Radio daze

by Twenty Major on February 6th, 2006

A long time ago I worked in the radio business and I made some good old friends. Since then once a year Larry Gogan, Howard Stern, Rick Dees and I meet for a weekend of beer, discussion about the state of the radio industry and to reminisce about the time we tried to make a clone of Stern which went horrifically wrong and we ended up with Ryan Tubridy. I told them we should have just waited and extracted a bit more DNA rather than using some of Larry’s poo but they wouldn’t listen.

We used to be 5 though as part of our group was Valdimir ‘the impaler’ Vladovic. He was the main man of Russian radio. He started as a 16 year old on a pirate station in Saint Petersburg called KISH FM. His zany style and wicked impersonations soon saw him gain a massive audience and by the time he was 21 he was on Moscow’s hottest top 40 station. Within 3 years his show was being syndicated across the whole of the country and his Russian Top 40 countdown was earning him a fortune.

He was a true Soviet celebrity, super-wealthy and he, following the lead of many others, decided to buy his own radio network. It wasn’t too long before he was known as the king of Russian radio.

Naturally he fitted in well with all of us and our annual weekends became legendary in the radio world. They were debauched, they were non-stop, they were great fun. Sadly one of them ended in tragedy. We used to vary the location. One year New York with Howard Stern, one year in LA with Rick Dees, one year in Moscow with Vlad and then a year in Dublin with me and Larry.

It was the Dublin weekend of 1983 that cost Vlad his life. Having been in Dublin before he was a huge fan of fish and chips and especially those in Leo Burdock’s on Werburgh Street. We were staying in the Berkley Court Hotel, Stern had insisted on a suite in which we could ‘paaaaarty’. So we were there drinking and carousing and singing and certainly not snorting enormous lines of cocaine because there was no cocaine in Ireland back then. Really.

Anyway, mid-party Vlad got peckish and decided to nip over to Burdock’s for a cod supper. No harm, we all just carried on. Larry Gogan was in a hotel bathrobe strumming a guitar and singing Thin Lizzy hits in that rich, baritone of his. Rick Dees was entertaining a young Finglas girl called Jacinta in the jacuzzi while Howard Stern had two blondes on a four-poster bed and I can’t tell you what he was doing as it’s still illegal.

After a while Stern decided he’d give us all a treat. He gotten into home cinema and had made his own ‘home movies’. Although we weren’t really into seeing any more of him than we’d already witnessed during the party he’s just not the kind of guy you can say not to. So he stopped doing what he was doing to the blondes, which took about 10 minutes, and pulled a tape out of his suitcase and put it in the machine. However, instead of the adult entertainment he was hoping to show us we got a taped from TV version of the Omen II.

To say he lost his temper is an understatement. He went beserk, throwing things around, kicking things over and at one point he vomited and some of it came out of the corners of his eyes. Lastly he went over to the machine that had offended him so and hurled it through the window. Real rock and roll style. We were all silent after his outburst and a minute or two later Rick Dees went over to look out the window.

“Oh Jesus!”, he said. “I think you’ve hit someone.”

We all rushed downstairs as fast as our little legs would carry us and once we pushed through the crowd we were greeted with a terrible sight. Our chum Vlad, having stuffed his face with the best fish and chips in Dublin, was on his way back to the hotel to carry on the party when a Sony SL-C7UB Betamax landed on his head, killing him instantly. The king of Russian radio’s brains were spread all over the pavement.

“Oh fuck!”, I said.

“I’ll be right back after these tears”, said Rick Dees. Stern just looked shellshocked and slightly guilty.

There was a plaintive sob from behind us. Larry Gogan stood there, his bathrobe open, his eyes welling as his genitals swayed gently in the autumn breeze.

“Oh no. I can’t believe it”, he cried.

“Video killed the radio Tsar….”

Charlie’s fantastic invention

by Twenty Major on November 15th, 2005

My chum Charlie (I don’t talk about him much but I have mentioned his racing pigeons) has always fancied himself as a bit of an inventor but the main problem is he’s technically obtuse, mechanically cretinous and he has the imagination of a shoe. His little workshop/pigeon coop in the back garden is full of failed experiments. There were the waterproof boots which he made entirely from duck feathers, the Renee Zelwegger repellent which may well be fully functional but he’s never been able to get close enough to her to prove it and the brown toilet paper which was just never going to work for those of us who like to look back after a good wipe.

Anyway, he’s been having some problems with him timekeeping in recent weeks and Charlie’s wife does not like it when he’s late. However, if you were to ever see Charlie’s wife you would certainly understand his reluctance to arrive home pronto. Think Mary Harney crossed with Fatima Whitbread, just with more gee flies.

Charlie will sit in Ron’s and talk to himself to avoid going back.

“One for the road, Charles?” he’ll ask.

“Don’t mind if I do, Charles”, he reply. He’s the only one who calls him Charles. He’s Charlie to everyone else. But as much as it would be easy to blame his enormous spouse for his tardiness the main problem is that Charlie gets too drunk to see and gets completely lost. Most of us have some kind of homing device which means we always, mostly, end up in our own place at the end of the night, no matter how rat-arsed we are. Not Charlie. He’s fucking hopeless.

Anyway, he’s been under more pressure to get home on time since Mrs Charlie’s bridge partner died (I am convinced she simply faked her own death. I mean, whoever heard of somebody dying from fractured quim?). She’s been on and on at him and last week when he arrived back a whole hour after he said he would be she clobbered him with a rolling pin like a real, old fashioned wife.

So he was complaining Ron’s about it on Saturday night.

“That old wagon is doing my fucking head in, the sweaty-minged battle-axe. I can’t even be a few minutes late or she’s in my ear like scabby wax. And I’m not going to give up my pints just because it takes me longer to get home when I’m shitfaced.”

“Why don’t you make some kind of invention to bring you back?” said Jimmy.

“That’s not a bad idea, James”, and when he arrived back at 1.30am having wandered 3 miles out of his way Mrs Charlie was most definitely not pleased so he spent the whole of the next day in his workshop/pigeon coop trying to figure something out. It was late afternoon and many, many crumpled blueprints later that he looked up at the skies for inspiration but because he was inside couldn’t see the sky. What he did see though was one of his champion pigeons. They’re only champion in the sense that he races them against each other so one of them has to win. His pigeons against real racing pigeons would be like racing Paul McCartney’s wife against Carl Lewis. Still, it was his champion and his champion that helped get the invention together.

The bird in question was called ‘Eyehat’, so-called after another one of Charlie’s failed inventions. He always hated wearing sunglasses and never liked wearing caps or visors and the like so he thought he could make hats for each eye and had a thousand prototypes made up by a factory in Taiwan before he realised he had no way of actually fixing the things to your forehead. If you think you could make use of Eyehats drop me an email and I’ll put you in touch with him.

So, last night in came Charlie to the pub carrying a large box covered in a piece of blue silk. It’s always much better to unveil something by letting the silk slide off it than to just wrap some old newspaper around it.

“What have you got in there, Charlie?” I asked him.

“Well”, he said, “It’s funny you should ask that.”

“What’s funny about it?”

“I knew someone was going to ask me that very question.”

“That’s hardly fucking funny. It’s obvious. Like if you came in with a bandage on your nose I’m going to ask what happened to your nose.”

“Fair enough. I’ll just get a round in and I’ll show you.”

So he got the pints in and proceeded to show us.

“Right. You know the way Mrs Charlie has been on my back for getting back late.”

“Aye.”

“Well this little beauty will make sure I never get lost no matter how scuttered I am”, he told us as he let the silk slide provocatively off what turned out to be a cage. Inside the cage was a pigeon which appeared to fastened to some kind of crossbow.

“What the fuck is that, Charlie?”

“I was stuck for inspiration the other day and I saw my champion pigeon Eyehat and I got to thinking. Pigeons can always find their way home, especially homing pigeons and my pigeons are homing pigeons.”

“But you’ve lost loads of the cunts”, said Jimmy the Bollix.

“I figure the ones that didn’t come home got eaten by hawks or weren’t homing pigeons, just regular French pigeons.”

“Whatever you say, Charlie. So how does that thing work.”

“Good question. Well, you can see the bird, with his unerring sense of direction - like a feathered GPS system, is attached to this high-powered crossbow here. Inside the bird I have planted a small radio transmitter which is linked to this compass wristwatch. The watch has a signaling device which will emit a pleasant beeping sound when I am going in the right direction and blast disgusting Damien Rice music when I am going away from my house and my …*cough* … beloved wife. I just shoot the bird in the air and away it goes leading back to my place.”

“Grand job, all very fuckin’ swish.”

“Perhaps I’ve made it a little bit more complicated than I needed to but I had to be sure. Mrs Charlie is talking about making me give her oral sex as a punishment if I’m late back again.”

“Good sweet holy jumping Jesus on the cross. Isn’t that a breach of human rights or something?”

“I don’t know but I just can’t take that risk anymore.”

“Can’t say I blame you, old pal. So this thing is foolproof then, is it?”

“I hope so”, Charlie said. “I’m going to have a few scoops here with you lads then give it a trial run. With any luck wherever I’ll aim Eyehat, that’s my home.”

Malachy Wong

by Twenty Major on November 3rd, 2005

It was a quiet night in Ron’s last night when all of a sudden the door opened and there was a distinct odour of sweet and sour sauce and monosodium glutamate. I looked up to see a Chinese man staring right at me. Normally this would have me reaching for my inside pocket. Not this time.

“TWINTY MAJORRR. HOW DE FECK ARE YE BOY?” he roared.

“Malachy Wong!” says I. “It’s been a long fucking time.”

“Dat it has ya langer. Now, are ya goin’ ta buy me a pint or am I goin’ ta have to do me kung-fu on ya like?”

So I bought him a pint and we got talking. Malachy Wong is a bloke me and Jimmy met in Cork one night we were down there for purely recreational purposes and not to put manners on some lad who had stolen a car Jimmy had stolen just an hour before. Feeling a bit peckish we stopped in at ‘The Golden Pond’ to grab a takeaway and Malachy was behind the counter. We asked him directions and being the kind and adventurous soul that he is he decided to follow us in case we got lost.

As it happened that was a good thing as the lad we were going down to talk to had four older brothers who were all built like fucking tanks. Jimmy hit one of them in the head with a piece of timber as thick as a government minister and he didn’t even flinch. As we retreated to our car to get out of there and come back another time there was a high-pitched shriek and in came Malachy and he Ju-Jitsued the shite out of all them.

“Tought ya might need a hand ya pair o gobshites”, he said and since then we’ve been firm friends. Fate brought us together and it was fate that brought his parents to Cork in 1962. They were heading for England to make a new life but the bloke that was smuggling them from the tip of France died and their boat drifted for days and days before it washed up in a little village called Baltimore. From there they made their way to the city and opened up the first Chinese takeaway in Ireland. As a tribute to the first man to help them onshore they named their first, and only, son ‘Malachy’.

“So what are you doing up here?” I asked him.

“Well, I need to get a copy of me birth cert so I thought I’d pay you a visit, boyo. How’s Jimmy?”

“Still a bollix, Malachy.”

“Ahh, some tings never change, eh? C’mere an’ I tell you though. Had a right laugh wit da young lad in the offices of Births, Deaths and Marriages. He made me fill out a form like, asking all kinds of shite like name, address, date of birth, and what ethnic group I belong to.”

“Right…”

“So I filled de feckin’ ting out and he calls me over and says ‘I tink you’ve got dis bit wrong here’. So I says ‘No, I don’t', and he says ‘I reckon ya do an’ all’ so I says ‘I’m telling ya I dooooon’t’. So he’s looking at me sorta biting his tongue and he says ‘Now I don’t wantcha ta tink dat I’m bein’ racist or nothin’ like dat, right, but there’s no way you’re white.’”

“He has a point, you know.”

“I know, ya spanner. Shut up. Anyway, I says ‘I am what I am and de box I’m after tickin’ is the one that applies to me’ so he says ‘Well, with the greatest respect an’ all I don’t tink it does’. So I pretend to be all aggravated and start swearin’ Chinese and runnin’ round the walls like Crouching Tiger Thingy Thingy. ‘Get yer supervisor in here. NOW!’ I shout so off he goes and a couple o’ minutes later in walks a fella with a big square jaw and curly hair.”

“Is that right?”

“It is. So he says ‘Mr Wong, I have discussed this case with my underling here and although you might think you’re white you’re not white so you can’t pick that box’ so I say ‘Is it dat you don’t want people like me in the same group as you? Is dat it?’ and he gets all flustered and says ‘No, no, no. Of course not. This is strictly in the interests of accuracy’ so I say ‘So you just want to categorise people and make sure dere’s no interbreeding because God forbid you might have a ginger child with slanty eyes running around Ireland ya bigoted shitehawk. I’m off to Dail Eireann to see my TD, so I am’.

“And?”

“So he says ‘Now I don’t think that’s necessary’ and I say ‘Don’t you tell me what’s necessary. My family has been delivering Wun Tun ta da Barry family for years and they’ve got some pull, let me feckin’ tell ya. I’m goin’ to the Daily Star and the Irish Sun and de Sunday Independent…’ - ‘NO! NOT THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT’ he interrupts. ‘Look’ he says ‘I’m sure if you’re happy with the box you’ve ticked then we’re happy with the box you’ve ticked. Isn’t that right, O’Neill?’ and the first fella says ‘Sure, absolutely boss’ so I say ‘Right den, glad we’ve got it all sorted, lads’ and 10 minutes later I had me birth cert and I went down to Davy Byrnes for some oysters and a pint.”

“You’re some man for some man, Malachy”, I said. “So how does it feel to be white.”

He looked at me for a moment like I was a knacker’s turd.

“I’m not white at all, Twenty, ya clown. I’m a Cork Asian.”

So it’s into year two…

by Twenty Major on September 29th, 2005

…and it starts with a hangover. Not that I was out celebrating the birthday or anything but Thursday night is always good for a few pints. It’s close enough to Friday so you can scrape through the Friday no matter how rough you feel. There’s always the Friday evening pints to put a bit of life back into you.

Anyway, I went around to Ron’s and there was a bit of gentle ribbing about the blog thing.

“You soft cunt”, said Jimmy. “You’ll be celebrating your first shag next. When you get it. You VIRGIN”

“I wish you wouldn’t make me out to be such a loser, Twenty”, said Dirty Dave. “I’m like a clumsy, stupid fool always making a show of myself.”

“Thanks for telling everyone I’m stinking”, said Pete.

“That’ll be €3.90, Twenty”, said Ron with his hand out. “Oh, wait”, he paused, “seeing as it’s your gay website’s birthday an’ all…make it an even €4.”

So we had a few pints, discussed the state of the world, decided it was all the fault of the politicians, Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Catholics and Phil Collins fans and had a few more pints.

Then in walked a stranger, although he did look familiar. He ordered a pint of Guinness and from his accent Jimmy had him copped as a Norwegian straight away. Jimmy lived for a couple of years in Oslo, went out with a Swedish girl and had a Finnish butler so he knows one from the other even if they sound exactly the same to you and me. Meanwhile Dave ordered one of Ron’s famous sirloin sandwiches. A great hunk of meat, nice and bloody in the middle, between two massive doorsteps of batch loaf.

So the Norwegian sat at the bar humming to himself and doing nobody any harm whatsoever. He had a guidebook to Dublin and given how we were all feeling good and charaitable (it is nearly Christmas after all) we decided we’d give him a hand.

“Need some recommendations or anything?” I asked.

“That’d be great!” he said. “My name is Morten, it’s my first time in Dublin and I’d love to know my way around a bit better.”

“No worries, Morten. Me and Jimmy here will sort you out, give you the full flavour of the Fair City.”

So we told him which bars he should go to, the sights he should see, the places he should go, the bars he could shelter in the rain from, the bars he could run to while waiting for the rain to stop and so on. Then he asked about food.

“What about the restaurants?”

“Ahhh, there’s loads of those. Full of Irish beef, Irish lamb, Irish sausages, black pudding, lamb stews, a bit of coddle, bee-”

“Erm, the thing is I’m a vegetarian. I have been ever since me and my band travelled around America and on one of our days off we were brought to a veal ranch and it made me sick. All those poor baby veals with their legs broken in little boxes so they don’t make their meat stringy and tough. It was disgusting. And to this day I’ve never seen an adult veal, which is a bit of a mystery, but still. Ever since then I’ve been off meat.’

I looked at Jimmy. Jimmy looked at me. We know that vegetarianism is a terrible disease which leads to gayness and anal sex with other men but seeing as it was a tourist and all we thought it best not to say anything. Norwegians are all right, really. They’re certainly preferable to the influx of Portuguese we’ve been getting.

“Well, to tell you the truth, Morten”, I said, “I really don’t know any vegetarian restaurants. I’m a carnivore. Every meal I eat must contain meat of some kind, be it beef, lamb, chicken, duck, veal, turkey, pork, horse, venison, aardvark…whatever. Everything except monkey. Those cunts taste like shit.”

“Oh no” he said. “Meat appalls me. I can’t even bear to be near it.”

Right then Dave had picked up his sandwich from Ron and was coming over to introduce himself and join in. Dave being Dave though tripped over the nothing that was on the carpet and his plate went flying. Slow motion it was. The plate fell. The bread came away and soon there was a massive chunk of sizzling beef heading straight towards our new pal. Nobody said a word. We were all wide eyed just following its flight through the air.

Eventually it landed straight in Morten’s face and slid down his front into his lap. I could see the juicy blood dripping from his chin. There was silence for just a moment then he jumped up shrieking.

“AAAAAAAAAAH. STEAK OOOOOON MEEEEEEE! STEAK ON ME.”

“Well, I’ll be gone”, said Dave and got his coat.

Next time I’ll tell you about Dave, Boy George and the Chameleon that got what was coming to him.

A small story

by Twenty Major on June 27th, 2005

Some three or four years ago I purchased a whole rake of scientific equipment that Jimmy and Pete had lifted from a consignment headed for a children’s hospital.

There were test-tubes, beakers, computers, particle crunchers, atom smashers, bunsen burners and lots of chemicals and stuff like magnesium, beryllium, copper and that stuff like plastecine that explodes when you when drop water on it.

The most important thing of all was the blackboard on which I scribbled theories, equations and doodles of men with their eyes really close together and strange chins.

I totally gutted the garden shed and made this my lab and it took me about two months to get the first blueprint together. Biting my nails I used a guinea pig for the first attempt but things did not go quite according to plan. Instead of ending up with a tiny, shrunken guinea pig I ended up with a hideous melted corpse with its organs on the outside. Shocked by the cruelty to animals I decided to never again to use a cute, cuddly creature and instead used refugees and orphans.

So I continued with my tests and soon I had created a great big pile melted corpses. Also soon I had perfected the process and saved the country hundreds of thousands of euros in social security payments. So I got my stuff together and arranged for Jimmy to come by and collect my post, look after my trusty hound Bastard Face, pick up the weekly settlements from my clients and administer the required beatings should they fail to provide the money on time. I had a farewell pint with Ron and the lads and the night of June 27th I entered my lab and set things in motion.

I made some last minute adjustments to the computer program, twiddled the zeeble just a touch to the left and walked into the chamber. I took a deep breath and using the control panel I’d made from a Kensington joystick I set things in motion. Things zapped, crackled, and quite literally popped. Success! It had worked. I was now miniscule like in that film about that bloke who shrunk himself and lived in the inner space of Dennis Quaid and in that inner space he had to make some adjustments to the workings of the inner space before getting out of the inner space at the very last minute. I think it was called ‘The really small man in a tiny spaceship.’

Amazingly enough I had also constructed a small spaceship but it wasn’t spaceship because I wasn’t going into space. I clambered aboard and soon I was speeding my teeny-tiny way across Dublin. I headed out towards Sandymount and then hugged the coastline, passing over the gorgeous sandy beaches, pausing occasionally to ogle the bevy of beauties sunbathing topless in Ireland’s glorious tropical climate.

Not long afterwards I came to Dalkey, an area in the very south of Dublin which is home to the most expensive houses, with beautiful views of the radiation poisoned Irish sea and a galaxy of stars like Lisa Stansfield and some bloke who used to read the news on the BBC.

It’s also home to a couple of members of the most famous Irish rock band in the world. I don’t think I need to tell you the name. I circled over the house of the singer but that wasn’t my target. It was the guitarist I was after. I swooped down, went in through an open window and went round the house until I found him. He was sitting at a desk reading a book and singing ‘What if God was one of us’ in a vibrant falsetto voice. I cruised in, did a couple of laps of his head and landed on the back of his neck.

Within my “space” craft I had brought supplies to last for at least a month. There was dried and canned food, water and toiletries and, of course, cigarettes. The first day or two I got accustomed to my strange and microscopic life. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to things, no matter how unusual they are. When he had a shower I took shelter internally, mostly entering through a nostril or perhaps the mouth. Once I had to fly down his Jap’s eye which is something I would not recommend to anyone. I went where he went, I saw what he saw, I avoided his calloused fingers when he went to scratch the parts of his body where I was roaming.

So for a little under 4 weeks this was my home. I ate, I smoked, I slept, I kept notes in my iddy-biddy notebook, I weed and pooed all over him and I watched him at work, at play, as he wrote songs, as he made phone calls to Bono and Larry. He never once called Adam but did send him a couple of emails and a text message calling him a ‘cunt’. He didn’t use an exclamation mark or any kind of smiley.

Anyway, as my supplies ran low it was time to head for home. I did one last poo on his shoulder and set off on my merry way. My ship was a bit spluttery on the way back so I didn’t go the scenic route. I just went straight back to the lab and into the chamber where my remote control embiggened me once again. It felt good to be my normal size again and I was absolutely dying for a pint. I went inside, had a shower and headed down to the pub for a reunion with the lads.

I marched down the road, pushed open the door and I said “Howya, lads?! Give us a pint there, Ron. I’m fucking gasping.”

So Ron poured me a Guinness, I waited for it to settle. It seemed to take a long time but soon I had a good long gulp and it tasted really, really good. Naturally the lads were full of questions.

“Where have you been Twenty?” asked Stinking Pete.

“Wait till I tell you” I said, and I explained where I’d been and what I’d been doing.

“That’s mental!” they all said, and they gasped and ooohed and aaaahed when I told them about the stuff that I’d seen, at the remarkable and unprecedented insight into the world of a rock musician’s life.

“But Twenty”, said Dirty Dave, “What on earth made you do it in the first place?”

“I’m not really sure”, I replied. “I think I just felt like living life on The Edge for a while.”

i REMember U2 in Croke Park

by Twenty Major on January 26th, 2005

So U2 are going to play Croke Park again. I was there many years ago, 1985 I think it was. I stayed near the middle of the crowd. I didn’t want to go right up the top because my mother always told me not to get to close to the edge.

The support bands that day were In Tua Nua, the Welsh version of Big Country who were called The Alarm, Squeeze and REM. Back then REM weren’t anywhere near as well known as they are now and after their slot the band came down and mingled with the crowd to take in the rest of the gig.

I was in a queue for the toilets when I spotted Michael Stipe wandering around looking for someone to talk to. Most people were avoiding any kind of eye contact with him whatsoever and I felt a bit sorry for the geeky young singer so I gave him the nod and we soon fell into deep conversation. I grabbed a couple of beers and hotdogs (yes, he was a vegetarian back then but he’s always liked a nice sausage) and he told me all about his plans for the band.

He said he wanted to write the perfect pop song but not sell out to ‘the man’. He wanted his lyrics to retain their poetic mystery and curious pentameter but still be accessible to the common man. He told me he’d had Peter Buck kidnap English professors from local universities and they had them held captive in the band’s underground studio in Athens, Georgia, poring over his latest lyrics. He even said he’d once travelled to the deepest South American jungles and after smoking some local plants had been told how to write the perfect middle eight by an ancient talking condor named Aubrey.

I couldn’t help but be impressed. We talked for nearly two hours, sipping our brews until all of a sudden Michael’s face went puce. I thought he was choking on his foot-long but I turned around and saw actor John Thaw. What could be the problem, I wondered.

I was about to ask Stipey when I saw a trickle of liquid hit the ground. Michael Stipe was wetting himself in front of me. How embarrassing, not just for me, but for him as well. Now people were beginning to notice. Whatever the problem was between him and Thaw it would have to wait. I had to do something to help my new chum conquer his fear.

“Michael,” I said grabbing him by the shoulders. “Pull yourself together man. There’s only one way to stop this. You have to look straight into his eyes and realise that he’s just a man. Whatever it is that makes you frightened is some kind of highly irrational fear and if you can beat it now you’ll beat it forever.”

He looked at me, whimpering slightly. I could see him trying to control his bladder. What could I do? I had to say something decisive, so I slapped him in the face and blurted out:

“Stand in the place where you piss. Now face Morse.”

It seemed to do the trick and he pulled himself together quite quickly.

“Thank you, Twenty” he said. “I’ll never forget this, your kindness, your help in making me face my demons.”

Although I never saw him again I heard he often tells the story of how a grey-bearded gentleman from Dublin helped him write one his breakthrough hits. But did I get a song writing credit?

Did I bollix, the baldy cunt.