January

“So if I fall in love and want to settle down and have children I’ll do it. Happiness and contentment aren’t always in record sales. I know countless women who sold so many records and have become amazingly famous but who are totally unhappy, I don’t want to end up like that. And men. Look at Elvis Presley and James Dean. They gave their lives for what they believed in and ended up with nothing. That’s not for me.”

• The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan

“I’ve always wanted to be famous. I don’t want to be a minority interest”

• Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker

“If you’re unemployed, they give you unemployment assistance. But I wish they didn’t. Because there’d be a fuckin’ revolution in this country. Unemployment assistance buys off the revolution. It’s just a means of givin’ people just enough to stop them reactin’ against the system. The Albert Reynolds’ of this world, if they had their way you’d get fuck all. But they know. Just give them enough, enough to survive on, or we’ll be fuckin’ gone.”

• Summerhill community worker Paddy Malone explains the politics of inner city life

“Yeah, women have tended to dominate the folk and traditional scene in recent years. Maybe it’s time to get some of the lads back into the picture and give the girls a good run for their money.”

• Sean Keane on why his sister Dolores and her mates ought to start looking to their laurels

February

“Yes, heterosexual bodies fit together in the sense that you can put a penis in a vagina but that doesn’t achieve all that much on its own. I’m biased here, but in terms of the details of technique, lesbians are often very imaginative because there’s no one thing that they’ve been traditionally told to do.”

• Writer and gay activist Emma Donoghue

“You sure as hell don’t order spaghetti in restaurants. Soup’s also dangerous because it has a habit of dribbling off the spoon but the biggest no no’s are chilli-dogs. If you’re going to eat one of those, you do it in private!”

• ZZ Top’s Dusty Hill on the culinary dangers of having a (very long) beard

“When k.d. lang looked at me over her glasses one time I almost crawled into her arms. But I did wonder if I was a bit of a sex object for her . . . wanting to crawl into her arms is not the same as wanting to give her head, is it? But I do imagine myself being a man, a lot. I said to my friend who’s a dyke, ‘if I had a cock I’d rub you from head to toe’.”

• Tori Amos

“Perhaps it’s because whereas you look at the African famine and it’s a cut and dry issue – ‘yes, we must send them food’ – Northern Ireland is far too involved and complicated for your average TV viewer to understand. I also suspect that it’s a little too close to home for most English people, so they blank it out.”

• New Order’s Stephen Morris on British apathy towards the North

“They approached me in the street, spat at me and gave it the whole ‘Fuckin’ queer, you watch your back’ routine. It occurred to me then that maybe they’d seen me on No Disco talking about being gay and that was why they’d confronted me, but that kind of thing doesn’t bother me. I enjoy being spat at anyway. They didn’t realise it but I got the horn actually!”

• Sack’s Martin McCann

“There is no Mostar anymore. There is a place where Mostar was once.”

• Bosnian refugee Emir Stranjaw

“The English are strange. They’re world champions now because they beat the All-Blacks, the way they go on. We beat England, so we’re the world champions, ‘know!”

• Ireland number 10 Eric Elwood snipes at the old enemy

“Feminism should be about women being successful and powerful, not about teaching women that they live in permanent danger from big, bad powerful men.”

• Author and feminist dissident Katie Roiphe

March

“I don’t like the idea that madness and creativity are connected, because my experience is that it’s a sickness, that it’s ugly, it’s humiliating and it’s not where your body’s supposed to be.”

• Diagnosed schizophrenic Kristin Hersh on why suffering for your art is overrated

“What happened was that there were a few things pissing me off and rather than getting rid of that through the music, I decided to challenge the kitchen to a boxing-match and the kitchen won on a technical knock-out. It’s still bragging about it to the bathroom!”

• Ginger from The Wildhearts explains that his broken arm is one of the 20% of accidents that happens in the home

“I don’t really feel there’s a threat in any of the words on the record; I think it’s more a fear of the white kids and the black kids gettin’ along. Or a little white girl takin’ down her Vanilla Ice poster and puttin’ a picture of me up over her bed, which bothers some of the racist parents in the world.”

• Ice-T explains why he’s not very popular with the Senators’ Wives

“Fuck off!”

• The wit and wisdom of the Sultans of Ping’s Niall O’Flaherty

“The bigger issue is the fact that the Maguires, the Conlans and the Guildford Four did spend fifteen years in prison wrongfully and these police have never been brought to trial. Ultimately, it’s a movie and Jim Sherridan is a storyteller and an entertainer so I just go ‘fuck it, so what’.”

• Gavin Friday defends the artistic licence used in the making of In The Name Of The Father

“They are only there to make our lives a misery. I know. And the six million Jews, and the thousands of Gypsies that were killed in the gas chambers in Auschwitz and elsewhere, their ghosts are crying out and calling out to us: ‘Stand up and get those people away. Close up their quarters. They are doing no good, and they are doing a great harm.”

• Auschwitz survivor Leon Greenman warns of the threat of the new far-right

“The worst thing is that people from outside think it’s as simple as two people signing a piece of paper and then going and burying their armalites in the back garden. A lot of people don’t seem to understand that there’s so much money involved. There’s drug rackets and things like this. A lot of people will lose their livelihood if this war stops.”

• Andy Cairns from Therapy? on why it’ll take more than a political solution to end violence in the North

“I’m more of a man than you’ll ever be and more of a woman than you’ll ever get.”

• Mr. Pussy cuts a heckler down to size at his Café de Luxe

“In one way, dance culture is more evolved than mainstream rock ‘n’ roll culture because it’s destroyed the long-propagated myth that to be credible you have to be disadvantaged or some sort of underdog. They’re much more free and open-minded which, personally, I find refreshing.”

• The Edge

April

“They always say that babies don’t come with directions but ours did. She had ‘love me’ written all over her”

• Garth Brooks causes an outbreak of communal queasiness at his Dublin press conference

“I think in general the whole system here needs a radical overhaul. Even the Ethics in Government Bill, I don’t know what it’s going to produce. And I think there’s a huge number of questions that need to be asked about the vested interests of different politicians in different areas.”

• Soon-to-be-elected Green Party MEP Patricia McKenna demonstrates that prophesy is one of her many talents

“Political correctness is terrible for creativity. It’s absolutely appalling. How can people be honest and creative when they are constrained by a set of rules?”

• The Proclaimers’ Charlie Reid

“I think you have to acknowledge that some people would really love hell because it’s full of drama and pain, the hell of pictures, the hell that some of us were taught. And in fact the mundane hell of the bad nightclub when the lights come up and you realise that you’ve spilled ketchup on your lapel and you’re trying to be so suave is far worse.”

• Elvis Costello

“I had to teach them in there how to sharpen needles. They’d ask me to fix them up and I wouldn’t, I’d say ‘if you want to do, do it yourself’. But then I saw one particular seventeen-year-old girl fixing up with a blunt needle and took it and sharpened it for her.”

• Fallen sixties socialite Zara Darlington on her stay in Mountjoy

“Nationalism is important because it rids Ireland of troops but then what – Albert Reynolds’ cabinet is somehow going to miraculously transform Ireland into this great country? Ireland is a fucked up country. It has huge economic problems. Huge unemployment. People in power amass money and that’s serious oppression. I do not believe that the problems of Northern Ireland can be solved in their entirety simply with the withdrawal of British troops. You substitute one oppressor with another.”

• Marxman’s Oisín Lunny

“I like to think that I’ll always love music and songwriting, and if I can incorporate that with making shitloads of money and flying round the world, great.”

• Inspiral Carpets’ Clint Boon

“I just sat in the corner of the control room, unable to do anything apart from nod and grin because I was paralysed with – not fear – awe. I’d heard about her being a maneater and having flings with Michael Hutchence and that bloke out of the Lemonheads but she probably thought I was the studio tea-boy.”

• Saint Etienne’s Pete Wiggs declares his unrequited love for Kylie Minogue

“A good engineer and a big bag of grass!”

• Belfast dance guru David Holmes reveals the tricks of the remix trade

May

“If we have 55 seats in this alliance, and the Labour Party have 33 it actually presents the arithmetic possibility of a change of government even within the present Dail. I know I’m raising a hornet’s nest by suggesting this and going much farther than most of our parliamentary party would go, but I certainly feel this is a possibility for the future. And somebody has to be prepared to say these things publicly.”

• Fine Gael’s Jim Mitchell gazes into his crystal ball

“I don’t think I’m a complete genius. I just think I’m a partial genius”.

• Neil Hannon – aka The Divine Comedy – gets bashful

“If Mick had been a garage mechanic, I’m sure I’d have had the occasional service for nothing!”

• Chris Jagger puts the benefits of having a famous brother into perspective

“Absolutely. I don’t think you have can have a foot in both doors.”

• Orla Guerin agrees that by standing for Labour in the European elections she’s effectively scuppered her chances of returning to RTE

“This virtual reality stuff frightens me because you’ve got a whole generation of kids coming up who are far better at interacting with computers than they are human beings. It won’t be long before you’re able to get an interactive shag and then there’ll be absolutely no reason at all to leave the house!”

• The Orb’s Dr. Alex Patterson gives a ‘thumbs down’ to the Sega Megabonk

“I just like messing around with knobs and dials. Making funny fart noises with synthesisers.”

• Erasure’s Vince Clarke

“All you have to do in the States these days is wave an Uzi around and scream, ‘Yo, I’m going to shoot you motherfucker!’, and you’ve sold a million. It’s the same all-boys-together mentality as heavy metal – showing off and proving how tough you are.”

• Massive Attack’s Tricky on why he’s not a member of the Snoop Doggy Dogg fan club

“Chernobyl is the forewarning, the foretaste of what is to come. God, if we haven’t learned from this desperate tragedy, I’m at my wits end to understand us as a species. If we don’t learn from all the pain and the suffering, without asking questions, why? And what are we doing about it to ensure that our children don’t become the children of Sellafield?”

• Chernobyl Children’s Project director Abi Roche sounds the alarm

June

“The reason I don’t get into rock magazines any more is because the guys don’t want to shag me.”

• Alison Moyet

“I wanted to become the Mickey Rourke who not only kicks people’s asses in the movies but also kicks people’s asses in real life. I wanted to brutalise women like Mickey and look like a complete scumball like Mickey. I wanted to chainsmoke Marlboros and say the word Motherfucker a lot.”

• American film critic Joe Queenan on why at least one chapter of his If You’re Talking To Me, You’re Career Must Be In Trouble book was a labour of love

“I just don’t want to be out on stage in my forties. It’s horrible when you start to hate the people you used to like because they disgrace their own legacy. A guy like Eric Clapton should just stop. He was in Cream. How much better does a band have to be?”

• Henry Rollins

“The DUP and Paisley and some of the hard-liners in the Official Unionist Party are definitely major obstacles to progress. But they won’t be there forever. And I believe when the younger Unionists come more into positions of authority within their parties they will want to advance these talks. It is something that is achievable within a ten to fifteen year span, but not within six months or anything like that.”

• Progressive Democrat TD Bobby Molloy

“The most bizarre was clearing out dead people’s houses and deciding what was worth selling and what should be thrown away. There was one old lady, she must have been in her eighties, who had the biggest dildo you’ve ever seen hidden away in a closet. It was the size of a tree trunk and I remember thinking, at least she died with a smile on her face.”

• Moby recalls one of the stranger jobs he had before becoming a full-fledged techno nutter

“There was me – a good right-on gay liberationist falling in love with a woman and suddenly I’m tabloid city. For all the years I lived with a man, no-one wanted to know anything about him.”

• Tom Robinson

“I’ve backed Brazil on £100 at 4 to 1, but that’s sentiment. I want to be commenting at a World Cup Brazil wins!”

• BBC footie commentator John Motson about to get his wish and a nice little cash bonus

“We know it’s going to be a very, very tough game against Italy. Okay they might be a little more apprehensive about playing us because of the results we had against Germany and Holland, which might help us a little bit, but we’re going in against one of the best teams in the world. To beat them would be a magnificent achievement in anybody’s eyes.”

• Packie Bonner

“This election will be the last one before the chastisement. And, after the elections, there will be no need for structures such as the European Parliament. Nobody knows the exact day or hour of the chastisement but – from my studies of the prophecies – it would appear to be coming within the next five to ten years.”

• Independent candidate Eamonn Murphy suggests there’s no point voting in the European elections because we’re all going to die anyway

July

“Put this in the biggest type you’ve got: ‘Joe Kinnear wants the Ireland job!’ I’ve had a taste of it abroad and to manage my own country would be a dream come true. On the other hand, there’s a train of thought that says you’d have to be fucking daft to try and follow Jack because short of winning the European Championship or World Cup, you’re always going to be living in his shadow.”

• Wimbledon manager and RTE pundit Joe Kinnear

“It is one of the truly great atrocities of the 20th century. I don’t say this lightly. Not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionately, as many people in Cambodia as the Indonesian dictator, Suharto, has killed in East Timor. It has also been a largely ignored atrocity. It has taken almost twenty years for the silence to even begin to be broken in the West.”

• Journalist John Pilger

“I don’t know about being a ‘serious musician’. That term always makes me think of Sting and Peter Gabriel and if that’s how people perceived me, I’d shoot myself. No offence Kurt!”

• The Beastie Boys’ Ad-Rock

“They said that Ireland is a country with high standards. Patients will have good treatment. But why does the Irish Government invite me here if they are not going to take care of me?”

• Bosnian refugee Abid Gagula critics the medical care he’s received in Ireland

“If there was a Eurovision Song Contest for complainers then the Bosnians would win it every year”

• Mr Conroy, Secretary Manager at Cappagh Hospital, fails in his bid to join the diplomatic corps

“‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is just a great song. And then he shot himself and I thought ‘What a tragedy’. But then when I read about the suicide note I thought, ‘What a pathetic, self-pitying whinge. What a coward, what a wet.”

• Bob Geldof on Kurt Cobain

“His vocation in life is to piss people off, and he’s still an expert.”

• Jah Wobble extols the virtues of John Lydon

“I was, as a person, dominated to a certain extent by strong women, good women in my opinion, in certain areas of my life. I probably paid a bit of a price for it. But in certain other areas I’m really happy about it.”

• Luka Bloom

“I’m surprised The Abbey hasn’t closed down years ago. The people there do nothing but perpetrate the art of fucking alienating people from the theatre. To me, The Abbey is a joke.”

• Playwright Lee Dunne

August

“This word representative is something that I’ve banned from my house for the next couple of years. I’ve been hit over the head with that so often. Like, is Heathcliff representative of Yorkshire men? Is Jesus representative of the Israelis?”

• Roddy Doyle responds to criticism of The Family and the way it portrays Dublin’s Northside

“I listened to the radio most of the time, and Chris De Burgh’s ‘Lady In Red’ was played over and over again. I hated it. And then I saw him on television and hated him even more. The feeling I got off him is that he’s so insincere. Truly insincere. I’m sure he would disagree.”

• Veteran journalist Nick Kent

“I have to check out the bathroom arrangements before I’m able to relax. Some people look out for good acoustics in a venue, I case the lavatory.”

• Aimee Mann

“Mushrooms and a tequila diet was my main thing at the time. Luckily, I’d broken my nose playing football so I could never do cocaine, never enjoy blow and that probably saved my life. But, in terms of drugs, I like most anything, though these days all I do is smoke a bit.”

• Hal Ketchum reveals his appetite for destruction

“You must differentiate between terrorists and freedom fighters which is a distinction that isn’t often made. The IRA is the Irish Republican Army who are fighting against a gerrymandered frontier which by definition created a minority in the North.”

• Tony Benn

“Vodka by the bottle. That’s the kind of culture I come from. We don’t sip drink, we fucking drink it. You go all the way, otherwise you’re a wimp.”

• Bjork

“Bye now, Father. I hope they’re the right size.”

• Grafton Street shop assistant to ‘Father’ Liam Fay as he rounds off his day as a priest by buying a packet of Durex Fetherlites

“I think the single greatest abuse of public money is the way we support the nuclear industry, with public funds, in ways the public doesn’t even know about. In this sense we are, for example, indirectly supporting THORP.”

• Green Party MEP Nuala Ahern

“There are some things like body-piercing that I’m quite into and that curious mixture of revulsion and fascination you get when you read about stuff like catheters. I mean, I can’t imagine myself saying, ‘Oh baby, you turn me on, stick that glass tube up my penis’, but it’s interesting to contemplate.”

• Therapy’s Andy Cairns

September

“I’m not involved with ‘Protestant thugs’. The people of Northern Ireland don’t elect representatives who are involved with ‘Protestant thugs’.”

• DUP Deputy Leader Peter Robinson

“Honestly, it’s Bimbo City. You’ve never seen a place where so many people are employed just for their looks – it’s like they’re trying to create some hip rock ‘n’ roll master race. What is it with Americans that they can’t leave anything in its raw state? They take a good idea, suck the life out and pump candyfloss into the corpse.”

• Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradfield explains why he doesn’t want his MTV

“I used to ask if there was some sort of fruit-flavoured condom convention on Tuesday nights ‘cause from early morning onwards it’s all fruit flavoured condoms, but there isn’t as far as I know.”

• Terry Power, the proprietor of Dublin’s Condom Power, ponders his customers’ tastes

“I myself pray for the day when the Queen’s head sits atop a pole on Tower Hill”

• Malcolm McLaren waves goodbye to his OBE

“There is no basis for it in nature. The definition of nature is recreation, the recreative cycle... in my view what is happening in the homosexual areas is the antithesis of nature.”

• Independent TD Johnny Fox attacks the decriminalisation of homosexuality

“I don’t remember the last time I had a drink of liquor. I haven’t had a beer in four or five years. I don’t have a wife to beat and I wouldn’t beat my wife if I had one.”

• B.B. King

“You gotta have ambition. Think penthouse, not bedsit. When you do the pools, do it to win. You don’t back a horse to lose, do you?”

• Oasis’ Noel Gallagher on the power of positive thinking

“If you align it with the workforce in general around the world, computers have taken over and put a lot of people out of work. The same thing’s happening in the music industry and why should these idiots think they’re more special than Joe Bloggs who’s just been laid off by the car factory? That’s probably a bit cruel but this is 1994 – wake up and grow up!”

• Sound Crowd’s Mark Kavanagh with a little advice for the Irish rock community

“To suggest, as he did recently in print, that the campaign to get a fairer deal for Irish artists is, ‘the hobby horse of a few’, is highly insulting to the thousands of people in this country who derive their living from music.”

• Jobs In Music committee member Johnny Lappin gives 2FM Head of Music John Clarke a slap on the wrist

October

“Over the last eight months, if you’re a Loyalist paramilitary you’ve learned one solid lesson – violence pays. Gerry Adams has obviously reaped the benefits from the violence by the IRA. Violence has worked and Loyalist paramilitaries look at that and say ‘we’ll make it work for us’ if things don’t change.”

• Ian Paisley Jnr. warns of the consequences if Westminster strikes any “secret deals” with the IRA

“I’ve no interest in Roddy Doyle. I think he is less a literary figure than a phenomenon of popular culture. And popular culture is easy and immediate. That’s fine, but let’s not confuse pop culture and art.”

• Author John Banville

“We can release fourteen statements on Northern Ireland, or any range of issues and they don’t even get mentioned in the newspapers. But if I say I intend changing the bulbs in the Mansion House, every newspaper jumps on the story. Anyone can see what’s happening here.”

• John Gormley, Dublin’s first Green Lord Mayor, alleges media bias against his party

“Yeah, I’m a real feminist, I hate men – that’s why I got married.”

• The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan being a tad sarcastic

“The Beatles, I know they’re a legend but I just don’t get it, Ob-la-fucking-di, Ob-la-fucking da. I can appreciate their greatness, I just don’t like their music.”

• Blink’s Dermot Lambert

“I’ve never seen a steroid in my life. I wouldn’t know one if you showed me one.”

• Sonia O’Sullivan

“Seriously, I nearly did sleep with Little Richard! He was under just a sheet in bed, playing with himself, saying ‘are all the boys from Ireland as pretty as you?’ And then he went to the bathroom. He was naked and had a half hard-on, a forty-five degree job. But he didn’t touch me, thankfully. Yet he is the queen of rock ‘n’ roll.”

• B.P. Fallon

“Oh my God. Poor Sinead! Why does she get herself into such a mess? I saw her tearing up that picture of the Pope on TV and I thought it was great. In a real pop way, I thought it was hilarious. And I’m on her side against those stupid Bob Dylan fans. They’ve got swastikas tattooed on their heads, those people.”

• American Music Club’s Mark Eitzel

“No, I’m not on cocaine! And unlike Bill Clinton when I smoked dope in College I did inhale. But there was never the supply there, in UCD, to use it regularly. Yet I did enjoy it. But I never touched acid or speed because I really do find it hard enough to keep my sanity at the best of times, without giving myself over to drugs like that.”

• Dermot Morgan

“Most of the songs that I’ve written are not even from my own perspective. I have a truly monstrous ego but I am not so multi-faceted and endless that I have experienced all that I have written about. My thirty-four years on this planet have not been that rich, thankfully.”

• REM’s Michael Stipe

“As a guilt-ridden Catholic, masturbation becomes a way of life and it was a big hobby of mine at one stage.”

• An Emotional Fish’s Ger Whelan on what he got up to while his mates played Scalextrix

November

“No”

• The Censors Office on whether or not they should have to justify their decisions to the public

“Our engineer Dick comes from Dublin, and I’m always amazed that near the back there’s two pages of sex ads. What’s happening in Dublin, is it the gay capital of the fucking western world?”

• The Jesus And Mary Chain’s William Reid turns out to be an avid reader of the Hot Press Classifieds

“Ye’re too soft down there in Dublin. The Provos would never have allowed heroin in the way ye allowed it down there. They wouldn’t have let the crime get out of hand the way ye did. They wouldn’t have let joyriding get out of hand. Wait till there’s a united Ireland. We’ll soon sort ye out.”

• Anonymous Republican paramilitary source

“And my book is, very much about the future and how, here in Ireland, we are coming into what could be the most exciting time in our history. And the question about U2 is to what extent are they the future?”

• Race Of Angels author John Waters

“Lola was an amalgam of lots of people. But, specifically, it was a person I was dancing with in a club, who turned out to be a man dressed as a really attractive woman. But I only noticed that when I went out into the daylight and saw the stubble on his chin as we caressed.”

• Ray Davies clears up another of rock ‘n’ roll’s little mysteries

“If John Hume gets the Nobel Peace Prize while the IRA are still in possession of their three ton of semtex, I will definitely not cheer.”

• Conor Cruise O’Brien

“I like to be popular. I like to be an ordinary chap hanging out with the boys. In Ireland, you’d better be like that or you’re a cunt.”

• Pierce Turner

“Some people just shouldn’t be allowed into a studio. Like, the Pet Shop Boys, Pulp, The Beautiful South, The Smiths – all those songs about normal everyday life, songs about nothing!”

• Ian McNabb upsets half of the western world

“I don’t write books with no plot, one character, all in the present tense in very short sentences with wide margins and type large enough for the legally blind. Therefore, inevitably, I’m hated.”

• John Irving

December

“This is so brutal I love it. Did you see yer one Clare McKeon, they have her picture on the back of the bus. Isn’t that very fitting, isn’t it? Oh yeah, Clare McKeon, a face new to television but, sadly, all too familiar to Store Street Garda Station.”

• Dustin The Turkey turns TV critic. Allegedly.

“To me, Elvis marks the beginning of the downfall of popular music because he was the first marketed entertainer, in the widest sense. He was the first Coca Cola bottle singer. They really turned him into a commodity, and with him the music. Colonel Tom Parker was, and still is, the greatest con man in America.”

• Tony Bennett

“A tape of Michael Smith’s speeches”

Democratic Left TD Pat Rabbitte describes his concept of hell

“It’s gone now, hasn’t it? – Bernard being in Suede. I’m saying that because I’ve got a career to think about.”

• Suede newboy Richard Oakes seeks reassurance that he won’t be returning to the dole queue

“There was this one bloke who got on top of a squad car, kicked the windscreen in and then jumped down and walked past half-a-dozen officers as if he didn’t have a care in the world. People talk about youngsters nowadays not having their act together but that’s the best bit of mindless hooliganism I’ve seen in years. Milwall ought to snap him up.”

• Fruitbat applauds the crowd participation which followed Carter USM’s gig in Cork

“Because the inside of my nose came out in my hand one day and I went to see somebody about it and he said ‘I know you, I know what you do, I would imagine that you have to be a fairly talented person to achieve what you’ve done, this is not the act of an intelligent person’.”

• 98FM’s Mark Cagney on why he stopped taking cocaine

“Kurt was probably headed right where Kurt was headed and there was nothing a change of venue was going to do for that. I will say this though: this life, it becomes totally unreal. People come in when you’re in the toilet and take a picture, and people scream at you on the street, and point, and freak out and go ‘Look! Look! Look!’”

• Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz

"What those critics forget is that there was no group in rock as manufactured as the Sex Pistols. All anybody ever compares Boyzone to is the Monkees. But they can deal with that. And so can I. There are many would-be rock stars in Dublin attacking us, but they're just begrudgers, jealous because we're making hits and they're not. So fuck them!"

• Boyzone manager Louis Walsh goes 'ya boo sucks' to their critics