Speed Demon

I did this piece for a Dublin magazine just before Christmas. Bill lives in my neighbourhood in Berlin. You’d like him if you met him.

 

 

Speed Demon

Drug smuggling, border hopping and sailing the seven seas with the inventor of really quick badminton.

 

This is a story about Bill Bandes, the man who invented speedminton. What, you’ve never heard of speedminton before? Well, soon as I clear that up, I’ll continue. See speedminton is a marriage of racket sports. But just like Princess Diana’s old situation, there are three in this marriage too. You take a basic squash racket, modify the shuttlecock from badminton and steal tennis’s style of playing and you’ve got speedminton. Speedminton is the hipster summer sport. It can be played with a cigarette on your lip and a cold beer in your hand. Bill, the inventor and mascot-in-chief, wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, so lets get back to his story.

 

Bill Bandes was born in Eastern Germany in a small town famous for having the biggest cement factory in all Europe. Nothing else. Big personalities don’t last long in small towns, but it was Bill’s mother, not Bill, who set him travelling for the first time. She had just been divorced. She was broke. She said to Bill, “We have two options: we turn the gas on or we escape to the West.” Luckily for you, me and Bill they went with option two and took an illegal train ride into West Berlin and freedom. It was 1960 in West Germany, and Bill and his mother were sent from refugee camp to refugee camp before they were given a home. They were Germans all right, just not the right kind.

 

Some youngsters get used to not having homes. They find their security in other deeper, hidden places instead of between front and back gardens. So for Bill it made perfect sense to leave his mother when he was fifteen and go make a life for himself at sea. He hitchhiked to Hamburg and applied for work on the first ship he saw.

 

‘It was the golden age of sea travel,’ says Bill. ‘Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Morocco.’ He lists off the countries like old friends. Bill got work as a steward meaning his job was to serve the captain and to wash dishes. By the time he’d turned sixteen he could speak Spanish, had broken a few Latin American hearts and was building the mental muscle that would get him through the rough times ahead.

 

Now a thing about Bill. He talks slowly. His words come out with the lazy speed of bowling balls returning from the gutter because Bill’s a pothead. He canes anything from nothing to ten joints a day.

What this means is that time undergoes an alteration when you’re in Bill’s company. Minutes stretch into hours, afternoon slides into evening, and you find yourself cancelling further appointments until it’s just you, Bill and the moonlight. But the stories grip.

 

‘I got fired on my second tour at sea,’ says Bill. He was sent to the kitchen to wash the crew’s dishes. Bill only washed up for the captain, remember? He did it but told the cook in charge that he didn’t like to be spoken to like a skivvy. He got a slap across the face and left for his cabin. His first officer followed him in and said that if he didn’t get down to the kitchen fast he’d hit him so hard he’d go head first through the cabin window. “I offered him my  cheek,” Bill says, “and he fired me on the spot. We were near the Azores in the middle of the trip, and I had to pay the rest of the way from my wages.”

 

He arrived home owing more than he made, but on the upshot, Bill now had a motto. “Head first through the window, that’s my way,” he says.

 

 

Bill wasn’t just hard-necked, he was cute too. One time his ship docked in Russia. It was winter and minus forty degrees. The Russians saw Bill’s good German boots , scarf and coat and paid big money for them. Bill then did a little currency exchange with the rest of his crew and doubled his Rubles into Deutschmarks.

 

But truth be told, apart from the odd up, Bill’s economic fortunes have always been down. He’s fifty-eight now and in spite of being the inventor of a very successful product, he’s no tycoon and he’s got no living legacy.

 

‘Sure, maybe I would have married,’ Bill says, ‘But I’ve always been broke and it’s hard for a woman to understand a man obsessed with shuttlecocks.’

The shuttlecock obsession began late for Bill. But he’d have to fight the law on a couple of occasions before that came about.

 

Bill came home to Germany and started living in Bavaria. Problem is, Bill was no typical Bavarian; he was a hippie with the take-no-shit attitude of a sailor and the drug appetite of a Rastafarian.

 

“People like me were hunted like criminals,” says Bill. “I was arrested for possession and given a ten month suspended sentence.”

 

A suspended sentence is not a get out of jail card, it’s more like a swinging axe hanging over your head, and if you so much as fuck up the once, it’ll chop you down. Bill took off to Copenhagen and the hippie commune of Christiania. When his parole officer eventually caught up with him, he said he’d have to come back and do the time for breaking probation. Authority has never had much luck with Bill. He’s a friendly character. Charming as a crooner, with the gift of turning simple speech into magic spells. But you wouldn’t want to tell him what to do. And so it followed that instead of coming back to Bavaria to serve his time, Bill moved to Berlin and went underground until the police finally caught him three years later. He was thrown in a Berlin prison. He took it with the usual stoic attitude that he’d taken every other setback with.

 

“When you’ve already crossed two oceans at the age of sixteen, what can hurt you?” he says, “I was formed at sea. It makes you strong. Many popular people have visited jail. I was only in there for drugs. For green leaves. I’ve never felt like a criminal.”

 

But that’s how he was seen, and it didn’t help that his drug of choice had recently upgraded to heroin. He got caught again. This time it looked like he’d go down for a decent stretch. He fled to Venezuela and stayed in South America for ten years. In that time he quit heroin. The ten years ground the last hard German corners from his character.

 

“I feel more like a Latino than a German,” says Bill. “I walk slowly. I don’t rush. I like to say manana to everything.”

 

And that’s the god’s honest truth. Bill always schedules meetings for late in the afternoon and can hang out shooting the breeze like he was raised under a Sombrero in a rain-parched plaza.

 

When Bill began to miss home he flew back to Germany and slipped into Berlin again. This time he’d really have to go underground and wait for his wanted order to go stale. He found a girl and lived with her for seven years. He fell in love but it’s hard to let yourself go when even the slightest bit of police attention could send you back to prison.

 

“If I crossed the street and the green man turned red, I’d freeze in fear,” Bill says.

 

Bill didn’t have much to do in that time apart from fretting and this is where the speedminton part kicks in. Berlin is full of parks. Bill hung out in those parks all day playing racket sports.

 

“We played different,” Bill explains, “We had no rules and we played harder. Shit got broken all the time. Yamazaki, Yamaha, Victor, all the shit kept breaking down.”

 

This is when Bill began work on speedminton. He’d develop a game that could not only withstand his rough treatment but also continue to work in the wind and in the darkness. Bill began to sketch his ideas and visit sports factories.

 

“I’m no engineer,” he says, “I just love to play. It makes you very happy if you do it the right way.”

 

Speedminton was invented, but first it was called shuttleball.

 

“That was a bad name,” Bill admits but through these early mistakes, the long nights taking scissors to shuttlecocks and the trips to the patent office, speedminton as the hipsters in parks and the surfers on beaches know it today, was born.

 

Each man kills the thing he loves, said an Irishman not a German. Bill sold speedminton and it was, he says, like ‘losing a child’. His business partners took the sport away from him and put him on a small salary that keeps the wolf from the front of the door but doesn’t afford for much comfort behind it.

 

“As an inventor you sacrifice everything,” Bill says, “It’s like monotheism and all my life I wanted to be plural.”

 

The next step for Bill is to get out of Germany. The wandering feet haven’t left him. He plans to hit up his partners for some more money, and travel the world as a tourist playing speedminton on the best beaches in the world.

 

“Waikiki, Peru, Lake Titikaka – the altitude would make the distance much further, can you imagine it?”

 

Who knows if this is going to happen. Speedminton has become a big industry and Bill is growing superfluous to its needs.

 

You still find Bill hanging out in the parks in Berlin handing out signed autographs if you’ll take one. He’ll bend your ear for a moment if you encourage him, and he’ll charm the pants off your girl without any encouragement. There’s some magic in the old sailor yet. It makes you think his fortunes will rise and he’ll come up smelling of roses. Bill always dresses for the beach, and soon as things work out you can bet that’s where you’ll find him. Racket in one hand, cocktail in the other with one eye on the game and the other on the beauties walking by.

 

“Many inventors died unhappy. Many killed themselves because an inventor has to sell everything to make his dream come true. You’re like a spider in your own net and it’s dangerous. Luckily my invention is just a few grammes of plastic. So it won’t kill me.”

 

 

 

 

 

Toilet Reading

This appeared in this month’s Totally Dublin. Freud suggested there were three types of fixation: oral, anal and genital. This story is mostly about the middle one.

A log’s tale / A Toilet Read

Totally Dublin’s first skatalogical guide to Dublin City and its rims.

In Germany, you don’t find books or magazines in the bathrooms. Neither do you find crude etchings of Roman bath times or witty warnings to wipe the seatie, sweetie. Germans go to the Kino, the Bierhalle and the nudist park to be entertained; when they go to the bathroom, they’re only interested in self-discovery.

You see German toilets are built with shelving units, unlike ours which are modelled on deep wells. When a German pushes one out they get to see the fruit of their womb, and all we get’s a plop and a splash as the pee, remarkably, tries to climb back from whence it came.

The Germans know their shit. And because of that you’ve got to say they’re some of the healthiest people in Europe. Not only are they 65 years without a genocide, but they emerged from the last recession debt free and with the keys for half a dozen Greek islands in their pockets.

In light of this revelation maybe Ireland could benefit from some anal gazing? Perhaps there are messages in the mud, smoke on the water, gold in the brown?

In order to verify this, we took a strange ride out to a rare and mostly unpeopled patch of Dublin called East Ringsend, to the capital’s sewage treatment works. If you’ve made it to the bathroom, then it’s made it here.

The complex is remarkable, but it wasn’t always like this.

Sanitation arrived late in Dublin. Remember the Viking Experience on Essex Street? It operated out of a church back in the glory days of Temple Bar, when it was full of squats and crack dens and served as ample fodder for parents who wanted to warn their kids of the consequences of not doing their ekker before Home & Away. The highlight of that tour was the smell. Early Dubliners shat where they ate and made no bones about it. And it wasn’t until the British arrived and taught us shame that we introduced sanitation to Ireland.

And then we put it on a pedestal. Not only is Ireland one of the only countries in Europe to not charge – directly – for water, it also has one of the most sophisticated sewage treatment networks in Christendom. In other capitals, waste travels along rickety Roman basins monitored by rats and pederasts; in Dublin, it’s like the Tube on a rare day when good services are operating on Central, Circle and District lines. Yes, we Irish have daily movements like any other nation but we manage to sweep it under the carpet with alarming speed and efficiency. Maybe an afternoon at the sewage plant would help explain why?

Like dating someone out of your league, the first thing you notice when approaching the plant, is that its shit doesn’t smell. The lack of stink nearly floors you. Last month there was a grand total of one odour complaint recorded. As recent as two years ago they could get as many as 30 in a month, but caps and seals have been rigorously employed to deal with gas leaks.

It’s larger than five football pitches with giant swimming pools that you know only too well are full of leftover Dublin, yet amazingly, even in the belly of the beast, there’s minimal reek. You establish that the air contains a heaviness and a warmness and a vaguely perceptible dampness, but it’s not unpleasant. And in fact, situated as it is, by the sea, you’d go so far as to say it feels positively Mediterranean. Ask the O’Connor family who live in trailers next door. They don’t mind, and they’re not going anywhere fast. The kids have fields full of stones to throw at the cars and Mrs. O’ Connor never runs out long stretches to erect washing lines. It’s a little corner of paradise. And if living beside a sewage plant is the price you pay for peace then so be it. Travellers in Ireland don’t live very long anyway.

Paddy and Ciaran run the show at the sewage plant. Both are engineers. Paddy’s from the old school and Ciaran’s the young buck on the prowl. They’re the classic Donnie Brasco twosome with a little less shine and polish. They’re engineers. Their names are bookended with acronymns. In modern Ireland, a job you wouldn’t even wish on an immigrant, requires a degree.

“Some people might call us shitheads,” says Ciaran, “But they wouldn’t try it to our face.”

Ciaran’s a Dub and he wears it on his sleeve like a gay who’s just moved up from the country. Paddy comes from Dublin, but he’s no Dub.

“It’s a very complex process,” he begins but I interrupt him immediately to ask when’s their heaviest period of the week.

“Well, you’d think Sunday morning after a night on the Guinness, wouldn’t you? But it all evens itself out.”

I had a sit down on Parliament Street this morning, by what time should it be worming its way to you?

“The city’s shaped like a basin,” he says, “It could be here already.”

It’s comforting to know that. A frantic reunion, like when you catch a glimpse of your luggage doing turns on the airport carousel while you’re walking into baggage claims.

Paddy chuckles in the background and offloads most of the answers to Ciaran. It’s a bond reinforced by the strangeness of their work. They’re a good team, and it’s going to be heart breaking at the end of this movie when Paddy shops Ciaran to the police. Maybe it doesn’t have to end up that way?

“It wouldn’t exactly be the first thing you tell a girl on a night out,” says Ciaran and jerks and dives dodging photo opps like they were blossom bullets.

Dublin got serious about sewage back in the 1880s and started to build the plant at Ringsend. Back then the boys would climb right into the pools and scrape the dookie into a tanker that brought raw sewage a few miles off shore then dumped it. And they wonder why, for an island nation, have the Irish such apathy towards swimming in open water. The men grew so immune to the smell that they’d even have their sandwiches on the edge of the pool. Marvelling at the sun flashing rays across the North Side, horsing into a Brennan’s (DANIEL: change accordingly dependant on advertiser’s darkest wishes) batch with their feet dangling in filth below. It was a decent job at a time when there weren’t many. On windy days, of which there were many, residents from as far north as Howth could sometimes catch a whiff of the plant in their back gardens. There are plant-facing windows along the bay that had signs glued to the inside saying ‘never ever open’.

Today, however the plant is almost odourless and clean as a whistle. Solids, the euphemism I probably should have used from the start to keep tender readers onside, reach a 6mm mesh where they are filtered into a settlement tank. Anything that isn’t at least 95% water rises to the top inside the settlement tank. A metallic jaw then scalps the solids and begins sterilizing thus reducing them to methane gas and biological fertilizer. This type of fertilizer is like steroids for crops. It’s so strong that the government allocate it in rations, but perhaps at heart they’re just afraid that if Irish vegetables are fertilized by Irish people, it might encourage widespread cannibalism.

The water which is left, is filtered through twenty-four sequencing reactors, which are stacked six stories high like a car park. Bacteria go to work and chew what’s left into liquid. Then a UV machine performs the coup de grace before your piddle is released into Dublin Bay. But don’t panic. It’s safe to go back into the water. The treated pee actually helps clean Dublin Bay. The colours on those blue flags don’t run.

After an afternoon at the plant, you re-enter the city with a certain spring in your step. The air’s fresher. You no longer feel like you’re using the shower after someone’s taken a dump. The city’s OK. Dublin’s not so bad. It’s had its share of embarrassments and a murky past that comes back to life when Ciaran talks about the unwanted babies they used to find at the plant. They were tiny enough to be flushable. The workers had a graveyard for them. Nowadays, condoms block the pipes. And that’s a great improvement.

We are a nation of shit generators. Be it the conventional sort that comes out our bottom holes, or the more theatrical brand that colours our speech. But if that shit can be turned into something that actually cleans our capital and makes it a better place for our grandchildren, and their children and their robot masters, then maybe the only thing we need to take from those over-achieving, continent-grabbing, Dirty Sanchez-loving Germans, is some more muesli.

Advertising Heroin

This was an interview I did with Johnny Cooper Clarke. First off I tried to get him after a show but it was impossible to get through all the fans giving him smokes and buying him beers. Eventually I got him on the phone, at his house, in the English countryside. He was an absolute gent and I felt like a bit of a cunt for running the piece with that headline, but you got to get them in the door somehow, right?

In school, in Ireland, we get Austin Clarke on our poetry syllabus moaning about heifers and blackbirds in the faraway Irish mists – snooze. In England they get John Cooper Clarke: “The fucking cops are fucking keen to fucking keep it fucking clean. The fucking chief’s a fucking swine who fucking draws a fucking line.” – fucking sweet. He’s experiencing a bit of an upturn in popularity in recent years thanks to endorsements by the Artic Monkeys, so not wanting to miss the ship after it’s left the shore, we figured we’d get ours in too.

What makes for a really good poem?
I don’t spend much time reading poetry I must say, but I like all sorts of stuff so it’s a tough one to pin down

Is there a point when you’re writing a poem where you think, that’s it I’ve nailed it?
Nah, I don’t really ever feel that. I tweak them all the time. I don’t think I’ve ever walked away going that’s it. I don’t work that way I suppose. Also with the show it’s not 100% poetry. It’s just sort of talking with the audience, getting a few gags in

Would you prefer it if your shows had less laughs and the poetry was taken more seriously?
No, I like that. I like it like that.

Do you put much time into your look?
No, not really I’ve been wearing the same kind of thing for years, which is a bit of a tall order these days as people are much bigger now. Buying a jacket off the rail is near impossible if you’re a bit on the slender side

You’re the skinniest man I’ve ever seen on a stage, do you eat much?
Loads. Go figure. I eat a lot.

Where did you first develop an interest in poetry?
At school. Where we all start

Was it not about strange for you to embark on such a fanciful career?
It is kind of fanciful but I’ve got a feeling that everybody in the world has written a poem. It’s the first refuge of the scoundrel.

Have you had many jobs to support your poetry?
How long have you got?

What was the worst one?
The worst one? A building site. Digging foundations for garages. Blimey that was heavy work. I lasted a fortnight. I didn’t really have many muscles but I was able to count each one as they hurt so bad.

How did the Ou Est la Maison De Fromage? collaboration come about with Alan Williams
That was a criminal act. It was a bootleg. I feel terrible about it and wish it didn’t exist. It was a bootleg. I made no money off it and I wish it never existed.

And has he got in touch with you?
No.

It must be nice to have kids a good forty years younger than you turning up at your shows?
Well the Artic Monkeys are always dropping my name, and Kate Nash too. It’s nice when these glamorous artists talk about you. And I did get put on the GCSE syllabus which introduced younger people to me.

How did the Sugar Puffs advert come about?
They left a telegram – I think that’s what we used in those days – saying get in touch. And I thought that sounds lucrative. They were great. They were a lot of fun to make.

You were using a lot of heroin back in those days weren’t you?
Yeah, but I kept it pretty quiet.

Did it not seem strange to be doing a kid’s ad considering?
A little bit, but the subject just doesn’t come up. Everybody’s got to eat.

Was it the hardest thing you’ve ever done, kicking heroin?
It was pretty tough yeah. It were hard.

Do you think you got anything out of that period?
No I think it’s all negative. I can’t think of anything to recommend that road.

So you wouldn’t recommend drugs to aspiring artists?
Whatever makes people good it ain’t drugs. Drugs will never furnish you with any particular talent.

you should check out john’s site and read his poems

After Party

Myself and Brian Coldrick spent a night in Dublin’s busiest A&E. We thought we were like Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman but ended up more Withnail and I. Most of the article is in fact not bullshit, although we never got through the lock in the bicycle to steal it. That was a big fat lie.

A night in accident and emergency

If you ever end up in one of those party situations where you’ve taken something that you were told was just “really good” Valium but was probably an E but might also have been Ketamine and you’re sat on the bathroom floor with all types of sweat coming out of you and then someone, your friend who was a boy scout a million years ago, steps forward like he’s been waiting for this moment since he was born and says, “We have to take him to A&E,” then pick yourself the fuck up off the ground and run as fast as you can, until your legs fall off or your heart explodes, because both of those things are better than spending any amount of time in an A&E under the influence of anything other than simple pain. That’s why we thought it’d be great to go to A&E and drop acid and do a story about it. We’d been talking about it seriously, and drunk at parties, for well over half a year but nothing was cooking. Over the June bank holiday, we finally got our shit together and picked up some cycle courier acid for a Saturday night in St. James A&E.

And then we lost the acid in someone’s coat pocket and decided the only thing to do would be to go in old-school, and that’s how we ended up in Kelly’s of Kilmainham getting drunk at a lock-in. Kelly’s is not the Tram. The Tram is so rough that a pint glass might smash itself over your head of its own accord and hold you down while the ashtrays hop on you. That’s why the Garda Superintendent went in there about three weeks ago and pulled the license of the wall closing the place permanently. The Tram will more than likely be a Centra or a Spar or a meth clinic in its next life. But Kelly’s is a decent bar. Now that’s not saying that you won’t find some contract killer or a coke dealer sat beside you, but at least you can give someone a nod in the jacks without the fear of having your head smashed into the bowl.

We decided to leave; we weren’t kicked out and god knows the lock-in may still be going on, and if Francy is reading this, apologies, we meant to return your lighter but sure you probably thought we were dicks already so what harm. We had a naggon of vodka mixed with half a bottle of flat coke and a full box of Bensons. We had a spring in our step. We were going to the most macabre of after parties. The after party to end all after parties and damn, did we ever feel good.

There’s a rating system for Irish hospitals on this website Irishhealth.ie. Out of forty hospitals Bantry scored top and James’ came thirty second behind some made up places like Cavan and Kerry General Hospital. It’s the busiest A&E in the country. Nearly 46,000 patients came through the twin swing doors in 2006. Wait times are generally nine hours but there are a hundred and one stories floating around about people spending upwards of twenty-four hours in the place. So you’ll be pleased to know that refreshments are provided. There are a grand total of four machines at the back of the waiting room selling chocolate bars, crisps and mixers for your vodka. There’s toilets too, with those killjoy UV lights to hamper you finding a vein if you’re a chronic diabetic, a small TV on a stand, and as chairs go, they’re not quite as good as Cineworld but they beat the motor tax offices.

Now, the first thing you notice about St. James Accident and Emergency at night is the camaraderie. No one wants to be here. If you have any money or sense, you’ll call your local doctor or take a whole lot of solphadene and tough it out till morning, or you won’t hang out in nightclubs in Lucan. That’s why John Paul is here. He’s the first person we meet arriving at the place. John Paul is wearing a combination of Top Shop and bandages. He’s got white gauze wrapped around his head and is naked from the waist up. John Paul looks like Axl Rose.
“I was dancing on my own when this girl broke a glass across me jaw, and then her fella jumped in and started knifing me all over the shop,” he says. John Paul’s covered in blood and he’s even getting it all over our bottle of vodka. He’s walking around like he’s Tupac but looking at the shallow scratches on his chest he looks more like he fell over shaving than someone who’s been knifed. I’m about to ask again what really happened when his mother walks out, and then I’m about to ask her what happened when a taxi pulls in and starts flashing its lights and beeping its horn. And this is when the true spirit of A&E comes out. This is camaraderie. There’s an old codger in the back who’s a patient of the hospital but slipped out to go for a few drinks in whichever bar served him when he walked in with a zimmer frame and pyjamas. Remember in MASH when Hawkeye would be trying it on with some nurse and the captain would be joshing him like the good-natured hard ass he was and then Radar would throw a great big turd into the mix by saying “choppers”? That’s what it was like when the taxi pulled in. We all ran over and helped carry this guy in. he must have been about eighteen stone and couldn’t move his legs by himself. All four of us brought him in, me Brian, Tupac and his mother. They guy stank. We dropped him inside the front door on a wheelchair and there he stayed for about an hour until he got up and fell on his ass and the nurses took him into one of the triage rooms. It was a good ploy, and the homeless guys sat in the front row took note. They’d been sat there since we arrived and no one had come to see them. Then the one with the gamey leg who was reading a John Le Carre book started puking up a whole stream of vomit on the floor. Five minutes later he got taken away by the nurses. The puke starts to run towards our feet but the interesting, no truly phenomenal, thing about A&E is that they pump so much disinfectant and bleaching agents into the place that you can’t smell a thing. The toilets are blocked, there are eight homeless guys who’ve probably pissed themselves around us and I’m wearing no socks so my kicks smell like a McDonald’s bin but still you can’t smell shit. In a thirty by fifty metre room in West Central Dublin they’ve effectively managed to neutralise smell, and all you can do is wonder why they stopped there. Another homeless guy makes a run at the Perspex windows separating the staff from the sick. “My stomach’s sore,” he starts shouting pissed off that his buddies were getting in ahead of him. The nurse is a youngish girl from Northern Ireland. She points at the flashing LCD screen that says ‘wait times are currently from 6-9 hours’ and raises her eyes. The homeless dude calls her a bitch and punches the Perspex. She’s not a bitch but you can understand how pissed off you’d be if someone who can puke on queue gets to see a nurse ahead of you. Out of nowhere, a team of huge guys in high-vis vests swoop into the room and haul the guy out by his feet. It was gripping. There was no descent from the small group in the waiting room. The nurses were our friends. We didn’t want to upset them.

Sat in the back of A&E with your eyes on the door is just like watching a horror movie. You know the second you stop giving it your full attention, is the time the real scary shit hits. It’s just when we’re coming to the end of the vodka and thinking that McGruder’s is probably still open that the Egyptian sailors arrive in with their buddy who’s lost a finger. They’re all laughing apart from the guy who’s lost his finger who is balling his little Egyptian eyes out. They’re prawn fishermen, none of them more than twenty-one. All of them are illegal here in Ireland, and all of them are virgins. “No cheech-cheech,” says Ahmed, “In Ireland lots of cheech-cheech but in Egypt, Muslim, no cheech-cheech. Marry, yes but no marry, no.” The Egyptians smoke like Chinese croupiers. They’re not so worried about their buddy. They’re worried about “cheech-cheech” and the fact that the Prophet Mohammed has stipulated they can’t have none.  They don’t drink any of our vodka but they do smoke the rest of our cigarettes, and with that we decide it’s time to go. We go in to say goodbye to Tupac. He’s getting off with some bird in a canary dress so we leave him be. The homeless boys give us a wave and the Nordy nurse forces a smile from behind the Perspex.

It’s dawn. McGruders isn’t open but we find a bike. It’s too small for one of us and even smaller for the two of us but we have a go anyway. Then we try and climb up to the window of some Polish party in La Rochelle apartments. We’re shimmying up a plastic gutter like having spent the night in A&E we feel like nothing can hurt us. Nothing can, even the drunk drivers can’t touch us as we cycle all over the road, but we don’t make it up the gutter anyway, and instead go back to a house to watch YouTube clips of skangers on buses till morning.

A&E is warm, there’s a TV and a bathroom and a phone, and you can see why a homeless person might hang out there all night. As for the rest of us, those who haven’t been knifed or lost fingers in fishing accidents, there are better places to go to find love, get drunk and wind the workday worries away, so go there instead.

Dee-tachable penis

Sexual conservatism takes one in the jaw

Baby Dee, god bless her harangued soul, may never grant an interview that does not include a line of questions about her gender transformation. And maybe her music will always play first wife to her long hair, lipstick, big hands and tits. That’s a shame. Because, in spite of everything we’ve achieved as an evolved homogenised society; and contrary to the advances of women, the potential emergence of Hilldawg as the most powerful leader of the world; the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, Ladyfests and all that hooey, we’re still just a bunch of school-yard kids getting cheap thrills debating the absence or presence of willies.

“I’d rather not get into that,” says Baby Dee. The sex-op that is, but a biography can make a musician and Baby Dee, aka Pinky Pinky Pinky, ex-tree surgeon, ex-organist, ex lap-dancer and ex-man has a story big enough for her own scene.

“I was kind of a bum, musically, and decided to become musically literate. So I took a class and I don’t know why but I became fascinated by Gregorian Chants. I became really obsessed with that type of music, and that’s what got me sort of singing. But I’d never really thought of myself as a singer.”

It’s Baby Dee’s voice that’ll either suck you in or spit you out. Hard to describe but here goes anyway: think of Fagan from Oliver Twist, Tom Waits, Joanna Newsom, the boys who were thrown out of choir for taking the piss, the low end notes on a tumble dryer, the sound of this symbol: Ω and that other ambiguous New York character, Antony.

“I never really got too far beyond Bach,” she says talking about those classes. And eventually graduated as an organist taking a job in a church in the South Bronx. Then Baby Dee had her Paul on the road to Damascus moment and realised that her vocation lay in being a woman rather than a man. “When I realised I was a tranny I had to do something about it and that was the end of my career in the church.”

‘Jesus got a plan for you. He’s gonna fry your fat ass in hell,’ is the line in Baby Dee’s The Song of God’s Great Plan.
‘What does a hooker know about loving?’ is another line from another song. “I turned a few tricks,” she says, “I had my time, not particularly successful at it. Lucky for me because if I’d been better looking I probably would have gone down the tubes.”

For someone so candid lyrically, Baby Dee is quite shy in real life, and on stage comes across like your nine-year-old niece who’s been rehearsing her party piece in her bedroom for six months but never imagined she’d be called upon to perform. It’s endearing. Crowds love her, as she ambles across small stages in odd, torn socks, from her harp to her keyboard, and then back to her harp again. I guess it’s because she’s gracious. She didn’t get her first band until she was in her fifties, and would probably have never been doing this interview if it hadn’t been for a certain Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy coming along to one of her shows and convincing her to make a record. For someone who previously had only been accepted in the entertainment world in freak shows, riding tricycles and going under the description of a ‘Bilateral Hermaphrodite’, to be treated like an artist must be a whole lot of vindication, and none too soon either. If music has the power to transport then most of what we hear today gets you about as far as an elephant on rusty rollerblades; Baby Dee shoots you out of a cannon into a completely different world.

She’s now 53. She drinks Scotch on the rocks, smokes Old Holburn tobacco that she rolls too loose to stay lit and wears a combination of Dalmatian and leopard print, fleece and hiking boots, with her dyed red hair pulled back tight inside a hood. Her only makeup is a thin line of red lipstick. She’s tall. A good three inches over six foot, with shoulders that look like they could carry grown men out of burning buildings. Baby Dee can handle herself, which is good because she stands out. On the day we meet, in a beer garden of a hotel, packed with tracksuits on £1Ryanair flights from some god-awful place like Hull or Wolverhampton, every head turns and it’s a bit hairy. Baby Dee doesn’t seem to notice and when asked about her role as a famous transsexual replies, “I’m not the spokesperson type,” she says. “I just do my part.”

The King has left the building

The Red Cow Roundabout was built by canny developers who wanted to make an impression on the two great opponents in Irish society. For Dubliners it means you are now leaving the city proper and can break speed limits and laugh at local radio presenters en route to whatever quaint village you’ve chosen to rape and pillage that weekend in Donegal, Mayo or Kerry. For country people it’s a last chance to brief your children on the dangers of heroin cigarettes and cocaine tabs and get yourself mentally prepared for the ‘lock-hards’, the joyriders and the junkies who make up the rest of the population of the city who aren’t originally from the country or Poland. But for one man called Moran it was a place of unison rather than division. He bought a small bar, then built a giant hotel and every year, during the Christmas holidays, his Red Cow complex hosts parties that bring country and city people together to the strains of music, laughter and tears. This is no Camp David and Bush, Blair and Clinton – the Mahatma Ghandis of our generation – haven’t even heard of the spot; this is the Red Cow Hotel and the man in charge of breaking down the barriers and bringing about sea-change is no politician – it’s Dickie ‘spit on me’ Rock.
Dickie Rock has been an entertainer for more than forty years. He made his name with the Miami Showband touring Ireland and England in the sixties and seventies. Dickie Rock is nearly seventy. He still gets nervous before a show. He still believes in giving the audience exactly what they want; he never leaves them waiting or wanting. Dickie Rock is the last great pro.
“I was a Dubliner, a skinny little fucker with attitude and I was told I was too slick for the country. I won them over by my performance and the choice of material.”
Tonight Dickie has a crowd of seven hundred nurses waiting for him. They’ve just had a sit down meal. The Duck a l’Orange was apparently too citric and the Beef and Mixed Veg was a bit dry but the Cherry Trifle and the Lemon Meringues rescued everything. Success. The crowd are happy. They’re from Our Lady’s Hospital. Men and Women. All ages. Sil Fox the comedian is warming them up while Dickie does his exercises in suite 206. No one knows quite what his exercises are. Long-serving manager Jackie Johnson can’t even hazard a guess: “Best to leave him be before he goes on. His routine is his routine.” Mystic indeed but my guess is it’s yoga. Dickie’s dropping from the sun salute into the scorpion and finishing off with the one-legged king pigeon replete with a couple of leg lunges and air-punches.
Sil Fox goes into his last number. It’s something about Budweiser and having sex in a canoe. “They’re both fucking close to water” is the punch line. The crowd give him a great send off but not too many of them go rushing to the foyer to buy his CDs. Either they’ve been too generous with the Lemon Meringue or they’re locked in anticipation of the crooner about to leap on stage. A lot of them, including pretty much everyone in the place under the age of forty-five, are sceptical. In fifteen minutes Dickie will have them on their feet, arms linked, swinging from side to side and when that’s not enough they’ll rush the stage for kisses. Don’t forget now, Dickie Rock is close to seventy – that’s Albert Reynolds and ‘Parky’ country, and they’re ain’t too many young ‘uns travelling there.
Both Kevin Myers and Bob Geldof have come out in criticism of Dickie Rock. Now while Bob Geldof has been dining out on one song for the last thirty years and Kevin Myers has been getting by on a faux-Irish Richard Littlejohn impression for the last couple of decades their criticisms still carry water. In a one and a half hour set Dickie does cover after cover, from Delilah to My Way to Spanish Eyes. He’s no songwriter. In fact Dickie Rock has never written anything more than his biography. He calls himself an entertainer, that’s all. But without him, chances are we’d still be having sex with the lights off in Ireland and the big ‘O’ would still be a reference to Offaly.
You see while the Brits had the Beatles and the Yanks had Elvis to shift them into a sexual revolution, we Irish were still going out to dances where resident bands made up of greasy musicians plonked on chairs supping warm porter was as good as it got. “They were like bricklayers; it was a trade,” says Dickie. When Dickie and the other showbands came along, they danced on stage, they mimicked Elvis and they contributed to the sexualisation of modern Ireland. In doing so of course, they provoked the ire of the moral minority, the original Taliban: The Irish Catholic Church.
“Archbishop John McQuaid was always against the showbands,” says Dickie. “He said it was a sin to dance during Lent and closed the ballrooms for seven weeks, putting a lot of men with families out of work.”
It was probably jealousy. Back then they had every Taoiseach in their pocket – Christ they even managed to get Call of the Wild, a book about a simple pack hound who got the horn for some wolfy chick, banned – so seeing virtuous Mna na hEireann losing their shit over these geeky teen singers was a threat. But in spite of their best efforts they couldn’t stop it.
The mania that followed Dickie was inexplicable.
“The first time it happened I was sixteen and had joined my first band. We were in the Finglas Hall and all the young ones were screaming. I had a voice I could sing a bit, but I wasn’t tall, I was no looker and I couldn’t work out why they were screaming,” he says, “It was great.”
Dickie doesn’t think much of the contemporaries. In his opinion they don’t sing like men, “Shane Ward? A man? Twenty-seven/twenty-eight? The best of luck to him but he sings like a little girl.”
Dickie in contrast lets it rip. He juggles the mic, machine guns the crowd with his fists and conducts the spotlight through an unselfish choreography that allows him to pick out ladies to the back and sides and serenade them.
A small group of women have gathered in the wing. Natasha is forty-five and has seen Dickie four times this year. “If he was ninety I’d still do him,” she says. Huh? I asked if she thought he was a good singer. Her colleague is nineteen, Jasmine. “He’s all right like,” she says, “for an auld fella an all.”
Non-committal in front of the notebook, Jasmine is still pouting and craning her neck when Dickie bends down to plant one on her cheek.
When the show ends Dickie disappears. “It’s the only way to avoid getting into trouble,” he says, “and you have to maintain an aura.”
In a pink sports jacket, blue shirt, tight trousers and ankle-length winklepickers, Dickie Rock packs up his bag and escapes out to his car. He’s living in an apartment at the moment. He likes to change his Dublin addresses every few years but spends most of the time with his wife in Spain. People offer him drinks, women offer him phone numbers but Dickie is not in it for the quick favours, he’s in it for the audience and nothing will compromise that.
“They’re the boss. They pay the tune,” he says.
Dickie Rock, what can I tell ye? Slightly deaf, skin like mahogany and old enough to say he was once your age, twice, yet still the last great pro in Ireland.