Joe Brolly picks his cultural touchstones, including George Orwell, Norman Mailer and Gay Byrne
Joe Brolly. Picture: Shane O'Neill
Joe Brolly, 52, grew up in Dungiven, Co Derry. His father Francie was a Sinn Féin politician and traditional musician; his mother Anne is also a musician and former Sinn Féin mayor. During an illustrious Gaelic football career, Brolly won an All-Ireland medal with Derry and two All Star awards. He works as a barrister when not dividing the nation as a pundit.
For many years, there was a constant soundtrack of music in my head: jazz, pop, rock, classical music. I was a very emotional and sensitive young person and adult. When I was a child, my cousin Gary lived with my grandmother in her council house. He was a butcher. He had a full sound system.
On Dungiven’s Station Road, on Saturday mornings during the summer, he’d get up at 6 o'clock to go to the butcher’s. He’d put speakers out on the window sill. We lived opposite. He would blast out Deep Purple, Status Quo and AC/DC.
My father was very, very opposed to pop music and all its unholiness and encouragement to libertine behaviour. It used to drive him mental.
There was a period when I was studying at Trinity College when I was completely immersed in classical music – Rachmaninoff, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler. I became hooked on the song cycles of Strauss.
I would listen to them over and over again. Whenever I was in private, I would cry listening to them. It was a private world of thrills and joys.
I used to love the stories I read about Vladimir Horowitz, the pianist. I've always been fascinated by creativity, authenticity and originality. Rachmaninoff heard about this young Russian pianist in exile in New York. He met him in the basement of the Steinway Salon in New York.
Horowitz, who was about 21 or 22, played the orchestral part of his third concerto, which was fiendishly difficult. Rachmaninoff, of course, was a legendary piano virtuoso himself who toured all the time and who thrilled audiences with his bravura displays. When Horovitz had finished, Rachmaninoff said: “The Steinway lay there on the ground like a slain dragon. I realised I wasn't able to play the piece at all. I never played it again.”
There used to be a boy Kieran “Warty” Kelly who played corner forward, on the other side to me, on the Dungiven senior Gaelic football team when we were in our pomp. I worked with him on the building sites in the summer of 1988.
He's a joiner. He hung the transistor radio up where he was working and he would listen to pop songs all day long. He would only speak to you in song. So if I said to him: “Are you still going with such-and-such girl?” He would reply, singing: “I never promised her a rose garden.” All he did, all the time, was listen to the charts. I could appreciate it – the consolation and power of music.
I love reading non-fiction. There can be few greater writers than George Orwell. Down and Out in Paris and London is maybe the greatest book ever written. I don't know how many people I've sent copies of the book. The poverty and the sounds, and how he conjures that up. Whenever he was working in the furnace of the underbelly of The Ritz in Paris.
The waiters before they would bring steaks to the table would put a dollop of saliva on their finger and then rub it on the steak to give it a nice glistening texture.
All his oeuvre, his essays, like on quitting smoking. Animal Farm. His writing is thrilling because it’s so raw. He’s a brilliant communicator. No compromises. All of his output is extraordinary.
Norman Mailer was a man of vast appetites, six wives, a fist fighter. He built an Orgasmatron – which Woody Allen lampooned – in his back garden. With The Fight, his account of the Ali-Foreman fight, he captures parts of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which, of course, was about the Congo River, where the fight was based.
I could still remember parts of the start of it. “It is always a shock to see him in the flesh again. For then the vocabulary of camp is doomed to appear. The world’s most beautiful man. You feel all your own inadequacies when you’re in his presence.”
The facility that he wrote with, his use of words, his description of the fight itself. It wouldn’t make any difference if you knew nothing about sport, reading it. He might be the greatest natural writer that ever took up a pen.
Whatever you might think about Gay Byrne’s politics, he was a huge figure – and for a reason. There was an essential honesty about what he did whether you liked it or not. The Late Late Show was a cultural event every Saturday night. It was massive. The time he unfurled the condom on the show, everybody was stunned watching it. I remember my ma dived across the living room floor and just narrowly missed the button on the TV and banged her head – and that's not a joke. The priest in Dungiven chapel fulminated against him the next day.
I enjoy the plays of Brian Friel always. I like Philadelphia, Here I Come! I say that line all the time when Gar is imagining being in America: “Mind if I walk you past the elevator to the incinerator? You’re welcome, slick operator. Two hamburgers, two cokes, two slices of blueberry pie. Wow-wow-wow.” When he’s imagining all he can eat in dreamy America.
I was invited to a revival of Dancing At Lughnasa. This was in the Noughties. All the great and the good were there, Seamus Heaney, world figures. During the interval, Mrs Friel came over and said, “Brian would like to speak to you.” She said, “You know that he makes me go to the shop and get the Gaelic Life [weekly GAA publication in Ulster] every week. He sits in the kitchen and laughs.”
She’s telling me this as we’re going back over to meet him. I was experiencing waves of pleasure. I was ushered into his presence, going bright red in front of all these people. This is what he said: “I have to tell you: every week I read you. Atrocious literature, but very funny.” Honestly, that is what's going on my gravestone.
