Banana Republic: Memories of a Suburban Irish Childhood

By Joseph O'Connor

IN THE SUMMER OF 1977 I was thirteen years old and pretty miserable with my life.  My parents' marriage unhappy for a long time had finally disintegrated in acrimonious circumstances.    

We lived in Glenageary, a middle-class housing estate in southside Dublin. There was a large stain caused by damp on the gable wall of our house, and if you glanced at it in a certain light, it looked exactly like the map of Ireland. I always thought this meant something important, but I could never figure out what. In the summer of 1977, with only myself and my mother living there now, the house seemed unutterably empty, haunted by lost expectations.    

I got a job that July, on a local building site. One of the labourers was a cadaverous, scrawny young fella, and it turned out that he would play a significant role in my musical education. Hubert was about nineteen, from a nearby working-class suburb which he sometimes referred to as Sallyfuckinnoggin. His language was flamboyantly atrocious, and so was his skin.

There were two things that made Huberts life complete. The first was pornography. The second was punk rock. He loved it. He absolutely adored punk rock, and he would talk to me about it for hours at a time. He told me about an establishment in town called Morans Hotel, in the basement of which there were punk rock concerts almost every night. It was all about being 'against society', he said; it was about 'smashing the system'. Hubert himself was 'against society, he assured me fervently. There were legions of people in the basement of Moran's Hotel every night of the week who were also 'against society', and they had stuck safety pins through their ears, cheeks and noses to prove it. 

The bands who played in Moran's Hotel were against society too, all of them. But the worst of the lot, Hubert confided, the mankiest shower of louse-ridden, no-good, low-down bowsies ever to plug in a Marshall, ram up the volume and hammer out a three-chord trick, was a year-old band called The Boomtown Rats. They were 'fuckin' scum,' Hubert would say, and he would smile in a fondly contented way when he said this, as though attaining the state of fuckin' scumhood was a development in which a person would take considerable pride.  'They don't even fuckin' wash themselves, he would beam diabolically, although how he was in a position to know such a thing remained unrevealed (perhaps mercifully).

That August afternoon, having lied to my mother about my destination - I think I said I was going to a boy-scouts' day out - I went to the concert with Hubert and his beloved, Mona. Mona was a healthy-looking girl, with the arms of a docker and a bewildering vocabulary of That August afternoon, having lied to my mother about my destination - I think I said I was going to a boy-scouts' day out - I went to the concert with Hubert and his beloved, Mona. Mona was blasphemies and curse words. All her visible garments were made of leather, a fact I found arresting in the extreme, mainly because, apart from my shoes, the only leather garment I myself possessed at the time was a scapular. It was a very hot day and the stadium was packed. Thin Lizzy and Fairport Convention were headlining the concert, but I did not care about that, mainly because Hubert had discreetly advised that these bands were not sufficiently 'against society'.  So, like my mentor and Mona, I only cared about The Boomtown Rats. When their arrival was announced over the PA system, I thought Hubert was going to ascend body and soul into heaven, Virgin Mary-wise, so screechingly enthusiastic did he become. 

I had never experienced anything quite like the phenomenal excitement as the band sloped onto the stage, picked up their instruments and began to play. I felt as though a lightning storm was flickering through my nerve endings. It's something you never really forget, the first time you hear the scream of an electric guitar, the thud of a bass, or the clash of a real hi-hat cymbal. The lead singer, Bob Geldof, looked like an emaciated and drooling Beelzebub, as he leapt and tottered around the boards, spitting these extraordinary lyrics into his microphone. The keyboard player, Johnny 'Fingers' Moylett, wore pyjamas on stage, an act of the most unspeakable and unprecedented sartorial anarchy. The bassist, Pete Briquette, lurched up and down, leering dementedly, as though suffering from a particularly unpleasant strain of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. And if guitarists Gerry Cott and Gary Roberts, and drummer Simon Crowe, looked relatively normal, you still would have had not inconsiderable reservations about the prospect of any one of them babysitting your sister. 

They played their music frantic and fast, incredibly LOUD, with a curious mixture of passion, commitment and utter disdain for the audience. I loved them. I had never heard a noise like this in my life. I was nailed to the ground by it. When they thrashed into their first single 'Looking After Number One', I swear to you, every single hair on my body stood up.

Now, this was what I called music. I staggered home that night with my head pounding and my heart reeling.  My mother was waiting, of course, and she spent several centuries yelling at me, which made my headache even worse.  But I felt empowered by the music, I really did.  It sounds so naive now, I know, but that's the way it was. I felt I had witnessed a kind of revelation. Suddenly it seemed that life was actually pretty straightforward. All you had to do, if someone was getting on your case, was tell them to fuck away off, that you didn't want to be like them, that you wanted to he like YOU! I tried it out on my mother and she didn't exactly see things my way, to put it mildly. But it was the summer of 1977, you see. It all seemed very simple. 

Back in school in September, I told my friends all about The Boomtown Rats. These pals and myself felt we had something in common, in some odd way. I think we felt we had experienced more interesting pain than other people had, although, of course, being teenage boys, we didn't talk much about such things.  It turned out that my mate Conor had heard about The Boomtown Rats himself.  He had read an article about them in Hot Press magazine, in which it was revealed that Bob Geldof had been to our school. 

If I had been interested in the Rats before, my enthusiasm rocketed through the roof now. These leprous anti-establishment scumbags had actually attended my school. Blackrock College, this priest-run joint long famous for churning out obedient wageslaves had somehow produced The Boomtown Rats! How had this possibly happened?  There was hope for us all.  

One evening that autumn, Bob Geldof and the Rats were booked to appear on 'The Late Late Show'.  Once again, I lied to my mother, so that I could get out of the house and go up to my friend's place to watch this. 

The atmosphere in my friend's living room was electric, as we uncapped the shandy bottles, passed around the solitary spit-soaked cigarette, and waited for the messiah to descend. Bob shambled onto the screen like an evil, bedraggled wino and sneered his way through the interview in a furtive southside drawl.  He detested many things about Ireland, he said.  He loathed the Catholic Church; he hated the priests who had taught him in Blackrock College, he disliked his father.  He had only gotten into rock and roll in order to get drunk and get laid.  Almost everything he said was greeted with horrified gasps and massed tongue-clickings from the audience, and wild cheers from my friends and myself.  When the interview was over, the rest of the band slouched on, looking very much as though they had just woken up in a skip, and thundered into 'Mary of the Fourth Form', a feverish song about the seduction of a schoolteacher by a female student.  The Late Late Show had witnessed many exciting events throughout its long and colourful history, but never a youth playing the piano in his pyjamas. As the number climaxed in a clamour of drums and wailing feedback, the studio audience was absolutely stunned.

'Well done, Bob,' smiled the nervous host.  Geldof turned around, scowling, wiping the saliva from his lips with the back of his hand.  'Well, if you liked it so much,' he snapped, 'go and buy the record.' Fuck!  The guy was giving cheek to the great Gay Byrne now!  Well, this was something new and dangerous.  This was practically revolution. 

In Ireland, in the late 1970s, this was absolutely astounding talk.  This was the decade when one million people almost a third of the entire population of the state - had attended a mass said by the Pope in Dublin's Phoenix Park. This was many years before Mary Robinson, or the divorce debate, or the legalisation of gay rights in Ireland. You could not legally buy a condom in Ireland in the 1970s, never mind go on the television and talk so blithely about getting drunk and getting laid and hating priests and disliking your father. And although I liked my own father a lot, Geldof's pungent cocktail of motormouth arrogance, unwise trousers and disrespect for authority really did appeal to me.  In time, I couldn't get enough of it. 

Soon after The Late Late Show, my friend Conor got a copy of The Boomtown Rats' first record and he taped it for me. It wasn't really punk at all, in fact; it was souped-up rhythm and blues played with a lot of aggression. But there were some fantastic songs on it.  'Never Bite the Hand That Feeds' and 'Neon Heart', for instance. The music was raw, brimming with verve and a crisp visceral energy.  But there were other things I admired about it.  The songs were full of characters, and I liked that.  It made the songs seem like they were about real people. And there was a surprising facility for language; a gutsy pared-down approach to storytelling.

But on The Boomtown Rats' first record there was also a slow piano-based ballad called 'I Can Make It If You Can'.  It was a tender song of vulnerability and longing. I kept the tape beside my bed, and I would put on 'I Can Make It If You Can' every morning as soon as I woke up. I felt that this was the voice of a survivor, a guy who knew about pain. I felt he was singing to me, and to people like me, and that there was some kind of integrity to what he was doing. I played the tape until it wore out and couldn't be played any more.  And there were many mornings around that time - I don't mind saying it - when that song helped me to get out of bed. I can make it if you can. 

I was so full of fear in those days that I would often feel it clenched up inside me, like a fist, literally; like a physical thing.  My life sometimes felt meaningless. It was hard to see a future of any kind. It is a terrible thing to feel so hopeless when you're so young, but I did for a while, and I have to say it honestly. No teacher, no priest, ever lifted a finger to help my family. There were three things, and three things only, which kept me going throughout those years.  One was the love of my father, which was constantly and unselfishly given. The second was the support of my brother and sisters and friends.  And the third was Bob Geldof. 

I would listen to him singing 'I Can Make It If You Can', and I would believe it. I simply felt that I could make it if Bob Geldof could.  I know I was utterly naive to think that, but I'm grateful now for the naivety of youth. I associated myself with Bob Geldof.  He became a paradigm of survival, toughness and courage. He would never ever get ground down by anything, I felt, and thus, if I remembered that, neither would I. As time went on, I began to think more about Bob Geldof and his band. I derived an active personal pleasure from anything the Rats got up to. I bought everything they released - 'She's So Modern', 'Like Clockwork', then the magnificent album A Tonic for the Troops.  I really did think their success had something to do with me.  I felt I was involved in it, inextricably linked to it, bound up with it in ways that nobody else could understand. I felt they were singing to me and to the people I knew. I thought of them as my friends, even though I had never met them.   

In November 1978, anyway, The Boomtown Rats became the first Irish group of the era to get to the top of the British charts. On 'Top of the Pops' that week, as he jabbered the brilliant lyric of 'Rat Trap' into his mike, Geldof ripped up a poster of Olivia Newton John and John Travolta, whose twee single 'Summer Nights' the Rats had just ousted from the number one slot.  In school, my friends and I were speechless with pride. Conor cut a photograph of Geldof out of the Hot Press and we stuck it up in the Hall of Fame, where the framed images of all the famous past pupils of the school had been hung. We stuck Bob up there, among the bishops and diplomats and politicians who had founded the state in which we lived. His gawky, grubby face fitted exactly over a photograph of former President Eamon de Valera, and this fact had the kind of exotically cheap symbolism that appeals very greatly to fourteen year-olds.  It felt like a victory of sorts at the time, and if I am honest, it still does. 

I listened to The Boomtown Rats all the time. I would listen to them for hours on end, and let them send me into a kind of comforting trance.  'I Don't Like Mondays', 'Diamond Smiles', I knew the words of their songs off by heart. I would recite them, over and over again in my head, over and over. There were many nights when I went to sleep with the words of 'I Don't Like Mondays' rattling around in my mind, and many mornings when I woke up still silently reciting them, like a prayer. 

In December 1979, The Boomtown Rats came back to Ireland.  They were supposed to play a big concert, but had been denied permission by the authorities at the last minute. The Boomtown Rats were seen as dangerous in Ireland, such was the murderous innocence of the times. The band took the authorities to court, and lost.  That Christmas, my parents were back in court too. I went along myself, but the judge told me to leave. When I came out of the courtroom and into the huge circular hall of the Four Courts building in Dublin, I was upset. But an odd thing happened, then. Fachtna O'Ceallaigh, The Boomtown Rats' young manager, was standing across the hall with his lawyers He was just kind of standing there with his hands in his pockets, looking cool as fuck. He might have been wearing sunglasses, although I'm not sure. Certainly, he was one of the few people present not wearing a wig. But I was very glad to see him. I felt it was a good omen.  It made me think of Bob. 

Christmas was dreadful that year. Terrible. The atmosphere in the house was one of pure fear.  Early in the new year the Rats released - unleashed would be a better word - the single 'Banana Republic', which deftly summed up their feelings about Ireland.  By now, they were feelings that coincided greatly with my own.

Banana Republic, septic isle,
Suffer in the screaming sea,
It sounds like dying, dying, dying
Everywhere I go now
And everywhere I see,
The black and blue uniforms,
Police and priests

It was a devastating attack on a society whose achievements in posturing cant and hypocrisy had so far outstripped its achievements in morality. It was delivered with lacerating power, at a time when it needed to be so delivered.  Nobody but Geldof would have had the guts to do it. I don't know how anyone else felt about it at the time, and I don't care. I admired Geldof for calling it the way he saw it.  I still do admire him for that.   

But it was to be the last big single for The Boomtown Rats.  Not long after 'Banana Republic', things started to wane for them. There were rumours of drug-taking in and around the band, I don't really know if they were true or not. One way or the other, I think the Rats simply began to lose their way as the tastes of the record-buying public started to change. But I still chart where I was in those days, and what I was doing, by remembering their singles. 'Elephant's Graveyard' was January 1981, the month after my parents' last court case.  'House on Fire was August 1981, the month my mother had to go into hospital.  

There were a brief couple of days when we stayed in the house by ourselves and went pretty wild, my siblings and I. We stayed up till dawn, we painted the words FUCK THE POPE and BOOMTOWN RATS across the front doors of the garage. We were drunk with freedom. We practically trashed the house. We had the Rats on loud, almost all the time. That's what I remember now, the intoxicating light-headedness of fear and freedom, the thud of the bass coming up through the floorboards, and the nasal roar of Geldof's voice. When you're in trouble, it is odd where you find consolation. 

One Sunday afternoon, not long after my mother came back, my two sisters ran away and returned to my fathers home, where they were treated with the love, affection and respect they deserved.  They never came back to Glenageary again. 

'Never in a Million Years' was released in November 1981, just after I started college.  That month, things got too much for me at home and I moved out too.  One day, when I went to see my brother, who was still living with my mother, he had brought along the copy of Tonic for the Troops which Id left in the house on the day I had finally run away. That tore me to pieces, I don't know why. 

'House of Fire' was released in February 1982, when I was going out with a girl called Grace Porter.  'Charmed Lives' was June the same year, just after we broke up.  'Nothing Happened Today' came out in August 1982, just after I finished my first-year exams. Almost everything that happened to me in those days, I am able to mark with a song by The Boomtown Rats.   

The single 'Drag Me Down' came out in May 1984. I remember this, because I bought it one cold afternoon in Dun Laoghaire before catching the bus up to visit my mother.  We had a violent argument and parted on bad terms.  It was the last time I would ever see her. She died nine months later in a car crash. I ran away to Nicaragua to be by myself. I took a tape of the Rats' last album, In the Long Grass that included the beautiful single of that year Dave.

And then, in May 1986, amid rumours that the band was about to call it a day for good, they came back to Dublin to play at a charity event, featuring Van Morrison, U2, the Pogues, all the great and the good of the Irish rock world. The Rats played a stormer. They blew everyone away and received a tumultuous reception from the audience. After the main set, Geldof strolled up to the microphone for an encore. He seemed taken aback by the warmth of the crowd's affection.  At first - unusually - he didn't seem to know what to say.  He appeared a little lost as his eyes ranged over the crowd.  'Well, it's been a great ten years,' he muttered, then.  'So, rest in peace.' 

The thundering drum roll began.  The opening riff pounded out.  The familiar chords, D, A, G, E. The last song The Boomtown Rats ever played in public was their first song, Geldof's hymn to snot-nosed anarchy and adolescent attitude, 'Looking After Number One'.

Don't give me love thy neighbour,

Don't give me charity,

Don't give me peace and love from your good lord above

I'M GONNA BE LIKE ME!! 

It was at once a powerful homecoming, a stylishly ironic act of self-deprecation and a poignant farewell.  And in some odd but profound sense, it seemed like a farewell to me too, a final goodbye to a time in my life that was over now. As I watched the show on television that day, I knew that I would leave Ireland again soon, that I wouldnt come back for a long time, that I would try to move on.

Gradually I lost touch with my old schoolfriends. I moved flat five or six times in London, and somewhere along the way I left behind all my old Boomtown Rats records. But I remember their force and power still, the healing power of their righteous indignation.  And I suppose that sometimes the words don't seem quite as electrifying now as they did in Dalymount Park on a summer day when I was thirteen years old and breathless with discovery.  But that doesn't bother me much.  Because great pop music sometimes heals us in ways that we don't understand, or in ways that seem unbelievably trite or trivial when we look back. Great pop music is about the people who listen to it, and the circumstances in which they do so, and not really in the end about the people who make it.  Maybe that's what's so great about it. I don't know. 

Last year, I was on a television programme in Ireland to talk a novel of mine, and Bob Geldof was one of the guests. He was absolutely great.  He had the air of a survivor.  He seemed like a man who had come through. 

In the green room after the show we chatted for a while about nothing at all, his eyes flitting restlessly around the room as he talked, his fingers running through his straggly hair. When the time came to go, we shook hands and he got his stuff together and sloped from the room, a battered guitar case under his arm.  It was like watching a part of your past walk out the door. 

I never got the chance to tell him what was on my mind that night.  There were too many people around, and, anyway, I suppose I hadn't really found the words I was looking for.  But when I think about it now, what I wanted to say was actually very simple.  It was this: when I was a scared kid, who felt that there was little point to life, his music and his example were second only to the love of my father and my stepmother and my brother and sisters in keeping me going through all the terror and misery.  It helped me survive.  It helped me sit out the dark days, and wait for the better times to come. They did come. They often do. But before they did, Bob was there. His music embodied a worldview with which I felt I had some connection.  It opened my eyes to things that had never occurred to me before.  Like the greatest pop music, it was fun, unpredictable, alive, iconoclastic, intelligent, witty, danceable, tender when it wanted to be, tough as nails when it had to be.  It just made me feel better.  It healed.  And it made me think I could make it, if he could. A foolish and adolescent belief, if ever there was one.  But in a world where I had to grow up too fast, at least Bob Geldof and his band allowed me to be foolish and adolescent just once in a while.  I'm grateful indeed, for that little, or that much. I'm very grateful for that. 

From The Irish Male at Home and Abroad (New Island Books/Minerva)