Authors: John Waters
From the outset,
Hot Press
had several writers who immediately stepped into our expanding consciousnesses, alongside people like Mick Farren, Ian MacDonald, Simon Frith and Charles Shaar Murray. There was the editor, Niall Stokes, his brother Dermot, Liam Mackey and, the since deceased genius, Bill Graham.
Hot Press
hit the floor dancing to a different backbeat, seeming to comprehend that an obsession with interesting noises went beyond the requirements of entertainment or diversion, touching on the vital pulses and impulses of the human state. In the same way that Irish artists like Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy and Horslips were making as much a statement by being what they were as by what their music said or did not say,
Hot Press
carried a message by simply turning up in the newsagent every two weeks. The
Hot Press
slogan resonated not just with the musical tastes of the young in those turbulent days of late-twentieth-century Ireland, but with the deeper longings of those who could hear, in the dizzying throb of the new noise, the echo of their own heartbeats.
Among a number of seminal early
Hot Press
pieces, there was one by Niall Stokes, the paper’s editor, about Graham Parker and the Rumour, three-quarters of which was an attack on the Catholic Church. This sounds lame and predictable today, in a culture in which the church is being attacked from all sides, but then it was genuinely liberating, making a precise connection between the oppression inflicted by the institution and the balm of the music we bought the paper to read about. At the time, the question of freedom seemed relatively simple: it was to be torn from the grasp of the greybeards who had blighted Irish life with their misanthropy and empty traditionalism.
Given the way the dice were loaded in the Ireland into which
Hot Press
was launched in that summer of 1977, it was reasonable to expect that it would last perhaps a month or two before going to the wall and into the record books as a plucky but foolhardy attempt to buck the conservative drift of a culture set up to bolster all that was grey and dried-out. It is an extraordinary tribute to the tenacity of Niall Stokes, his wife Mairin and a handful of other key individuals that
Hot Press
has survived now into its fourth decade, and continues to thrive in extremely parlous times. In that period,
Hot Press
has boxed well above its weight, contributing in no small measure to the radicalising of the culture in accordance with values associated with youth and a particular understanding of freedom.
But the problem with
Hot Press
is that, having contributed to the transformation of Ireland in a certain direction, it has, in common with most other implements of change and progress in modern-day Ireland, tended to follow the logic of its revolution long after its battles had all been won.
Ireland had changed out of all recognition, more or less in the way demanded by the informal movement of which
Hot Press
was a part. From the culture of a generation ago, which ignored its young, Ireland has transformed itself into a culture that lionizes everything to do with youth. Countless radio stations play pop and rock around the clock, and the coverage of rock’n’roll in the national newspapers has become indistinguishable from that of
Hot Press
. The culture has flipped over, and the meaning of the revolution has inverted itself without anyone noticing.
At the back of these drifts is a failure to recognize that social change can never be the final word, that human happiness depends on deeper callings that are not answerable to ideology or fashion. In the old days, it was a little daring to write the word ‘fuck’. Now, it has become a matter of complete indifference to virtually everyone. There was a time when talk about homosexuality was shocking; now it is merely boring. Once, a campaign to legalize cannabis might have seemed a push for freedom, but nowadays half the TDs in the Dáil boast snickeringly about their exploits with the Bob Hope.
And yet, this revolution has not delivered the happiness it seemed to promise. One of the as yet unspoken discoveries of those who were young in Ireland through the past half-century is that freedom amounts to something other than the blind pursuit of the diktat of instinct. People are freer, in a certain sense, and yet, in other respects appear more put-upon, less hopeful, than they were. The culmination of the years of striving for freedom, in the drama of the Celtic Tiger, opened up a new set of questions about freedom and revolution, but almost nobody seemed to want to look at these. Instead, those who led the charge sought to pretend that the objectives of their youthful burst for freedom remained unachieved. Rather than looking around at the wreckage of the revolution, which now littered the arena, they climbed daily atop the same old barricades and shouted down the laws and diktats of patriarchs who had died several decades before.
Thus, the instruments of Ireland’s countercultural revolution gradually came to reveal themselves as preoccupied with a narrow version of freedom.
Hot Press
, like many instruments of cultural liberation, is today crippled by a shallow neurosis developed in response to the exigencies of a particular moment of conception, resulting in an often embarrassing datedness in its obsessions with sex, political correctness and socialist politics. The reason, of course, is that, in the beginning, defiance against the precise nature of actually existing oppressions made these the obvious battlefields. But things have moved on and nowadays there is nothing revolutionary about confronting Catholic puritanism or so-called conservatism.
Perhaps this state of affairs, in as far as it relates to
Hot Press
, can be ascribed to a single event: the sudden death, in 1996, of Bill Graham. After that,
Hot Press
seemed not so much to lose its way as run on the spot, as though frightened of something. Thus, in spite of his admirable achievement in keeping
Hot Press
afloat through bad times, good times and then some times that were even worse than before, Niall Stokes must answer the charge that, in keeping Ireland safe for rock’n’roll, he contributed to the cultural sclerosis that besets Ireland at the dawning of the third millennium.
But Bill must also be indicted for dying when he did.
Bill was the prince of the Irish counterculture that emerged in the wake of the Lemass years. He had a deep knowledge of virtually every form of popular and roots music. He lived and breathed the music and its history, mystery and meaning. In the din of a club, as a new band shambled through a clumsy set, Graham would stand at the back and shout in your ear about why they sounded as they did, and what they needed to do to make the world listen. He was generous, not merely in his assessments, but in giving his own passion. When he stumbled on something, he wanted everyone to know about it, believing the world to deserve an occasional break from bad taste. It is often said that Bill ‘discovered’ U2. This is untrue. Bill created U2, through his enthusiasm for them. He gave them back a reflection of their own possibilities and they only looked back that once.
Unlike that of most music writers in Ireland, Bill’s interest was not confined to music, but extended to embrace all the things the music touched. He was the first Irish writer to write about the connection between Irish political culture and Irish rock’n’roll. He heard a noise from a stage and could immediately intuit its trajectory, past and future, through the culture that begat it. Bill, who once memorably described the Soviet Union as being like ‘an entire continent run by the GAA’, was capable of expounding at length on the influence of Czechoslovakian trick-cycling on the policies of Fianna Fáil. He was a philosopher, a psychologist and a political scientist, who transcended ideologies and reached out again and again into the zeitgeist for words to describe the hidden meanings of the screams that emerged from the mouths of the blessed and the broken. And Bill was never ‘cool’ – he could write as happily and as lucidly about Philomena Begley as the Velvet Underground. He knew that rock’n’roll is not just about fashion and diversion, but that it offers a soundtrack for the journey home. He wanted us to understand what rock’n’roll was capable of saying to us about ourselves, where we were, which was Ireland with all its warts and wonders. He was an artist who wrote about music.
He ought to have looked after himself better. He ought to have drunk less and eaten better food. He ought to have worked out, maybe taken up jogging. Had Bill survived into the Tiger years, it is hard to see that things would have been allowed to get so stupid-ass. Like Padraig Pearse, Bill had a map of the future, a map with all the routes, not just the obvious ones. He knew music and he knew, too, that music is prophecy, and nobody could read rock’n’roll’s raucous rune-tunes the way Bill could read them.
Rarely in Irish culture has a gift been so sorely missed. We needed him to keep making the connections that might have helped us onwards past the first milestones of freedom to a richer, wiser place.