TALL TALES

OVER THE last two decades, the artist formerly known as Rocky de Valera has worn many hats on his famously bald head. Ferdia Mac Anna has been a bandleader (fronting good-time rhythm and blues acts like The Gravediggers and The Rhythm Kings), author, editor, TV producer, father, husband, cancer sufferer and brain haemorrhage survivor. But broadly speaking, he s probably best described as a gas man, an authority on humour (if that s not a contradiction in terms), a connoisseur of chuckles.
On print and in person, MacAnna s a funny guy, borne out by his latest novel, the madcap caper yarn Cartoon City. The originator and butt of much of the book s jokes is its protagonist Myles, aka Goalpost, who suffers from Somatomegalic Epiphyseal Dysfusion Syndrome a rare (and imaginary) medical condition which causes an adult to suddenly begin to grow again. Myles, a sub-editor with a Dublin evening rag, decides to boost his flagging career by tagging along on a series of real life heists. Through these, he meets beautiful young artist Mia (who specialises in penis paintings) who embroils our inept hero in a plot to kill her money laundering father. All told, it s fast n farcical stuff; a galloping plot spiced up with sharp dialogue and some crackling one-liners.
The Cartoon City of the title refers to Myles childhood memories of the Christmas lights being turned on, but also has much to do with how Dubliners, rather than rub themselves out, prefer to caricature each other out of existence.
Irish people have a natural but ambivalent attitude to humour, MacAnna reckons, sipping a cappuccino in Harvey s on Trinity Street. Even someone who has no sense of humour can come up with a one-liner that can haunt a person for life. Everything here is so heightened you see your previous history walking down the street. Dublin s supposed to be a city of a million and a half people? I don t buy it! I think there s about 2000 people who just circulate. Pat McCabe said he loves writing about small towns cos people in them are stone mad.
The same might be said of Billy Roche. And like those two scribes, MacAnna is a musician who turned to writing as a means of making a crust when rock n roll became untenable. Did the band years retard him as a person?
Yes, I did feel retarded. I felt like the world had moved on and I had stayed in some strange place where the rules of normal society did not apply. It was almost like you didn t need money in the band, you didn t need a flat, you didn t need anything. We were just going along a strange twilight zone that had no purpose beyond the day-to-day business. And after a while we didn t even listen to music anymore. In my diaries, the first year is, Everything is wonderful, women are fantastic, my friends are these guys in the band, the record companies are out there just waiting to sign us. The second year is, That asshole has to leave, so-and-so is writing crappy songs and we re not gonna do them, that girl can t come on the road with us anymore, she s breaking up the band. And the third year was just complete Heart Of Darkness. It was madness. Everybody just lost it.

Yet, as soon as MacAnna began trying to make it in the straight world, meeting his American wife Kathryn Holmquist through an editing post at In Dublin, he began to feel a creeping dread, as if anticipating some cosmic payback for his feckless years. It could ve been diagnosed as classic Catholic hangover guilt, except MacAnna was the beneficiary of a liberal upbringing that prized Gunter Grass over Sunday Mass.
All I know is that I was in the band, which is a wonderful way of staying in limbo and prolonging your adolescence, he reasons. I d managed to do that til I was 27. When I was 28 I got married, started writing as a journalist, started messing around with novels I d never completed. And then I remember getting a headache one day and it stayed for nearly a year, on and off. It was a bad feeling, like you d a hangover but you didn t do anything the night before.
One night, dining with friends in 1985, MacAnna keeled over, bleeding from one ear: he d suffered a brain haemorrhage. He recovered, but sustained significant memory loss (to this day, there are books, films and people he can t recall), and all but lost his sense of smell. A year later, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Again, he beat it, only to suffer from a lengthy bout of depression ( post-traumatic stress disorder, some kind of survivor s syndrome for about a year I moped around, I didn t do much ). Then Dermot Bolger convinced him that he had a unique story which should be heard. The result was Bald Head, a small book with big Irish sales.
I got about 200 letters a month for about three years after that book came out, Ferdia remembers. I d never heard of testicular cancer in my ignorance I d never heard that cancer could affect people under 50. I suppose it s the young man immortality thing again. I d never been sick a day in my life and suddenly all these things were happening to me. So it s very hard to relate that to what you thought you d achieve or what was in store for you.
In more recent times, MacAnna has distinguished himself as a novelist (The Ship Inspector, Last Of The High Kings, the latter also a successful film starring Jared Leto) and TV producer, and is now recognised as one of the primary nurturers of comedy in RTE, producing shows such as Couched and Don t Feed The Gondolas.
Couched was my favourite thing that I ve ever done in RTE, he muses, it was like Beckett on acid . . . or more like Endgame on Ecstasy really! Even the floor manager didn t understand what was going on. I didn t understand half the things they were saying! But some of the repeats got audiences of over 70,000 people at three o clock in the morning.
Whatever happened to the mooted Apres Winfrey project?
Apres Winfrey was one of the most fascinating projects I ve ever been involved in, and it would ve worked, he says. It got a 95% approval rating from two test audiences. We developed it over eight or nine months with the most talented team of comedians I have ever met, including Mark Doherty, Gary Cooke, Barry Murphy, Brendan Dempsey, a bunch of people. For once we did it right RTE hired a hotel room, let them write, and the idea was could we transfer Apres Winfrey from a five-minute slot after sports into a mainstream comedy programme, not a cult programme.
And we went for it. We took all the shackles off and we said, Okay guys, you re basically jazz musicians and you play riffs, and as long as you know where you re going with everything, we can edit in and out. We gave the camera crew no scripts, I said, Lads, this is a different concept, this is like coverage, just follow these guys where they re going. Everybody said, Yes! because it was something new.
So what happened?
It was cancelled in the cutbacks. And the reason RTE had a lot to answer (for) as a result of it was that all these guys were more or less promised that it was gonna happen, they gave up a lot of time and trouble for buttons, weren t paid very well at all, and we made what I consider to be the most fascinating, radical and potentially excellent comedy series that RTE has ever done. Now I m not saying it s perfect if you look at the tape you ll see loads of things that could be improved but the potential was phenomenal.
Once, such setbacks might ve demoralised MacAnna, but these days he seems to relish the challenge. In fact, he insists on mentally deducting three years from his age, reasoning that he was cheated of that period of time in his late 20s.
I remember I had no dreams in three years, no dreams at all, he testifies. And I remember the dreams coming back in black and white, very slowly, little snippets, like little trailers of the dreams I was gonna have. And for the last three to four years the dreams have been in livid, vivid colour: cinerama technicolour, little movies, double features, triple features, Dolby in-house sound! The bad feeling I had when I was getting ill, that changed a few years ago, and now it feels . . . it s really hard to find the words for something that isn t spiritual, that isn t connected to anything except your instinct. And my instinct now is that the good times are coming.
Cartoon City is published by Review at #9.99 st.