"Jobling presents the first unauthorized biography of the iconic Irish band in their almost 40-year career… U2 fans will eat this up."—Booklist
"Jobling presents the first unauthorized biography of the iconic Irish band in their almost 40-year career… U2 fans will eat this up."—Booklist
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Overview
"Jobling presents the first unauthorized biography of the iconic Irish band in their almost 40-year career… U2 fans will eat this up."—Booklist
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250074591 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Press |
| Publication date: | 05/26/2015 |
| Pages: | 394 |
| Sales rank: | 276,371 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.88(d) |
About the Author
JOHN JOBLING is a British film and music journalist. He is the former music editor of the UK lifestyle website Mansized and has also contributed to DotMusic, Total Film and Playstation Sports, among others. Over the years, he has interviewed such personalities as Michelle Pfeiffer, Gillian Anderson and Karen O.
Read an Excerpt
1
Into the Heart
Ireland in the 1970s was a grim and depressing sight, a far cry from the picturesque snowdrops, daffodils, and early-morning dew cited in the country’s Eurovision-winning entry “All Kinds of Everything” at the dawn of the decade. Ireland was dreary, oppressive, and bereft of hope; ravaged by nationwide inflation, endless public-sector strikes, high unemployment, and high emigration. Dublin’s north inner city was the epicenter of Ireland’s crisis. There the buildings were dirty and decrepit, with over 70 percent of the old Georgian tenements without hot running water, according to historical data. You could literally smell the abject poverty. Speaking at the launch of Combat Poverty’s twentieth anniversary in 2007, Father Peter McVerry recalled that the tough inner-city area of Summerhill, for example, was “crawling with rats—rats the size of little kittens and immune from every poison ever invented. Parents would tell you of waking up in the morning and finding a rat on the baby’s cot. Some blocks of flats had to share an outside toilet and the children had to be washed in the local Sean McDermott Street swimming pool, as they had no baths or showers.”
It was an era when the Catholic Church still exercised powerful influence on government policy and the lives of everyday people, particularly in terms of anything that concerned sexual morality. Sex before marriage was a sin and a social evil. Contraceptives were banned. Homosexuality was a crime. Divorce and abortion, also illegal. Even the slightest “morally dubious” reference found in the media, such as the imported feminist magazine Spare Rib showing women how to examine their breasts, was blue-penciled into oblivion as the Church and State sought to hold back the tide of liberalism surging in from Britain and America, and preserve and strengthen Catholic moral teaching in the Irish population, 90 percent of whom attended Mass every Sunday.
Meanwhile, the political struggle in the North was a continual presence in the news. Belfast was Baghdad. Walls and fences divided religious sects. Soldiers patrolled streets. People got tortured. Death piled upon death.
In this period of social and economic crisis and sexual repression, many young people turned to hard drugs in an effort to escape. Coke and heroin replaced acid and hash on Dublin’s inner-city streets, and plunged entire neighborhoods further into darkness. And the authorities didn’t seem to care; that is until the spread of heroin led to an upsurge in property crime in more-affluent areas as users searched for ways to finance their next fix.
Irish music struggled to find its voice amid the soul-destroying oppression in the South and the fatal bomb blasts in the North. There were very few venues or professional recording studios for the rock bands brave (or stupid) enough to make a noise, and no music press or rock radio existed for much of the decade. The smartly dressed show bands reigned supreme, and made a decent living performing their polite covers of contemporary pop hits and traditional country favorites. But their lack of ambition was crippling. Youth culture’s only glimmer of light came from the outer world: NME, Sounds, pirate radio, and, at least in Dublin, the BBC, which broadcast Top of the Pops and The Old Grey Whistle Test. True, Ireland had whipped Thin Lizzy and Rory Gallagher into fighting shape, but they both had to move to London to get noticed. Ireland was a cultural backwater that drowned anyone who stayed there for too long.
It was against this hopeless backdrop that a fourteen-year-old boy called Larry Mullen pinned a note on the bulletin board at Dublin’s Mount Temple Comprehensive School looking for fellow students to form a rock-and-roll band. The note read: “Money wasted on a drum kit. Anyone done the same on guitars?”
* * *
Lawrence (Larry) Joseph Mullen was born on October 31, 1961, in Artane, on the north side of Dublin. His namesake father was a civil servant at the Department of Health and Environment, having previously considered a life in the priesthood, and his mother, Maureen, was a housewife. He was the middle child of three, and the Mullens’ only son. Larry was a good-looking lad, but physically small and painfully shy around people he didn’t know very well. At the age of nine, his parents thought it would be good for him to express himself through music and enrolled him in a piano course at the College of Music in Chatham Row, near St. Stephen’s Green. His teacher was, in his own words, “a really nice lady,” but within a few months she pulled him aside and told him that he was probably wasting his time learning the piano because his heart didn’t seem to be in it. Larry agreed; he didn’t practice much at home and hated studying the scales. But as he was leaving the college that day with his mother, he heard the sound of drums being played in an adjacent room. He immediately turned to her and said, “You hear that? That’s what I want to do.” His mother agreed to let him, but only if he paid for the lessons himself. So Larry washed cars and mowed lawns until he had saved enough money to attend a weekly class at the college under the tutelage of Joe Bonnie, a veteran of the Irish theater world who specialized in military-style drumming. Larry instantly fell in love with the instrument, but again demonstrated little interest in going through the rudiments of music theory. The little drummer boy was far more interested in doing his own thing, which was tapping along on a drum pad to the music he heard when tuning in to Radio Luxembourg on his pocket radio or watching Top of the Pops, specifically glam rockers The Glitter Band, Sweet, and David Bowie.
Tragedy befell the Mullen household when Larry’s little sister, Mary, died in 1973. She was nine years old. Larry continued to attend the drum lessons, albeit halfheartedly and less frequently, until 1974 when Bonnie died of a heart attack and his more demanding daughter Monica inherited the class by default. Larry’s father and older sister, Cecilia, rewarded him for sticking with the course for so long by buying him his first full drum kit (which was made by a Taiwanese toy company) for seventeen pounds.
In many ways, Larry and his old man had a typical Irish father-son relationship. His father was a tough man, a disciplinarian, and Larry, subconsciously or otherwise, challenged his authority at almost every turn. His father was well educated and hardworking, and he expected his son to follow in his footsteps. But Larry showed little interest in school or education in general. However, father and son had at least one common bond: Gaelic football. Both were supporters of the Dubs and regularly attended games together at Croke Park, and it was there Larry first saw the Christian Brothers–run Artane Boys’ Band, dressed in their distinctive blue-and-scarlet uniforms, entertaining the spectators at halftime. Before long, his father had signed him up to the junior marching band, but Larry left after just three days when the Brother in charge ordered him to chop off his shoulder-length golden locks—Larry’s pride and joy. Eventually, Larry settled on the Post Office Workers’ Union Band, which was a more relaxed outfit and afforded him the opportunity to goof around with friends. He spent two blissful years with them, playing in towns up and down the country.
In the autumn of 1974, Larry joined Mount Temple Comprehensive School after failing the entrance exams to St. Paul’s College and Chanel College. Mount Temple had opened its doors just two years earlier and held the distinction of being Dublin’s first co-educational, multi-denominational school under Protestant management. It was considered a place that encouraged expression and individuality, free from the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse prevalent in the Catholic-run institutions. Here, it almost seemed as if the old world had died, and the new one was fighting to be born.
Larry was well liked at Mount Temple, especially among the young ladies in his year. “He was quiet but popular,” recalls Janice Bearman, an ex-classmate. “I must admit I did not see the attraction, but two of my friends were very taken with him and you were aware that Larry had a lot of female admirers, though he was modest and did not seem to be aware of it. If he was, it did not go to his head.” One such admirer was a chatty, blond-haired girl called Ann Acheson, and soon she and Larry were spotted holding hands in the schoolyard.
However, life at Mount Temple wasn’t all blushing teenage girls and budding romance for Larry. Because he was quiet and short in stature, he was bullied by a number of older children. His bus ride home, for example, was often a bumpy one. Recalls a former pupil: “We used to get a bus from school that went up Malahide Road and he used to get off at the roundabout in Artane, the same as us. I feel quite embarrassed about it now, but we used to give him a clip over the head. He’d be sitting near the back and everyone who went by would just clatter the poor kid.”
Bruised head aside, Larry relished the relative freedom of Mount Temple, which in turn sparked an improvement in his schoolwork. He became particularly adept at maths and art. But the drums remained his true passion. Always the drums. And in September 1976—at the suggestion of his father—he plucked up the courage to put out a call on the school notice board for guitarists to join a new band. “You are not going to get anywhere,” Larry Senior told him, “if you continue playing on your own.” Although no one paid much attention to his ad to begin with, Larry was determined. He had heard Mount Temple’s new arrival Adam Clayton was a mean bass player, and approached him in the schoolyard. “I got so excited when I saw him,” Larry said later, “because he had bushy blond hair, he was wearing tinted glasses and a really long afghan coat. He looked so cool and I just said, ‘I want to be in a band with him!’”
* * *
Adam Charles Clayton was born on March 13, 1960, in his grandparents’ home in the quaint English village of Chinnor in Oxfordshire. His father, Brian, was a pilot for the RAF, and his mother, Jo, was a rather glamorous-looking housewife and part-time air hostess. In 1964, the Clayton family—Brian, Jo, Adam, and his younger sister, Sarah Jane—upped sticks and moved to Nairobi when Brian landed a job with East African Airways. It was an incredible place to live: the heat, the smells, the servants. But within a year, the threat of ethnic violence amid a tribal conflict had become too great, and affluent white families were encouraged to leave. Brian promptly accepted an offer to work for the Irish airline Aer Lingus and the Claytons settled down in Malahide, a middle-class coastal town ten miles north of Dublin city. Another child, Sebastian, was born there.
Adam attended St. Andrew’s National School until he was eight, after which his parents enrolled him at the preparatory school Castle Park in south Dublin, where he boarded through the week. But Adam hated every minute of it. He was chubby, bespectacled, and allergic to every sporting activity outside of cricket, and from day one, he exhibited a total lack of interest in the value systems of getting a good education or working hard in a nine-to-five job. Adam’s defense mechanism was to be the class clown and push the boundaries of what was acceptable in an antiquated schooling system. He was a rebel, but a charming rebel. He spoke with a posh English accent and was invariably polite and well mannered. Nevertheless, he often found himself hauled in front of the principal for being disruptive. “What’s going to happen to you?” the exasperated principal asked him one day. To which Adam replied: “Well, sir, I’m obviously going to be a comedian.”
Pop music and television were frowned upon at Castle Park, but Adam found a small window of escapism in the Gramophone Society, which got together twice a week to listen to classical music. An outgoing teacher also played him the soundtracks from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar and David Greene’s screen adaptation of Godspell on an old tape recorder. This inspired him to experiment with piano lessons, but he soon gave them up when he realized that he had neither the hand coordination nor the discipline to do the instrument justice.
At the age of thirteen, Adam was on the move again, to another boarding school in south Dublin, St. Columba’s College. It was cold there, terribly cold. There was no heating throughout the old buildings, and the enormous dormitories housed around twenty-five to thirty shivering students. Adam shared a bunk bed with an English boy called John Leslie, and the two of them became close friends. “I think it [St. Columba’s] was a shock to both our systems,” recalls Leslie, “and we immediately hit it off. Adam was a much more outgoing character than I, and he was up to hijinks literally from the minute he hit the ground there. He was always up for a laugh in the nicest possible way. Never nasty.”
Adam and Leslie fell in love with classic rock in a big way when Leslie’s brother in England began to ply them with cassette tapes of bands like the Grateful Dead, The Who, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Later, Adam persuaded his father to bring him back sacks full of tapes whenever he was on pilot duty in Singapore. Then he would make copies and sell them to other students to fund the purchase of cigarettes and alcohol. “By the time Adam was fourteen or fifteen, he had the most enormous library of cassettes,” says Leslie. “He was absolutely riveted by rock music really from as soon as he and I could get our hands on it.”
Leslie had started playing guitar when he was around twelve, and spent hour after hour practicing in the music room to stave off the boredom of boarding school. Adam occasionally joined him on a secondhand acoustic guitar, and even took a few classical guitar lessons at the school. Eventually, Leslie sold him on the idea of picking up a bass guitar, saying that he thought it would be “quite good craic to make some noise together.” It was then that Adam formed a cunning plan and presented it to his parents: buy me a bass and my grades will improve. His parents took the bait and handed him fifty pounds to obtain his weapon of choice. “I remember we went off down to McCullough Piggot’s, which is a well-known music store in Dublin, but decided they were far too expensive,” recalls Leslie. “We ended up in a tiny little guitar shop to the left of Dame Street where we spied a brown Ibanez bass copy and that’s the one he got. Then we just messed about. I didn’t really teach him. Adam was a typical rock-and-roll bass player right from when he started in that he wasn’t that much interested about playing it. What he was interested in was having a good time, and that’s what he did!”
Indeed. Adam grew his hair, wore hippie clothes, and skipped classes. He was regularly put in detention.
Soon the two friends roped in a young drummer called Paul Newenham and started fleshing out a rock musical Leslie had begun to write. “I suppose loosely speaking we were a band, the three of us together,” says Leslie. “We rehearsed together in a place called the Concrete Sock, which was an old pig house in the farmyard that was attached to the school beyond the science block. That was our first attempt at playing with other people.”
But, alas, the trio’s bid to become the heirs to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical throne was cut short in the summer of 1976 when St. Columba’s asked Adam to leave due to his awful grades and taste for the absurd. The mood in the Clayton household was one of anger and shame. Not wanting to stick around for it, Adam agreed to visit Pakistan and Afghanistan for a couple of months with another St. Columba’s castoff, George Petherbridge, whose father, John, was the Australian ambassador there. It was during this period that Adam discovered two other abiding fascinations: pretty women and drugs. “That summer was a wild and mind-expanding time, two months of sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll that determined that whatever I would do in future, it had to be creative,” he told The Observer in 2011. “There was a lot of incense, patchouli oil, and smoking pipes with big lumps of black stuff in them, all the things you associate with the seventies and the hippie trail. I bought an afghan coat, heard Bob Marley for the first time and was drawn to the freedom in his music.”
Upon his return, Adam, now sporting an Afro hairdo and the aforementioned tinted glasses and afghan coat, was sent to Mount Temple, where he prepared himself for an uncertain future. Yet again, he found school life intolerably dull and would do anything to alleviate the boredom. The more eccentric and antiestablishment, the better. He took to wearing a yellow hard hat and kilt as he strolled through the school corridors, drank coffee from a flask during lessons, and hung out with the dope smokers at lunchtime. Yet again, detention became like a second home to him.
Larry was two years behind Adam, but couldn’t help but notice him. Everybody noticed Adam. Talking music in the schoolyard, Larry was impressed with his apparent rock-and-roll knowledge and invited him to swing by his house that Saturday and audition for his new band. Adam agreed, and soon was joined by Dave and Richard Evans.
* * *
David Howell Evans was born on August 8, 1961, in Barking, Essex, in East London, and was of Welsh parentage; his father, Garvin, and mother, Gwenda, both hailing from Llanelli, an old industrial town on the south coast of West Wales. His brother, Richard, was two years older than him. Dave’s parents had moved to Malahide when he was twelve months old, and Garvin’s employer, the electronics giant Plessey, offered the engineer the chance to run their new plant in Dublin. Dave’s sister, Gillian, was born there a couple of years later. In his junior years, Dave attended St. Andrew’s National School, where he briefly met Adam before the young maverick was wheeled off to prep school. He was a quiet, studious child, but equipped with a sly sense of humor. He claimed, years later, that being Protestant and Welsh-English in origin in a predominantly Catholic country made him feel like “a bit of a freak,” and he spent much of his time indoors with his brother reading books and listening to music.
In fact, there was always music playing in the Evans household in some shape or form when Dave was growing up. Garvin had founded the Dublin Welsh Male Voice Choir in 1966 and played a bit of piano, while Gwenda, herself a member of the Malahide Musical Society and a veteran of numerous Welsh church choirs, often sang hymns to her three children before bedtime. It was Gwenda who first introduced Dave to the musical instrument that would become his calling card, when she gave him a toy Spanish guitar for his ninth birthday. Dave liked the shiny look of it and he and Richard spent many an hour fighting over it. Then, at the age of eleven, Dave vowed to follow in his father’s footsteps by studying the piano, but called it quits two years later out of frustration. “I always had a good ear,” he later told Hot Press. “I never used to read the music. I’d just figure it out. But that was no good because the idea was to read the dots and I could never get that together. It was like teaching arithmetic to somebody who already had a calculator.”
Upon his arrival at Mount Temple, Dave found the clash of cultures tough going and retreated further into his shell, burying his head in textbooks and hiding out in the school library between classes. From the age of fourteen, he started to take a more serious interest in the guitar, fueled by his discovery of the Horslips (whom he later lost his concert virginity to in a darkened ballroom in Skerries), Rory Gallagher (his second concert experience), and Patti Smith’s proto-punk opus Horses. When his mother bought him an old acoustic guitar at a local jumble sale for one pound, he began to practice on it religiously. His big brother taught him a few basic chords and he later joined a guitar class at school. Richard, an electronics enthusiast prone to performing wild experiments in the family garden shed, also attempted to build the two of them an electric guitar from scratch following a step-by-step guide in Everyday Electronics magazine. The result was essentially a crude yellow V-shaped plank of wood with strings, but for once, Dave had no trouble being heard. When his genial music teacher Albert Bradshaw suggested that he reply to Larry’s ad, Dave agreed that it seemed like the next logical step, and he invited Richard along for the ride.
Last to arrive at the audition was Paul Hewson, a charismatic fireball with a God-shaped hole.
* * *
Paul David Hewson came kicking and screaming into this world on May 10, 1960, at the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. He was the second child of Bob and Iris (their firstborn, Norman, arrived seven years earlier) and was raised at the semi-detached 10 Cedarwood Road, Glasnevin, sandwiched between Finglas and Ballymun on the north side of the city. Bob was a postal worker, a solid middle-class occupation at that time, while Iris was a stay-at-home mother. On the surface, they were a typical Irish middle-class couple; however, he was a Roman Catholic and she a Protestant, a rare and frequently forbidden arrangement in the highly sectarian Ireland. “My father was very cool about it, he was very evolved,” Paul was to recall many years later. “He got a lot of flak and criticism for marrying a Protestant woman. He used to drive us to church [St. Canice’s Church of Ireland on Church Street in Finglas] on a Sunday with my mother, drop us off, and then go to Mass [at St. Canice’s Roman Catholic Church on Main Street].”
Bob was something else, all right; he was a tough, no-nonsense Dubliner who listened to opera music and conducted the stereo with Iris’s knitting needles. The big regret in his life was that he hadn’t learned the piano when he was younger, and yet he never encouraged either of his children to be musical or to pursue their own dreams. In fact, quite the opposite was true. “To dream is to be disappointed,” he told them. It would be inviting to think that Paul’s impulse to think big developed here—an act of rebellion, if you will.
Paul was by nature restless and unpredictable, the kind of kid who was impossible to tie down. He could be charming, thoughtful, and full of laughter, but there was also a lot of aggression and violence in his makeup. On his first day of school at the Protestant-run Glasnevin National School, aged four, he saw a boy bite the ear of his friend James Mahon and responded in kind by taking the culprit’s head and banging it off an iron railing until a teacher intervened. Another time, after a row at home, his father caught him placing a banana skin in the hallway and quietly sniggering to himself. “People used to—and family still sort of—put up the cross whenever I come in,” he later joked to Rolling Stone. “They used to call me the Antichrist.”
That same year, Paul befriended Derek Rowen, who lived across the road from him at 5 Cedarwood Road with his father Robert and nine siblings. Paul and Derek literally did everything together, whether it was taking turns on the swing in Paul’s back garden, exploring the surrounding fields, or painting in the evenings under the watchful eye of Bob Hewson, himself a willing slave to the canvas. “You’re good,” Bob would say to Derek. “You’ve got talent.” But he never said the same to his own son. “He used to think there was a future for [Derek], but never for me,” Paul would later lament. “That was always the way—same with music, same with anything.”
Derek was brought up Plymouth Brethren, with his father, a strict disciplinarian, forcing his children to attend Brethren Sunday school and midweek meetings held at the Merrion Hall in the city center. Paul sometimes tagged along and was both fascinated and frightened by the various Old Testament fundamentalists that spoke constantly of the Scriptures and warned the youngsters about the fires of hell. Between this and attending St. Canice’s Church of Ireland every week with his mother, Paul developed a strong foundation of Christian faith from which to build upon.
Around the age of seven, Paul became enamored with the world of television and developed a taste for the theatrical. He would reenact scenes from his favorite shows—Batman, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, and, later, Hawaii Five-O—in his living room and the schoolyard. Anything to get attention. One day, he acquired a Batman costume and vowed to rid Glasnevin’s streets of crime. However, the big boys made fun of him and pulled the mask over his eyes so that he couldn’t see where he was going. He never donned the iconic cape and cowl again. Paul was often living in a world of his own, lost in the power of storytelling. Even back then, he seemed to understand the value and importance of legend. Years later, he would tell the world that he grew up in the heart of Ballymun, which was one of Dublin’s most deprived areas, a concrete jungle full of haggard junkies and dealers, as well as feral children riding bareback on ponies and horses. “Bono says that he’s from Ballymun because there’s more cred, but actually he’s from Glasnevin/Finglas,” says Dave Robinson, former president of Island Records. “He’s very good, he’s changed a lot of the little historical facts to suit the U2 story, and that’s the sign of a great promotion man.”
Paul’s interest in music was piqued by seeing Tom Jones perform on a Saturday-night variety show in 1969. The gold-chained, big-voiced Welshman was thrusting his hips and sweating like an animal, causing the middle-aged housewives in the studio to scream and go weak at the knees. It was almost pornographic. “I’m thinking, what is this? Because this is changing the temperature of the room,” Paul later told Rolling Stone. Then, in 1971, he watched the Scottish pop group Middle of the Road mime along to their UK chart hit “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” on Top of the Pops. This also made an impression on him. “I thought, Wow! This is what pop music is all about. You just sing like that and you get paid for it.” The first record Paul bought was John Lennon’s idealistic utopian carol “Happy Xmas (War is Over),” the second Alice Cooper’s “Hello Hooray,” a pop star’s confession that he needs his audience as much as they need him. Soon he would pinch records from his brother’s private collection, including David Bowie, Kenny Rogers, Rory Gallagher, Led Zeppelin, and The Beatles.
However, music was yet to become a dominant force in his life. Around the age of twelve, he became obsessed with the game of chess after reading a book about its grand masters. “I found I was being pressured into organizing my thoughts and I wanted to be able to do that because I have a very competitive instinct,” he recalled in NME. “I was too erratic as a persona and so I found a game like chess suited me because I was able to put everything from my mind and work with something abstract.” He later claimed that he went on to compete in major international tournaments, although his father said this was an exaggeration—he merely beat the chairman of his local chess club one time.
Paul remained an erratic fantasist. He’d wake up one day and want to be a politician, the next a traveling salesman like his beloved uncle Jack. On one particular occasion, he wanted to be a thespian and ran away from home, only to return the same day when he found out there were no drama schools in the area. His headstrong and impetuous manner resulted in his dismissal from St. Patrick’s Cathedral Choir School (where, incidentally, he studied campanology and assisted the elders in ringing the church bells, summoning the believers to their place of worship) when he was caught throwing dog excrement at his Spanish teacher in a nearby park in 1972, and he was off-loaded to Mount Temple.
There, Paul quickly established a reputation as an unabashed extrovert with a powerfully charged battery of energy and an insatiable curiosity for just about anyone or anything. He was always on the hunt for a good conversation, a willing audience, and he appeared to know everyone at the school by first name. He especially enjoyed the company of the opposite sex and acquired a group of female admirers known simply as “Paul’s girls,” led by meek bookworm Maeve O’Regan. In his second year, he went on the charm offensive to woo Alison Stewart, who was in the year below. The daughter of a small electrical business owner, Ali was the quintessential girl next door: smart, sweet, pretty, with short dark hair, brown eyes, skin as white and smooth as cream, and a soft, round figure. She was compulsively clad in a gingham dress and Wellington boots. Paul was truly smitten. “He worked very hard at being the heartthrob,” Ali would recall in the Evening Standard. “He came up to me within the first day and asked, did I know where his class should be going? It was just an excuse to talk to me, and I thought, What an eejit. I remember that on the fourth day at school, I saw him walking across the courtyard and it was, bing. That is the guy for me.”
However, Paul’s world came crashing down on September 10, 1974, when his mother died of a brain hemorrhage after collapsing at her father’s funeral. She was in her midforties. Norman Hewson later told The Sunday Independent: “She was on life support for three days, but there was nothing they could do about the brain hemorrhage, and the machine had to be turned off. It was tough for all of us, but hardest on my father.” With three alpha males struggling to come to terms with their loss, it was nigh impossible to maintain the same level of standards in the household. Paul and Norman were constantly at each other’s throats—especially when it came to carrying out their chores. “I was a bully,” Norman admitted. “I gave him a hard time.”
Paul wasn’t particularly close to either of his parents, but in a strange way this only made it harder for him to let go of Iris. He told Rolling Stone: “When it all went wrong—when my mother died—I felt a real resentment, because I actually had never got a chance to feel that unconditional love a mother has for a child. There was a feeling of that house pulled down on top of me, because after the death of my mother that house was no longer a home—it was just a house.”
Paul’s mental anguish also manifested itself at school. He was yelling insults, throwing chairs across the classroom, and turning over tables before storming out. One time, he even pinned a teacher up against a wall. Eventually, he was sent to the school’s guidance counselor, Jack Heaslip, who nursed him through the darkest stages of the bereavement process. Paul began to question God’s judgment and motives, and in 1976, he joined Mount Temple’s Christian Union, a group of pupils who held Bible studies in a classroom during lunch hour. Sophie Shirley, the school’s young religious teacher and a born-again Christian, presided over the meetings in an unofficial capacity. The eccentric Shirley played an important role in defining Paul and the other members’ relationship with God. She portrayed Jesus as a kind of spiritually enlightened and morally robust hippie-cum-rock-superstar and showed them the moralistic film The Cross and the Switchblade, in which the lives of a pastor and a gang member are transformed by the power of God. She personally reassured Paul that He loved him and would never stop loving him, that His intentions were true and everything in the universe happens for a reason. “God’s fingerprints are everywhere,” she said. All he needed to do was look around and listen.
This was a monumental time for Paul, as it was also the year that he and Ali officially became an item (although they briefly broke up after six weeks, when Ali promised her best friend Jackie Stewart that she’d get him out of her system) and when he was exposed to the British rock band The Who on his brother’s reel-to-reel tape recorder. The confessional lyrics of Bob Dylan and John Lennon had already struck a chord with the tortured teenager, but it was the dramatic power chords and rage of The Who’s guitarist Pete Townshend that set his imagination on fire. It was a visceral and magical sound, where everything and anything seemed possible. Like being a lead guitarist. Consequently, on the advice of his closest friend at Mount Temple, Reggie Manuel, Paul went along to Larry’s house to try out for the group. The fact that he could barely tune his brother’s old acoustic guitar, let alone play it, was neither here nor there.
* * *
And so it was, on Saturday, September 25, 1976, that a group of disparate teenagers crammed into Larry’s kitchen at 60 Rosemount Avenue on the north side of Dublin with dreams of becoming a rock-and-roll band. The entire group consisted of Larry on his toy drum kit, David and Richard taking turns on their acoustic and homemade electric guitars, Adam on his brown Ibanez bass copy which he had plugged into a battered purple Marshall amp, and Paul on his brother’s acoustic guitar, as well as two other Mount Temple pupils, Peter Martin and Ivan McCormick, whose involvement was always going to be short-lived (Martin was Larry’s friend and hoped to be the manager. McCormick, meanwhile, was a spotty thirteen-year-old who was invited to the audition solely because he owned a rather jazzy-looking Fender Stratocaster copy). Much of the meeting was spent tuning up their respective instruments and discussing their favorite music: The Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, Thin Lizzy, T. Rex, etc. Something to emulate, even outshine. Then the evening concluded with a shambolic jam session in which the teenagers attempted to claw their way through The Stones’ “Brown Sugar” and “Satisfaction.” Soon they had a band name: Feedback. “That was really the name we gave ourselves because that was the predominant sound of our rehearsal, this squealing sound of feedback as we all tried to plug into the same amp,” Dave was to recall. “We never made it to the end of a song. We’d always get about a minute and a half in and just the sheer strain would be too much.”
Rehearsals continued in Mr. McKenzie’s music room at Mount Temple on Wednesdays, which was a half day with optional activities in the afternoon, and Adam’s grandmother’s house on weekends. The adhesive that held Feedback together was their passion for music and a shared sense of humor and identity inextricably wrapped up with the larger appeal of being in a gang. But for the timid Larry, his days as leader of the pack were numbered pretty much from the get-go. Paul was an alpha male, and what he lacked in musical talent, he more than compensated for with his charisma, enthusiasm, and bravado. Abandoning his own acoustic guitar, he exhibited an almost shamanistic ability to conjure something resembling a melodic sound from the other youngsters’ instruments. “He [Paul] was larger than life and the absolute ideal man to front the band, which I think is something that Adam recognized from literally the minute he met him,” says John Leslie, who observed many of the rehearsals. Within weeks, Paul had dropped the idea of being a guitarist altogether and appointed himself the lead singer of the band. The fact that he couldn’t sing was again irrelevant.
During practice it was clear that Dave was streets ahead of everybody else in terms of musicianship. Relieving the younger McCormick of his beloved Fender Stratocaster copy, Dave would dazzle the others with an array of Rory Gallagher guitar solos he had perfected over the years, and thus positioned himself to be the rational choice for lead guitarist. Richard, for his part, resisted various hints that he was a fifth wheel and declared himself the rhythm guitarist. Larry’s status was never in doubt; he was responsible for bringing the teenagers together and could just about keep a beat. Adam, on the other hand, only pretended he could play bass. He had a persuasive “been there, done that” vibe all his own as he nonchalantly smoked his way through a packet of cigarettes and used buzzwords like gig, fret, and action. This justified his place in the final lineup.
The same, however, could not be said of McCormick and Martin, and after just six weeks, both were pushed out the door. McCormick’s departure was particularly unceremonious. Adam called him at home one evening and told him that the band had landed a pub gig. He explained to him that he was too young to get into the venue and hoped there would be no hard feelings between them. McCormick was heartbroken and cried his eyes out. It was only later that he realized that his now-former bandmates were also too young for such a gig. He’d been well and truly shafted.
In truth, Feedback’s live debut came at a talent contest held in Mount Temple’s gymnasium on the last day of autumn term. Virtually all of the students in the school were in attendance, chatting among themselves between acts and eagerly awaiting the final bell. Feedback (minus brainiac Richard, who was at university) were the penultimate act and walked nervously onto the makeshift stage composed of classroom desks thrust together. As legend would have it, when Dave struck the first chord of Peter Frampton’s “Show Me the Way,” the young audience went wild and almost blew the gymnasium roof off. But that is all it is: legend concocted by the band and perpetrated by their Irish media disciples. In reality, Feedback’s two-song set (which also included a cover of the Bay City Rollers’ “Bye Bye Baby”) was loud, sloppy, and barely recognizable. Most of the pupils either looked on in bemusement or covered their ears. “I just wanted it to end,” laughs ex-pupil Janice Bearman. “There was another group that played which I preferred.”
Nevertheless, Paul in particular devoured the few crumbs of applause friends felt duty-bound to toss their way, the ecstasy of acceptance and being the center of attention temporarily filling the emotional void left by the loss of his mother and his experiences with his emotionally distant father. He believed God had answered his prayers in the form of the band.
Copyright © 2014 by John Jobling
Table of Contents
Introduction ix
1 Into the Heart 1
2 Street Mission 19
3 Fortune Favors the Bold 39
4 Boy Meets Man 60
5 A Kind of Religion 75
6 The Battle Cry 92
7 The Professor and His Students 113
8 The Rising Flame 131
9 The Two Americas 143
10 The Ground Beneath Their Feet 167
11 Standing on the Shoulders of Giants 192
12 Achtung, Berlin! 209
13 Under an Atomic Sky 223
14 Staring into the Flash 241
15 Billion-Dollar Dreams 259
16 The Goal Is Soul? 278
17 Love and Money or Else 296
18 The Ecstasy of Gold 313
19 The Wrong Compromise 330
Bibliography 349
Acknowledgments 355
Index 357