Classifieds Advertise Archive Subscriptions Family Announcements Photos Digital Editions/Apps
Connect with us

Double Vision

I remember I went to Glastonbury, but that’s all!

Published

on

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

After reading Denise McNamara’s excellent piece in the Tribune’s The Look magazine recently about her experience of the Electric Picnic, my mind wandered, stumbling around distant memories of festivals like a drunk in a field.

All these years later I can still remember a moment at Reading Festival in 1978 when I briefly experienced ecstasy. That’s the feeling, not the drug, folks. 1978, remember?

Off my tiny teenage mind on a cocktail of gordknowswot, I returned from the stage area to the campsite, abandoned to squelching my way across fields of muck and detritus, and then I saw a vision.

Like a medieval army resting up for the night, the fields in front of me were filled with tents, flags and fires. Even from a distance I felt I could feel the spirit of bonhomie and comradeship coming from the camp.

Where was my tent? Who cared. I stumbled from fireplace to fireplace, naive and safe, having a ball. It must have had a profound effect upon me, because I’m feeling it right now.  

It’s a cocktail of freedom, trust in your fellow man, a lack of care and a host of kinship.

Equally, I remember the discovery of Drambuie that night, and the subsequent wasting of hundreds of drinks, spoiled by failed attempts to look cool. Del Boy’s drinks didn’t come from thin air. A pint of Directors with a drop of Drambuie: very sophisticated to an insecure 18-years-old Adley.

Life was confusing back then. Not enough to be half-man, half-boy, I was also half a Public School boy maybe on his way to Oxbridge, half a warehouse-working dart-throwing biker boy from the other side of the hill, and just to make things particularly challenging, half a hitch-hiking low-life, hoping to be a hobo.

To mirror all these halves the world of music had been rendered in two. I saw Led Zeppelin in 1973 and Deep Purple and Frank Zappa and Humble Pie and will spare you all the gigs, because gradually many of the bands became boring. Guitar solos went on for ages, and don’t even talk about the drum solos that had thrilled me as a 14-years-old, slightly drunk on cans of brown ale and Long Life.

So when Punk arrived I was right in there, thank you very much. Down the Marquee on Wardour Street, armed with the cut-out advert from each week’s NME, with which you got in for free, Monday-Thursday. At last, here were bands you didn’t sit down to. You weren’t half a mile away from them. Suddenly, anything could happen.

Yes, I loved punk, because I was 16 in 1976 and felt I had no future. I pogoed to The Clash, The Pistols, The Anything that you wanted to call your band, and a special mention goes to the Ramones.

Nothing could ever compare to a Ramones gig. I went to six or seven, memorably one in which I lost a single shoe after 10 minutes. The morning after a Ramones gig my black leather biker jacket could be snapped like Jacob’s cream cracker. Rigid in dried sweat salt, it had to be soaked in a bath and then hung to slowly dry before it would bend once more.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

Connacht Tribune

Space and silence – it’s all us oul’ lads ever wanted in pubs

Published

on

Dave O'Connell

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

The crowds that flocked into the centre of Dublin last weekend provided the clearest indication yet that, thank God, a cure had been found for Covid.

The masses dancing and hugging on the streets was vindication that all of the self-isolation had been well worth it, when you could now congregate as close as you like to each other, to your little heart’s content.

Or so you’d think.

One weekend of slightly relaxed licencing laws was all it took, and in the blink of an eye thousands of revellers were up and at it like this was Paris in 1945 after it was freed from the Germans.

The newly-imposed regulations for relaxation would suggest that all of these bouncy people at least had the benefit of a nine-euro meal inside them – how else could they get served?

So, we’d better brace ourselves for when they go out on an empty stomach.

Much has already been made of the fact that pub life will never be the same again – and that might well be the case.

Social distancing is bad news for the publicans, limiting their ability to wedge the entire student population of NUIG and GMIT into the equivalent of a phone box.

But it’s great news for curmudgeons – particularly for those whose capacity for imbibing alcohol is shot.

Advancing middle age has seen the tolerance of the early twenties reduced from the equivalent of a sizeable plastic bucket to an amount that once wouldn’t have even pass the standard definition of being out.

Three pints? That’s what you’d order when they rang the bell at closing time.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

Get the Connacht Tribune Live app

The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.

 

Continue Reading

CITY TRIBUNE

Angels took pain out of hospital Christmas

Published

on

Charlie Adley

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

More than any other time of the year, when we sit around our dinner tables on Christmas Day, we are aware of who is there and who is not. At the age of 17, having performed impressive acrobatics with my Yamaha 250, a saloon car, a ditch and a barbed wire fence, I spent six weeks in hospital over Christmas and New Year.

My femur was snapped in two, which is no mean feat with thighs like mine, and my tibia had a crack or two as well.

Bed-bound, with my leg in traction, I developed a bronchial chest infection after an emergency operation.

Every two seconds for six weeks I coughed in hacking spasms, thus shaking my smashed leg, which was hung in a sling, supported by a metal pole they had driven through me, just below the knee.

Suffice to say I came to terms with pain.

In our part of the ward, there were four beds and three bikers with broken bones.

There was Kev, who had fallen off his sleek and mean Suzuki GT750 (a two stroke 3-into-1, since you ask), and opposite us two was brick shithouse Yorkshireman Gary, ex-SAS, and mighty embarrassed, having survived several covert tours of duty in Northern Ireland, to have to admit to falling off a Honda 125.

Compared to the other patients in the hospital the three of us were well off.

We were not sick. We’d had our operations, and apart from antibiotics for wounds, and pain killers for broken bones, we needed very little medical attention.

We were young, male, bored, and allowed to drink beer. Naturally, we tried to attract the attention of the student nurses as much as possible, and equally, they were happy to have a bit of a laugh with lads who were not ill, physically, at least!

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.

 

Continue Reading

CITY TRIBUNE

Don’t be a slave to the algorithm

Published

on

Charlie Adley

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Saying “I love newspapers!” feels these days like buying a ticket for the next David Bowie gig, but I do: I love them. When I read a newspaper, I’m not a slave to the algorithm. Were I ten years younger, I’d read all my news online, on apps that I’ve set to my personal preferences.

Even when I visit media sites I’ve never been to before, there are cookies and bots and gordknowswot working away to offer me more of what the algorithms think I want.

Every link off each page is tailored to please me, but that’s no good.

I don’t want to be fed things that only fit into my areas of interest and opinion.

Sitting at my living room table, mug of tea and two slices of toast (peanut butter, since you ask), and a paper – any paper – open in front of me, I can see the full wonder and horror of the world, as interpreted by The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Irish Times or Daily Mirror.

As I browse into the heart of the paper, far from major news items, I let my eyesight fall all over the place, because each page is full of varied items, and, here on page 14, I’ll find the big story that’s being buried: the story they have to report, but are under instruction to dampen down.

Also here are stories that no algorithm-driven link would ever lead me to. Quirky little tales, able to dissolve an adult brain in seconds.

When driven sufficiently doolally by what I’m reading, I tear that particular piece of madness out of the newspaper, placing it on top of the wobbly towering stack of other torn madnesses by my desk.

There are dark torn madnesses and fearsome ones, but today I’m in the mood to prowl the ones that force me to furrow my brow, gasp for breath, pout my lips and grunt “What the -?” at the universe.

Notes are seeds, from which every writer will grow different fruit. When that writer is working for the Daily Mail, the fruit need bear only minuscule relation to the seed.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.

Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.

Continue Reading

Trending