Dirty old town lit up by magical nights at SFX

Eugene O'Brien

Seeing The Pogues in full flight and a host of 1980s trailblazers reminds us of the power of live music — and what Covid is denying today’s youngsters

Shane MacGowan

March 28 2021 02:30 AM

It is September 1985, and the curtains billow on the SFX hall stage. Roadies scurry on and off. The anticipation is mounting to fever pitch. Then we hear a banjo pluck and a drum roll. The curtains part and Shane stands at the mike and spits out the first few lines: "McCormack and Richard Tauber are singing by the bed. There's a glass of punch below your feet and an angel at your head. There's devils on each side of you with bottles in their hands. You need one more drop of poison and you'll dream of foreign lands."

Then - one, two, three, four - the tempo explodes…. Pan- de- mon- ium! I am in a sea of sweaty young people of all types, from punks with mohawks to culchies in jumpers, the giant waves of the crowd moving us around the venue. All high on the frenetic, punkish 'céilí on speed' that's coming off the stage.

We are swept from the front of the stage over to stage right, then to the back of the place. About one thousand of us. Some people were drunk, but there was no drink on sale inside. It was before the days of ecstasy and the like. It was tribal, primal. Like being part of a football crowd when there were terraces and mayhem and anarchy. No bouncers or health and safety.

You jumped and pogoed and sang and shook your fists and clapped and roared and stamped your feet. Steam lifted off us and we'd be grateful for the odd ballad to slow things down. Just to get your breath. The Pogues in their prime. The Rum, Sodomy & the Lash tour.

I was ready to give it a lash as well. I was about to start college the next week. I was ready to come out of my shell. The Pogues made me believe that anything was possible. That there was oceans of craic and drunken poetry and experience out there. You just had to go and grab it by the bollocks and live it.

The legendary music venue St Francis Xavier Hall - known as the SFX - stood on Sherrard Street, just down from Mountjoy Square. It was demolished in 2006 to make way for 41 apartments.

The venue had been built in 1957 and once housed the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra, but that wasn't the kind of music that made it famous. Every influential band of the 1980s gigged there: Echo and the Bunnymen, The Smiths, REM, The Clash, Depeche Mode, The Pretenders, Nick Cave and New Order. I saw Simple Minds, Billy Bragg and the Cocteau Twins in the place and, of course, U2, who were touring their third studio album, War.

The U2 gig was my first SFX experience in December of 1982. Myself and my two mates, Kenneth and Ferghal, aged 15, were allowed to get the bus to Dublin, go to the gig and stay over at Kenneth's brother's student flat in Drumcondra.

We felt fierce grown up. We weren't just reading about gigs in NME, we were actually going to one. Ferghal was music mad and we would pass Clash albums back and forth during benediction in the church, but this was a new religion. I remember Ferghal wrote a piece for the Offaly Topic about the U2 gig where he described it as a religious experience and asked the question: "Why can't mass be like this?"

In second year in school Ferghal was asked by the priest what he wanted to do and he said: "Be in a band, Father." The slagging from the class descended like a tsunami and Ferghal was advised to get real and get sense. Ferghal, thankfully, never got sense.

He formed a band called Whipping Boy, who would one day go on to play the SFX and have a brilliant, much acclaimed existence in the 1990s. But he wouldn't have dared dream that the night at U2, with Bono climbing the speakers and asking for the tricolour.

We floated home to the dingy student flat afterwards. On cloud nine. Almost deaf. Our ears ringing with Sunday Bloody Sunday. We ignored the sink, which looked like something out of Withnail and I, and stayed up and talked into the night.

In college I experienced live music in another way as I was the one performing. Lead singer. Now when I say 'music' I mean a 'piss-taking, acting the maggot' punk band called Shellfish Orgasms. The only one who took it seriously was our drummer, who could kind of drum, but all the rest of the membership - which constantly changed from gig to gig - had no iota how to actually play instruments.

We appeared at battle-of-the-bands type events and had songs like Double Entry and Elvis is Dead. We once played an actual proper kind of gig in a community hall somewhere in west Dublin and were kind of advised to leg it afterwards as quickly as we could.

We got stoned later and I took a girl to a late show of Mad Max 2 in the Stella Rathmines and really felt I was now living the life that Shane and the Pogues had set me dreaming about.

Unlike me back then, my 22-year-old nephew Troy is a proper musician. He attended rock school and he sings and writes songs and plays guitar and is a brilliant drummer. He has gigged in Fibbers and the Underground but not for ages now.

I feel for him and all of his age. It looks like another summer of no fun, music-free, festival-free. It's no craic being young at the minute. Indeed it's no craic being any age.

None of us has ever yearned for that 'up close and personal' tribal coming together as much in our whole lives. Music, especially live music, inspires us to dream. It moves something deep within us and we are all the poorer without it.

I feel for all the musicians making do with Zoom and live Facebook broadcasts. Let's trust that we are heading into the last lap of this thing and that soon they will be standing on a stage and belting it out.

Just like they used to do in the SFX all those years ago when a young man from Offaly came up to be moved, shaken and stirred.