WILD YEARS: Old rockers never die, they just reinvent themselves. Tony Clayton-Lea catches up with some luminaries of the Irish music scene from the 1980s and 1990s.
FLO McSWEENEY
Then: Lead vocalist with numerous high-profile Irish and UK bands in the 1980s, including Toy With Rhythm, Les Enfants, Moving Hearts and A Certain Ratio; television presenter on TV Ga Ga and Megamix. Now: Mother of two children; married to Irish comedian Barry Murphy; in demand as a voice-over artist.
"The first gigs I played were in The Sportsman Inn, supporting The Lookalikes and bands like that. I was terribly excited about the whole thing, and loved the theatrics of it, although I was naturally a very shy person, sometimes painfully so. I drifted from there into Toy With Rhythm, with Ed Darragh.
"I was working as a receptionist in a hair salon in Dublin. We all had jobs and were, I think, just playing at being in a rock band, gigging at nights. But we entered a competition co-sponsored by Maxell Tapes and the Evening Herald. We won it, and our prize was to release a single - Junior Discovers Electricity, written by Ed and produced by Bill Whelan.
"They were absolutely brilliant days. What struck me most about the 1980s was that everyone had a record deal with massive advances, so we'd congregate in the Pink Elephant, whooping it up. And everyone expected to make it, too. There was a lot of talent, but also a lot of casualties. I left Toy With Rhythm to join Les Enfants, and then Moving Hearts, which was something I definitely shouldn't have done. Probably the only reason why I was in the band is that I was easier on the eye than Christy Moore and Mick Hanly. It was so wrong for them and completely wrong for me.
"I look at some kids nowadays and they have a five-year career plan. I never had a plan - if anyone asked me to do something I'd think about it for a few seconds and say yes. I was bumbling along, basically. I started doing television in the mid-1980s, stuff such as TV Ga Ga and Megamix, and that was exciting, but I never found presenting much of a challenge.
"Gradually, as my late 20s came around, I got to a point where I tired of wanting to be a pop star. I'd never say I wasn't ambitious enough, because I was, fiercely so. But I'd seen how some people would do anything to be successful, and I just didn't have the drive for that. I never fully established myself in any one thing. That was probably a mistake, but I don't regret anything. In retrospect, I was completely fearful, and had a lot of self-doubt.
"Would I like to go back into music? Yes, I would, but with no pressure. I don't feel I have to prove anything now. The person I am today - calm, content, good with my kids - is because I packed a lot in during a short space of time when I was younger. Life now is very ordinary and safe, but I'm a happier person for it. I still think, what am I going to be like when I grow up?"
TOM DUNNE
Then: Lead singer of Something Happens, one of Ireland's leading rock bands from 1985 to 1993. Now: Presenter on Today FM; occasional gigging with Something Happens.
"Something Happens formed in 1984, but when I say formed, we were really just rehearsing for two hours on Sunday afternoons. We signed to Virgin in 1987, and it was weird at first, because we didn't know what to do with our time. We'd all had day jobs and been rehearsing twice a week up to that point. Now, we were booked into rehearsal rooms every day. Some days we just didn't have any ideas for songs.
"We drifted initially; it was almost a joke, meeting up every day, going for coffee, having buns and going for walks around town. What were we supposed to do? Then, after a short enough time we suddenly found ourselves with our backs against the wall. The first album (Been There, Seen That, Done That) didn't turn out the way we had planned. So we went from wandering around Dublin, leading the artist's life, to suddenly having Virgin wondering whether they should drop us.
"We felt under huge pressure then, and suddenly there weren't enough hours in the day. The only thing that saved us from being dropped was our profile in Ireland, which was going through the roof. At a point where Virgin was just shaking the head at us, we sold out the SFX venue, and from that, the label reckoned we had something going for us. We came away from that rehearsing like there was no tomorrow. During that time we wrote the second album (Stuck Together With God's Glue) and the majority of the songs that Something Happens are known for to this day. Everything seemed to be coming together.
"When we were dropped, we felt very hard done by, to be honest. I look back on that time with great fondness, but I remember throughout 1995 being angry and broke and having to play gigs we didn't want to play in unsuitable venues to unsuitable audiences in order to pay off debts. A lot of things soured what had gone on before - and what had gone on before was fantastic.
"The thing that goes through my mind is I came out of it with a sense of being able to do more than I gave myself credit for. The skills I learnt in Something Happens - the disciplines behind recording, producing, marketing, working with teams and so on - I've found enormously beneficial in relation to my radio show - how to pace it, how to mix the music, the style of it, who you're aiming at.
"A lot of great things came out of the band. We're all close friends, which is probably unusual. I don't think in our heart of hearts we blamed each other for what was going on - there was such a sense of helplessness at times. Better bands than us also failed to make it, and far worse bands than us became very successful. There was such randomness about the whole thing.
"Now? Presenting is something I love doing. I'm so used to critiquing songs, throwing away the bad ones and listening to songs where they lose the plot; I can apply that immediately to what I play on the radio. I feel songs have to belong together.
DEIRDRE McGOLDRICK
Then: As Deirdre O'Neill, she was Ireland's answer to Xena, Warrior Princess, in rock bands from The Joys to Junkster. Now: Mother of two and businesswoman.
"Junkster was signed to RCA America and because of that we spent a lot of time in the US. It was a bit strange - you'd come home and tell friends how big we were in Alabama and they'd go 'yeah, right'. In places such as North Carolina we'd get people queuing up to meet you after the gig, people that had driven over 100 miles to get there. Atlanta, Georgia, was another place where we were successful - and then we'd come home and find it difficult to get a gig. But that was grand, too, because Junkster was never a massively successful band in Ireland. We'd all been in bands for so long in Dublin and all our friends were involved in music, so going from moderate success in the US to virtually none in Ireland was never a terribly confusing state. It was more peculiar than anything else.
"Regrets? None whatsoever. We were unceremoniously dropped, which happens all the time, of course. I gigged up to until the eighth month of my first pregnancy - we did gigs with Blondie and Bryan Adams, and I was forever trying to overcompensate when I was pregnant because I didn't want people to think I couldn't cut it just because I had a huge bump. But when I came back from the hospital with Jacob, my husband told me that the record company had dropped the band. It was a great time for it to happen because I was so blissed out with the baby. It probably wasn't the same for the other members of the band, of course, but for me it wasn't heart-breaking.
"There are people who say they couldn't possibly do anything except music, which used to puzzle me, because while music always did and still does have a huge part to play in my life, I never thought it was all I was able to do. I never had aspirations to be really successful anyway - that would have frightened the pants off me.
"The whole experience? It was an achievement getting the record contract and playing gigs and paying my mortgage for seven years. I left the band four years ago, and I have two children now, and it stopped at exactly the right time for me. There wasn't one day when I was regretful that it was all over.
"I recently opened a shop in Dublin - The Pregnancy Store on Dawson Street. I worked for the past two years on it - it's a complete one-stop shop. When I was pregnant I got tired walking to half-a-dozen different shops for things, and I wanted cool, funky clothes and accessories - the kind of things you see in the US.
"It's hard work doing it with two kids in tow, but I love it. In terms of getting from the idea to actually opening the shop, it was exactly the same as being in a rock band and getting a record deal: the idea was the demo that had to be developed. Then I had to shop it around and impress the right people, and pick all the right elements to make it work. You shouldn't underestimate what you can learn in a rock band."
BRENDAN MORRISSEY
Then: Member of My Little Funhouse, which signed to Geffen Records in 1991 for a three-album, $2 million deal. The band split up in 1996. Now: Bar/restaurant/nightclub owner and MD of fanscape.com
"We won the Carling/Hot Press competition, on only our second gig, and Geffen snapped us up. I'll tell you how we got signed: we were staying in the Presidential Suite of a Dublin hotel with an A&R representative of Geffen Records. A group of strippers called the LA Centrefolds were performing at the Olympia. Louis Walsh was our booking agent, and we told him that we just had to be there. We went to the gig, but Louis could only get tickets for the gods, and sure enough we couldn't see anything from up there. So we said to the Geffen guy that if he could get all the strippers back to the suite we'd sign with his label. So we went back to the hotel and within 30 minutes all of the LA Centrefolds walked into the room.
"Our third gig was as support to Guns 'N' Roses at Slane. After that, we headed off to Los Angeles for four years. The whole experience was a culture shock for us. We lived in LA, touring with Guns 'N' Roses, The Ramones, Red Hot Chili Peppers. We made our first record in London, and the second album in LA. That album cost a fortune, but it was never released. Then we did a third record, also in LA, and that wasn't released either.
"I knew two years into the record deal that things were going downhill. I tried to make sure that the band saved their money, and that funded things when we got back to Kilkenny. The label was becoming impossible to work with. Music changed after Nirvana - who signed to Geffen for $60,000 in the same week that we signed for $2 million - and that meant us and the likes of Guns 'N' Roses were out the door. We were shafted, but we were lucky - we got $2 million because of the sound we had.
"When we came back to Kilkenny, myself and Tony, my brother, who was also in the band - set up Zoo club (now called Coda). We also opened Morrissey's Bar last year, and we're about to open another Morrissey's, in Thurles; we're also working on a similar thing for Carlow. I'm also working on fanscape.com, which is a US-based online operation that bridges the gap between fans and rock/pop acts.
"Do I still distrust people? Not as I've gotten older; it's all about communication, really, and we didn't have it back then because we were so young. We were just some Irish kids hanging around LA, going to clubs every night. I'm still in touch with some of the people from Guns 'N' Roses, good mates in fact. I've no regrets at all, but as I said, we were lucky. We lived the life for six years and have mostly brilliant memories from it. I'm still into music, through occasional band management. But the labels are running out of money. It's not like it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they had money to burn."
BREN BERRY
Then: singer/guitarist in Revelino, one of the few genuine contender Irish rock bands of the 1990s. The band released their third and best album, To The End, in 2001 and split up shortly after. Now: Concert promoter/booking agent for Aiken Promotions.
"Revelino's first album came out in October 1994, and the week of release was the week we did our first gig. Because of previous bad experiences we had in an earlier band called The Coletranes, we took the approach to be completely independent. In order to have enough money to make, release and work an album, we spent about a year playing covers in a band called The Beat Generators - we did it for the craic and free drink, and for the money we'd get, which was a lot to us at the time. We put every single penny into making that first album (Revelino), which created a big stir in Ireland. It was great to be successful at home, but it was utterly frustrating not to have any kind of success outside the country.
"Initially, we had a lot of major record label interest, but that eventually vanished because we weren't perceived as being hip. We went to New York to play at an indie festival in 1997, and coming back I came to the realisation that I had just had enough - I didn't have a penny to my name. I really didn't want to give up on the band, but I knew I had to start earning some money. I was on the dole and living off the woman who is now my wife.
"Then I received a phone call from Peter Aiken, asking me to check out a new venue called Vicar Street. I went to meet him, and out of the blue he offered me a job. Initially, I was brought in to work with Irish acts, but it was realised quite quickly that my knowledge was broader, having been in a band and having had experience of band management. "Looking back on the days of the band, I've come to realise how brilliant they were. Even though we were on the dole, we lived like kings. There were so many ligs, gigs and parties to go to; and then, of course, you're following a dream. The fact that you wake up from the dream is something you have to come to terms with. I miss playing live, but a guitar given to me by the Après Match guys spurred me on somewhat. I now have seven. If I get any more my wife will beat me over the head with them.
"Any regrets? Well, I feel we didn't have as much success as we deserved - I can objectively say that we were better than the level of success we received. But those are the breaks and I know there are factors involved other than just talent. It's great to still be in the music industry. I'm still a big music fan. I suppose I could book myself as a support act, but I only book stuff I like and I haven't quite reached that point with myself."