However, he wouldn’t let her call an ambulance. The last thing he wanted when he was in so much pain was to be poked, prodded and asked questions.

By Sunday, he was no better.

“I was in rag order. I kept throwing up with the pain.”

He finally allowed Gabriella to call an ambulance, which took him to St Vincent’s hospital.

“I was completely hysterical when he left,” says Gabriella, who couldn’t go with him because of Covid restrictions.

In St Vincent’s he had a CT scan, then was put in a wheelchair and given a bed.

“I thought, ‘if the CT scan was clear, they wouldn’t be treating me like this’. So, I kind of knew.”

Then a doctor told him: “There’s blood all over your brain.” He had an aneurysm that had bled into his brain. Guggi asked what his chances were of survival.

“Not great,” came the reply.

Another ambulance took him to Beaumont Hospital the next morning.

“I was talking to a few of my mates on the way,” he says, meaning his childhood pals, Bono and Gavin Friday.

In Beaumont the next morning, Guggi was asked his name, date of birth and the month. Then he was asked it again and again.

“The same questions, over and over, it never stopped.”

At 1pm, he was brought to the theatre, where four surgeons were waiting to operate on him.

One asked him again: “Guggi, just give me the date and the month please.”

“It’s January 1996,” he answered.

The operating theatre fell silent.

“Then I said: ‘Only messing!’ The four of them cracked up laughing.”

The surgeons told him: “We are going to go in through your groin, up through your heart to your brain. We are going to send a camera up there and have a look to see if you are suitable to have the procedure done this way.”

They drew him a diagram and explained that he had a subarachnoid haemorrhage, the aneurysm had ruptured, and bled into his brain. They were going to block up the hole with titanium pins. “We could have to go in through your skull.”

Luckily, Guggi was one of the 85pc who could be operated on via his vascular system, without cutting through his scalp.

“Then I breathed in the purest, cleanest air that I had ever inhaled. I woke up as I was being wheeled back to the ward,” he says.

“The operation took four-and-a-half hours. It was a bleed on my brain, but it then bled a bit more while they were operating.”

What kept Guggi calm throughout the operation wasn’t the morphine. It was his faith in God.

“There was a far greater force at work. There was no doubt about that. That took over the situation. I wasn’t frightened. It was my Creator. There is absolutely no doubt about it. I mean, why wasn’t I afraid? I didn’t have an ounce of fear, genuinely.”

He spent two weeks in recovery in St Vincent’s. On May 3, Gabriella and his eldest son Moses brought him home.

Guggi was born Derek Rowen in the Rotunda Hospital on May 13, 1959. He can remember drawing a pirate ship with a rolled-up rope when he was four.

That was the age at which he met his neighbour at 10 Cedarwood Road in Ballymun, Paul Hewson.

Another friend, Fionan Hanvey, lived at No 140, at the end of the road.

At 13, he renamed Paul “Bono Vox” and Fionan “Gavin Friday”, while Paul christened him “Guggi”.

When he was 17, he moved out with his younger brother Trevor – by then re-named Strongman – to a squat on New Cabra Road. As they left the house, their father told them how tough it was going to be out in the big bad world.

“I’m still waiting for it to get tough,” Guggi says. “It’s not that it can’t be tough, but it’s not nearly as tough as he made it for us. He’s a difficult person. He was a lot tougher than he needed to be. He was unreasonable. He had a bad temper.”

His father’s mood wasn’t improved when, in 1977, Guggi, Strongman and Gavin formed The Virgin Prunes (with The Edge’s brother, Dik) and started to wear skirts and high heels.

“He did not like that. He kind of blamed Gavin. He blamed me as well for being so stupid, being led astray. Gav would call for me wearing a pair of culottes. Gav loved rubbing it in. My dad didn’t get that at all.”

Robert Rowen was a strict fundamentalist Christian who sent Guggi and his siblings to Christian Brethren meetings in Merrion Hall from an early age.

“It was the gospels and teachings of Christ without all the frills and altars and the costumes and the candles,” he explains. “They just wanted the message, uninterrupted.”

Did his father prefer him to be with Bono because his father was Church of Ireland, rather than Gavin, whose father was Catholic?

“There was certainly a touch of that with my dad, which I had no understanding of at all. I was always, ‘you take people as you find them’. Actually, Bono’s dad was a Catholic and his mum was Church of Ireland. He was brought up Church of Ireland. So, I don’t know. My dad had all sorts of fixed ideas, I guess.”

In any event, Guggi was fired from the Virgin Prunes by Gavin in 1984.

He opened a signwriting shop that also sold fruit and vegetables because he wanted to make some money. He also had other ambitions.

“I wanted to paint full-time,” he says. 

The following year, in 1985, he was arrested by the police in Finglas. He had been driving at 120mph with no tax or insurance.

When he appeared in court, he told the judge he realised the severity of the offence and had immediately gone out and had the motorbike taxed and insured.

The judge seemed pleased and as if he was about to let him go, when he was informed that the young man in front of him had 14 such previous offences.

Guggi was sentenced to six months; he appealed and received a shorter sentence.

The week before he went to court, however, Guggi said hello to one of the heroin addicts who used to buy lemons (to help break down the heroin) from him.

Guggi kept saying hello, until he noticed that the guy had his hand in the bag of an old lady at a city centre bus stop.

The woman realised she was being robbed and the police were called.

“You’re f**king dead, pal,” the addict said, thinking Guggi was somehow responsible for his arrest.

Fearing for his life, Guggi took an iron bar into his shop the next day. The man never showed up.

On his first day in Mountjoy Prison, after being strip-searched, it was suggested by a warden he get his hair cut. He refused, saying: “This is who I am.”

Another time Guggi was in the yard when he recognised the lemon guy walking towards him with two men. The first one looked “absolutely mad”. The second one had a scar all the way across his face.

“The animal came out in me,” remembers Guggi. He walked up to the aggrieved prisoner, put his own forehead against his forehead and said: ‘If you come near me, I will f**king kill you.’”

Neither the addict nor his two friends came near the young artist again.

Two weeks later Guggi was transferred to Loughan House Prison in Co Cavan.

He recalls: “The next day, in the yard, everyone stood to the side for this prisoner who had chopped a young fella’s head off with the side of a shovel because he caught him robbing one of his horses.”

The man beckoned Guggi over and asked him to smell his aftershave. Then he asked him if he wanted to buy some. When he replied that he wasn’t in the market for fragrance, the man pulled Guggi by his hair, kissed him and said: “If I ever see you in the showers, you’re f**ked.”

He didn’t know whether it was a threat or a joke. But Guggi was glad the following week when one of his friends paid a visit.

“People were coming up and saying: ‘He is a f**king ringer for Bono!’ I said: ‘There’s a reason why he looks so much like Bono. It is Bono.’

“They simply did not believe that such a person could be in such a place for any reason. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, he could do well now as a lookalike. He could be signing books. He could make a living out of that.’

“I eventually gave up and said, ‘He is very like him, isn’t he?’”

The U2 singer was fresh from playing to a TV audience of one billion at Live Aid and had come to see him with Gavin Friday.

“No one searched the B man. Then they slipped me the half bottle of whiskey.

“I was really risking a lot by walking back to the cell with that whiskey under my jacket. I remember going past the second in command, the assistant governor, nodding to him and then to my room and stashing the bottle behind the sink.

“That night I cracked it open with my cellmate from Scotland.”

In the prison, Guggi came into his own artistically. He showed the art teacher how to sign write and made and sold jewellery boxes.

“I had everyone wanting me to make these boxes for them. It gave me real power. I was getting double portions from the lads in the kitchen and cigarettes. I wouldn’t say I was running the place but there was no one who was running it more than me.”

When he got out of prison he continued to paint. His first exhibition was in Dublin’s Hendriks Gallery in 1988. It was a group show with the whiskey smugglers themselves: Bono showed photographs he had taken in Ethiopia and Gavin showed some of his oils on canvas.

Guggi’s work featured landscapes and skyscapes. He says now: “I knew it wasn’t what I was about.”

In 1989 the Kerlin Gallery gave him an opportunity to show one of his paintings in a group show. “They said drop over two and we’ll pick one. I dropped over four and hoped they would pick two.”

When he drove up in his van, there was no one at the gallery. He propped the paintings against the wall, and pulled off.

He had just pulled off in the van when the actor Richard Harris and director Jim Sheridan arrived. The pair were working together on the movie The Field.

Harris wanted to buy Sheridan a painting. The director chose one of Guggi’s.

“So, he walked into the Kerlin and bought one for Jim and the other three for himself. That was the biggest pay day I had ever had in my life up to then. I think they were a grand each.”

Guggi rented a studio space in Dublin’s city centre. It was here that he met German artist Sibylle Ungers, who had a studio in the same space. They had a joint exhibition in the Kerlin in 1990 and in Ghent in Belgium the year after.

The following year, the couple got married. In 2003, Sibylle told me: “I sometimes think I met a boy and I now have a man. Guggi will often say I’m the sanest person he’s ever met.

“Because Guggi and I became a unit he was able to maybe leave his father – as much as he loves him – behind him a little bit. Not to forget, but to look beyond his father, to put that time behind him, and heal himself to an extent, because he did, in my opinion, have a hard childhood.”

 

Their marriage ended in 2017. “I moved out that year,” he says. The break-up came after nearly 30 years and four children together. He is father to Moses (33) by a previous relationship, and has four sons, Eliah, Caleb, Noah and Gideon, ranging in age from 28 to 19, with Sibylle.

His exhibition in 2019 was titled, Broken.

Does he feel the stress of the break-up played any part in his aneurysm ?

“I had a few pretty hard years. Not hard in the way that some people have hard years. I have always been a family man, in the sense that I am the second eldest of 10 children.

“When I was a small child myself, I was helping to feed the baby and taking the baby for long walks in the pram. I was surrounded by children. Then I got a few years off and I started having my own.

”I suppose going from being a member of a big family to having my own big family to just living in a little apartment by myself and not seeing my four youngest children, which I didn’t. I was under all sorts of pressure in those ways. And I suppose I felt it. And then building up to this,” he says, meaning the aneurysm.

“But you know during that time [the end of the marriage], I had wonderful times too. It wasn’t all pressure and concern and depression or anything like that.

“In many ways, my friends are also my family. I have very close friends who stood by my side all the way through it, and I have so much to be thankful for. Look, the old cliché, ‘if it doesn’t kill you, it will make you stronger’ holds... I think I am a different person to the person that I was five years ago.”

Why did he and Sibylle split up?

“I would say we grew apart, to put it mildly. I think I am a different person. I think I’m wiser in some ways because I have experienced stuff [now] that a lot of people experience – health issues, break-ups. But I suppose one led into the other; and just as I was feeling that ‘now I am back on my feet’, it happened,” he says, referring to the brain aneurysm.

“So, the timing was interesting . I am so aware of the fact that people go through much harder things. People lose children. So, I would never dare complain about anything. I have so much to be grateful for. When I think of my dream as a child in primary school to become an artist...”

Internationally acclaimed, the fella from Ballymun has exhibited from Los Angeles to Tokyo to London, Berlin, Reykjavik and the South of France. His latest exhibition, Time, opened two days ago at the Galerie 75Faubourg in Paris and runs until July 30.

The show was inspired by his obsession with ordinary objects – vessels of one kind or another, often discarded or unwanted – an obsession that began as a child in his granny’s house in Fairview.

“I just remember really hating a milk jug made of tin she had on her windowsill. It was no more complicated than that.

“It struck me as like someone with an enormous nose that appears to start at the base of their forehead, and I could really see an awkward-looking person in this jug. And over many years, I came to love that shape.

“Then I started collecting these jugs,” he says. “And then anything of awkward or simple or cylindrical shape I loved, and I collected. Some because they struck me as a beautiful shape; others because they struck me as ugly, but for that reason, they then struck me as being beautiful.

“I collected them with an idea to photograph them. Then I had an idea of setting up a very simple shelf system and putting some of these objects on it. Then when we got this house [in Killiney], which was built in the 1860s, I started looking at the surfaces. There were four or five layers of paint or wallpaper, and you pull it and see all the different layers, colours, surfaces, fragments...”

There is time in the walls?

“Absolutely. It is what time does to things... There is a real beauty that can be missed.”  

He and Gabriella chat to me as they eat their lunch at a paint-splattered wooden table at their house. Guggi finishes his ham sandwich and starts on some Tayto crisps.

“He eats like a 17-year-old,” the Italian photographer says. “I compare him to a 17-year-old too with his energy, humour and absolute love of life. He is more flexible than me.”

For his part, he says of Gabriella: “She has been by my side and making everything work for some of the most difficult years of my life.”

The recent brush with mortality doesn’t seem to have slowed the 62-year-old down. I mention the motorbike parked outside in the yard.

“I tried to bump start it the other day,” he says. “But it was out of petrol.” No doubt he was hoping to take it out for a spin around the narrow, hairpin bends of Killiney.

How does he feel now?

“I feel great. The blood lying on your brain can cause all types of different problems. I am not out of the woods because the blood is sitting there and it has nowhere to go.

“But my chances of it happening again statistically are the same as yours and Gabriella’s.”

Did the experience strengthen his belief in God?

“I don’t think it reinforced my faith, but I think it brought it home that I could have been taken. I want to up the ante a little bit regarding my life and my work. I’ll see to what extent it changes me,” he says.

“I do have a very practical faith. He is always with me in that sense. I do have a strong Christian faith – strong in the sense that I don’t tend to get rocked, but not ‘good’ in the sense that I’m a good Christian, because I am not a good Christian. I am a really bad one and I know so many great ones and I am not one of them. But you are either in or you’re out.”

 

‘Time’ by Guggi runs at Galerie 75Faubourg (in participation with the Galerie Enrico Navarra) in Paris until July 30