on top of each other. I grew to not mind the school but it’s all a bit of a blur now, except for a couple of the teachers: Mrs O’Callaghan, who lived on our road, and Mrs Hughes. She was all about joined-up writing and I never took to her: she just seemed so very, very old and, more pertinently, old-fashioned.

I rubbed along OK at Mount Merrion School until the age of seven, then the next year it became girls-only, so I had to move on to Kilmacud National School, which was a mile further down the road. Again, what I remember most was the first day – or rather the first week, which must have been once of the worst weeks of my life.

After Mount Merrion, Kilmacud seemed pretty rough. It also looked it. As we waited for a new school to be built at the corner of the Upper and Lower Kilmacud Roads, the classes were held in makeshift prefabs where the Stillorgan Bowling Alley now stands. Soon after they built a shopping centre across the road from it, the first mall in Ireland, and it was considered such a big deal that we were all given a day off to celebrate.

I had thought break times at Mount Merrion School were mad; at Kilmacud it was Armageddon. At lunch break there would be hundreds of kids charging around the yard playing football, smashing into walls or lamping the ball as hard as they could and not caring who it hit or who they hit. Or there would be piggyback fights where you threw punches and tried to push the other guy off his mate’s back. This all happened on concrete: Health & Safety wasn’t such a major concern in those days.

There would always be two teachers patrolling the ground with their hands behind their backs, talking to each other, and every now and then shouting someone’s surname to make it look as if they were in charge. I don’t think I was a particularly delicate child but I really wasn’t into the massive rough-and-tumble and horseplay, so mainly I just tried to stay out of the way.

After the first week, as I grew used to the daily casual violence of the playground, I did OK at Kilmacud. That was the story of my whole academic career: OK. I wasn’t particularly good, bad or indifferent. The only subject I really did well in was English. A typical exercise came when our English teacher asked us to write a four-page essay and I wrote nine pages, which I ended up reading in front of the class. I was mad for James Bond, so my story was all about me being a spy and escaping the enemy by having a bomb hidden in a button in my coat, and pulling it off and throwing it at them. Stupid stuff, really, but it’s still amazing to me how, two generations on, 9-year-old boys still love James Bond.

In terms of discipline, I was fine in school: I never gave teachers a hard time and I always did my homework. This didn’t always protect you though. There was a definite downside to being in school in Ireland in the 1960s and 70s; while I didn’t suffer anything like the horrors of the poor kids who got abused or beaten in Church and industrial schools, there were some bad moments. Children being hit and caned in class was accepted – that was just how it was back then.

As I said, I was never great at Maths but I always did my best. In one lesson though, I dropped a howler. The teacher – and I don’t think I’ll shame him by saying his name, although it’s a close decision – had given us all a textbook with about a hundred pages in it, and on every page there were ten or twenty mental arithmetic questions. Every day he would give us a page of the book as homework, then the next day we had to tell him the answers we had worked out.

One day in class, the teacher started examining us on the sums we should have done the night before and said, ‘OK, let’s hear your answers to page 78.’ Disaster! I had done page 79. I must have had a brainstorm and written down the wrong page number. I thought I might as well come clean so I put my hand up and said, ‘Sorry, sir, but I did the wrong page.’

The teacher just lost it. He went absolutely mad. He pulled me out of my seat and got physical with me, shoving me around the room and screaming in my face, ‘Fanning! I TOLD you it was page bloody 78!’ Everybody in the class went quiet, because they knew it could just as easily be them the next time – this probably happened about three times per week.

Even today, thinking back, I’m staggered at the madness and inhumanity of it all. This grown man, a trained professional, was belittling and ridiculing me, psychologically and physically bullying me for no reason at all other than I had made an innocent mistake! How could a teacher think it was OK to treat a basically blameless child in this way, and did he really think it was educative?

For weeks afterwards, I relived that scene in my mind and fantasised over what I would have liked to do to him. In my imagination, I answered him with a string of cutting, Oscar Wilde-style bon mots and told him to take out his frustrations on some other poor victim, not on me. I picked up his cane, snapped it over my knee, told him, ‘If you need this to be a teacher, then get another job,’ picked up my bag, and strode manfully out of the classroom. Of course, the reality was I did what any other terrified 10-year-old would have done: cowered, stayed silent and then slunk back to my seat.

Another time, I was caned for mixing up two words when I recited the Catechism – a question-and-answer book with simple illustrations that we had to learn off by heart. There were no ambiguities, no grey areas: you either knew the answers word-perfect or you were in big trouble. The Catechism started off:

Who made the world? God made the world. Who is God? God is our Father in Heaven, the creator of all things.

Then there was some pretty odd stuff about God the Father, God the Son and the third member of the Holy Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, at which point it got really weird. When I accidentally said two words the wrong way round, the meaning of what I had said was 100 per cent the same, yet still I was caned for my mistake.

I never told my mum and dad about incidents like these, and to be honest, although they were loving parents, I think they would have just shrugged if I had. That was how things were back then. You had no choice but to deal with it.

Television had launched in Ireland in the early 1960s and one of the big programmes was Tolka Row, our weekly soap opera. An early series ended with a cliff-hanger as Sean, the decent but rebellious son played by Jim Bartley, crashed his car and sat motionless in the driver’s seat as the credits rolled. They filmed the scene at the top of Foster Avenue, about a hundred yards from my house, and hordes of us excited kids swarmed over the set all day.

On another occasion, they filmed an ad for crisps at the 64A bus stop by our house. A man crunched into a crisp and suddenly a bowler hat-wearing, brolly-carrying businessman who had been walking past him was clinging to the top of the bus stop. The idea was that the crisps were that crispy the noise had frightened the guy and propelled him skywards, but nobody making the ad seemed to be having fun and the actor spat the crisps out as soon as he heard the word ‘Cut!’ I saw the ad on TV months later. It looked really stupid.

When I turned 11, it came time to leave Kilmacud and start secondary school. John, Peter and Dermot had gone to Oatlands School, which was run by the Christian Brothers, but my mum had decided the education there was barbaric so Gerard and I were packed off to Blackrock College, another mile down the road from Kilmacud.

That was typical of Annie. She was absolutely determined that all of her children would get a good education, and it is to her credit that nearly all of us eventually went on to get a college degree. John and Peter were the first to head off to University College Dublin. John later went to London to work in advertising, then came back to McConnell’s, which became Ireland’s largest marketing communications business. In later years, he became chairman of McConnell’s Advertising, adjunct professor of marketing at Trinity College, a non-executive director of the Irish Times and, for a while, a board member of the Abbey Theatre. He’s an expert on branding and in 2006 wrote a very well-received book, The Importance of Being Branded. Having also written a doctoral thesis, he is now Dr Fanning.

Peter and I had occasional rows as boys but mostly got on just fine. He now lives in Canada, where he has taught English in Vancouver for the last twenty-five years. My next brother, Gerard, has always been huge into literature and has published four books of poetry to date. There was sometimes a degree of one-upmanship between him and John. One family Christmas, Gerard proudly produced a not-yet-published anthology of new Seamus Heaney poems – then John trumped him by flourishing a signed version of the same book!

As for me, I have never bought into the cliché that your schooldays are the best days of your life but I had a fantastic time at Blackrock. It is the best-known rugby school in Ireland, with alumni including Brian O’Driscoll, Luke Fitzgerald, Leo Cullen and Bob Casey, but neither Gerard nor I ever played rugby or were put under any pressure to do so, for which I remain hugely grateful.

Gerard was two years ahead of me at Blackrock and spent five years in the same class as a lanky kid called Bob Geldof with a mass of bouffant hair and an intense manner. Geldof always stood out a little: he just looked different from everybody else, and was the first boy around our way to ride a BMX bike. He and Gerard were mates and one year they went off to England together to do a summer holiday job shelling peas at a factory in Peterborough.

Academically, I again did OK at Blackrock while never setting the world alight. There were five graded classes, from A to E, and I was happy to be in B for a few but mostly in C, which was where I felt I belonged. I didn’t struggle but nor was I in the academic A-league.

Actually, this may be just my self-serving twist on things, but I’m glad that I was middling as a student. There are definitely downsides to being an academic over-achiever. Just last year I watched a documentary about prodigies who went on University Challenge years ago, and most of them seem to be fucked-up and crazy nowadays. You wouldn’t want to be one of them: the cleverest of all was drinking nine pints every day. At least that is one life I managed to escape by not being too brainy.

I was even happier in Class C because my two best friends were also there, middle-achievers like me. They were called Jerry Coyle and Mel Reilly, and throughout our teenage years at Blackrock, and beyond, the three of us were inseparable. We hung out together every day, and, remarkable as it may seem, forty years on Jerry and Mel remain my two best friends in the world.

I met Jerry on my very first day in Blackrock. He told me he lived in Mount Merrion at 42 Wilson Road, right round the corner from my house in Foster Avenue. I scornfully took him to task and explained he was mistaken: ‘That’s ridiculous, I know everybody on Wilson Road, and I don’t know you!’ I even reeled off a list of people I knew on the street, but he stuck to his story.

After school we walked home together and I still thought he was having me on. When he walked up the path of No. 42 and rang the bell I expected him to run away, but his mother answered the bell and asked him how his first day had gone. I couldn’t believe I had lived so close to the guy my whole life and never noticed him. We then made up for it by being virtually inseparable for the next twenty years, until he emigrated to America.

Mel Reilly came to Blackrock a year later than Gerry and me when he transferred from the college’s junior school called Willow Park. He lived in a huge house on Cross Avenue and was the oldest of five boys. Mel is now a teacher in Dundrum and even today there is hardly a day goes by that I don’t hook up with him.

Jerry and Mel weren’t much into football yet that was what occupied most of our spare time in a jumpers-for-goalposts kind of way. Sometimes we would play on the hockey pitches at Belfield, over the road from us at University College Dublin, or in the car park of the Stella cinema, despite the fact that it was a steep slope.

Mostly, though, we would play three-and-in on Foster Avenue itself. The gateway of my friend Gary Byrne’s house served as perfect goalposts. For a more elaborate and arguably somewhat grisly ball game called ‘Sick, dying and dead’ we used a wall on Owenstown Park at the entrance to UCD. Nowadays Foster Avenue is one long car park, but back then it saw hardly any traffic. After the game we would sit by Teevan’s newsagent and eat Cowboy bars and drink Kool Pops or, if we had a little more money to spare, lavish 2d on a Trigger, a Flash bar or, the tastiest of them all, a Macaroon bar.

Dermot Morgan would sometimes join in our kick-abouts. He lived five doors down from Jerry on Wilson Road and in later life starred as Father Ted on TV. Dermot was a couple of years older than us and was in my brother Gerard’s class. We used to call him Morgan the Mighty after the character in the comics.

Dermot wasn’t the best footballer in the world and nor was his dad, Darragh, with his massive shock of white hair. Darragh would join us after he had finished work and was a bit of a character. He would charge around like mad kicking the ball for half an hour and then retire, absolutely bollocksed. I never hung around with Dermot, but by the time I went to UCD a few years later he was doing lunchtime sketch shows in the Arts building theatre to over a hundred people and trying to get on to TV. He was very funny; I never knew he had it in him.

In my pre-teen years, various friends came round to my house all the time and my parents always made them welcome. On Wednesday afternoons, when we were off school, we’d pull out both leaves of the dining-room table and play table football: the great Subbuteo.

We would take Subbuteo massively seriously. We had quite a primitive version and the players didn’t have 3D facial features or even arms or legs, they were just lumps of plastic on a round base, but that didn’t bother us. We were very strict on flicking the pieces only, no scooping. If we scored a goal, we’d run around the room: our celebrations were even more pathetic than the Premier League players today.

My dad sat in his chair, smoked his pipe and read the paper while we played. On the table next to him was a peculiar contraption: a crude, slightly rusty guillotine that he used to cut thin slices of plug tobacco. Barney would ground the slices with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand into the palm of his left, scoop them into the pipe and puff away happily. The whole process used to fascinate Jerry and Mel.

My father loved horse racing and would spend his Saturdays in front of the telly egging on every Irish horse, Irish-owned horse, Irish-trained horse or Irish jockey. I had no interest at all in this, although it didn’t stop me jumping out of my skin when my dad suddenly started shouting as they headed into the home straight.

My dad was very much a homebody. He never really went out, except on Friday nights for a pint with his friend Jack Walsh in Byrne’s of Galloping Green in Leopardstown. Other than that, he didn’t really drink, and I remember when President Kennedy came to Ireland, a few months before he was assassinated in Dallas, my dad was invited to the big reception in Dublin Castle and took some persuading to go and take my mother. It was certainly the only time I ever saw him in a tuxedo.

Of my brothers and sister, I hung out the most with Gerard, who was the nearest to me in age. We shared a bedroom and plenty of adventures and we remain close to this day. I was close to Miriam as well but how many boys hang out with their four-year-older sister? She was also heavily into ballet: she’d come pirouetting into the room on tiptoes, and I’d raise my eyes to heaven and go back to whatever I was doing.

John and Peter had both left home by the time I hit my teens. They had moved to London, which seemed impossibly glamorous to me. In fact, whenever I read about Carnaby Street and swinging London, I felt like my brothers gave me a link to that exotic, tantalising world just across the water, even though I had never been there myself.

One major tradition in my family was the big annual summer holiday. In those days, ordinary families didn’t vanish off to the Algarve or Tuscany, and we always went to exactly the same place: Bettystown in County Meath, about thirty miles from Dublin and five miles from my father’s home town of Drogheda. We would go for about a month, to give him time to catch up with his family, and I loved it.

We’d rent a house right next to the sea with a grassy bank that led straight down to the beach. It would be a proper old-fashioned summerhouse, with wooden walls like a chalet, and we would play on the beach all day long, even if the weather was lousy which, of course, it often was. When the tide was out it was a long way to the sea, the water was bitterly cold, and the totter back up the beach to the house felt like torture.

Movies were always big news in our house. My father would take me to the Stella Cinema in Mount Merrion – which, sadly, is now a furniture shop – and the Ormonde in Stillorgan, which, I’m glad to say, is still open today. The Stella was a grand old-fashioned picture house, with two ornate kiosks to buy your tickets and your sweets, and beautiful sweeping staircases up to the balcony that we hardly ever sat in. I used to love seeing the usherettes walking through the cinema selling ice cream from their trays.

The movies were always screened either Mondays to Wednesdays or Thursdays to Saturdays, with a different bill on Sundays. Normally, there were double-feature screenings and my dad took me to a lot of Westerns. Saturdays would often be comedies, including some really, really bad ones interspersed with Pathé News.

As I got older, I would sometimes go to evening showings that began at 7.30, with friends from school. Sometimes we would be too young to see the films without a grown-up with us, so we would have to wait outside and ask an adult if we could go in with them. They would usually say yes because they knew us from around Mount Merrion, and they weren’t X-rated movies – they just finished at 11 p.m., and unaccompanied kids had to be out of the cinema by then. There would be about ten of us, and once we got in we would make a beeline for the front row.

I have so many memories of wide-eyed nights in the Stella. I saw Wait Until Dark, the famous movie with Audrey Hepburn as a blind girl. Friends who had seen it already told me it had a really terrifying scene. At one stage Alan Arkin, playing a villain, killed one of his own guys by ramming a car into him. I thought, ‘Was that it? Big deal!’ I relaxed – and a few minutes later, Audrey went to close a fridge and a man leapt out of it at her. Mother of Jesus! Thinking of that scene still gives me goose bumps to this day!

I was an avid moviegoer as a kid. Any trailer that I ever saw, I longed to see the film. I was an absolute sucker. I remember when I was slightly older, Jerry Coyle and I went to the Ormonde to see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which had a real effect on me. Even at the tender age of 15, I thought Maggie Smith was brilliant.

Maybe I was always going to host a movie show, because as a kid I would write reviews of every film I saw in a little book that I made from pieces of brown paper stapled together. I would carefully write out the title, the director and names of the stars and then give it a critique and a mark out of ten. I am not sure my critical faculties were too honed back then; the only film I ever gave ten out of ten to was a totally obscure war film called Tobruk, starring Rock Hudson.

I read quite a lot as a kid – my mother made sure of that, and our house was full of books and literature. I was big into Enid Blyton with her Famous Five and Secret Seven and their mad adventures that always ended with farmers’ wives giving them sandwiches and lashings of ginger beer. Her Island of Adventure and Castle of Adventure stories were the best. I was also fond of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books – but when it came to reading, my major obsession was comics.

It started with the Beano and Dandy, with all the characters I can still picture now: the Bash Street Kids getting slippered by the teacher, Little Plum with his feather coming out of his head-band, Dennis the Menace knocking lumps out of Walter the Softie. In one story I particularly remember, Dennis came out of school with a book marked ‘Sums’; Walter’s was called ‘Harder Sums’. My sister Miriam got the Bunty and Judy, and when she got too old for them, I started buying them instead. I didn’t care that they were aimed at girls: the stories in them were just as good, especially the Four Marys, Lorna Doone with her magic dancing shoes, or the unfortunate heroine who would have her saddle loosened by horrid, wicked types who schemed to thwart her chances of winning the local gymkhana.

In my teenage years I took a bit of a step up with the comics, and – yes, I know this is sad – I can still remember the sequence that used to define my week. It was the Hornet on a Tuesday, the Hotspur on Thursday and the Victor on Friday. That was the big one: Friday afternoon, home from school, reading the Victor and eating fish and chips with the weekend ahead was definitely a major highlight of my week. I always sat at the same part of the kitchen table. I’d place the comic in the cutlery drawer, read bits as I digested the food and push the drawer back in when I went to the plate for a little more.

The Second World War stories didn’t really do it for me. I could take or leave Matt Braddock VC or Captain Hurricane and his pint-sized batman Maggot Malone. Captain Hurricane had a ‘ragin’ fury’ every week and would use guns, grenades and his filthy temper to wipe out ‘krauts’ and ‘slant-eyed goons’ – not terms you tend to hear in today’s more enlightened, politically correct world. I much preferred Morgan the Mighty or Alf Tupper, the ‘Tough of the Track’, who always ate fish and chips before and after winning a race.

The Hornet always seemed to me to have the best stories and illustrations. Every week it had a serialised non-pictorial story over three or four pages in which Paul Terhune tried to solve some mystery or other, each instalment invariably ending on a cliff-hanger. As soon as a story finished, after about ten weeks, I would immediately go back and read the thirty or forty pages in one go. My favourite was a rather unlikely tale called ‘Invisible Bullets from Nowhere’ in which Terhune tried to work out why random citizens were being shot but nobody could find the shooter or the bullets. It transpired that a disgruntled employee at the local observatory high above the town had fitted the giant telescope with ice bullets and was taking pot shots at pedestrians he held a grudge against. Well, it made sense at the time.

Just reading the comics was never enough for me. They used to have competitions that I was soon compulsively entering. Quite often, I won. The first time I saw my name in print, I absolutely loved it. My mum used to read the Irish Catholic, and they had a competition asking readers to fill in the missing words in a limerick. I knew the answer because I had heard it before – in fact I can still remember it:

There was an old man quite weird,Who shrieked, ’Tis just as I feared!Four owls and a wrenTwo larks and a henHave just built their nest in my beard.

I sent my answer in to the Irish Catholic and won £3, which was a small fortune to me. I wrote them a letter saying it had been fantastic to win, and they printed that too. The biggest buzz was just reading my name in the magazine: D FANNING, DUBLIN.

Fired by this triumph, I was soon entering all the competitions in my weekly comics. The Valiant asked readers to send in a cartoon, so I got hold of a copy of a religious magazine that we used to have in school called the Word. It had a cartoon of two guys on a pulley hanging off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, too far away to clean the windows, and I traced it and posted it to the Valiant. Let’s face it, it was plagiarism, pure and simple, but the £1 postal order came in very handy.

I had no conscience about how I won the competitions. Once, I copied a joke from the Beezer and sent it to the Topper. I won. The question was ‘What is the definition of a phone kiosk?’ and I said ‘A chatterbox’. They also asked for a definition of an alarm clock and I said ‘Something that scares the living daylights out of you’, which I thought was absolutely hilarious.

I entered and won so many competitions that the people at the DC Thomson offices in Scotland must have been saying, ‘Jesus, not another one from that Irish guy!’ The prize was normally a postal order, but on one occasion the Beezer sent me a walkie-talkie. It was two small hollow pieces of red plastic joined together by a foot of hollow black cord that looked like a piece of liquorice, and it was rubbish. But it was still as much of a thrill as ever to come home from school for dinner and find a parcel waiting for me next to my place at the table.

Like any normal, average young Dublin lad, I lived for music and football. There is much more to come in this book about music, believe me, but for a while in those early years football meant almost as much to me. The first games I ever went to were at Glenamlure Park in Milltown, the home of Shamrock Rovers. Dermot took me there every now and then. The ground was always packed. That was in the days when Mick Leech was the George Best of the Rovers team, and other star Irish players included Alfie Hale at Waterford and Freddie Strahan at Shelbourne. Glenmalure Park is now a housing estate, and many Shamrock fans have never forgiven the board for selling up.

I also saw a few international matches at Dalymount Park. It always struck me how much more physical the game was than it looked on television, how much more sweaty and grunty. You could easily be hit by flying spit. I remember seeing the great Noel Cantwell, who was always known as a true gentleman of football. As I gazed at him in awe, he glanced at the referee, then elbowed the guy next to him in the back of the head.

Yet most of my football watching was via television. I followed the English league closely, and in 1966, during one of our family holidays to Bettystown, I watched the legendary match when England beat West Germany 4–2 in the World Cup Final.

It was so exciting; so incredibly dramatic. We all watched it on a little black-and-white TV. At half-time I walked down to the beach, stared across the sea and told myself, ‘I can see England, where the game is going on!’ Then it was back in the house for the rest of the match. When Webber equalised for Germany and made it 2–2 in the last minute of normal time I thought, ‘Uh-oh, this is going to go wrong!’ Then Geoff Hurst scored that famous goal off the crossbar, which, let’s be honest here, was never a goal. Unlike many Irish people, I had nothing against England winning the World Cup, but they certainly had all the luck.

Forty-four years later, in South Africa in the summer of 2010, again against Germany, Frank Lampard’s goal would have made it 2–2 and kept England in the World Cup, but for the ref who decided that a perfectly good goal wasn’t a goal. England never recovered.

At about 12, I decided that I was a Manchester United fan and followed the Red Devils avidly for the next two years. The Irish newspapers didn’t have the in-depth coverage I wanted, so I subscribed to the Manchester Evening News & Chronicle – but only on the days after United had played. It would arrive in the post a few days after it had been published and I would cut the United articles out and glue them into my scrapbook.

I watched United – who at the time boasted the holy triumvirate of George Best, Bobby Charlton and Denis Law – beat Benfica 4–1 in the European Cup final in 1968. It was so emotional. It was ten years after the Munich air disaster, and Benfica were enormous in those days; they had just beaten Everton 5–0 and 2–0. Charlton scored two goals, Best got that famous one where he cheekily rounded the keeper, and Brian Kidd got the other, on his nineteenth birthday. I’ll never forget it: right after Kidd scored, I went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and my dad shouted out, ‘Jesus, he’s done it again! Exactly the same as the other one!’ I ran back in, looked at the screen, and realised that my dad hadn’t yet got his head around the concept of the instant action replay.

I once actually saw George Best play in the flesh. Manchester United were drawn against Waterford in an early qualifying game for the European Cup and they held the game in Daly-mount Park. United won 3–0, a Law hat-trick, and Best came on at half-time. One little kid got past security and ran up to him while the game was going on, and Best stopped and signed an autograph. He was just so cool.

Oddly enough, after two years I gave up supporting Man United and just followed football in general. The World Cup in Mexico in 1970 was hugely exciting. In those days the organisers didn’t kowtow to European evening viewing times so the games were on live at two or three in the morning. It was school holidays, warm evenings and football in the middle of the night … the muffled, atmospheric commentaries added to the sense of exoticism and novelty that marked that great summer.

One big family ritual was watching The Big Match on Sunday afternoons, hosted by Brian Moore. I will never forget how the programme used to start: Moore commentating and saying, ‘Charlie George, who can hit ’em!’ and George, with his long hair flying, hitting that amazing goal for Arsenal in the 1971 FA Cup final and then lying flat on his back.

Queens Park Rangers used to be on a lot, when Rodney Marsh and Stan Bowles were sexing up football. Marsh always seemed to score a hat-trick when the cameras were there. My oldest brother, John, was a mad QPR fan, and decades later, one of the proudest moments of his life came when he was about to retire from his advertising agency. John’s favourite poet is Thomas Kinsella – he has even written a thesis about him – and his work colleagues had managed secretly to get hold of Rodney Marsh. At John’s farewell party, they showed him a film of Rodney drinking a glass of wine and saying, ‘Hello, John! I hear you’re retiring!’ Then he read him a Thomas Kinsella poem. Rodney’s rendition from the autocue was somewhat idiosyncratic – I’m not too sure he entirely grasped the nuances and subtleties of what he was reading – but even so, what an amazing retirement present!

Football wasn’t the only TV I watched. Absolutely my favourite programme as a kid was The Avengers. To my young mind, it was on a heightened, more surreal level than everything else on television. Patrick Macnee as Steed was so cool. Every week would start with him going to a big country house to see some retired brigadier-general or other who had a big moustache and would be re-enacting the battle of El Alamein on his kitchen table, moving toy soldiers around with a big stick. Steed would wander out into the garden, then go back in and the general would be lying dead, with an arrow in his head or some such.

I loved the fact that the Avengers had this ace, swinging London sort of flat. The Saint was the same. Roger Moore couldn’t act, and actually still can’t, but that didn’t matter – he just had to look the part and drive his long, phallic-symbol white car. Pretty much every week would end with somebody saying, ‘Thank you for saving my life – who are you?’ And he would raise an eyebrow; that music would start; the halo would appear over his head; and he’d drive off.

As I got older, I was big into Monty Python’s Flying Circus but – probably typically for me – I loved the albums more than the TV shows. There were five different albums, and I’m afraid I’m the sort of obsessive who can quote whole sketches left, right and centre. It’s not something I am particularly proud of, but there you go.

One strange old tradition in Ireland is that a lot of secondary-school students used to go away for about a month to a college where they just spoke Irish. I had been quite proficient in our native language until I was about 12, but after that I lost a lot of it. In my second-last year at Blackrock, in 1969, I went off to an Irish College in Carraroe in County Galway. Jerry and Mel were there with me.

We asked – in Irish of course – if we could have a day off to mourn the death of Brian Jones, the Rolling Stones guitarist who died on 3 July. Our request was denied. While we were there, the three of us also watched on television as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, and we were completely overcome by the sense that, for humankind, this was history in the making. We went out cycling through Carraroe later that night and I remember stopping my bike and just gazing up at the moon and saying to Jerry and Mel, ‘Jesus Christ! There’s two guys up there!’

So I guess I had a pretty normal, happy-go-lucky Dublin childhood, except for one major, glaring anomaly – by the time I was a teenager, I was absolutely obsessed with music, listened to it every waking hour, lived and breathed it and, in truth, cared for little else. It is the all-consuming passion that has dominated my whole life and shows no sign of dimming. Why, exactly, am I so fixated on music? That may be a little harder to explain …