What with all that sniffing and snorting from the big ol gas tank going on as you came in, you may have mistaken me for Blue Velvet-mode Dennis Hopper but, contrary to what you might have thought, I was not ingesting anything of an illegal nature. As if I would. No, it was just good, clean, unadulterated oxygen, that s all, but withal, a vital commodity if, being the underworld kinda guy that I am, your acting editor is to acclimatise to the thin air up here at the front of the mag.
Still, that s as nothing to the challenge of coming to terms with our new compact design. Yes, yes, I know that the reaction has been universally positive but can I just say, for the record, that I feel deeply uncomfortable to find myself on a page in which, frankly, there isn t enough room to swing my dick. Admittedly, as regular readers will know, I am hung like a goddamn sperm whale, but back in the old days this was never a problem. Hell, if Sam was on a roll and wanted to lay his thing out over four whole pages, the Editor simply said Sure thing, big fella and how about a run-on and a Part Two Next Issue while you re at it?
Of course, those were the golden days of hotpress, the days before the onset of attention deficiency syndrome turned our young people into monosyllabic baboons. Back then, the epic instalments of the mag came down the gangway like a procession of great big ocean liners. Who will ever forget issues containing such heavyweight literary events as Blue Oyster Cult The Six Part Retrospective , Beginning this week: The Secret History of Claddagh Records or Wishbone Ash The Ad Feature ?
And then there was a personal favourite, that celebrated issue of March 79 featuring my open-ended, one on one Q&A with the fabled purveyor of intensity in ten cities, the axe-man who ate Detroit, the veritable storm in a loincloth, big game hunter and metal marauder, Ted The Fuckin Nuge Nugent.
That was some mutha right enough: one photo and sixty-three pages of closely typed print, leaving us with barely eleven pages for a live review of Scullion and a small ad offering a second-hand leather waistcoat for sale. And you think Mojo sprang out of nowhere?
Of course, it s all changed now. These days, the editorial floor in hotpress is like something out of 2001 A Space Odyssey, all banks of winking lights, luminous screens and soft bleeping noises, bathed in a white glow and backdropped by an ambient soundtrack. The Head of Design reclines in a flotation tank, dreaming up ever more minimalist typefaces. Every hour or two, he blinks his right eye, whereupon six more pages instantly materialise on a screen before zipping off though cyberspace to our printers in Nassau in the Bahamas.
Contrast this sterile, antiseptic scene with the good old days when Sam and the gang went about their business armed with scalpels, pots of cowgum and huge big sheets of groovy Letraset. The scalpels gave us the forensic accuracy of brain surgeons when it came to doing corrections as, eyes squinting and tongues protruding from mouths, we cut out tiny words and glued them over misprints, so that the finished pages frequently had a pleasingly quilt-like consistency.
Of course, not all the corrections ended up on the page. Like sand, the little bastards could get anywhere. One of our number was halfway through a difficult meeting with his bank manager before he found that the word riff was stuck to the bridge of his nose. And, on another occasion, I was indulging in the rites of poontang with a willowy blonde of Norwegian extraction when the erotic mood was somewhat deflated by the discovery of the name Paddy Moloney securely fastened to my right buttock.
As for Letraset, I have myself not yet fully recovered from my first encounter with the black art. As a trainee rock hack I was delighted to be asked to Letraset a headline. It seemed quite an honour, as if an old monk had said, Here, laddie, fancy having a crack at the K in Kells? Needless to say, I was hoping for something dramatic and groovy like DIZBUSTER! or even THE FUCKIN NUGE . Knowing that the then Head Of Design was a bit of Morrison freak, I was even prepared to settle for VAN THE MAN . Instead, what the bastard asked me to Letraset, in tiny 24 point helvetica bold (no, I don t easily forget), was: AND THE BONNY BOAT WAS ONE AS WE SAILED INTO THE MYSTIC .
I began work on this headline in September, 1977 and completed it in February of 1982. Fortunately, I was still in time for the print deadline owing to the fact that a fresh delivery of cowgum had rather distracted the entire workforce with the result that they d spent most of the intervening five years staring vacantly into space trying to remember what it was they were supposed to be doing.
And, of course, when the issue did finally come out it was well worth the wait, containing as it did, a 64-page preview of the Lisdoonvarna Festival, a cut out and keep guide to making your own uileann pipes and that Van Morrison news story in full. Aye, great times, but you try telling that to the young people nowadays and they won t believe you.