Hot Press 40th Anniversary: The Biggest Events Since 1977 (1977-1986)

THE DEATH OF ELVIS PRESLEY (1977)

Hot Press was still in its infancy when Elvis Aaron Presley collapsed in the bathroom of his opulent Graceland mansion on the afternoon of August 16, 1977. The 42-year-old star – known to fans worldwide as ‘The King’ – was rushed to Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was pronounced dead. His grossly overweight body (he was around 350lb) was shipped to the morgue and autopsied the same afternoon. Three days later, the coroner issued his death certificate stating the cause as a heart attack. However, toxicology results soon identified several pharmaceutical drugs in the star’s system, with codeine being ten times the therapeutic level. This started accusations of a cover-up, and the conspiracy theories continue to this day. With the news coming in just after we’d sent the issue to press, his death was quite ill-timed from Hot Press’ perspective. A fortnight later, an image of Elvis featured on the cover alongside live shots from Thin Lizzy’s Dalymount show (the intended cover story).

BIRTH OF 2FM (1979)

In the late 1970s there was a pirate radio craze sweeping Dublin and the rest of the country. RTE’s response to this was 2fm (or RTE Radio 2 as it was originally known), which began broadcasting on 31st May, 1979 with the catchphrase “Radio 2 Comin’atcha!” The very first song played on the station was the Boomtown Rats’ ‘Like Clockwork’, with Larry Gogan dropping the needle on the vinyl. RTE 1 staffers Vincent Hanley, Jimmy Greely and Mark Cagney were transferred over, while most of their other DJs were recruited from the pirates, including Michael McNamara, Declan Meehan, Ronan Collins, Gerry Ryan and Dave Fanning. Sadly the legendary Vincent Hanley and Gerry Ryan are no longer with us, but the station – which has suffered from increasing airwave competition from independents in recent years – will celebrate its own 40th anniversary in 2019.

THE MURDER OF JOHN LENNON (1980)

Just three years after the death of Elvis, there was an even more unexpected rock ‘n’ roll passing. On Monday, December 8th, 1980, former Beatle John Lennon was returning from Record Plant Studio with his wife, Yoko Ono, when he was shot four times in the back by a lone gunman in the archway of the Dakota, his residence in New York City. The shooter, Mark Chapman, remained at the scene and began reading JD Salinger’s classic novel The Catcher In The Rye until the police arrived and arrested him. He repeatedly said that the novel was his statement. Soon afterwards Lennon was pronounced dead on arrival at the nearby Roosevelt Hospital. His murder sent shockwaves around the world. Having been denied parole nine times now, Chapman remains in prison to this day. Lennon himself once declared, “I’m not afraid of death because I don’t believe in it. It’s just getting out of one car, and into another.”

THE 1981 HUNGER STRIKES

The 1981 hunger strikes by Irish republican prisoners in HM Prison Maze were one of the darkest periods of the Northern Irish Troubles. The protest originally began in 1976, with the blanket protest seeing inmates refusing to wear prison uniforms after the British government withdrew Special Category Status for convicted paramilitary prisoners. This escalated into the 1978 “dirty protest”, which saw prisoners refusing to leave their cells to wash and smearing their cell walls with excrement. In 1980, seven prisoners went on a hunger strike which ended after 53 days. The second strike the following year turned into a showdown between the prisoners and British PM Margaret Thatcher. One hunger striker, Bobby Sands – later portrayed by Michael Fassbender in the film Hunger – was elected as an MP for west Belfast during the strike, which brought the attention of the world’s media. Ten prisoners ultimately died – including Sands, whose funeral was attended by an estimated 200,000 people. The hunger strikes radicalised Irish politics and were instrumental in enabling Sinn Fein to become a mainstream political party. Interestingly, Bobby Sands now has a street named after him in downtown Tehran.

COMPACT DISCS

(Mid-80s)

While the technology had been around for a while, the very first commercial compact disc was produced in a plant in Langenhagen, Germany, on August 17th, 1982. It was a 1979 recording of Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau performing Chopin waltzes, and Arrau himself was invited to the plant to press the start button. The first popular music CD produced at Langenhagen was ABBA’s The Visitors. Initially, uptake on compact disc players was quite slow and mostly limited to classical music fans. It wasn’t until the release of Dire Straits’ fifth album, Brothers In Arms, in 1985 that the new format started to take off with rock fans (it ultimately sold over 1m copies on CD). Once popularised, record companies literally made billions by selling people albums they already owned on vinyl or cassette on the new format. Incidentally, when CDs were first marketed it was said that they were so indestructible that you could practically eat your dinner off them. Yeah right…

THE SUCCESS OF U2 (Mid-80s)

U2 were already a big band before their memorable Live Aid appearance put the four Dubliners firmly on the world stage. Bono, Edge, Larry, Adam and manager Paul McGuinness didn’t fail to capitalise. Two years later, the seismic release of their fifth studio album The Joshua Tree had the influential Time magazine billing them “Rock’s Hottest Ticket”. It wasn’t just the band themselves that benefited from this. Suddenly Ireland – still deep into a recession – was almost as much in the spotlight as U2 were. Dublin became a super-cool mecca for U2 fans, many of whom flew in from all corners of the globe just to scrawl graffiti on the outside walls of Windmill Lane Studio. The band have been great ambassadors for Ireland ever since, with Bono himself being hugely influential in enticing tech companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook to set up their European HQs here. Their forthcoming Croke Park show – which sold out in minutes – will bring millions of euros into Dublin in July. They still have their homegrown begrudgers, but the fact remains that the band have achieved far more for Ireland than the vast majority of our political representatives.

LIVE AID (1985)

Organised by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise relief funds for the then ongoing Ethiopian famine, Live Aid – which took place on July 13, 1985 – was a truly phenomenal global music event. Billed as the “global jukebox”, the dual-concert was held simultaneously at Wembley Stadium in London and John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia. There was a crowd of 72,000 in the former and 100,000 in the latter, but the real audience was the television one. Live Aid was one of the largest-scale satellite link-ups and TV broadcasts of all time: an estimated global audience of 1.9 billion, across 150 nations, watched the live broadcasts. In addition to some of the biggest rock stars of the day, TV audiences also witnessed a scruffy looking Boomtown Rat imploring, “People are dying NOW! Give us the money NOW!” Although the phrase “give us your fucking money now” has passed into folklore, Geldof never actually used the word (on that occasion at least). Either way, more than 40 million was raised on the day. Ireland reportedly donated more per capita than any other nation.

THE CHERNOBYL DISASTER (1986)

In terms of cost and casualties, the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, in what was then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union, remains the world’s most catastrophic energy accident – closely followed by the incident in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011. The two are the only accidents classified as Level 7 events (the maximum classification) on the International Nuclear Event Scale.

On April 26th, 1986, technicians conducting a test inadvertently caused one of the reactors to explode. Two people were killed in the initial blast, and hundreds of staff and firefighters tackled a blaze that burned for 10 days and sent a plume of radiation around the world. More than 50 of these died at the time, and most of the rest have passed away from cancer since. Authorities evacuated 120,000 people from the area, including 43,000 from the city of Pripyat.

While nuclear power has many supporters (most notably Monty Burns of The Simpsons), there’s more than one good reason not to go there. According to Mark Zachary Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, “Every dollar spent on nuclear is one less dollar spent on clean renewable energy and one more dollar spent on making the world a comparatively dirtier and a more dangerous place, because nuclear power and nuclear weapons go hand in hand.”