JANUARY

“Tom Murphy”

• Garry Hynes, then Abbey Theatre Director, nominates both the first and the last person she’d invite to her birthday party

“My speciality is what I’ve christened ‘shit terrorism’. There are a hundred and one things you can do to freak people with a crap and, what’s more, it’s 100% natural and biodegradable.”

• Faith No More’s Mike Patton on his idea of fun

“I’m living on an unofficial site. It’s one of the best unofficial sites around. The reason why it’s one of the best is because we have a bit of hard ground. We have a tap outside which in November, when it starts freezing, you get no water from sometimes. There’s one porta-loo. And that would be seen as a good site.”

• Glenroe star, Michael Collins

“Most of them come off the top of my head. I do keep a few written down but I never use them because I forget to! Things like ‘He has hands like frying pans’ just seem to come out.”

• BBC’s “Voice of rugby,” Bill McClaren, on his phrase-turning prowess

“Rave culture, I’m sorry to say, has fuck all to do with music and everything to do with making money.”

• 808 State’s Darren Partington

February

“The Catholic Church did its bit to make my first eighteen years as miserable as possible. They fucked me up in all the usual ways, guilt, sex, all the usual stuff. I still have it in for the fuckers.”

• Kevin McAleer

“The truth of the matter is that I’ve made twenty movies and I went over budget on two, and both of them were movies that I financed.”

• Francis Ford Coppola on his reputation as a grossly profligate director

“The human predicament has no solution. That’s why we’re not in paradise. That’s why our central myth is the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. You know, what are you gonna do now that you’re not in paradise?”

• Leonard Cohen

“I’ve drunk meths, surgical spirits, stuff you could run a fucking car on. I’d just pour it into tea and guzzle it down. I’ve even drunk aftershave – Old Spice was particularly awful.”

• Beechy Colclough, reformed alcoholic and drink councillor to the stars (He’s also said to be among those who have been treating Michael Jackson for his pain-killer addiction)

“Anyone who claims it is just a bunch of women moaning has a serious problem with their perceptions and their politics.”

• Maura O’Connell on the A Woman’s Heart project

“I think you will find in the Parliamentary Labour Party that the level of aggression will be lower. The culture of the group is bound to change because there are now five women in it. They can’t be just ‘the lads together’ now.”

• Joan Burton, TD

“For years now, I’ve been obsessed with women’s bodies, specifically their asses, and even more specifically, women’s asses in faded jeans. I could follow a dungareed ass for blocks and blocks until I’d find myself lost in neighbourhoods I’d never seen before.”

• Spalding Gray

“I can’t believe all the kids coming up who are only concerned about management and publishing. At twenty years old. I understand that if you’re thirty, but when you’re young, you’re meant to be idealistic. I don’t know how many of them could go through the suffering, the hard times of Cecil Taylor or Sun Ra. I don’t know if they could survive for fifteen years before getting their chance.”

• Hal Willner

“Hopefully, what our success gives us is the ability to turn around and basically say Up Yours! to people like Hot Press, MCD and the whole Dublin music clique who’ve been proven wrong.”

• Just one of the eh, quibbles from that Sultans Of Ping interview

MARCH

“I remember one Christmas during the late ’60s or early ’70s, he was President at the time, and he was given a gift of an Indian head-dress and pipe. He dressed up in this whole outfit and spent the whole evening sitting there, puffing on this pipe and acting the Red Indian chief which was very amusing for us as children.”

• Eamon O Cuiv, TD, on his grandfather, the well-known prankster and clown prince, Eamon De Valera

“I don’t think everything new is shit, it just doesn’t hit me like the stuff I grew up on. I find some of it interesting, the problem is it doesn’t last long for me, and it doesn’t inspire me. I wish it did.”

• Lenny Kravitz explains his fondness for the good old days

“We’re not The Spinners or The Dubliners. You might have difficulty slamming or stage-diving to our music but it’s still rock and roll.”

• Spiritualized explain themselves

“The Sultans Of Ping are a novelty band from Cork. They’ve got a psychological problem with people from Kilkenny because every time Cork play Kilkenny in hurling, they get their arses whipped.”

• Engine Alley’s Brian responds to jibes from those cheeky Leesiders

“Have you seen me in any movies lately? The last thing I did was a Kung Fu movie! Believe me, man, it’s a long way down since Heaven’s Gate!

• Kris Kristofferson reviews his screen career

“The trade in monkeys is a scandal. Right around the world, they are being packed in crowded crates under the assumption that some will die during the journey, so they pack in as many as they can, alive, to begin with.”

• Trevor Sargent, TD, on links between laboratory abuse of animals and zoos

“I know every portaloo in the country, and how it works. We’d have needed them all.”

• Jim Aiken explains just one of the logistical considerations which led to the scrapping of U2’s proposed free gig in the Phoenix Park

“I know all about starting to drink at eleven o’clock in the morning and then drinking steadily all day – without ever getting drunk. For a while, I was on a bottle of wine and a half bottle of brandy every day.”

• Wendy James

“I’m not in favour of abortion. I don’t think abortion is particularly liberating to women. I don’t see it as a civil right. I would describe myself as pro-life.”

• Roisin Shortall, Labour TD

“I’m proud to say that I don’t listen to much contemporary music.”

• Frank Black

“I really do believe that I’m the kind of fella that, if I fell out of a hotel window, I’d land in a cartload of something soft. . . like shite!”

• Paddy Moloney’s charmed life

APRIL

“A dog, so I could lick my own micky.”

• The animal Brendan O’Carroll would choose to be if he weren’t a human being

“Dublin says ‘Forget your identity, sell out, be like us’. I say ‘assert your identity despite all that’. Local, national and racial identity is an essential factor in terms of mental health.”

• Dr. Moosaje Bhamjee, TD

‘It’s been pretty much reduced to weedly-weedly-wee, make a face, hold your guitar like it’s your weenie, point it heavenward, and look like you’re really doing something. Then, you get a big ovation while the smoke bombs go off, and the motorised lights in your truss twirl around.”

• The late Frank Zappa, in one of his last ever interviews, on contemporary guitar rock

“I feel quite bitter about the time I wasted. I’d like to get back to two albums a year, get things motoring again. I feel full of energy.”

• Bryan Ferry

“I had three uncles, a brother-in-law, and five, or was it six, aunts who were all here before me. RTE runs in the family, and, I suppose, you could say that the family runs in RTE. I think I was destined for RTE, don’t you?”

• The er, secret of Simon Young’s success

“I’ve been writing like fuck, so I’m very much a working poet lately. I work like that. When you’re your own boss, you’re never authoritarian enough with yourself. Which reminds me, I must see meself about a rise . . . I don’t give meself enough holidays, either!”

• John Cooper Clarke

“The night Bush declared war, there was rioting in Seattle. The kids where I’m from went fucking crazy – we ran downtown and took the freeway over, trashed a few police cars and generally registered our displeasure.”

• Alice In Chains frontman, Layne Staley

“We get a lot back stage that are actually mothers, and lots of thirty-year-olds and stuff like that. I’m so into the idea of it.”

• Suede’s Brett Anderson refutes the suggestion that all their fans are screaming teenyboppers

“I’d love to be Superman, that’s all. He’s my biggest hero of all time.”

• Christy Hennessy

“The women who got elected (in the last General Election) were very distinctly middle class, with the Labour Party in particular going for the middle class vote. What we need in Dáil Eireann is working class people, not middle class people masquerading as working class.”

• Liz McManus, TD

MAY

“I asked him if he hadn’t been a priest, what would he like to be and he said he would’ve loved to have gone to Hollywood and studied with Fred Astaire. He was a very good dancer. And the other night I woke up and thought ‘Gee, it really would be unfair to cheat him out of the movie’. I’ve taken him this far, I might as well take him to Hollywood. I could even imagine him saying ‘She did all this to me, why the hell didn’t she take me to Planet Hollywood too!’”

• Annie Murphy on yer man

“I still don’t realise how much I’m under the spotlight, it’s only in the last couple of months I’ve realised what pressure there is on me. Stupid little things get blown up and they’re in the back pages of every newspaper.”

• Roy Keane on growing up in public

“I’m not obsessive in the way some people seem to think I am. I don’t work weekends, I don’t work in the evenings, unless I’m touring. If I’m lucky on a writing day, I’ll get about four hours work done and that includes the yawning, pacing around, and banging my head against the wall time.”

• Ben Elton

“If the Abbey is simply staging a series of picture-box productions, why don’t we just turn it over to Bord Fáilte and stop pretending.”

• Former Artistic Director of the Abbey, Gary Hynes

“Speaking of Century, if Marty Whelan wants to stop selling Daz then we’re prepared to put him on top of our waiting list of DJs!”

• Dr. Groove, of the Dublin pirate station, Radioactive 101 FM

“I don’t like the arrogance of science, the way that they impose and assume that they somehow possess the knowledge, ’cause scientists today laugh at scientists a hundred years ago the way that scientists in a hundred years time will be laughing at the scientists today.”

• Matt Johnson

“Bishop Eamon Casey – to complete our interview.”

• The first person Gordon Thomas would invite to his birthday party (note clever use of the word complete, in the sense of carry out in the first place)

“I honestly don’t think that growing old has changed my attitudes much. I’m still the same argumentative, self-opinionated bastard I was five or ten years ago, except now my anger’s a little more focused.”

• Cathal Coughlan

“It’s kind of the butt of jokes in Texas since it’s a very fundamentalist Baptist town. A year and a half ago, Willie Nelson wanted to play a big date there for some children’s charities and they wouldn’t let him because of his opinions on marijuana.”

• Joe Ely on the town of Waco in his native Texas, the scene of the David Koresh inferno

“Politics is a pointless activity now. It isn’t gong to change anything.”

• That Petrol Emotion’s Ciaran McLaughlin

“Strenuous efforts must be made to bend towards the Unionists, to show them that their civil rights and their religious rights will be respected – even if that means making internal arrangements that will suit Unionists better than they will suit the rest of us.”

• Gerry Adams

“We loved it there, and they were mad for our music.”

• The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan on their first visit to the U.S. Under-statement of the year, perhaps?

JUNE

“If people had really been listening to what was coming out of rap and coming out of Chuck D. and what they were saying, maybe the riots wouldn’t have happened. But fear is the enemy. You should never be afraid to express even the darker side of yourself, or ourselves.”

• Bono

“I don’t want to get too close to people so they don’t have to depend on me. That’s why I don’t have a girlfriend. And quite honestly, I like being on my own. Most people I know I pay a salary to.”

• Henry Rollins

“I don’t think people like me very much in Ireland. If people don’t like your music then that’s fair enough. But if they don’t like you personally and they’ve never met you then it becomes a bit of a joke.”

• Gary Moore

“I always thought Casey was a prick, to be honest with you. I’ve thought he was a prick since I was about eight and I saw him singing ‘Come Back Paddy Reilly’ on The Late Late Show. I just thought, you know, fuck off! And, all these years later, I’ve been proven right.”

• Roddy Doyle

“My favourite thing is where you hear easy listening covers of Steely Dan songs. I like those elevator music versions. They’re funny.”

• Donald Fagen

“If you’re idolised, you’re not idolised forever, you’re idolised for a moment in time. There’s more important issues. Does anybody want another millionaire rock singer? I don’t think so.”

• An Emotional Fish’s Ger Whelan

“I tried jumping into the crowd once and nearly broke a few limbs. No matter how crowded it may look down there in the pit, you’d be surprised at how much room can be made in a matter of seconds.”

• A House’s high-flying frontman, Dave Couse

“I don’t think the capacity to drink is one of the distinguishing features between the parties. I enjoy a few pints myself but I don’t put it on my election posters. I don’t think it’s a major political attribute to drink a gallon of Bass. I’ve been known to drink a gallon of Guinness myself but I don’t boast about it.”

• Michael Noonan, TD

“Discovering that we were slowly being reduced to cartoon characters, and caricatures, made us realise we had to create an anti-cartoon to counteract that, and to become far more than people had begun to reduce U2 to.”

• Bono

JULY

“Check out my fucking record ’cause it’s really good. When I play around your town, check that out too because that’ll be the same, only more so!”

• Iggy Pop

“I don’t know what the fuck that was about. She kept on insisting on me hitting her so I hit her, not very hard. Then, she punched the shit out of me. I dunno why.”

• Shane MacGowan describes his nightclub encounter with Lisa Stansfield

“When you consider the punishment David’s put himself through, it’s amazing how well his voice and, come to that, his spirit have stood up. Looking at his face you can see he’s been down roads that you and I will hopefully never have to travel but he’s a survivor. He’s kept kicking at the gods.”

• Marc Cohn on David Crosby

“I just sang the whole thing with my eyes closed, I was pretty nervous.”

• Andy Cairns recalls Therapy?’s first time on Top of the Pops

“I have no doubt that Elvis and his mother were deeply tied into a sexual relationship with all the passion, all the inability to live without each other and all the sentimentality that goes with that, but I would be very surprised to find that their clothing came off at crucial moments.”

• Author and journalist Nik Cohn

“Go into the Olympic on a Saturday night and you get kids from Kilbarrack and Coolock mixing with kids from Malahide and Killiney. There’s never any trouble but stick ’em in a normal pub and they’d beat crap out of each other.”

• Sound Crowd’s Mark Kavanagh on the therapeutic qualities of raving

“Don’t be upset by Suggs’ appearance. We keep on telling him that male pattern baldness and obesity are nothing to be ashamed of but he’s having a hard time dealing with it.”

• Madness’ Cathal ‘Chas Smash’ Smyth

“As far as live performances go, I always try to do my best now. Before if I was in a bad mood I just wouldn’t sing or something.”

• Evan Dando

AUGUST

“It’s like all of those things that are happening in your brain when you’re singing a song. It’s like fuck me, look at me, kill me, love me, hate me. It’s crazy.”

• Maria McKee

“As far as I’m concerned, what happened could not have happened without Pronsias De Rossa and Des Geraghty. Without those two and their influence, the coup would not have taken place. They were trusted, I trusted them. Therefore, I would feel they were the most treacherous people.”

• Tomas MacGiolla on the split in the Worker’s Party

“”Use a condom!”

• Michael Hutchence

“And where we have prayers before we go on stage, I believe that some of those groups have seances and pray to Satan before they face their audiences.”

• Ricky Skaggs

“Being in a band doesn’t give you licence to act like a complete wanker.”

• The Manic Street Preachers’ Richey James

“Occasionally he (David Coverdale) wrote some wonderful glorious rock ’n’ roll poetry. I mean the opening lines of ‘Here I Go Again’, they are great – “I don’t know where I’m going but I sure know where I’ve been” – that’s a classic opening line.”

• Deep Purple’s Jon Lord

“He is a scurrilous hack of the same type as the journalistic bootboy in the Sunday World who attacked Dick Spring crudely and then tried to intimidate me with the line: ‘If you think this is bad Michael D., you ain’t seen nothing yet’.”

• Michael D. Higgins explains why Eamon Dunphy isn’t his favourite journalist

“Oh yeah, I’d love to see Gay Byrne naked.”

• The Pale’s Matthew Devereux

SEPTEMBER

“We’ve discovered that if you let a lawnmower come up and hit your leg just right, it doesn’t slice the limb off but leaves a little shaved area. Hey ladies, no more waxing!”

• Jim Rose

“I find it funny when people say there are too many bands around. What are they going to do – get a machete and hang out at the Rock Garden?”

• The Blue Angels’ Shane O’Neill

“If any of them said ‘boo’ to me I’d say ‘don’t you fucking talk to me like that’. I was a devil! I remember throwing a brandy glass at Frankie – and it was full!”

• Mary Black reminisces on her time with De Dannan

“I’ve never had a problem with people calling me pretentious. I don’t regard it as an insult. I had my moment of courageous pretentiousness jumping in with Tommy. That felt pretentious at the time but I still felt I had to do it. So if being pretentious is what I have to do, that’s fine by me.”

• Pete Townshend

“We could all do with the money.”

• Billy Doherty on why himself and the rest of the Undertones apart from Feargal Sharkey want to reform

“I am starting to feel that it (England) is an intolerant, racist, homophobic, narrow-minded, authoritarian rathole run by vicious suburban-minded, materialistic philistines.”

• Writer and filmmaker Hanif Kureshi

“I get tired of hearing the word ‘intransigence’ used in relation to unionists. The people who have given most over the last 20 years have been the unionist community. The nationalist community hasn’t budged an inch from what it believes.”

• DUP Councillor Sammy Wilson

“On the side of their cars it says ‘To Serve And Protect’ and no one believes that. ‘To Harass And Intimidate’ would be more appropriate.”

• Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello pays tribute to the Los Angeles Police Department

“I don’t like powders, pills, chemicals, syringes, none of that business – because people close to me have become junkies and it’s not funny. People lose their soul and their spirit. But weed, to me, makes you feel what’s real.”

• The Stereo MC’s Rob B

OCTOBER

“I don’t think comedy will ever take over from rock ’n’ roll. You’ll never have spotty-faced teenagers standing in front of a mirror going ‘A funny thing happened on the way to the pub’.”

• Paul Merton

“We met Nirvana once when they were in the office ages ago. They wanted to pack it all in and go back to college because they weren’t getting anywhere. So I sold them some smack and introduced them to Courtney Love.”

• Jim Bob from Carter

“I definitely think we could still be massive.”

• Craig of Power Of Dreams

“Kissing your grandmother and feeling a tongue in your mouth.”

• Andy Townsend’s concept of hell

“I often have to say “I am not 50,000 people, right?’ Particularly when Bono jumps up on the table at nine in the evening after coming back from a tour and says ‘where’s the audience’!”

• Ali Hewson

“The Japanese make absolutely the best tub and sink stoppers in the world. They’re black rubber balls. I used to think that the British ones with the replaceable rubber grommets were the best, especially compared to the ones we have in the States or Canada which have a tendency to sorta rot. But the Japanese ones are fantastic.”

• Science-fiction writer William Gibson

“I’m concerned about offending people who don’t deserve to be offended but those feminists who complain about our lyrics obviously aren’t getting laid enough.”

Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler

“You gotta go to the Music Store, you gotta find a guitar, and then you’ve got to LEARN it. Only, THAT’S not the worst of it! Then you got to CARRY it everywhere you go. It’s heavy, and it’s a pain in the arse . . .”

• Kim Deal of The Breeders explains her theory behind the scarcity of successful female bands

“I have this vision of myself being codded up to the eyeballs by the kids. ‘We’re just going down to a friend’s house’, when in fact they’re going off to a rave to take Ecstasy and get drunk, and I won’t have a clue because I’ll be befuddled.”

• Pat Kenny ruminates on being an ‘old parent’

NOVEMBER

“A note on my desk which reads contact Tom re photographs of Cardinal bonking his brains out.

• Declan Lynch’s concept of heaven

“All death is regrettable. All human life is sacred but we can’t sit back and allow our people to be killed without us taking some form of defence. We have to protect our citizens. Responsibility for deaths is largely due to the IRA.”

• Spokesperson for the UDA

“If you’re trapped in this van environment, where you’re going from town to town and the only people you know are the guys in your group, you start to hate the way they eat, hate the way they fall asleep, hate the way they drive. That would just escalate until finally the van would pull over, we’d all pile out and beat the shit out of each other.”

• Greg Dulli of Afghan Whigs

“The IRA calculated that if they took out the UDA leadership ‘collateral damage’ of this sort would be acceptable to their supporters. And in this, as I say, they were probably right.”

• Eamon McCann, in the aftermath of the Shankill bombing

“I’d been brainwashed by U2 and REM into believing that group democracies were a wonderful thing but I quickly underwent a change of political orientation and I’m now proud to declare myself a complete megalomaniac.”

• Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy

“Every force seems to be conspiring to convince women that the best way to justify yourself, as a person, is what you do as your job, not the fact that you’re a mother.”

• Paula Yates

“What I did learn, is that a depressingly large number of indigenous Britons have no desire to mix or integrate with their immigrant neighbours.”

Photographer Leo Regan, who spent two years shadowing a gang of neo-Nazi skinheads around the UK

“I have empowered myself by going public, and that is what I am encouraging other people to do.”

Pat Tierney, author of The Moon On My Back, who was diagnosed HIV-positive two years ago

“It was Chuck Berry’s ‘My Ding-A-Ling’ that gave me my first sexual experience.”

• Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub

“I’ve taken a lot of drugs but I don’t necessarily see that that’s a wrong thing. I don’t even necessarily see it as a bad thing. I don’t see that from a moral point of view at all.”

• Nick Cave

“I release new albums of my latest material and I know that if I don’t break back through today, it will happen tomorrow.”

Gilbert O’Sullivan

DECEMBER

“I didn’t learn one thing at Rock School, but I had a good time.”

• David Hopkins of Lir

“At a concert like this, every time you make eye contact with any other person over four feet tall, you’ve got to convey, wordlessly and in a matter of milliseconds, the following information: “I’ve got a legitimate reason to be here. I am not a pervert. I am a good person, and, by the way, I think Take That are crap as well.”

• Liam Fay on the Take That Experience

“I know now that I can never again be the young man I was then, in any way, really, and I’ve just got to learn to live with that. And learn to live positively with being HIV positive.”

• Holly Johnson

“I always laugh when I hear myself saying that being a comic is stressful. You’re under a different kind of stress when a patient has got you in the corner of a ward with a knife to your throat than when you’re on The Brain Drain.”

• Comedienne Jo Brand reflects on her previous job as a psychiatric nurse

“Not being united is what fucked us up the first time. Nobody will have the power to split us up again.”

• Christy Dignam

“It seems pretty clear at this stage that the Republic of Ireland will win next year’s World Cup. Or not, as the case may be.”

• Declan Lynch’s Foul Play prediction for 1994

“All I say is that should you find yourself over the festive season, or indeed at any other time, in a situation whereby you can choose to sleep with a person of your own religion or a person of the other persuasion, then all things being equal, do, please, choose the person from the other side.”

• Eamonn McCann’s peace plan

“Very competitive.”

• Pelé’s assessment of the Republic of Ireland team

“PARADISE FOUND IN OFFALY”

• Border Fascist headline

“We’ve certainly talked about it (experimenting with a rock show). Jim O’Neill’s seventies programme certainly gets into pretty rocky numbers and it’s working great for us, being able to play, say, Noddy Holder. You know, he can really let a guitar fly!”

• Jeff O’Brien, Controller of Programmes for 98FM

“My key to on-the-road survival is having clean underwear. As long as my Y-fronts aren’t crusty, I’m a happy camper.”

Miles Hunt of The Wonderstuff

“I probably expect to be dead within ten years. Not that I’ve got any serious illness. It’s just that that’s a thought I constantly live with. And part of it is that things have happened too fast for me. I always wanted to do things with my life and I seem to have done them already.

• Sean Hughes