The Thing is…. Bono
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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 …
Chapter 2
My parents used to have a piano in our house in Foster Avenue. My mother played it occasionally, but they got rid of it because my two oldest brothers, John and Peter, had not shown enough interest in