Track 3: 'walk on by, walk on through...'

'There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality....only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.' Christopher Moore.

When I was seventeen years old, my father passed away. He was just forty-one.

He had been sick for some time; the trips to the hospital became more and more frequent, the spells confined to a hospital bed longer.

We had lived with this constant sense of dread for some years, but his death still came as a numbing, brutal shock - it felt like my world disintegrated at that moment.

You can keep your Velvet Underground, your Sonic Youth – nothing is going to influence and shape how you make music, how you write, or make art, like the death of someone that close to you at that age.

Of course, I didn’t realise any of this at the time.

 It was many years later when I figured out that I expressed all the rage, anger, frustration and sadness of that experience in how I played guitar. It was only with the passage of time, that I could hear it in the music, but it is there, in every note, every shrill blast of distorted guitars. For months after his death, I shut myself off from the world, staying in my bedroom, listening to music.

Curiously, the album I drew most comfort from during this period was ‘The Unforgettable Fire’ by U2. I played it repeatedly, hearing something in it that resonated on a deeper level.

When you are that young and a parent dies, you feel in some way marked, singled out. Different to your friends, your classmates. I was acutely aware of this in my final year at school.

Mylie would come to stay over at the weekends.

It was only then that my mood lightened.

We would spend long afternoons browsing the record shops in the city centre.  Freebird, Comet, the Virgin Megastore. We listened to music for hours on end in my bedroom.

We plotted and planned. The idea of forming a band was now becoming an obsession.

We compiled albums of fictitious songs in a little red notebook. I found that notebook recently –  it is a cringe-worthy collection of embarrassing song-titles, clumsy, gauche attempts to mimic the bands we loved. We even named this fictional paper-based band: Joy Parade.

 At this point, neither of us could play a note of music.

I got a cheap, second-hand nylon string acoustic guitar from somewhere.

Armed with a book from the library, I set about learning to play.  I wasn’t a natural; in the beginning I found it difficult to ever envisage a day when I would even be able to change from one chord to another.  I was resolute though and stuck with it.

Gradually, over time, making & holding the shapes became easier, the fingers calloused, and I was able to put together a few faltering chords.

 Progress.

The red notebook started to fill up with even more embarrassing, half-baked attempts at writing lyrics. We were beginning to find magic in the simple process of trying to put words and melody to the few chords I knew.

Mylie was always so encouraging – he was able to convince me, someone who was always naturally plagued by self-doubt, of the brilliance of our first painful attempts at writing songs! They were awful, but that didn’t matter.

Because at that point, the only audience we had to convince was ourselves.

One weekend, Mylie arrived in carrying a guitar case. He opened it up to reveal a shiny new bass guitar. He had bought it from a neighbour, a bass player with a Dublin band called the Candy Shop. He was upgrading and sold it at a good price.

I was impressed. This was the real thing. He had no amplifier, but this was a step closer to the ultimate goal. We knew what we had to do next.

The nylon string guitar had served its purpose.

I kept practicing, but every penny I got, I put in a savings box. It took some time, but eventually, I had enough to buy my first electric guitar.

I had a limited budget, so the decisive factor was that it had to be cheap - other than that, it didn’t really matter much.

In the music shop, all around me there were lads noodling, playing complicated heavy metal riffs, displaying their prowess. I plugged this black Hondo Les Paul copy with a cream scratch-plate into an amp - it burst into life, feeding back, hissing & buzzing.

I played a couple of simple chord progressions – it sounded nice and lively.

It would do.

It would be many weeks later before we had saved up enough to buy a couple of amps but things were now moving in the right direction.

We both had instruments now; Mylie was making good progress practicing with his amp-less bass, and we were writing these awful songs that thankfully, nobody would ever get to hear.

The only way from that point was up.