A STAR IN OUR MIDST

IT WAS three o’clock in the morning. The computer would not obey me. I was sipping Southern Comfort. The room was too hot. I drew back the curtains, opened the window wide and let the fresh air in. The light flooded out into the dark street. There was a misty rain falling.

A young male voice called “Hi, Nell.”

Because the accent was familiar, I leaned out over the window sill, he leaned in over the fence, and his two friends listened while we established who his mother and father were. Eventually he asked the provenance of some cobble stones which lay scattered on the earth just inside the railing. I named the street in Derry from which they had been retrieved while the Council laid down a new layer of tarmacadam.

Say “Fifth Avenue”, and New Yorkers launch unprompted down a verbal memory lane. Mention Red Square and Muscovites reach for the vodka and start telling you about world history. However badly you pronounce Champs Elysee, the French swell up and want to make love. Say Sheriff Street and Jim Sheridan starts to sketch his next movie.

Say Fahan Street and Derry people start to giggle. The beautiful young man wondered that any cobble stones had been left after the street was torn up and flung at the RUC when he was in nappies. One of his companions, with whom he was staying while in Dublin, promised not to steal the historical remains of that civil rights era – some young swain in the street I now call home, in this here Republic, removed a stone bowl full of flowers from my doorstep in the early hours of last Valentine’s day.

LITTLE COMFORT

Paul Herron told me he had come down to Dublin to do a gig on television. He had been runner-up in some competition or other. He sings with The Big Electric Ceili Band. I hung, awestruck, over the window sill. Three-thirty in the morning, in the rain, and I’m talking to a world-famous rock star. You don’t get a chance to do that in New York – the window sills are too far up the skyscrapers.

On the Elysee, rock stars expect to be seen, not spoken to. Red Square is where dead socialists hang out. But Dublin, Derry, anywhere in Ireland, you open the window for fresh air, while the rest of the world sleeps, and a passing rock star stops to say hello.

I managed to murmur, modestly, that I had caught the band’s act when it played by the gasyard wall in the Bogside last summer. Such a night that was. Thousands of young people had flocked into the derelict field at the end of what was supposed to be a purely local community fête, they sprawled on grassy hummocks and drank from six-packs under a full moon, and it was only when the Big Electric came on to close the show that I understood why. All-Ireland piper and accordion champions its members may contain, but this was no mean ceili band. In a phrase, the Pogues can kiss this fan’s ass.

Paul said goodbye, I returned to the remains of the Southern Comfort, composed a boastful fairytale of Dubbalin, and come four a.m., he was back outside the window again, right in the middle of a cable TV video of the Frankie Goes To Hollywood album. Paul had come with two tapes, a solo one of him called ‘Different Worlds’ and the band’s debut album entitled The Best Kept Secret.

There being little Comfort left in the bottle, and me being too shy to talk to a rock and roll God, I affected concern that he should get some sleep before going on RTE and then I played the tapes, alone, until the birds joined in.

I think I’m talking a plaque on the wall of my house.

“Paul Herron paused a while here, on the night of January 19, 1994.”