TALK TO JO: THE GARAGE BAND YEARS

To those of us who were getting our groove on during the late 1980s, a pipeline of information and entertainment came via television and radio and, in particular, some of the regular youth-focused output on RTÉ. Much of which we whinged about relentlessly but that now, with the benefit of hindsight, looks far more prescient and impactful than it ever felt at the time.

There are several pieces on the blog already about the influence of Saturday morning television and late-night radio in Ireland, especially the landmark Anything Goes and Rock Show strands. Which, for decades before digital broadcasting and the advent of the internet, provided essential bulletins for enthusiasts and those of us with an interest in music who wanted to dabble outside of the obvious.

It was live on Anything Goes, for instance, that Martin Fry, the vocalist with the debonair British pop group, ABC, offered his degree in English Literature to the presenter, Dave Heffernan, during an interview. Where Billy Bragg performed a couple of zesty protest numbers – accompanied by his noisy guitar – shortly after breakfast one morning. And where a windswept Prefab Sprout were first unveiled to an unsuspecting brunch-time audience of alickadoos, a video appearance that still has many of us salivating over forty years later.

A flagship strand for youth programming in Ireland, Anything Goes was where numerous emerging presenters, directors, and producers were sent to cut their teeth and gain their stripes and, in the process, were enabled and encouraged to turn most things on their heads, presenters included. Generational, home-produced video clips for Philip Lynott’s ‘Old Town’ and The Blades’ ‘The Bride Wore White’ are the best-known testimonies to that freedom of creative expression on a series which ran for five years from 1980.  

But there are many other fine television performances from that period that haven’t survived in the broadcast library. For decades, it was deemed just too expensive to collate and store live studio output – some of which went on for ages and was recorded onto film –and in particular the youth-skewed stuff: a heap of it was just wiped.

And so, it’s to anoraks, home video enthusiasts and skip hunters that we increasingly turn to now for audio-visual evidence of the time, most of which is invariably re-published via the internet. A source that consistently throws up gold-plated performances from old television and radio strands that have been well and truly forgotten by broadcasters, archivists and, dare I say it, artists, and performers themselves.

I was reminded of this once again after I stumbled on a compilation of studio performances by a slew of young Irish bands for the Jo Maxi series that’s available on YouTube. And once this stuff drags you in, its often very difficult to get back out. So …

Jo Maxi was a long-running tea-time magazine series for teenagers that ran from October 1988, on RTÉ 2, the national broadcaster’s second channel and whose aim when it was launched a decade previously was to attract younger audiences. The series ran nightly in a pre-watershed slot and, while the Angelus was calling order to the nation elsewhere, Jo Maxi was kicking into gear on the other side, set for the purposes of television in a replica garage, replete with appropriate props and trussing.

That the series played directly in competition with the main evening news bulletins told you all you need to know: Jo Maxi was basically the news as it applied to Ireland’s youths. It was overseen by John Condon, a long-time RTÉ staffer from Cork who’d served his time on numerous high-profile strands, most prominently on the satirical series, Hall’s Pictorial Weekly, before assuming a post as Head of Young People’s Programmes. The original Series Producer was Adrian Moynes, the Armagh-born producer who enjoyed a long and distinguished career with the broadcaster in a variety of shop-floor and management guises.

After a public search for presenters, the first series of Jo Maxi was fronted by Dublin newcomers Geri Lalor and Antoinette Dawson, and Ray D’Arcy, then an aspiring disc jockey from Kildare. They were joined by Clíona Ní Bhuachalla, Dublin-born but with a dash of Cork, who’d previously done stints on some of the station’s Irish language output. All four were introduced to the public via a photo shoot in which they were decked in white mechanics’ overalls decorated with the programme’s logo.

Jo Maxi’s spot in the schedule meant that it was far safer in its ambitions than other youth programmes in the RTÉ stable, like the imperious TV Gaga, a Late Late Show for those with piercings and who preferred to tog out in dead men’s clothes. Pitched at the older end of the youth market, this played late at night during the mid-1980s and hosted regular studio debates about hash, unemployment, rubber johnnies and how mass was redundant. It also featured a formidable array of live – or ‘as live’ – music and, from that strand, a number of excellent studio workouts survive, notably sets performed by Dublin guitar bands Something Happens, The Slowest Clock and The Stars of Heaven.   

It was on TV Gaga in January 1986 that U2 fetched up for an interview with one of the hosts, Liam Mackey, and played a three-song live set – including an early version of ‘Trip Through Your Wires’ – in front of a live audience. The band memorably pulled two unsuspecting young bucks from the bleachers to help them complete a scuttery version of ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door.’  

You got none of that sort of carry-on on Jo Maxi, which was berthed in a much safer space. It veered instead towards the Blue Peter model, featuring a staple of views and reviews, studio contributors and ‘well-known faces’ as well as filmed reports from all arts and parts. It was just a sturdy, all-round proposition. And of course, because of its target audience – teenagers – it too featured a wide range of music.

Whether that was a report about Ireland’s most recent classical piano-playing prodigy who’d just decamped to Juilliard, a piece about careers in Irish music journalism or a home-made, lo-fi film clip from an emerging group of noisy shams in Roscommon, Jo Maxi covered a multitude.

In that long TV Gaga interview, Bono referred to the quality of new music and young bands emerging at the time in cities and towns all over Ireland, listing three Dublin outfits as his favourites. All of whom – The Subterraneans, Hothouse Flowers and Operating Theatre – were then attached, or about to be attached, to Mother Records, a record label run by U2 with some of their associates.

By any measure Jo Maxi lent plenty of support to that cohort of new groups making hay in U2’s slipstream: at one point it appeared to me that The Stunning, a band from the Clare/Galway border, had a residency on the series. But in reality, they were simply among a host of emerging rockers fetching up on the RTÉ campus in Montrose to give it plenty for the cameras: this was a period during which an appearance on Jo Maxi was the ultimate critical compliment to a radio session for Dave Fanning on Radio 2FM.

Some of the most potent new music out of Ireland during this period was being funnelled through the primitive sound system at The Underground, a downstairs dive bar on Dame Street in Dublin, run by the late Noel Brennan and his son, Jeff. That bar, and its role in the development of live music in the capital during the 1980s, features on several previous pieces here.

Power of Dreams, from Walkinstown in South Dublin and driven by Craig Walker and his brother, Keith, were among the numerous Underground luminaries who turned water into the wine and who, from slow nights spent annoying Johnny, the bar’s dray man and mascot, went on to sign major label record deals. They debuted their first single, ‘100 Ways to Kill a Love’ with a typically energetic performance on Jo Maxi, an appearance notable for the fact that Keith Walker was fifteen years of age at the time. And was already drumming with the ferocity of an old-style printing press.

One of their peers from that Underground set, Dublin’s Sonic Youth/Velvets-infatuated Whipping Boy, also took their television bow on the series. As did another seriously under-rated local troupe, the effervescent guitar janglers, Giant, built around the twin vocals of Niamh McDonald and Susan Kavanagh. They performed a mimed version of ‘Put Yourself in My Shoes’ for Jo Maxi in 1989, flying the flag not just for their own promise but also for the venue that birthed them.

Giant’s Jo Maxi performance – the series rarely had the capacity to capture fully live performances and instead favoured either full mimes or live vocals performed to backing track – is notable for a couple of things. The band’s star quality and Susan’s appearance on back-up vocals. She’d later fetch up as a member of another group who took root in The Underground – the re-built A House – but not before she completed a tour of duty as a presenter on the second iteration of Jo Maxi.

There was a practical element at the heart of the booking policy on the series too, though. Daily shows on radio and television – especially those that go out live – are unforgiving and hoover up material. They’re prone to last minute changes and cancellations and require a store of pre-made microwaveable matter that can easily and quickly plug holes. And so, the Jo Maxi running orders were routinely scaffolded by an array of home-grown bands who often just conveniently filled airtime.

To this end, one flamboyant Cork-based impresario must have spent the guts of a year trying to secure a studio spot on Jo Maxi for one of his charges. In the days before mobile technology, this was either a commendable over-commitment to the cause or what could now be construed as a criminal offence. Either way, I’m happy to report that his persistence eventually paid off, but at what cost, financial, psychological or otherwise, I’m unsure.

But this was the way. U2’s global breakthrough not only stirred up positive vibes in rehearsal rooms all over the country, it also brought a number of aspiring Paul McGuinness-types into play, many of them with high notions. And it’s there to see in one library of important archive from the time – the Hot Press Yearbooks – which capture the breadth of rock music emerging across Ireland during the 1980s. Listing bands from all over the country with relevant contact details, one thing was clear: where there was a young group lashing away in a garage, a local Broadway Danny Rose was never too far from them.

It’s funny what we remember and its funny what we forget. In was on Jo Maxi that I was first introduced to one of my all-time favourite Irish groups, Hinterland who, one anonymous October evening in 1989, fetched up in the studio, explained who they were and then performed their brooding single, ‘Dark Hill.’ From such unsuspecting beginnings began a love affair with a band and a record that has endured to this day.

Two years later, one of my pet Cork bands, Benny’s Head, also took to the studio floor in Donnybrook, performing their prescient eco-observed single, ‘Backwater,’ which had been released the previous year on the Danceline label. Led by Cormac O’Connor, they were one of the more elegant groups to have emerged out of the city during my time on the prowl there and I loved them as much for their ambition – and the out-size of their creative necks – as I did for their songs, which were smart, considered and built on far more than just frenetic guitar bashing. Their Jo Maxi performance – in which the late bass player, Diarmuid Murphy, is among their number – captures them at their creative peak, with layers and loops – and no drummer – miming fully to backing track.

Benny’s Head were just one of a number of Cork outfits to appear on Jo Maxi during its history. Among them The Caroline Shout, fronted and led by Mark O’Sullivan who, when he wasn’t on the busker’s beat outside The Long Valley, surrounded himself with some of the best technical musicians in the city, the gifted drummer Dave Barry among them. They memorably performed an assured, self-issued ‘Into Your Arms’ for Jo Maxi in what was the first domestic national television appearance by one of the most successful writers and performers in the recent history of Irish popular music.

Mark’s international achievements as a producer and writer – using the handle DK7 – while also working to complete internationally accredited academic qualifications as a football coach, is testament to an extraordinary dual career. Much of which has taken place without hoopla and far from the maddening crowds.

Jo Maxi eventually ran for several seasons, during which presenters, producers and researchers came and went like those journeymen footballers who feature regularly in Mark’s academic work. Ray D’Arcy is easily the best known and most successful of its presenter graduates while many of those who served on the Jo Maxi frontlines are still actively kicking out the jams in film, television and radio.  

And although the history of broadcasting in Ireland is littered with short-lived youth television strands that quickly ceased to be relevant and outlived their purpose, some of them enjoy better and more lasting legacies than others. For its consistent commitment to emerging music, Jo Maxi is one and should be garlanded for that. In a way that, in its lifetime, it wasn’t.