The book includes interviews with Joan Rivers, Sarah Ferguson, Lorna Luft., Davina McCall, Christy Dignam, Johnny McEvoy, Mary McEvoy, Brendan O’ Carroll, Dolores Keane, Bernard Loughlin, Leslie Dowdall, Jon Kenny, Ferdia McAnna, Paul Johnson, Phil Coulter, Honor Heffernan, Lisa Cummins, Margaret Riordan, Suzy O’ Mullane, Mariane Pearl, Moya Brennan, Brian Friedman, Charlie Landsborough, and Anne Buckley.

“Joe Jackson is the best print interviewer in Ireland.”
(Gerry Ryan, Irish broadcaster).

“ The word ‘article’ is too small a word to describe the emotional truths in this piece.”
(Anne Harris, Deputy Editor of the Sunday Independent, on A Song For My Mother).

“I can tell you my story and know it won’t be violated. Interviewing isn’t just your job, it’s your life, your art. I see you as a medium, a healer, so maybe this is your higher calling.’
(Tori Amos, singer, in conversation with Joe Jackson.)

Walk On: With Hope In Your Heart is a book that shall be published for Christmas 2011, after working on it for four years, and that needs to be published now, fundamentally as a Christmas present for my mother, Phyllis who inspired the book, and is seriously ill. And apart from containing the articles A Song For My Mother – which was described by one woman when it was published at Christmas in 2009 as “a Christmas present for all mothers” – and the more recent A Prayer For My Mother it will feature 25 inspirational interviews listed above. If you want to order a copy contact joejackson@eircom.net or my Facebook pages Joe Jackson or Joe Jackson Journalist. Or writteninireland.com. Or just enjoy this preface plus sample interview, with Joan Rivers

Walk On: With Hope In Your Heart. Prologue

Walk On: With Hope In Your Heart. So, ok, let me slip into my interviewer mode for a moment and lick off by asking a question. Can you remember the first time you ever really heard, as in, took to heart, the message in that gloriously inspiring line? Minus, of course, the crass colon I added in order to create the title of this book. I certainly can, at least with the aide-de-memoire of a childhood diary. It was at 8.51 am GMT on Saturday October 5th 1968.
Why would I have marked that minute so precisely? Because at the time, Elvis Presley, as my mother Phyllis Jackson, would recall nearly a decade later, the night he died, was my “life.” The “King”, as I’d called him since I was 12, also happened to be going through a lull in his career and even though I had gleefully noted signs of a comeback in singles such as Big Boss Man, Guitar Man, and US Male, none got near the top of the charts and I knew he needed a huge hit. As big as, say, the Top 3 that week, Those Were The Days, by Mary Hopkins, Hey Jude by the Beatles, and Jesamine, by the Casuals. Or, better still, because it was one of my favourite non-Elvis 45’s that year, Macarthur Park, as recorded by my fellow Irishman Richard Harris, and a song I’d read Elvis had sung, in part, while filming his forthcoming TV show.
So, at 8.15 am that Saturday I had awakened, reached sleepily towards my Aristo Tone 12 pocket transistor radio, turned it on, retuned the dial from Radio Luxembourg to BBC Radio One and began what I’d later describe in my diary as ‘my 28 hour a day vigil hoping to hear Elvis’s new single.’ Namely, You’ll Never Walk Alone. Finally, DJ Jonathan King, just before finishing his early morning show, played the A side and minutes later I wrote this review.
‘Was I anticipating too much? Even though I love El’s voice, I am sad (as is Mr. King) because with Elvis’s voice in such as “powerful” form it might need a powerful orchestra to really leave its mark on the pop world.’
Sadly, the single was a flop. But, coincidentally, or not, depending on whether you believe in cosmic synchronicity, and I do, two months later, to the day, on December 5th, I heard El’s next single, which was the first on which he used a “powerful” orchestra. And also a song that, I’d later learn, and, later again, tell Richard Harris, was composed as an indirect response to the king singing those few bars from Macarthur Park while filming that TV Special. Steve Binder, the producer, had asked Presley if he would record something as modern and the king said he would, then, W. Earl Brown was dispatched to write what turned out to be the song, If I Can Dream.
Either way, after hearing that 45, I wrote in my diary the following rave review: ‘how brilliant can a singer get? After 12 years as the reigning king, he now turns out his greatest masterpiece, If I Can Dream! If I Can Dream! If I Can Dream!’ I obviously believed in the concept of the trinity. And maybe not surprisingly, that song immediately became my anthem, which it has remained – its lyric even gave me my life-long motto, ‘As long as a man has the strength to dream/He can redeem his soul and fly’ – the single was the king’s biggest hit in years, and his NBC TV show instantly became known s his Comeback Special. Happy days? You bet.
Although the truth is that apart from the happiness Elvis Presley, plus the perpetual love of my mother – who was wrong to say he was my “life” in that sense – primarily, provided, those days were far from happy for me. In fact, they were further from the Garden of Eden my childhood had been, in my home place, which is called Eden Villas, than any I’d ever known. And that distance was determined to a great degree by the fact that, as I explain in A Song For My Mother, Chapter 1 of this book, my father, Joe, was spending most of his time in London with, I have since learned, a girlfriend, while we, his family, were living, often destitute, in Dublin.
That’s why, as I explain in Chapter 1, Elvis’s gospel songs, such as It Is No Secret (What God Can Do) suddenly began to mean so much to me. I’d already been inspired by many of the man’s secular recordings, particularly life affirming film songs such as, Follow That Dream, There’s A Brand New Day on the Horizon, and Shout It Out, but now the spirituals on Elvis’s Christmas Album, His Hand In Mine and How Great Thou Art seemed to give form to my every soul cry. These songs may even have given me my first spiritual experience of music beyond the walls of the chapel in which I am told that ever since I was a child I loved to hear, and sing along with, hymns like Holy God. All of which obviously was a blessing, in every sense, following the fragmentation of my family, and maybe even my faith, as I explain in A Song For My Mother.
Either way, all these resonances, subterranean, or otherwise, must have been in play that morning I first heard Elvis sing, You’ll Never Walk Alone. Of course, I’d known the song, in a sense, from the hit version recorded by Gerry and the Pacemakers, and versions my dad played from the soundtrack LP of Carousel, and by Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland, but Elvis made me feel I was hearing it for the first time. And this, I believe, is because he sang You’ll Never Walk Alone not as a show tune but as a spiritual song, like, say, It Is No Secret (What God Can Do), which, in fact, has the lyric line ‘there is no night for in his light you will never walk alone.’
That’s what got me. And even though, as a teenager, I didn’t have the insight, or words to write in my diary that Presley probably was singing “powerfully” simply because he felt connected to the power of God, the part of the song that really hooked me was the way in which he sang that line, ‘walk on…’ And this hook from the song itself, literally speaking, but even more so metaphorically and metaphysically, has never been removed from my soul.
In fact, one night, around Easter, in 1973, not long after my father’s soul was savaged by Electric Shock Treatment, I listened again to Elvis sing You’ll Never Walk Alone and, this time in response, wrote not a diary review, but the following poem. It is called You’ll Never Walk Alone (2) and dedicated to Elvis Aron Presley,

My name has finally been torn
From my father’s will
He has threatened and twice tried
To
Kill
Me

Yet even now as I watch him rip
From the family album
All photographs of the son
Even as I am commanded to remove
From the living room shelf
The image of Elvis as a child

I do not cry

Hurt too deeply
To dare feel
Anything
I am but a shell, a shadow

Until Elvis calls
To take my part
And to let me fall and
Fall
And
Fall
Yet never so low
That he cannot lift me.

Thrown back to face alone the myriad ghosts
Of childhood
I find that as it was then
So too now I need no one
Other than my original earthly archangel
Dreamweaver and King
Elvis

To sing and to tell me
I need not be afraid
Of the dark
Sadness
Surrounding this family

Just Elvis

To whisper his assurance
That if, in my heart,
I try to hold onto hope
Then daylight and a true dawn
Will eventually arrive for all of us.

He sings
My Tears
Dry

My eyes I open and once again I know
That with his help
And even this one silver song
I can
And I shall
Survive any storm.

No, I don’t need to be told that this is not great, or even good, poetry. A Creative Writing teacher told me that at the time, much to my distress, and shattering my confidence, which I now see was a devastatingly non-creative thing to do, on her behalf. But the poem is true. And not only true to what I was feeling, but also, more importantly, I believe, true to the feeling of hope I have since discovered that Elvis consciously set out to inspire by recording such songs, be they secular or spiritual. In fact, Sam Phillips who discovered Elvis, once said to me hat every recording by Presley, from My Happiness to Unchained Melody, was a spiritual. I agree. My poem also is, by extension, true to the feeling of hope that Elvis passed on to me and that I, partly as my tribute to the man, but also as a tribute to my mother, try to pass on through my writings. Up to, and including, Walk On: With Hope In Your Heart.
Indeed, the title comes as much from that poem I wrote as it does from Elvis’s recording of You’ll Never Walk Alone, a fact that I, at least, think entitles me to add that colon. Not only that, the cover illustration on this book is a photograph I took of my home place, Glasthule, back in the 1970’s to symbolise the ‘golden sky’ and/or ‘true dawn’ promised in that song and poem. Furthermore – and how’s this for an act of cosmic synchronicity? – the photograph was taken from the precise location where, far more recently, during September 2011 in fact while I was writing this book, my mother had a stroke. She, ever true to her faith in Jesus Christ, sees religious significance in this and so, I admit, do I. At a time when mom and I are praying, as are many others, that she will walk again, it certainly adds another layer of symbolic resonance to the book’s title: Walk On: With Hope In Your Heart.
All of which brings me to A Song For My Mother. It’s an article I wrote for my mom in 2009 when she was going through a period of psychic pain more torturous than any she had previously known but was, itself, too personal for me to write about. Even so, having interviewed many people who spoke glowingly about their mothers and fathers at a point in life when those parents could no longer hear, at least physically, what was being said, I wanted to celebrate mom’s life, love, and spirit and wanted her to share in the celebration.
Also, frankly at the time, coming up to Christmas, given that my mother and I were once again going through the kind of financial struggle I write about in this slice of childhood autobiography, I hoped that if I made the story universal enough, it might help families in a similar situation. And given that the world, and Ireland, in particular, had been brought to its knees by a global recession, there obviously were many such families. That’s why I loved, and still do, the preface, which was provided by the Irish newspaper, the Sunday Independent, when this article was published as its ‘Big Story’ on the Sunday before Christmas Day in 2009.
‘It should be a time of joy and light but for many Irish families, this Christmas will be marked by pan and darkness. A difficult year will end with violence, alcoholism, and loneliness for some. And what of the children who witness this? As a youngster, Joe Jackson saw his mother endure beatings and financial neglect from his father. Here he writes an ode to her courage and explains how hope and faith can bring us through the darkest days.’
That article also directly influenced to write this book, which, in the end, I really had no choice other than to call, Walk On: With Hope In Your Heart.

Joe Jackson, Dublin November 21st 2011

Chapter 2. Joan Rivers, Comedienne.

Joan Rivers stared at the gun in her hand. She realised suicide wasn’t simply some vague concept but had become “a definite reality, a viable option” after her husband of 21-years, Edgar Rosenberg, had killed himself, and that now it could become a reality again. But just as Rivers was about to pull the trigger a pet dog leapt onto her lap and she immediately snapped out of that suicidal mode by thinking, “no one will take care of this disgusting old dog if I go!”
Better still, Rivers not only pulled herself back from contemplating suicide, she swore she’d fight her way out of the “morass” that had engulfed her life during the late 1980’s. And it was a morass. Look at it this way. Apart from losing a husband, Rivers also had become estranged from their daughter who blamed her for his death; she was “black-listed” by NBC TV; told by the powers-that-be in Las Vegas “no one wants to see a person whose husband killed himself” and “totally” broke.
In fact, Joan is “still paying off” a $37 million debt that arose after her “comeback”, which might help explain why this “most brilliant comic mind, a woman for our own sceptical times,” as one critic called her, is still gigging at the age of 71. I know, a gentleman isn’t supposed to disclose a lady’s age but given that this particular lady readily admits that her current greatest “uphill fight” is against ageism I do so only to show how remarkable her current achievements are – such as netting a new show on Channel 5.
Then again, Rivers has always been engaged in some kind of “uphill fight” to prove herself. For example, part of the woman’s original impulse to perform stems from the fact that she was so often called “a fat little pig” as a child. However Joan’s “epiphany” in this sense came about when she was “eight or so”, telling a tale to some friends of her father and realised they were laughing not at but with her. Yet, why would these men have been laughing at the Brooklyn-born Joan Rivers – or Molinsky, as she was known then – in the first place?
“Because I was a little fat, not particularly outgoing, ugly child and the butt of everyone’s jokes!” she replies, sitting in her room at London’s Ritz Hotel. “But that day I was on a fishing trip with my dad, who was a doctor, and all his friends were really enjoying my story about my teacher and it was such as rush for me because I realised ‘I am the focal point in this. I am controlling this. I love it’!”
Rivers has said: “comedy is a medium for revenge. We can deflate and punish the pomposity and the rejection that hurt us. Comedy is power. Comedy is control.” Therefore, she “totally” understands why humour laced with sarcasm is “almost a second language in Ireland” given that we’ve been “put down” by the British for so long. This tendency is also “a defining feature” of Jewish humour.
“Why do you think two-thirds of comedians in our country come from a Jewish background?” she says. “And that tendency towards the put-down is a form of getting back at people. But a lot of the time it’s getting back before they get at you, making the joke before they do, about you. That’s certainly what a lot of my humour is all about.”
Even so, the “put down” was not part of Joan’s family life in terms of the way her Russian immigrant parents spoke to their two children.
“The opposite was the case, my mother told myself and my sister we were the most beautiful things in the world and then we got one hell of a shock when we ‘came out’ socially!” she says. “So she ruined us by seeing nothing wrong with us, never correcting us, saying we were perfect. That just didn’t prepare us for the real world. As far as our parents were concerned we were the stars of the universe so it was bound to hit hard when you get into the real world and are told, ‘you’re not pretty – you’re just fat little pig’!”
That’s why, all these years later, Joan is still trying to recover her position as a “star” of the universe, right?
“Probably!” she responds, laughing.
But, seriously, didn’t Rivers also once say that part of the “power” of comedy is that “we can get the love and the admiration and the attention we bottomlessly crave.” So, is this really her psychology at a core level?
“Maybe that is what I’m still striving for,” she muses, falling uncharacteristically silent for a moment. Either way, Joan “always set her sights on” on becoming a performer, though at first, she chose to be an actress rather than comedienne.
“I still see myself, primarily, as an actress,” she says. “’I’ve just filmed the last episode of Nip/Tuck but I’m not playing Joan Rivers, it’s a straight acting role and I just loved sitting round with the actors discussing acting techniques. And back in college, all I was aiming for was to become an actress so I appeared in nearly every school production. But because my parents were first generation Russian immigrants, their goal was all about bettering themselves, getting their children a college education and so on. And my sister was the youngest woman graduate from the Columbia Law School so that’s the pattern I was expected to follow.
“In other words, if I had said back in 1958, ‘I want to become the world’s best surgeon and that will take 22 years of training’ my parents would have said ‘wonderful.’ But I told them ‘I want to be an actress’ and they said ‘are you out of your mind?’ then, basically, disowned me. I remember a year where no one spoke to me and I lived in my car until I got a job. There had been a terrible scene and I stormed out of home one September and didn’t come back until the next. Then, my parents gave me six months to establish myself, which didn’t work, but slowly, what I was doing became more acceptable to them and thankfully, both lived to see me succeed after I got my break on The Johnny Carson Show. And late in life my mother did say, ‘I used to just worry whether or not you could take care of yourself, but now I don’t worry anymore’ which was so gratifying for me to hear.”
However, Joan’s “break” didn’t occur until 1965 by which point she’d already spent these seven years struggling, first as an actress in off-Broadway productions (“so far ‘off’ they were in New Jersey!”) and then when she changed her career having been told she’d have a better chance “doing comedy.” Her “fellow struggling” peers at the time were the likes of Woody Allen and Richard Pryor. But River’s “real turning point” came when she saw Lenny Bruce perform and was hit by the revelation that “personal truth can be the foundation of comedy and that outrageousness can be cleansing and healthy” – an aesthetic that remains central to her stage act.
“But it is not outrageousness for outrageousness sake, it’s knowing that in order to make your point you sometimes have to shake people up”, she explains. “And Lenny Bruce did that by going for the bare bones of whatever he was talking about, which is what I try to do. And looking back on those years when I was struggling I realise there was a great sense of camaraderie because you were accepted by that group and no one looked down on you in that group.”
Surely, Joan also was eaten up by her bottomless craving for love, admiration, and attention.“
Always,” she admits. “But there was nothing else to do. It was like a religious calling. And there would always be an audience you’d connect with and they would love you and you could live on that. One great night, out of ten, would help so much.
Even so, nothing helped Joan as much as hearing Johnny Carson say “you’re going to be a star” while he was still laughing at her act.
“Carson was so big in those days that when he said he believed in you all the doors flew open so that absolutely changed my life”, she explains.
Clearly, it did. Within a few years Rivers was a guest presenter on Carson’s show, had a small part (“very Chaplinesque – I played a tramp!”) in the movie The Swimmer, co-wrote the Broadway play, Fun City and moved “into a beautiful colonial home in Bel Air.” Then she penned the TV movie The Girl Most Likely and wrote and directed her first feature film, Rabbit Test. By 1983 Rivers also was a headliner in Vegas, had produced a Grammy-nominated comedy album, published two best-selling books and finally got her own TV series, The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers. But then everything went wrong. How? To answer that question we must flashback in time and shift the spotlight to Joan’s love life. After graduating from College, her “flair for fashion” and “a padded bra and tight sweater!” got her a job at Bond’s store in New York where she met and soon married its Vice President. So, was that, even in part, to please her parents?
“Yes because that’s what was expected of us – to graduate and marry,” she says. “That’s what all my friends did. And for the whole period I was married, I didn’t even go to the theatre; I put all those dreams away. Yet after six months I left the marriage, went home to my parents and said, ‘I’ve done what I’m supposed to do and it doesn’t work, now I’m going to do what I want to do’ and that’s when I told them I wanted to act.”
Did the break-up of that marriage wound Rivers romantically?
“Oh no”, she responds. “It was more like going to the electric chair and the warden calls at the last minute and says ‘she can live’! But even on the day I was getting married, I didn’t know why. I just stood there in my white dress and said to my sister, ‘can you believe this?’ So, it was ill fated from the start. And I do feel sorry for the man involved because he had no idea he was marrying this miserable girl!
Rivers, however, was far from miserable around the time she met Edgar Rosenberg. But then only months beforehand she’d gotten that break from Carson who also, in fact, recommended Rivers to Rosenberg – a TV producer with a script that needed rewrites. They were married within four days of their first meeting which does suggest that they were deeply in love from the start.
“We were deeply in like,” says Joan, correcting me. So when did ‘like’ evolve to ‘love’ if it did? “Well, the marriage lasted 21 years so it obviously worked and he was a terrific husband and we had a great time together and had our daughter, Melissa, who was born in 1968 so everything was going our way for a long time. But then he had a heart attack, at 51 that sent him into tremendous depression. Then we got our own show, The Late Show, and he was fighting Rupert Murdoch, who owned Fox TV. My husband thought he was going to beat Murdoch, but you don’t beat Murdoch. At one point he and Murdoch were butting heads for seven months then they brought me in and said ‘you can stay, all these stories being printed about the show failing are lies, the numbers are fine, but your husband has to go.’ I knew how mentally upset he was so I said ‘if he goes, I go’ never thinking they’d say, ‘then tomorrow is your last show.’ Yet they did. And my husband knew it was his fault and killed himself three weeks later. Direct cause and effect.”
Nevertheless, Joan also admits that during those three weeks she was “very angry” at Rosenberg and not a “wonderful wife” at home.
“I can’t say I was being gracious, I was trying to be but, believe me, I was so angry,” she says, “because it was totally his fault, as I saw it, then. In fact, I thought we were going to separate because I’d said, ‘if you don’t get help I’m out of here. You’ve already ruined my career, so if you don’t get help I’m leaving.’ Then one day he went to Philadelphia and committed suicide, which I’d never even imagined he might do. But I’m still so angry at him.”
When Joan got the call saying her husband had killed himself, did she feel guilty?
“Of course!” she responds. “There was a tremendous feeling of ‘I did this.’ But, actually, I didn’t get that call. My daughter did. Some son of a bitch told her. She was 16 and the Philadelphia police called, said, ‘is your mother home?’ She told them, ‘no’ and they said, ‘well, please tell her your father killed himself.’ So, she had to come and tell me. It was devastating for her.”
Equally devastating was the fact that Rosenberg had phoned Melissa and said, “I’m coming home tomorrow” just before killing himself.
“So Melissa had to deal with all those demons of ‘what didn’t I say, what could I have said that might have changed things?’ and she still feels that way,” claims Joan. “That’s why I’m still so angry at him, for what he did to our daughter – to say that to her, then hang up and kill himself. I go around lecturing, these days, on suicide and know that someone has to be desperately unhappy to do it – so unhappy they don’t think about the pain of the people around them – but I’m also all about survivors and I think it’s okay to be angry. Apart from the grief, the anguish and all the mixed emotions you have I even think its okay to be furious at that person until the day you die.”
Joan earlier said she and Edgar were “deeply in like” so did his suicide cancel out love, can she tell me, now, she still loves the man?
“I did love him but do I love him now?” she responds, pausing. “No. Someone said to me recently, ‘when you die and get to heaven you’ll see Edgar’ and I said, ‘I’ll kill the fucker all over again for what he did to my daughter, what he did to us’ – and I would fucking kill him.”
Patently part of River’s rage in relation to her husband’s suicide is rooted in the fact that her daughter later said, “you could have saved daddy” and then stopped talking to her for a year. Joan then discovered that she herself she was penniless.
“During the last week of his life my husband invested all our money into terrible things so it all went down the tubes” she says. “So on top of everything else I was broke and just couldn’t get a job.”
That’s when Joan contemplated suicide.
“Suicide is just a concept until it comes into your family,” she suggests. “Then it does become a definite reality and a choice. If somebody in your family commits suicide you think, ‘I can do this, it’s a viable option.’ And there was one point when I was so low I did have a gun and then this little dog, Spike, who’s just died…”
Joan pauses, murmurs “there I go” then reaches for a tissue to dab the tears at the edge of her eyes.
“Actually, Spike, came over and jumped on my lap and that made me think ‘no one will take care of this disgusting old dog if I go!”
But surely, Joan Rivers, of all people, can also see the black humour in this story and should perhaps – and I say this with all due respect to herself and the dog – call her next volume of autobiography, The Disgusting Mutt that Saved My Life!
“Maybe I will!” she says, laughing and crunching up that tissue. “But that night was another turning point because having decided not to kill myself I did set out to build back up my life and career. So, I went out and started working again in tiny clubs, which was hard. When you’ve been playing to 5,000 people and suddenly you’re saying ‘thank you’ to 70 in a club in Toronto and they aren’t particularly thrilled to see you, you really have to draw on your inner resources. But I stuck at it, partly because I didn’t want my daughter to have to say her two parents gave in. Yet it took me ten years to get back to where I had been.”
At which point “everything crashed again, though less so” when “the ageism factor came in”, Joan lost her daytime talk show “because they wanted someone younger” and her QVC TV Classics Collection jewellery company “went public and the guy who took it public with me absconded with $37 million and the rights to my name and likeness.” Rivers had “signed everything away” after being promised she’d get rich.
“So after that I had to start yet again and I’m still paying off that debt,” she says. “But the real uphill fight now is against ageism and I only now, recently, got my own television show again, on Channel 5, in Britain.”
All of which leads to a question I wasn’t going to raise with Joan Rivers because nowadays, as in her childhood, she too often is the butt of jokes though now it’s about her face-lifts. But, presumably, in part to fight ageism Joan has had extensive plastic surgery on her face and body.
“Every actress does it” she responds. “Look at Michelle Pfeiffer, who is so beautiful, but she’s given mother roles now. That’s just the business we’re in. It is youth-obsessed. Yet I also would say to any woman, or man, if you hate your nose, work three jobs to fix it, do whatever to your body that makes you happy. But, definitely, I still am fighting ageism every day, in any way I can. But doesn’t Joan ever feel it’s time to relax even retire?
“And do what?” she asks. “I’d be funny if my daughter was giving a luncheon, I’d rather be funny in Dublin on a stage!”
But what about Joan’s love life; does she currently have a lover?
“Yes, since Edgar died I had two major relationships and I am involved now.”
That, then, is what Joan could “do”!
“These men are getting older!” she says, quite seriously. “And, to tell you the truth, I am in limbo right now because I feel I don’t fit in with old people and I don’t fit in with young people, though that is good for comedy.”
Meaning? That “fitting in” can lead to the curse of complacency for any creative artist?
“Exactly, and then you are dead, on a creative level,” says Rivers. “Likewise, when they start saying you are ‘beloved’ you’re really screwed! As in, when they say, here’s so-and-so, we’ve loved her for years.’ Forget that! No matter what age you are get out there and knock a home run out of the ballpark! That’s what I still want to do. And I probably always will.”
So, for Joan Rivers her upcoming gig at the Gaiety is no less a matter of do-or-die than her first gig nearly 50 years ago?
“It’s exactly the same,” she says. “Even the producer on my new Channel 5 series said ‘we’ve never seen a producer so involved!’ Of course, I’m involved! This is my show.”
See what I mean about Rivers still needing to be the “star” of her universe? But she also has claimed that her daughter is “the centre” of her life. So have Joan and Melissa resolved their differences in relation to Edgar’s suicide, has her daughter ever said, “mom, I now understand and forgive you?”
“I don’t think those differences will ever be fully resolved,” says Joan. “I think there will always be an undercurrent in relation to unresolved problems Melissa has in terms of her father’s suicide. But she did say, on a 20/20 TV show in America, ‘now that I’m older I understand’ and she has come to grips with that better than ever before.”
So, which does Joan Rivers see as her greatest achievement, her career, or daughter?
“I always say I have two children and they’re both my greatest achievements,” she responds. “And at the end of the day, I am very proud of both Melissa and my career.”

Once upon a time, I believed I could become the next Elvis. All I needed was a guitar, a ‘private recording’ and to be discovered by Sam Phillips, the man who introduced to the world the ‘King of Pop’ and who owned a magical, mystical, and even mythical recording studio called ‘Sun’ in the no less magnificently named American city of Memphis, Tennessee. At least, that’s how it all seemed to me, as a kid born and raised in a little village called Glasthule, on the south side of Dublin. The fact that I might be expected to be able to play that guitar and to sing didn’t enter even the outer regions of my mind. JJ was going to be the next EP, no problem, no sweat, just you wait and see.
Then again, that particular once upon a time occurred when I was only ten and a year after Elvis and Sam had started sprinkling their particular kind of Memphis stardust all over my psyche, ever since I first heard of EP. No, that’s not true. Two years earlier, days after I heard my mother, Phyllis, tell my Uncle Martin “the singer, Mario Lanza, ate himself to death” and deduced that Mario must have been a cannibal, I began to believe that all singers were weird, simply because the next singer I heard about was called after a herb. Elvis Parsley, whose surname I first encountered, and mispronounced, after I put a penny in the first bubble gum machine I’d ever seen and it spit his picture in my face.
At the time I was living not in Glasthule, County Dublin, my hometown but in Birmingham, Great Britain, and actually far more fascinated by the bubble gum machine than the bubble gum, buddle gum cards, or Parsley. So, I pestered my mother for pennies, slipped them into the silver slot on that red machine, chewed enough bubble gum to nearly make me sick, then I gave the bubble gum cards to my cousin, Catherine Mahood, who assured me Parsley was “the most.” Most what, she didn’t explain. But Catherine did “just love” him and another singer with a funny name, two first names in fact: ‘Cliff’ and ‘Richard’ who we watched one Saturday on a TV show called Oh Boy! But what bewildered me most was the way Catherine leapt up out of the sofa and started, “jiving”, and said the music was “real gone, rock ‘n’ roll.” By this stage, I was gone, totally lost.
But then, oh boy, everything changed for me that Saturday afternoon back in Dublin when another teenage cousin of mine, Katrina Slattery, brought me to see a movie called GI Blues. The magic started the moment Elvis Presley – Katrina corrected my mispronunciation – appeared on screen. Never in my nine long years of living had I heard such screams. Sure, I had heard screams in a cinema but that usually was during scary pictures like The Blob and Elvis looked nothing like that glob of red jelly. Yet, what really caught my attention was the fact that only girls were screaming and they didn’t look scared. In fact, they looked deliriously happy.
No, it was more than that. They looked like they were hypnotised and screamed every time Elvis smiled, sang, or, most amazingly of all, even when he said “huh” in a song. He was like Mandrake the Magician – with music. But the little trick Elvis did that really hooked me, from there to eternity, came during the scene when he sang Wooden Heart. And it started when he seemed to beckon not only to all those kids in the movie who were watching a puppet show, but also to those of us in the cinema and me, personally – I swear to God, it was like he said “And you too Joseph!”- to sing along. But at first I didn’t. I was too shy. I had never before sung in public, apart from when I was at Mass in St. Joseph’s Chapel, where I loved the floating feeling I got while singing, say, my favourite hymn, Holy God. But as I looked around the cinema and saw hundreds of children singing about someone called ‘Mousy Dan’ I surrendered and the more I sang the more I felt like I wasn’t just floating, I was following Major Yuri Gagarin who, that week, became the first man to soar into outer space. And I too was deliriously happy.
So, what exactly happened that Saturday? I’m still not sure. But I suspect that I may have had my first experience of transcendence, that part of me never fully recovered or returned from that trip to outer/inner space and the feeling may even be something I have sought to recapture or recreate ever since. All I knew, for sure, as I stepped out of the Adelphi Cinema onto the main street of Dun Laoghaire late that Saturday afternoon, was that Elvis Presley had become my favourite singer and that Wooden Heart and not Tommy Steele’s Little White Bull, was my favourite song. It also was the first song I was going to learn off-by-heart, I told Katrina who, that day, wrote down its lyric for me. In other words, Elvis had made me feel like I could fly, become my first music hero, provided me with a new favourite song and got me interested in lyrics for the first time. Not a bad outcome from one matinee trip to the pictures to see GI Blues, was it?
But also, though I didn’t realise this at the time, as a social misfit of sorts and a kid who’d had no close friends for my entire life and was a loner – later I’ll explain why – I now was, a genuine GI, in one of the biggest armies on the planet – the army of fans of Elvis Aron Presley. And the magic didn’t stop there. Indeed, it had barely begun

It now is Sunday January 22nd. For the record here is the quote, which I have on tape, and that Louis since the book was published, says he never made. He now claims he never took cocaine or smoked hash. I shall broadcast this quote to prove this is precisely what Louis told me in 1997. After that section there follows one of the previously unpublished Out Takes

Joe: Before Boyzone, did you ever get depressed at not seeing any way out of the quagmire?
Louis: Yes, terribly, because I didn’t have money to pay my bills.
J: But you seem always to be quite up, jolly. With all due respect, some would say you are superficial!
L: I don’t think I am. It just so happens I don’t talk about my problems to anyone and the reason I wasn’t broken by it all is that I still love the music. But I definitely was looking for a way out, something new, some way to finally make money.
J: Did you drink at that point?
L: I’m just a social drinker, basically.
J: Ever do drugs?
L: I did cocaine a few times, about ten years ago, did absolutely nothing for me made me even more hyper than I am. And now I’m actually anti-drugs because I’ve seen them screw up to many people. I was a bit more open then. That’s why I don’t go along with the Hot Press line of “legalise them” because they’re safe, or “cool.” They’re not. Look at Phil Lynott. [Lead singer with Thin Lizzy, who died at 36 from complications probably caused by lon- term drug abuse]. I remember Phil as always being a star in Dublin, because he was black and I saw him once in the Bailey and he was dressed all in black looked great. So, I am totally against drugs now. I’ve never taken E or any of that.
J: Hash?
L: Tried it once, got sick! There’s more to do in life, like walking, reading, enjoying it all that way.
J: But you don’t read, Louis!
L: I read all the magazines, from Billboard, to Arena.
J: Yes, but do you have interests outside pop music?
L: Probably not. Nothing as great, though I love movies and occasionally read a book.
J: So you are the quintessential pop obsessive, in other words an emotional and intellectual retard, Louis!
L: Whatever you say! I probably am! I live in record shops, watch MTV, flick to teletext to get the charts on Sunday. And these days what I love are those female singers, Dusty, Patsy Cline, Brenda Lee, Dinah Washington. But I’ve no time for the A Woman’s Heart [a compilation of Irish female singers] thing, Mary Black. And I hate Francis Black. She’s never in tune. Diddly-Eye [Irish traditional] music does nothing for me, either. I am obsessed with pop.
J: So, you were desperately looking for something new, and decided that Ireland needs a boy band along the lines of East 17, Take That, put the ad in the paper, auditioned guys and formed Boyzone? Is that the story, really?
L: Basically, yeah, though I also signed up Sean O’ Farrell, thought he could be the next Daniel O’ Donnell, worked at that for two years, made nothing. Then he went to Ritz records, haven’t seen or heard from him since.
J: What do you think of Daniel O’ Donnell?
L: I don’t like his music at all. Soul-less. But I admire him because he is a household name and is absolutely sincere about what he does. He is not the best singer in the world, but he’s Daniel O’ Donnell twenty-four hours a day. He signs all the autographs, does all the right things, knows his market, and plays to that. His market is older women and he’s the boy-next-door they always wanted to go out with. He’s knows exactly what he’s doing.
J: Did you style anything of Boyzone on Daniel O’ Donnell?
L: When they were starting I used to say, “Do a Daniel on it”! As in meet everyone, sign the autographs, be nice to them!
J: So there’s a little bit of Daniel in Boyzone?
L: (Laughs): Yeah!

Chapter 5. Out Takes. Previously Unpublished.

For this book I did edit that interview but nevertheless decided to leave some repetitions of earlier quotes, in order to maintain the original tone of what was, after all, the first interview Boyzone had published in a rock magazine. And, yes, once again I left Keith’s quotes until last because he gave me the best copy. But there were many quotes I didn’t use, and stories I heard, which I didn’t tell, some of which troubled me deeply and would find their way into subsequent Boyzone related interviews. For example, I didn’t reveal in that last interview that while Boyzone were hanging around the Elstree studio while waiting to film their appearance on Top of the Pops I, at one point, sat with Keith outside the studio and consoled him as he cried because of “the pressures” he was being “put under” to sign a contract. Nor did I draw upon a taped cassette memo I made in the middle of the night after I went back to my hotel and which, in fact, I haven’t heard since 1994.

“Keith told me that in ways they are wary of Louis and that the contracts they had checked, they were told not to sign and had to sign with a “gun, held to” their heads. Because the contracts had things like, if the band falls apart and the guys go on to form new bands, or whatever, then 20%, off the money made off that band must go back to Louis. I love Louis but I told Keith not to yield to those pressures and to tell the other guys to hold out for the best contracts they can get. Also, according to Keith, they hate the way they can’t disclose that they have girlfriends, and they basically feel as Keith said – and he did say something like this during the actual interview – “If Louis came in here and I said ‘I’m freezing’ he wouldn’t give a damn about my health, it would be his investment he’d be worried about.”
It also seems there was an “explosion”, says Keith, and that Louis attacked Mikey’s girlfriend, which led to Mikey leaving the band, for a day. Then, when Louis came over here for the Smash Hits awards, said he wasn’t happy Mikey had walked out, but had had it all checked legally and told the other guys that he could haul Mikey over the coals if he leaves Boyzone. But Mikey left because of Louis’s explosion and Mikey’s girlfriend told Louis, “feck off and mind your own business, if I told him to leave the band in the morning he’d leave.” Yet, then, when Louis said he could drag Mikey through the coals, legally, Keith said, “If you get rid of him you get rid of all of us.” This created a stronger bond between the guys and Keith says that right now there is no relationship between Louis and the five guys. Certainly today, yeah, they were tired, but there was a noticeable lack of warmth, enthusiasm, the dreams, and the hopes I noticed back in May when I first met them. Steve basically ignored me as he wandered around for most of the time, on his own, and on his mobile phone, so I’ll have to use old quotes.
The guys also are clearly terribly lonely. Keith said he is aching to see his girlfriend, who is coming over here to London tomorrow, but now that Louis is here, he won’t be able to see her.
Another story Keith told me- and Louis told me this story too – is that they have found out that Steve, who is 17, “put himself around” starting years ago and there are “a few old queens from Cabra” who “had him when he was younger” and who are trying to sell this story to newspapers. Maybe that’s why Stephen was so preoccupied yesterday. And Keith told me he really hopes that Stephen doesn’t bring them all down, as in Boyzone, if the story breaks about him being a homosexual and having that kind of past.
As such, it’s going to be very hard for me to present in an article Boyzone as the five cheery guys who made it all the way from Dublin to the BBC to make their debut on Top of the Pops when the truth is that a lot of what I encountered today was Boyzone wasted and low. They saw the Smash Hits magazine when I was there, and were a wee bit excited but they just flicked through it and then tossed it to one side. That is not the way it should be.
Keith also told me Boyzone believe that if they could get rid of Louis in the morning, they would and they feel closer to Paul Keogh. Now I know why Louis said Keogh dislikes him. There is a power struggle going on. Keith also says he’s really angry because for every thousand pounds Boyzone earn, Louis gets 200, then the “lighting, staging, insurance, all the other people are paid” and what is left is split five ways between the boys. So, Keith said Louis will get richer must faster than they will. This pisses them off. Also, Joe, make note of the fact that even though the interview started on a high it ended relatively joyless. And say that after the show, two members of Boyzone went on to see Eternal, but three others were driven back to the apartment, being rented for them in London. and told me they are just counting the hours until Friday when they can get back to Dublin.
They’ve been away for a month but will be back in Dublin for only a day then it’s back to Britain to do more publicity and then back to Dublin again for their first show at the Point. The pressures of fame are taking their toil.

Chapter 1. My Happiness: Discovering Elvis and Sun Records.

Once upon a time, I believed I could become the next Elvis. All I needed was a guitar, a ‘private recording’ and to be discovered by Sam Phillips, the man who introduced to the world the ‘King of Pop’ and owned a magical, mystical, and even mythical recording studio called ‘Sun’ in the no less magnificently named American city of Memphis, Tennessee. At least, that’s how it all seemed to me, as a child born and raised in a little village called Glasthule, on the south side of Dublin. The fact that I might be expected to be able to play that guitar and to sing did not enter even the most peripheral zones of my mind. JJ was going to be the next EP, no problem, no sweat, just you wait and see.
Then again, that particular once upon a time manifested itself when I was only ten years old and less than twelve months and after Messrs Presley and Phillips had started sprinkling their peculiar kind of Memphis stardust all over my psyche, ever since I first heard of Elvis. No, that’s not true. Two years earlier, and only days after I heard my mother, Phyllis, say to my Uncle Martin that “the singer, Mario Lanza, ate himself to death” and deducing from this that Mario must have been a cannibal, I began to believe that all singers were strange, simply because the next singer I heard about was called after a herb. Elvis Parsley, whose surname I first encountered, and mispronounced, when I put a penny in the first bubble gum machine I’d ever seen and it spit his picture in my face.
At the time, I was visiting Birmingham, Great Britain, and far more fascinated by the bubble gum machine than the bubble gum, buddle gum cards, or Parsley. So, I pestered mom for pennies, usually those she got as tips in the pub she worked in on a nearby corner, slipped them into the silver slot on that red machine, chewed enough bubble gum to nearly burst, then gave the bubble gum cards to my cousin, Catherine Mahood, who continually told me Parsley was “the most.” Most what, she didn’t explain. But Catherine did “just love” him and also another singer with a funny name, two first names in fact: ‘Cliff’ and ‘Richard’ who we watched one Saturday on a TV show called Oh Boy! But what really bewildered me most was the way Catherine at one point suddenly leapt up out of the sofa we were sitting and started doing a dance she called, “jiving”, and kept saying that the music was “real gone, rock ‘n’ roll.” By this stage, I was gone, totally lost.
But then, oh boy, everything changed for me during another Saturday back in Dublin when another baby sitting teenage cousin of mine, Katrina Slattery, brought me to see a film called GI Blues. The magic started the moment its star, Elvis Presley – Katrina had smilingly corrected my mispronunciation – appeared on screen and seemed to shake the Adelphi cinema to its foundations, if not also the main street in Dun Laoghaire, and all of Ireland. Never in my nine long years of living had I heard such screams. Sure, I’d heard screams in a cinema but that usually was during scary pictures like The Blob and Elvis looked nothing like that glob of red jelly. Yet, what fascinated me was the fact that only girls were screaming and they didn’t look scared. They looked deliriously happy.
No, they looked like they were bloody well hypnotised and screamed every time Elvis smiled, sang, or, most amazingly of all, even when he said “huh” during a song. He was like Mandrake the Magician – with music. But the little trick Elvis did that hooked me, from there to eternity, occurred during the scene when he sang a song called Wooden Heart. At one point Elvis really did seem to beckon not only all those kids in the movie itself who were sitting watching a puppet show, but also those of us in the cinema and me, personally to sing along. I swear on the Holy Bible. It was like he said, “and you too Joseph!” But at first, I didn’t. I was too shy. I’d never sung in public, apart from when I was at Mass, where I “just” loved the floating feeling I got while singing, say, my favourite hymn, Holy God. But that Saturday afternoon as I looked around the cinema and saw hundreds of children singing about someone called ‘Mousy Dan’ I finally surrendered to the rising tide of voices. And the louder and higher I sang the more I felt like I wasn’t just floating, I was following Major Yuri Gagarin who, earlier that very week, had become the first man to soar into outer space. And I too was deliriously happy.
So, what, exactly, happened that Saturday? I’m still not sure. But I suspect that I may have had my first experience of transcendence while singing Wooden Heart, that part of me never fully recovered or returned from that trip to outer/inner space and that probably is something I have sought to recapture or recreate ever since. But all I knew, for sure, as I stepped out of the Adelphi Cinema, was that Elvis Presley had become my favourite singer and that Wooden Heart rather than Tommy Steele’s Little White Bull, which it resembled, musically, was my favourite children’s song. It also became the first song I learned off-by-heart, after Katrina wrote down its words for me and it may have started my fascination with the words of songs. In other words, Elvis had made me feel like I could fly, become my first music hero, provided me with a new favourite song and got me interested in lyrics. Not a bad outcome from one matinee trip to the pictures, is it? And is it any wonder that I still believe so deeply in the incomparable power of popular culture?
But also, on a more intrinsic level, psychologically, and even though I didn’t realise this at the time, as a child who had no close friends for the first twelve years of my life, a loner – later I’ll explain why – I had become a GI in one of the biggest armies on the planet – the army of Elvis fans. And the magic didn’t stop there. It had barely begun.
Look at it this way. I certainly did. On September 16th 1961, at 2.10 Greenwich Mean Time as I was heading towards Katrina’s home on Convent Road, after school, who do you think jumped out, pointed a gun a me and said, “freeze!” Elvis. At least, and again that is how it seemed to my wild imagination. Or, maybe more specifically, the part of my wild imagination that loved the Wild West. Because right there, to my left, in the window of Barnes’s newsagents was a picture that would later similarly fire the imagination of a certain Andy Warhol, and it showed my favourite former GI now looking more like one of my cowboy heroes Kit Carson, or Buck Jones. Beside this picture were the words, ‘GIANT FREE PIC INSIDE’ and the fact that ‘inside’ meant within the pages of a girl’s comic called Valentine which claimed it ‘brings you love stories in pictures’ didn’t bother me at all, I wanted that poster, so I marched right into the shop and bought Valentine.
I did not, however, show that comic or the poster to Katrina, simply because I knew that my aunt Olive was at home and didn’t approve of Elvis. Katrina had told me about the time Catherine Mahood, my cousin from Birmingham, had sent her Elvis tattoos for her skirt, my aunt made her burn them and said, “Elvis Presley should not be that close to a young girl’s legs!” Katrina laughed telling me that story but I hadn’t a clue why. Nor
did I buy Roxy and Marilyn over the next two weeks, even though they had similar posters of Cliff and Adam Faith which would it was promised make up ‘the biggest, zingiest, pin-up ever.’ But I did buy Valentine, on October 7th because on its cover was the headline ‘THIS IS ELVIS. Now it can be told…the fabulous life-story of a fabulous guy!” That got me for two reasons. Firstly, I knew next to nothing about Elvis and needed to be told, and secondly, earlier that year I’d seen a film called Deadline Midnight, and decided that when I grow up I want to be a journalist and in Valentine the Elvis story was being told by ‘Clem Walters, show business correspondent for several New York papers.’
How could I have known, at the age of nine, that this particular comic-strip tale, as told by the fabricated ‘Walters’, who reminded me of Frank Sinatra, the ultimate music hero of my father, Joe Jackson senior, would click into place a sense of personal identification with Elvis Presley which would remain for, and reshape, the rest of my life? And that process probably began as I read that ‘El’s [story] starts way back in 1935, on January 8th, when he was born in a little town called Tupelo, Mississippi’ to a mother and father called Gladys and Vernon, he had been one of twins, but his brother died at birth. This was bound to find a parallel in my mind, consciously or otherwise, with the fact that my mother told me that when I was born, six weeks prematurely, she was warned I might die.
My sense of identifying with Presley on a conscious level certainly was initiated when I saw a sketch of Elvis at roughly my age, wearing the kind of blazer I often wore and a schoolbag like mine, and read Clem’s comment, ‘Elvis was pretty much like any other kid in those days attending the local grade school.’ It made me think, ‘if Elvis was much like any other kid in those days then I myself, in these days, might be a kid like him!’
But what really hit me like, well, a truck, was reading in Valentine that after leaving school ‘Elvis’s big ambition was to be a truck driver.’ That was what my dad worked as! Imagine! My dad and Elvis had the same job. But how, in God’s name, I wondered, did he get from being a truck driver to making girls scream by just saying, “huh”? I was fascinated by this question. Then, I got the answer. It was easy. He ‘started playing a guitar and singing…just for fun’ in Memphis where his mother would say, “sing another song Elvis…one of those old southern songs we used to sing back in Tupelo” then ‘one day, he stopped his truck and walked into a record shop to make an amateur recordings’! Then afterwards as he walked away with that record under his arm, a man standing in the record shop doorway shouted, “you didn’t do a bad job there, son…what’s the record in aid of?’ and Elvis told him, “just a present. It’s for my mom…She likes the way I sing.”
The fact that Elvis made that record as a present for his mom really excited me. If only because one of the greatest joys in my life was giving mom presents, like, say a box of Milk Tray chocolates and seeing her smile with delight. So, I could easily imagine the face of Gladys Presley as Elvis handed her that disc. As such, I was even more thrilled to read that ‘not unnaturally, Mrs. Presley thought the record was great.’ But I couldn’t understand why Elvis had said, “to me it sounded like someone beatin’ on a bucket lid.”
But, as Walters said, ‘three or four years later that “beatin’ on a bucket lid” was being heard all over the world’ and Elvis had forty golden discs, each of which was awarded, for sales of over one million discs! However, of the ten listed, I had heard only Wooden Heart and I now realised I had so much to live for – like hearing Heartbreak Hotel, Hound Dog, I Got Stung, Don’t Be Cruel, All Shook Up, Jailhouse Rock, It’s Now Or Never, and Surrender!
So, it was not surprising that on the following February 21st, when dad asked what I wanted for my tenth birthday, I said “records!” then wrote a list that had only one word, ‘ELVIS’ in capital letters, followed by the song title, Wooden Heart, then the names, Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele. There was one problem, however. My father and I may have built what he told me was “the first domestic stereophonic sound system in Ireland” but all I owned was a wind-up gramophone my grandfather, Henry Kelly, had thrown out and I hauled home on my handmade trolley. Therefore I was not a happy boy when dad came home from Dublin that day and said, “the fella in Liam Breen’s record shop on Liffey Street told me they’ve stopped pressing the latest hits on 78’s, so I couldn’t get you Wooden Heart. I’m afraid.” But then dad smiled, a little slyly, reached inside his belted Crombie overcoat, hauled out a half dozen, or so, 78’s and said, “but I did get you these hits, and he says they are only a few years old.”
Then, dad handed them to me one by one. I read each label. Rock With the Cavemen, Tommy Steele; Plain Jane, Bobby Darin; Kewpie Doll, Frankie Vaughan; It Doesn’t Matter Anymore, Buddy Holly, and Memories Are Made of This, Dean Martin. I didn’t know any of the songs and even though I hoped dad wouldn’t sense my disappointment, I couldn’t help but feel that these were not the first records I had dreamed of owning. Yet, it was at that moment, as if reading my mind, which dad and me always seem able to do when it comes to each other, he smiled again, handed me one more 78 then said, “whatever about those, I have been assured that you will really like this one!” I grabbed it and, saw the black and silver RCA label, then to the left, ‘Recording First Published 1959’, to the right the words, ‘New Orthophonic High Fidelity’, the title and then gushed, “I Need Your Love Tonight! ELVIS PRESLEY with The Jordanaires! That must be his band! Dad, can I, can I, can I play it now? Please”
“You know you can, Joseph, but how many times must I tell you that the proper phrase is ‘May I’?”
“May I! May I? ”
“Yes, you can! Go on! Go on!”
Then it happened. I slipped the 78 out of its white and wine coloured sleeve, placed the disc on the turntable, cranked up the gramophone, set the needle at the edge of the disc, heard the surface noises and then, literally leapt back. It really was as though, instead of directing the arm of the record player towards that 78 I had stuck my forefinger, wet, into the electricity socket on my bedroom wall. Then when Elvis began to sing, I got a second, short, sharp electric shock, I had never heard a sound, a song, a singer, so exciting. This had to be, I reckoned, what Catherine Mahood had tried to tell me all about when I was seven years old, real gone, rock ‘n’ roll. No, I knew it was rock ‘n’ roll, and I loved it.
Sadly, dad didn’t. This I could see from the look on his face, which reminded me of the time he stood on a rusty nail in the back garden. And when I said, “did you hear, Elvis sang about a hi-fi!” he replied, “I couldn’t hear a word he was saying amid that din.” Them dad turned to leave my bedroom, but before doing so he handed me one more 78 and said, “anyway, here’s one I myself choose for you. It’s by one of my favourite composers, Tchaikovsky. I hope you like it.” I read the title, Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, and then whereas I had hoped earlier that dad wouldn’t sense my disappointment, I definitely sensed his disappointment after he saw me toss that 78 onto my bed and heard me say, “I’ll play it later. First, I want to hear the other Elvis song, A Fool Such As I!”
But none of this prepared me for what happened the next night. That day, I’d dropped the Tchaikovsky 78 by accident and hated having to tell dad. Also, maybe I shouldn’t have told him while he was listening to an LP, S’Wonderful, by Ray Conniff and his Orchestra and reading its sleeve notes. He suddenly and inexplicably snapped into a rage.
“Broke it by accident, my arse” he bellowed. “You broke it on purpose because all you want to listen to is Presley and that cretinous caveman ‘music’ called rock ‘n’ roll.”
Then, while I was standing at the other end of the room, dad flung that LP cover, sideways, at me, it hit me in the face and my nose began to bleed. I knew dad had a temper. I’d seen him punching our coal room door the same way Kirk Douglas punched a wall in the film Champion. But this was the first time I remembered him striking out at me. It wasn’t, mom told me later. My father had once slapped me on the side of the head so hard, when I was six, that mom became terrified he might have ruptured my eardrum, and warned him, “if you hit Joseph like that again, I’ll go to the cops.” Either way, as I wiped the blood onto the back of my hand I found I couldn’t move until dad shouted:
“Now, get out of my sight!”
As I climbed up the stairs, I suddenly realised that my hunch, the day before, had been true. Dad did hate my new hero, whom he forever more would nearly always refer to as ‘Presley’ and never ‘Elvis’ and he hated the music I had begun to love. Rock ‘n’ Roll. The “Generation Gap” as it soon came to be called, sometimes even by my father, and which, in time would widen into a kind of Irish Grand Canyon, and involve reciprocal physical violence, started largely because I became a fan of ‘King’ Elvis Aron Presley.
Yet, there was a plus side to all this. The tension between dad and me helped me tune into the father-son conflict at the soul of King Creole, which, for countless other reasons would always vie with Wild In The Country for the title of my favourite Elvis film, and both of which I first saw at this stage in my life. Not only that, if discovering Elvis has led, ultimately, first discernible distance between my beloved father and me, it also brought my mother and myself even closer, if that was possible. And it was possible, when it came to music. I’d never forgotten that day when I was trying to master the Twist, on my own, on a plank near my granny’s home, and my mother called out, “’Joseph, Elvis is on the wireless, a lovely song, hurry.” Thus, Wild In The Country became the first of countless Elvis recordings we heard together. I also was delighted by the fact that at the time dad gave me those 78’s, mom adored Elvis’s latest 45, Can’t Help Falling In Love, even if I preferred the faster flip side, Rock-A-Hula-Baby. And when I had played for her, A Fool Such As I, she loved it, as I did, in part because Elvis sang about being “sentimental” and mom agreed that she and I “were both, that, indeed!’
All of which may help explain why, a few months later, when I read The Elvis Presley Story, the first book I’d ever read, and discovered that Elvis’s mother was dead, it made me terribly sad. Particularly after I learned in a chapter tellingly titled, ‘The Woman Behind Elvis’ that ‘poverty was the birthright of Elvis Presley’ and that even though his family was ‘sharecropper poor’ their ‘lack of material goods nurtured a feeling of love between Elvis, his father, and mother.’ Apart from reminding me of my own family situation, this made me feel so sorry for Elvis. In fact, when I read that after his mother got ill in 1958, he rushed home from Fort Hood, where he was stationed as a real GI, spent a day in her room, ‘her spirits were raised by his presence’ but the next morning at 3:15, he got a call to say she’d died, I cried. But when I then went on to read that at his mother’s funeral, Elvis ‘leaned on the casket and moaned, “everything I have is gone” I began to dread the time when I would do the same and this became a recurrent nightmare.
However, if The Elvis Presley Story brought that kind of shadow into my life for the first time it also delivered me right to the door of rock ‘n’ roll light, because it was in its pages I first came across the glorious names of Sam Phillips and Sun Records. I even began to suspect that Clem Walters was no Joe Friday, from the TV series, Dragnet, and might have gotten the facts, just the facts, mam” wrong. In this telling of the tale, it wasn’t a record shop in which Elvis made that amateur recording, it was the ‘Sun Recording Company,’ he paid $4 to ‘cut’ that disc and it’s president, Sam Phillips, ‘recognised that the boy had possibilities.’ And the first song Elvis cut was called That’s All Right, Mama, which seemed appropriate given that he made the record for his mama – if that story was true. Bu El’s break came a year later, when, ‘Phillips hurried him into a recording session and had him cut, That’s All Right, Mama c/w Blue Moon of Kentucky.’
It took me years to work out what ‘c/w’ was and then, when I was told it meant ‘coupled with’ it sounded dirty. But the moment I first read those two song titles they became, in the mind of this boy, the musical equivalent of the kind of treasure I hoped to find if I ever discovered King Solomon’s Mines, which I’d read about in a Classics Illustrated comic. Likewise, the modern day myth of Elvis, the Sun Recording Company and Sam Phillips certainly meant more to me than the ancient Celtic myths of Cuchulainn we were being taught in school or the tales of those who fought for Ireland’s freedom in 1916. And this I say despite the fact that my granny’s brother was Michael Collin’s aide-de-camp and she herself once smuggled guns, in a baby’s pram, for the Old IRA.
I definitely now had a new hero, Sam Phillips, because I knew right away that wit him without him me and millions of people all over the planet might never have heard of the name of Elvis Presley. I wanted to thank him personally, face to face, and saw no reason I couldn’t do so. And this faith was fuelled by the fact that in the pages of The Elvis Presley Story, I had found my first motto and it was something Elvis once said. While making his second movie Loving You, he’d told a reporter, “a person can do just about anything he wants to. If you really try, the Good Lord won’t let you down.” But then why wouldn’t I be drawn to that quote? My favourite prayer at the time happened to be, “Most Sacred Heart of Jesus I place all my trust in thee.”
Then, on June 17th 1962 my dreams moved into another dimension. Fittingly enough, less than a day after I first heard the title track from Elvis’s new EP, Follow That Dream, which I would later ask mom to buy for me as a memento of the memory I am about to recall. At one point that Sunday she was standing beside the gas cooker in our scullery cooking dinner while I sat in the living room, on my own, at our oak table, reading another comic strip version of Elvis’s life story, in the 1959 Valentine Pop Special. It had the headline, ‘KING ELVIS: How the Top Cat made it’ and posed the question, ‘how come a poor boy from Tupelo, Mississippi could get so far and raise such a ruckus?’ which resonated so deeply inside me it resurfaced thirty years later in an article I wrote for The Irish Times. What struck me immediately, however, were two sketches that ran side-by-side. The first showed Elvis, as an adult, thinking ‘is this true? Can this be happening to me? Or is it all a dream?’ The next suggested that sometimes he must flash back to ‘the days when he was just another poor kid sitting with his mother on the doorstep, and it showed him, at roughly my age, having this conversation with Gladys.
“I don’t know how I’m going to pay the grocer’s bill this month. Seems like we’re always in debt,’ says Gladys.
“Don’t worry none, mom. One of these days things will change,” Elvis replies.
Those words echoed not so much like the sound of a door slamming, but more so like the sight of a door opening into light. Any pain my mother felt, I felt, so I was truly, painfully aware that she was struggling, on a daily basis, to pay our bills, especially since dad lost his job as a truck driver with Connelly’s Builder’s Suppliers. So, I slid off my chair, dashed out to the scullery, showed her that sketch and we had this exchange.
“So, Elvis and his mammy went through hard times, too, love, did they?” said mom.
“Yeah, but I’ve got a great idea. When I grow up, I’m going to be rich and famous, like Elvis! Then you won’t have to worry about bills anymore, mom! And I’ll even buy you a mink coat like Elvis bought for his mother, though she didn’t really want one!”
“I’m sure that you will become whatever you want to be, God willing.”
“That’s what Elvis says! He said if you really try, the Lord won’t let you down!”
“And he’s right. But I don’t really want a mink coat either! Your daddy bought me one when he had a few bob. It’s not real but it’ll do. That’s the fur coat, remember, when he had it shortened for me, we got that Davy Crockett hat made for you out of its end!
“Yeah! I loved that hat. But you deserve a real mink coat and I’ll get you one!”
“And I’m sure, you will do that too, Joseph, if that’s what you want to do.”
Decades later, I’d discover that Sigmund Freud once cited as the source of his self-confidence his mother’s “faith and pride” in him as a child. But no one needed to tell me that Sunday how blessed I was to have a mother who believed that I could become, as I also told her, “the next Elvis” or whatever I wanted to be. So, I did, as you shall see. But after deciding I wanted to become not just a pop star but the next Elvis I, naturally enough, rushed back to read more fervently than before ‘How the Top Cat made it.’
And, according to this tilt on the tale, that first day Elvis walked into the Sun Recording Company he said to a female receptionist, “I…uh…want to cut a disc for my folks.” And it said that when ‘Sam Phillips heard Elvis’s demo’ he wrote on a memo pad, ‘Elvis Presley, good ballad singer.’ Then, ‘a bit later’ Sam ‘came across a new ballad… gave El a chance. El was terrible.’ But ‘one day’ Sam called Elvis, said ‘would you like to come over and try out something I got here?”, Elvis apparently ran all the way to the studio and that song turned out to be ‘Big Boy Crudup’s That’s All Right, Mama.’ He asked El, “reckon you could sing that?” El said, “reckon I can try anyhow” and they cut the record.
Then Sam gave that disc to ‘Dewey Phillips to play on a radio show’, Elvis went to the movies, and while he was sitting thinking, ‘I wonder what they thought of the record?’ his mom ran into the cinema, shouting, “Elvis! Elvis! Quickly.” Then, when he asked her, “mother what happened?” she said, “plenty, and it’s all good.” This really was thrilling stuff. And it got better. Because what Gladys meant was that ‘ever since Dewey Phillips played the record the phones at the station hadn’t stopped ringing. He wanted Elvis on the air fast.’ And this all meant, as the caption writer said, ‘at last Elvis’s dream was beginning to come true.’ Now I knew how I could become the next Elvis. All that was necessary was a guitar, demo, Sam Phillips, the right song you, too, could be a king.
Predictably, my father, who quite liked the idea of his boy becoming a writer – at this point, unknown to me, he had begun to write poetry and was reading James Joyce’s Ulysses- did not warm o the idea of me becoming the next Elvis. But he did agree to get me a guitar for Christmas. Yet, then, on Christmas Eve, as I headed to bed, I heard him say to a friend, “Joseph wanted a guitar for Christmas. I got him one. It’s not real but it will do.” This stopped me on the stairs for two reasons. It proved that Seamus Haskins, a neighbour, was right when he told me that week, “there is no Santa, you’re silly to believe there is, your parents get you the presents.” Also, I didn’t want to believe what dad said.
That’s why, the next morning, as I lifted that plastic Selcol guitar, with a picture of Elvis near the part where you tune the strings I asked him, “Is this real?” Dad replied, “of course, it’s real. You don’t think Presley would allow his name to be put on a dummy guitar, do you?” I couldn’t believe that my father, who always told me he believes that “without honesty we have nothing” could lie to me. Or, smile as he lied. This hurt m more than hearing there was no Santa. It was like dad had also often played for me that song Frank Sinatra sang called High Hopes, but it seemed the higher I hoped, or dreamed, there was always someone waiting with a bow and arrow, or a crossbow, to shoot me down.
And in terms of this new dream of becoming a pop star, or the next Elvis, the arrows kept flying. The next probably hurt the most, if only because it was fired by my mother and silence me, in an essential sense, for at least two years, if not the rest of my life. Not long after Christmas, she and I were at a party in a pub near my aunt Kathleen’s home and their sweet shop in Little Bray, Country Wicklow. At one point mom sang her “party piece”, and one of her favourite songs, My Happiness, which I’d noted she tended to sing more sadly since her mother, Mary Ellen Kelly, died less than a year earlier. But this time I also noticed that mom seemd to be singing the song directly to me and I felt that somehow I had to respond in kind. So, as soon as she finished singing, and even though I was so shy I’d blush if anyone stared at me for longer than five seconds, and had never sung at a family gathering, I decided to sing a song right back to her. Wooden Heart, given that I knew all its words, even the verse in German, with that reference to ‘Mousy Dan’ who I had long since reckoned might be related to ‘Desperate Dan’ from the Dandy.
And so, I made my debut as a solo singer, wallowed in the way all eyes were on me and the way everyone seemed to be listening so intently, and decided this is how Elvis must feel when he’s on stage. Then, when I ceased singing and the applause washed over me I wallowed some more. Best of all was mom, for the first time, applauding me. I also loved the look of pride on her face, which seemed to be glowing like my not so wooden heart. This was truly wonderful.
But then, when I said I’d like to do as an encore, “the bits of another Elvis song, His Latest Flame, that I know!” mom suddenly frowned and said, “No, Joseph, I think one song is enough.” This was the very opposite of Gladys Presley once asking her son to sing another song. My heart now did feel like it was not only made of wood but also dissolving in my body, sliding right down through my legs and out into the rest of the sawdust on the floor. Because I believed that what my mother had said was the kindest way she, as someone who was always praised for her “beautiful singing voice,” could tell me that I was more like my father who, everyone said, “hadn’t a note in” his head.
In other words, I was shot down big time in the sense that I realised right away that if I hadn’t a note in my head I couldn’t become even a singe much less be like the king. This was not the happiest day of my childhood. Incidentally, thirty years later, my mother explained, “God, Joseph, that is sad. But I wasn’t saying, at all, that you hadn’t a note in your head. It was just that we weren’t supposed to have children in a pub at that time of the day and I was afraid that if the manager heard you, we’d be thrown out.”
But back in January 1963, the damage was done and I would never again sing in public with the kind of confidence that defined my original boyish rendition of Wooden Heart. Then, a few weeks later, mom left me shattered again and this time she knew it. One day I came home from school to discover that my Elvis guitar, which I had grown to love, was missing. Mom told me, with tears in her eyes, which upset me more than noticing my guitar had gone, “I’m sorry, love, but we had to borrow money from your aunty Kathleen for Christmas and I’m supposed to pay it back by the week but today I hadn’t got a penny to give her. So, she said she’d take your guitar for James and I had no choice, really.”
Of course, I knew that what my mother was telling me was exactly the same thing as Gladys telling Elvis back in Tupelo, “seems like we’re always in debt” so I took my cue from that story and said, “don’t worry, none, mom, one day I’ll get another Elvis guitar.” But afterwards, I finally decided that I really would want to be a right dummy not to realise that someone, maybe even God, was trying to tell me that I was not meant to be the next Elvis or a pop star. So, somewhat reluctantly I reverted to my original dream of becoming a journalist. Maybe I could become a ‘king’ among journalists, who knows?
And then mom, albeit inadvertently, seemed to reward me for my wise-boys-say-only-fools-hang-in decision. She bought for me the following Christmas 1963 the Superman annual, Elvis Special 1964, and Valentine Pop Special No. 6. But it was the latter, as with its 1959 predecessor, which rerouted my dreams, yet again. That said, I would be lying if I claimed that after reading its first article, ‘At Home With Elvis’ and noting it was written by Roy Pockett, who had interviewed a beautiful blond Elvis fan named ‘Jean Alsop’, I decided, ‘this is what I want to do with my life – go to Hollywood and interview blondes.’ I didn’t, at least not on a conscious level. But I can say, truthfully, that a quarter century later, as I stood in a mansion in Bel Air – outside which Alsop had been photographed – talking with the irresistible Ellen Barkin, whose beau, Gabriel Byrne, I had interviewed, I was reminded of Alsop and that article from Valentine Pop Special.

I also can say, truthfully, that one image from that ‘At Home With Elvis’ became the single most iconic Elvis-related image I encountered during my late childhood and early adolescence. It showed him standing outside his Memphis home, Graceland – a name I loved because I knew it meant ‘land of grace’ – and had this caption. ‘The home – Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee. The car – a British Rolls Royce. The man – Elvis King of Pop.’ I wanted it all. A mansion like Graceland and a Rolls Royce, even if by now I had accepted I would never be King of Pop. But also, I this portrait contrasted so sharply with that sketch of Elvis as a boy, sitting on his doorstep, promising his mother things would change, that it seemed to tell, ‘this is how far you can go if you dare to dream.’
And after reading that article I dared to dream even higher, whether or not there were baddies with bows and arrows waiting to shoot me down. For one thing, I decided that if
a British Ice Skater, namely Jean Alsop, could get to meet Elvis, so could I. Furthermore, I wanted him to greet me in exactly the same pose he had standing there dressed head to toe in black on the driveway of Graceland. However, I was astute enough to know that at the age of eleven, it might be a year, or ten, before I was old enough to fly to Memphis. In the meantime, through the words of this poem, I asked him to come to Dublin to meet me.

Oh Mr. Elvis Presley won’t
you head this plea
You’ve never been to England
your adoring fans to see.
Just come here once that’s all we ask
and for our pleasure sing
You’ll soon discover how we think of you
the Show Biz KING.

To be continued

Book blurb David Norris: Trial By Media.

David Norris was elected as in Irish Senator in 1987. In March 2011, he put himself forward as a nominee to become President of Ireland. Two months later, the Senator was mired in a controversy caused by the reappearance of two old interviews he had given and that threatened to derail his presidential campaign. “This is the cruellest thing that ever happened to me,” Norris told Irish journalist Joe Jackson at the time of the original publication of one those interviews in 2002. More recently, Norris has claimed that an interview Jackson himself did in 2002 was the “definitive rebuttal” of the allegations made against him nearly a decade ago and he says it “saved” his life. The senator made similar assertions in relation to an interview that was conducted by Jackson in 2011. This book contains the full transcripts of those characteristically probing interviews and presents a critical perspective on the way in which the Irish media dealt with the controversy. Trial By Media also is David Norris’s own, sometimes tearful, but more often joyful, and endlessly inspiring, life story told in his own words and in his own ebullient fashion.

Joe Jackson is an author, journalist, and broadcaster. His books include Troubadours and Troublemakers (Ireland Now: A Culture Reclaimed) Boyzone, Our Story, and Other Voices, Other Rooms, A Personal History of Folk Music, which he co-authored with singer Nanci Griffith. Jackson’s articles and interviews have been published globally in magazines such as Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Humo. He has interviewed roughly 1,000 musicians, artists, and politicians and worked for Ireland’s most prestigious media outlets, such as RTE Radio 1, The Irish Times, and the Sunday Independent. Jackson is currently compiling a collection of his most inspirational interviews, titled Walk On With Hope in Your Heart, and working on a play and a memoir based on his thirteen years as the last, official biographer, of Irish actor Richard Harris. The play and memoir are both called, Excuse med While I Disappear.

What follows is the prologue of the book. This is the copyright of Joe Jackson and can not be used, in part or whole, without permission in writing, from the author, myself. Any breach of copyright will be rigorously pursued.

Prologue.

It’s Bloomsday, June 16th 2011, and as I write these words, the political future of noted James Joyce devotee, Senator David Norris, hangs in the balance – like a sea green snot at the end of a sailor’s nose, as Joyce might say. Three months ago, almost to the day, the senator launched his campaign to become the next President of Ireland, and then, ten weeks later, listeners to one of the country’s most popular radio programmes voted him the person most likely to win the race. But that was before journalists Helen Lucy Burke and Jason O’Toole, dashed centre stage brandishing a brace of old Norris interviews, and accused him, in one case, of having the kind of “evil beliefs” that make him unfit to hold the highest office in the land. Now, according to one tabloid, ‘Norris has blown it’ by which I presume they do not mean his nose.
Then again, I can’t remember a time when David Norris was not being put on trial, in a sense, by the media. Or, at least, having his sexuality explored, sometimes to a pathetically prurient degree. In fact, my earliest experience of this particular, and maybe peculiarly Irish phenomenon occurred the first time we met. It was late one evening circa 1994, and Norris – someone I knew little about, apart from the fact that he was a senator, gay, loved James Joyce and had won a landmark case in the European Courts of Human Rights which led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ireland – approached me in a Dublin restaurant that was run by Norman Hewson, the brother of Paul Hewson, aka Bono, who I’d recently interviewed. Incidentally, I was in that restaurant not to be fashionable but because that afternoon I’d met, in the offices of a nearby rock magazine, which sometimes published my work, an American U2 fan and now I was, let’s say, exploring all possibilities. As such, Norris’s contribution didn’t necessarily add to the mood of tentative romance.
Either way, as the senator approached I noted that he did so rather tentatively and that he looked somewhat perturbed. But the latter didn’t really surprise me. I’d noticed earlier that he was being interviewed over dinner by a journalist who, let’s say, had always struck me as far less interested in the art of interviewing than in the more basic, and, some would say, base, act of self-promotion, at the expense of interviewees. One of whom, Mary Black, an Irish singer, had told me she was “deeply upset” by “the sexist, condescending c**p” he had written about her.
“Good evening, my name is David Norris and I am extremely sorry for interrupting you while you are having dinner”.
“I know who you are David, and this is Alycia”.
“And, you, if I’m not mistaken, are Joe Jackson who does those weekly music interviews for The Irish Times and I hear on The Arts Show?”
“Guilty, on both counts, my Lord!”
“Then let me ask you something. And again, I’m sorry for interrupting you and, Alycia; forgive me for what I am about to repeat. But, Joe, this chap whose is interviewing me and who has just gone to the toilet –”
“I know who he is”.
“Well, he keeps asking me the most impertinent of questions, such as saying ‘When you were young, did you masturbate to pictures of Oscar Wilde?’ Is this the norm during interviews, over dinner? It’s certainly not, in my experience. What am I supposed to say in such circumstances?”
“Nothing. Don’t even say ‘no comment’ because even that quote gives him an excuse to print the question, which he probably will anyway. Just move the conversation ahead or stop it in his tracks by asking, ‘Why? Did you?’ That should do the trick”.
“Oh that is good! So, maybe this is all transference on his behalf!”
“Maybe! But David, go easy on the wine. I noticed he’s barely drinking while you are, let’s say, less immune to its charms! That’s another trick I hear he uses, getting people drunk while he remains sober”.
“That’s all called ‘yellow journalism’ where I come from,” said Alycia.
“I’m familiar with the term, and I guess that’s what this is, in a way,” Norris responded. “Ok, lovely to meet you both, albeit fleetingly, I better get back to my table before he returns. And thanks for the advice, Joe”.
“And I’ll send over a crate of mineral water! Good luck”.
With that, David Norris departed and we did not meet again until nearly a decade later, in 2002, when our paths crossed again largely as a result of journalism, yellow, or otherwise. By this stage, lured by the prospect of extending my journalistic palate beyond what Norris called, “those weekly music interviews” I had left The Irish Times, was doing broad-based interviews for the Sunday Independent and during that February, and found myself caught in the middle of an minor media tiff, which did, nonetheless, directly influence an interview I’d soon conduct with Norris.
Ronan Collins, a DJ on Ireland’s national radio station, RTÉ Radio 1, for which I myself also worked at this point, presenting a music series called, Under The Influence, had described the debut single by Irish pop group Six, There’s A Whole Lotta Loving Going On, as “absolutely awful” and “lacking in credibility, imagination and musicianship”. Their manager, Louis Walsh, responded by declaring that Collins was “a failed show band star” and then added, – referring to the latter’s charity work –that he should “go and save the children of the world”. So, in two interviews published on February 3rd, and February 10th, respectively, I gave Louis Walsh his say, and Ronan Collins, the right of reply.
What each actually said, as with much of the ephemera that defines the world of pop, is now largely irrelevant. However, I was more than happy to let each state his case in a national newspaper that had a potential reach of one million people, roughly a quarter of the Irish population, and leave it to our readers to decide who was right and who was wrong.
All of which brings us back to David Norris. The same Sunday my Ronan Collins interview was published, I saw, in another newspaper, Ireland On Sunday, the headline ‘Senator Backs Sex With Children’. Under that was the line, ‘Fury at gay’s “pedophilia is ok” message,’ beside which was a photograph of Norris. Shocked, as no doubt most readers of that newspaper would have been, by these claims, I read the article and discovered that the allegations were based on comments David had made during an interview he did with a restaurant critic, whose name I was encountering for the first time at this point, Helen Lucy Burke, for Magill magazine. I bought the magazine, read the article, and realised immediately that Norris’s comments clearly had been sensationalised and broadly misrepresented by Ireland On Sunday. Even so, the Magill article itself raised some troubling questions so I phoned Norris on February 11th, requesting an interview, which we did two days later in his office in Ireland’s government building, Leinster House. What follows, in the first section of this book is almost a word-for-word transcript of what was said, allowing for edits which, as with all exchanges I quote, and, indeed, all my interviews, are made purely as part of a tightening-up process.
Why am I returning to these tapes, after nearly a decade, and to my notes and diary from that period, plus all the related material surrounding my two most recent interviews with David Norris in 2011? Simply because there is the perception that he has “blown” his chance of becoming president and I happen to believe the man is too often being judged on headlines – a tendency of which Norris is aware – and on articles that continue to sensationalise and to misrepresent his beliefs and, for that matter, who he is.
Of course, I’m not deluded enough to claim that the three interviews we did, the articles that emanated from those interviews or this book, David Norris Trial By Media, capture what some might euphemistically call ‘The Truth About Senator David Norris’. Nevertheless, Norris himself does describe our 2002 interview as the “definitive rebuttal” of those accusations that were made against him by Ireland On Sunday, claims that our interview, in response, “saved” his life and makes similar assertions for our most recent interview. Though, in terms of the latter what David Norris – who tells me he does not like “sucking up to people” but who is, in my opinion, inclined towards hyperbole – said was that I had “saved” his presidential campaign. Although, realistically speaking, whether I did or not, to even the most infinitesimal degree, remains to be seen.
In the meantime, Senator David Norris definitely insists that he last interview we did, on June 9th 2011, includes what shall remain, presumably for the duration of the presidential campaign, his “final comments” on “quotes or controversies that have arisen from old interviews”. By which he means specifically, those he did with Helen Lucy Burke and with Jason O’ Toole. As such, now, a week later, on Bloomsday – the date I choose because Norris and I both adore the life -affirming aspects of Ulysses and I love even the similar resonances in even the word ‘Bloomsday’ – I have decided that everything we discussed, over nearly a decade, and as set against the backdrop of the frequently polar opposite positions that have been taken in the Irish media vis-à-vis Norris, should be a matter of public record. If only, again, in my own infinitesimal attempt to help my fellow Irish people to decide, in four months time, who they want to elect as our next President.
This really is my core reason for writing this book, although no doubt I will be accused of having other motives. It’s title, Trial By Media, incidentally, comes from a phrase that Senator David Norris himself used at one point, suitably enough, while being interrogated during a programme on Irish radio. So, let the trial begin. Or rather, let it continue.

Joe Jackson, Dublin, June 16th 2011.

On flyleaf it said “Joe Jackson is renowned for his in-depth, and frequently controversial interviews which have become a frequent feature of both —- and The Irish Times. He is an interviewer who sems to possess the uncommon ability to immerse himself so deeply in the psychology of his interviewees to such an extent that they invariably reveal more about themselves, and the world they inhabit, than they might have originally intended. This pursuit for what he sees as “the hidden truth” often sets up a tension which is not unlike the dynamic one finds ion a one-act play’.

Quotes were “Thank you for the most penetrating interview I’ve done since, at least The Dick Cavett Show, in the 1960′s” Richard Harris 1987

“Hot Press is noted for its probing interviews conducted by Joe Jackson”, Deaglan De Bradun, political correspondent, The Irish Times 1988

“Once a week in The Irish Times you are marking the Irish psyche with The Joe Jackson Interview” Shay Healy, broadcaster, 1994

“There’s no one in Ireland doing what you do, in terms of these in=depth — interviews on politics and the arts. These are important social documents.” Ciaran Benson, Professor of Psychology UCD, Chairman of the Arts Council, 1995.

As an aside all these years later, I haven’t a clue who these guys are talking about!

The blurb says ‘Nanci Griffiths distinct blend of pop, rockabilly and folk has made her one of the most respected, popular and lover singer-songwriters working today. Having released fourteen of her own critically-acclaimed albums as well as recording countless guest appearances on other artists’ albums and contributing to film scores, Nanci crates music that has taken root all over the world – her melodies and lyrics resonating wherever they are heard. The Grammy award-winning album, Other Voices, Other Rooms – one of the most successful albums of contemporary folk music ever – marked a watershed moment in Nanci Griffith’s career. Not only is it her sole album of cover songs, but it is also a seamless blend of tradition, collaboration and innovation.The follow up album, Other Voices, Too: A Trip Back To Bountiful, continues that tradition of passing on other writers’ work and presenting folk music as a vital force in today’s music.
Go behind the scenes with Nanci Griffith and listen in on a very special conversation with Joe Jackson, an acclaimed music journalist, as they explore the roots and inspiration for Nanci’s extraordinary career and trace the history of the folk music movement.
The book is a guide to Nanci’s trip back to bountiful – to the place where inspiration springs freely. With more than one-hundred behind-the-scenes photographs and candid interviews with Nanci and her collaborators, including John Lomax 111, Emmylous Harris, Dave Van Ronk, Pete Seeger, Odetta and members of the Blue Moon Orchestra and many, many others, this book offers a rare glimpse into the artistic heart and soul of one of this country’s greatest musical treasures: Nanci Griffith

Nanci Griffith on Joe Jackson, from preface to this book: ‘I am grateful for the collaboration on the text for this book with my friend, journalist Joe Jackson. Joe writes regularly for — and The Irish Times, out of Dublin, Ireland, and for many publications worldwide. He is the rare music journalist who actually listens to music. His knowledge as a musicologist has been treasured and invaluable to this project. His contribution to the text is deeply appreciated as well as the time he took out of working on his own book to come to America and work with me and to interview all the artists quoted here.
Like DJ’s of a generation ago, music journalists who are also great writers are few and far between these days. I hope that contemporary music will always maintain writers like Joe Jackson in Ireland and the UK and America’s own Steve Morse who writes full time for the Boston Globe. Without these writers and their rare peers we might never see another book like Folk Songs of North America, from an archivist the like of its writer, Alan Lomax

Blurb says ‘Little more than a year ago Shane, Ronan, Mike, Keith, and Stephen were five ambitious working class lads from Dublin’s northside. Now they are Boyzone, Ireland’s first pop group poised on the edge of international stardom. Voted the best newcomers by Smash Hits magazine, their first two singles – Working My Way Back To You and Love Me For A Reason – reached the top of the UK and Irish charts
In Boyzone: Our Story the boys tell their own stories to Irish photo-journalist Joe Jackson, who has had a unique working relationship with the band since it was formed. Here they speak intimately about their families, love lives, reaction to stardom and hopes for the future.
Containing exclusive photographs of the boys from childhood through to superstardom, many of which were taken specifically for this book by Joe Jackson, Boyzone: Our Story is the only official book about the band; the only book that tells their story in detail, in depth, and in their own words. It is the book no fan can afford to be without.

Days of innocence, indeed, relatively speaking.

Exalted company indeed, I was proud to be involved in this project.