I WAS A TEENAGE TUBTHUMPER!

My name is Peter Murphy. I am a recovering drummer. I haven't picked up sticks in anger now for 709 days, nine hours and six minutes. There isn't a moment goes by that I don't think about whaling the tar out of some inanimate object. My rehabilitation has been a slow and painful one, and I have fallen off the wagon many times. However, with the grace of God and the help of my family, I'm getting through it, one day at a time. Perhaps by sharing my experiences, I can in some way help those who are now at that same dark place I was ten years ago. Who knows, maybe I can even make young people think twice before getting into the world of drums. This is my story . . .

DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME?
Your first band is like your first love. It might not be the best, but you'll never quite recapture that original, wide-eyed rush. And if the forming of that band is a whirlwind romance, the first gig is the night you lose your virginity. No matter how hard you try to forget all the performance anxiety and fumbling lack of technique, it is, and always will be, your first time.
I still have a tape of that hour-long initiation into the art of live performance. Listening back to that old Maxell C60 is as squirm-inducing as it would be to watch a home-video of my younger self losing his cherry. Every clumsy, cack-handed drum fill reminds me that, while I might've felt like some Italian stallion doing the wild thing at the time, in reality, I looked, smelled and sounded like an over-excited St. Bernard. Still, people enjoyed it. My first conjugal performance, on the other hand, did not inspire applause.
The band (we'll call it The Pismires) got together as I was halfway through the Leaving Cert year, effectively scuppering what slim chance there was of me being the first of the Murphy brood to go to college. Like your humble correspondent, the development wasn't planned, it just happened. However, this does not adequately explain why we were such a disparate and bizarre collective. Nothing could.
For a start, the cellist, Theo, also doubled as my maths teacher. He didn't actually teach my class at that time (that would've been too weird), but it was odd, harbouring a fear of being busted behind the bikeshed by the very guy who was feeding me Marlboro after-hours. And it's hard to strut around the school when you have to address your fellow rock-god as "sir". I was in the singular situation of having half the teaching staff for a fanbase (even at that stage I got it all arseways, not grasping that the band's groupies were supposed to be younger than the players). Still, it made for an interesting social life, sinking beers of a Sunday night with the very people I had to explain my lack of homework to the next morning.
Also in The Pismires was a four-and-three-quarter-foot tall saxophonist called Ted, who steadfastly refused to play anything but ska riffs. This diminutive Dr. Sax wore a bowler hat, dungarees and hobnailed boots, and his baritone horn was bigger than he was. He travelled to and from rehearsals with Joey, the singer, a six-footer with an impenetrable south east-accent and exceptional teeth. If Ted didn't feel like talking, he didn't. Joey would mediate. The two cut quite an Of Mice And Men dash.
The rest of us were no oil paintings either. I boasted, if that's the word, the hair and dress sense of an inverted mop. The bass player, Newt, wore a Mohawk, sprayed his boots silver, and had a penchant for wearing bum-flapped jeans over a bare arse in the middle of winter (in a rural Irish town this is news). Our motley ensemble was completed by my multi-instrumentalist, ex-boxer brother, who had the tattoos, bullworker neck and general disposition of a Hell's Angel after a particularly ugly rumble.
We weren't a band. We were a Fellini movie.
I wish I could say that I began my musical career as a fully-formed, cool-as-phuck hipster with The Best Of The Electric Prunes on the headphones and a copy of Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung in my back pocket. But the gruesome truth is that The Pismires were so old-hat even Bob Dylan wouldn't have used us as headgear.
In fact the man from Minnesota was the source of all our problems - we were afflicted by a particularly nasty Dylan fetish, specialising in a kind of seminal (or semenal - don't forget, the rhythm section were still teenagers) folk-rock played with all the restraint and finesse of Motörhead Unplugged. This was a decade before Al Jourgensen's infamous cover of 'Lay Lady Lay', except his deconstruction of the Big D was intentional - we were trying to play it straight. In fact, our first gig featured no less than five Dylan covers. The more I think about it, the more I wish we'd just gone on the road as Blood ... The Tracks, made a shitload of money, and retired at 25.
Eventually we plucked up the courage to book our first gig, upstairs in the local hotel, a small room capable of holding about 150 people. The day of reckoning, April 6th 1987, came around with frightening speed. Even though we were only using a vocal PA, we spent about ten hours setting up and soundchecking. Indeed, the PopMart tour could've been moved lock, stock and barrel from Barcelona to Berlin in the time it took me to secure the tom-toms onto the bass drum. I was so scared, I was passing more planks per hour than the local sawmill, biting the head off anyone who came near me, and poncing around the room like Michael Flatley with a live eel stuck down his jockstrap. From my carry-on, you'd have sworn the touts were asking for $300 a ticket outside on the pavement.
My nerves felt like guitar strings slowly being tuned to up an unmerciful pitch. Would we all forget how to play the songs? Would the sound be awful? Would anyone show up? The Fear was a tangible thing. You could smell it. The mid-'80s trend of wearing one's brown trousers tucked inside their fairy boots served a very practical purpose that night. In fact, in the hotel bar, moments before showtime, I was still seriously considering my brother's sarcastic offer of a pair of bicycle clips.
Luckily, the place was jammed. We had cannily timed the gig to coincide with the return of my fellow Leaving Cert students from their annual school trip to Paris. After a weekend of French, er, culture, staff and students had turned out en masse, pissed as lords, to see their colleagues triumph like hometown heroes, or crash and burn miserably. Either way, they figured, it would be entertaining.
But once that first song was over (a club-footed version of Bob's 'I Threw It All Away', an apt title given my career choice), the rest of the night went like a dream. That is to say, trippy, uncontrollable, and fuzzy around the edges. Now, usually I dismiss recounts of naturally high experiences, like finding God, or breaking the twenty-mile wall in a marathon, as the ravings of unstable cranks, but after that adrenalised hour or so, I was more wired than I'd been since playing St. Peter in our sixth class production of the Passion Play. I was hooked. A prisoner of rock 'n' rooooooll! Farewell Wexford! Hello Cleveland!
The next day when we all congregated to pick up the gear, we stayed for a celebratory drink. Just the one, mind. That's the reason why, that night, one of our number somehow drove five miles home, parked, lost consciousness, and woke up hours later with his head between the brake and accelerator pedals.
It was all downhill after that. For a band made up of relatively decent skins, The Pismires were a veritable hothouse for more infidelity, immorality, embezzlement and substance abuse than you'd see in any season of Melrose Place. Given the amount of covert snogging of each other's partners that went on, it's a wonder not only that the group didn't fracture sooner, but that nobody was garotted in their beds. Certain band-members spent so much time plotting amorous intrigues and rutting like rabbits, it's a wonder we ever got time to practice.
In retrospect, The Pismires were cursed. Every time we looked like getting off the ground, some unforseen disaster would befall us. Like one of the band would spend all the money in our bank account and we'd be stupid enough to sack him/let him do a bunk before getting it back. Or one of the more multi-talented members, like, say, the drummer, would decide he wanted his latest batch of esoteric haikus about rhododendrons used as lyrics, or else. Or one of the secondary vocalists would orchestrate a Machiavellian plot to usurp and replace the lead singer. Jesus, we had more covert operations, conspiracies and coups d'etat than you'd find in an Oliver Stone script.
But the worst of all our misfortunes was the time when three of the band were driving back home after recording a Dave Fanning session, and stopped in Wicklow to aid a stabbing victim lying on the road. The trio were standing on the roadside, debating whether to move the guy or not, when a Chinese bloke driving too far in on the hard shoulder ploughed in and hospitalised the lot of them. Joey was laid up for three months, with most of the bones in his body broken. The stabee (having by now, also become a motorway statistic) recovered and was home within days.
After that, we fought our way through a couple more years' worth of personnel problems, personal differences and lack of musical direction, but all to no avail. The innocence somehow went out of it, and when that happens, the end is in sight. We split up after a particularly rotten gig in the summer of 1990. Nobody died, nobody cried. However, on a good night, we did do a bitchin' version of 'Werewolves Of London'.
And, as Bill Hicks said, it's just a ride.

INTERLEWD
All the recent talk of refugees, immigrants and non-Caucasian Irish nationals put me in mind of the time I was in a band called The Antibodies. The bass-player (we'll call him Ralph) in that outfit was a handsome, dark-skinned chap of multicultural extraction. But despite his exotic appearance, Ralph was a Dubliner to the core. Nevertheless, as we went gigging around the country, he was often accosted by well-meaning but nosey individuals asking him how long he was in the country for, and what he thought of Ireland. While there was no badness in these inquiries, they did become rather tiresome after a while.
One night, at the bar after a gig somewhere in deepest Connacht, yet another curiosity-cat chirped, "So, where are you from originally?" Our hero smiled sweetly, and in his broadest Clondalkin accent, replied, "Me Ma's gee and me fuckin' Da's bollicks."
I sincerely hope Ralph gets the opportunity to use that line on immigration officials the next time he's coming through Dublin Airport.

DON'T SPOOK THE HORSES
The worst gig I ever played was also the one that paid the best.
One balmy night in The Rathmines Inn, my friend Igor introduced me to an ex-pat singer-songwriter colleague of his. The guy's name was Milo, and he was quite a sight: huge muttonchop sideburns, seven feet tall, Fishbone T-shirt. But his credentials were impeccable: he could play The Replacements' 'Unsatisfied' and had seen Neil Young and Sonic Youth on the legendary Don't Spook The Horse North American tour.
Milo was accompanied by an equally strange-looking customer by the name of Job, who, despite years of hard labour in Boston and New York, had the thickest Cavan accent I'd ever heard. The two looked like inbred twins from some remote Irish-American backwoods clan. Exactly the kind of company I should have been getting involved with.
Anyway, within hours of returning to Irish soil, Milo had landed a gig in Mullingar, a fund-raiser for the Irish Olympic Showjumping team. All he needed were musicians. He even had a name for this combo: The Craic Babies. The gig was in two days.
Igor and I agreed to back him for the night. Milo sang and played acoustic, Igor was on electric and, for the purposes of this gig, I was relegated to bongos. Six tea-fuelled hours of practice yielded a set of about 18 tunes, none of which we seemed to be able to start or finish at the same time. The middle sections weren't too hot either. To compound these problems, Milo's attitude to tuning and timing was somewhat, er, liberal.
Anyway, the three of us, plus Job (now our "manager") and a guy we'll call Podge, who'd helped arrange the gig (making him, I guess, the "promoter"), drove up to Mullingar that fateful Saturday evening in the summer of '91. Dinner and after-dinner drinks were consumed in a restaurant in the town, then we visited the "venue", which was essentially a barn sequestered away amongst several blocks of stables. Serious horsey country. The sweet smell of horseapples mingled with the even sweeter scent of money. We got our gear set up and had a few kicks before the match.
While we were practicing, a couple of concerned-looking passers-by approached Job and asked him if we played "any dancin' music".
"Sure!" Job assured them. "Reels, jigs, hornpipes, two-steps, four-steps, side-steps, whatever ye like!" The pair nodded uncertainly then went away, gawking over their shoulders at Igor as he stamped on his FX box and absent-mindedly ran a carrot over the strings in order to achieve that authentic Metal Machine Music ambience. We did sound a little loose, but hey, it was too late to stop now.
In a busy pub before the gig, Podge suggested we might tart up our set with a few better-known songs, something the punters might recognise. Milo, in all seriousness, suggested Lenny Kravitz's 'Mr. Cab Driver'. That shut Podge up.
By midnight, back on site, the pre-gig disco was swinging and the barbecue was steaming. Your three intrepid minstrels plugged in and got ready to rock. The DJ faded the Deee-Lite tune he was playing, and the assembled party-goers, a bunch of clean-cut equestrian types in their best Saturday night frocks and Sunday-go-meetin' suits, looked at us expectantly. I looked at Milo. Milo looked at Igor. Igor looked at me. I looked back at Milo again. We were all getting rather cross-eyed by now, so Milo shrugged and began playing the opening chords of the first tune. Igor and I joined in. The dirt-floor emptied.
The sound was awful: I couldn't tell what song we were playing, much less which verse. To make matters worse, I was playing the bongos on a high-stool, and halfway through the first tune my left leg developed this uncontrollable twitch, a bizarre sort of Parkinsons-for-beginners, causing my knee to shake so violently I was missing the drum as often as hitting it. Also, I kept inadvertently knocking the microphone away, rendering my percussive accompaniment inaudible.
And the more ragged my playing got, the more Milo and Adam strayed from the conventional boundaries of time-keeping, resulting in some weird mutation of hillbilly folk, avant-garde hardcore, and Mexican Mariachi band music. We were only a trio, but between us we somehow managed to create a cacophony as objectionable as every appliance in Power City whining into life at the same time. We stumbled through the first song, before unceremoniously faltering to a halt. No applause. I'm surprised we weren't lynched.
As we began another tune, our version of a song called 'Sperm Factory' by an obscure Boston band called Egg (sample lyric: "Sperm factory/Betwixt me legs/It won't make you happy/It'll make a baby instead"), the hostess of the whole shindig, a mature, rather posh, obviously irate lady, accosted our "manager" side-stage and shrieked, "It's awful. Please. Tell them to stop."
As Milo bellowed a climactic chorus of "There's only one egg/But there's millions of us," Job shrugged his shoulders and replied, "I can't."
"Why not?"
Good question, Job thought. He desperately racked his brains for an answer. Finally, it came to him. "Listen now," he intimated, putting his arm around the old dear's shoulders. "Imagine you were in a tournament, and you'd just jumped your second fence, and somebody told you to stop, you'd be upset now wouldn't you, hey?"
The hostess nodded.
"Well, these are artists. They're very temperamental, like, y'know?"
Stumped, this sweetheart of the rodeo flounced off, trying to think of a diplomatic way to get these dreadful racketeers to cease and desist immediately.
She needn't have bothered. We were getting the message. A yawning dirt-floor, the deathly silences between songs, and the blank, bewildered looks from innocent bystanders told us all we needed to know. At the back of the barn, Podge made a cutting gesture across his throat. We finished up with a version of 'Ride On' which wouldn't have been out of place on Trout Mask Replica, Milo putting the seal on it with a topical rant about horses and, er, riding. The disco came back on. I made a beeline for the free beer laid on in the riders', sorry, artists' enclosure.
Podge sidled up to me. "That sounded just like The Velvet Underground," he said dryly.
"Fuck off, Podge," I grunted, and set about getting as drunk as possible before we were run out of town.
But we weren't run out of town. True to their word, the Olympians fed, watered and paid us in full. I got bow-legged drunk, danced, and generally had a fine time. But there was, of course, an altercation. A local hothead with the general disposition of a yeast infection got the hump about something or other and began ranting and raving and throwing the garden furniture around. As the "security" were attempting to muscle this agitator off the property, he howled, "You'll be sorry! I'm tellin'' ye! You won't embarrass me in Mullingar!" at his horsey oppressors. This reduced us all to fits of drunken snorts, which only made Redhead more angry. He rounded on one of the strapping young men. "You useless Protestant baaastad," he hissed. This would have been rather unpleasant had he not chosen to insult (present writer excluded) the only Catholic within a mile radius.
Finally, the night drew to a reluctant end. Sleeping arrangements were fuzzy. We seemed to remember being told that we could sleep in one of the trailers, but, on investigation, the trailers turned out to be rank with rotten hay and the overpowering smell of horse. But then, as Podge pointed out, they didn't stink as badly as our playing. We bedded down in the hayshed and counted ourselves lucky.
At daybreak, Job shook us. "Why are you sleeping here, hey?" he inquired in that inimitable accent. Bamboozled, groggy and sore, we looked around. Haybales. Plastic tumblers. Igor had laid his head down mere inches from a mustard-coloured minaret of old dog-turd. Blinking, we walked out of the haggard and into the morning sun. The cab door of one of the trailer-vehicles was open. Chuckling, Job proudly unveiled the immaculately clean and comfortable bunks behind the driver and passenger's seats.
After breakfast we drove back to the city and drank our profits in one of the early houses on Capel Street. That night, after 32 hours of sustained drinking, I finally passed out in a friend's flat. Why can't it be like that all the time? n