Pure Gold

Introduction

I WAS IN A BROOM closet with an older man. I could feel his breath on my face. Surrounded by mops, buckets and containers full of cleaning chemicals, there was barely the width of the small tape recorder I was holding between us in this confined space. So I was looking straight into his unflinching eyes.

They were eyes which, for almost four decades, peered into the souls of men and women from all walks of life – celebrities, Hollywood A-listers, award-winning authors, rock stars, politicians, Church leaders, sporting champions, many of the most famous people of the twentieth century – and consistently asked pertinent questions.

The man I was with was Gay Byrne, host of The Late Late Show, Ireland’s flagship television chat show, which had been running since 1962. Gay was an institution. While at Granada in Manchester in the early 1960s, he chatted with The Beatles on their first TV appearance. On his mid-morning radio show, as well as on television, he had steered decades of debates on all the major issues in Ireland. Having appeared on the TV show a few times, I could vouch for Gay’s ability to slip in a zinger of a question when least expected. He was a master of his craft. The consummate interviewer.

But that night I was the one expected to ask the questions.

promotional routine, I dreamt of becoming a recluse, writing haiku and watching a bit of sport. Although I read voraciously, it never once occurred to me to deconstruct the interview process. I had zero interest. Besides, in the demimonde of what passed for social life in Dublin, I’d learned it was prudent not to ask difficult questions. Questions could get you into trouble. If the Ireland of the 1980s had a defining catchphrase, surely it was the title of soon-tobe Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney’s hair-raising poem, ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’.

However, the latest in a long line of notable swashbuckling editors, Denieffe knew the ropes. His enthusiasm and encouragement were infectious. ‘This will be in a question-and-answer format with a brief introduction,’ he explained. ‘You’ll need to ask plenty of questions and coax interesting answers. Given your background, I reckon you’re the person for the job.’

The background he referred to wasn’t just a brief stint writing copy in Dublin advertising agencies, where early in my career I’d picked up a few awards piggy-backing on the work of more illustrious creative talent. Nor was it editing and publishing smallpress poetry magazines, whose place on an international arts grid had guaranteed some stellar names alongside nascent local talent. Michael was aware that, as a member of Horslips, I had been around the world and had appeared on many prestigious stages and chat shows, consorting with the famous and the infamous. Like a keeneyed football manager, he reckoned he could spot a potentially half-decent utility player when he saw one.

By now I was thinking of the Q&A features I’d enjoyed reading in Interview, the snazzy magazine set up by Andy Warhol over a decade earlier. I recalled a Warhol aphorism. Not the obvious ‘famous for fifteen minutes’ one. What sprang to mind was the rackety, ‘Being

the right thing in the wrong place and the wrong thing in the right place is worth it, because something interesting always happens.’ I buried my misgivings. You could say it was Andy who swung it.

‘Right,’ said I, ‘I’ll give it a shot.’

Knowing he was dealing with a novice, and having a refined critical overview, the editor flagged two crucial imperatives. One was to avoid politicians. Too dull. I would later discover that many experienced interviewers also declare actors verboten, arguing that film stars, theatre actors and stage school thespians rarely go further than putting the love in ‘luvvie’.

‘It won’t be easy to arrange an interview every week,’ Denieffe cautioned. Here was something I hadn’t considered; the pressure of meeting a deadline every seven days. But the die was cast. Despite my apprehension, there could be no backing out now.

Ignorant of the steep learning curve ahead, I left his office unsure of just what I’d let myself in for.

In the end, I discovered I loved the buzz of interviewing subjects from whom I never knew what I would get. I would spend over thirty years as a journalist conducting hundreds of press or radio interviews with famous people and aspiring stars. However, long after the event, random exchanges with interviewees would, from time to time, pop into my mind unbidden. Recently, I came across a large box marked ‘Tadhg’s Tapes’ and made a startling discovery. Nestled among a friend’s gift of collectable mixtapes was a cache of my old interview tapes. I instantly began a process of exploration. It quickly became apparent that in many cases there was much more preserved on tape than had originally appeared in print.

when he was thirteen on the subject, ‘When I’ll be Taoiseach’. He eventually did become Taoiseach, in 1997, for the first of three terms. During his third term, in May 2008, amid concerns over the economy, controversy over his receiving substantial payments from friends and businessmen described as ‘dig outs’, and a drop in support for Fianna Fáil, he resigned as both Taoiseach and leader of the party. But in 1989 man-of-the-people Bertie Ahern told me, ‘I had a huge interest in the Paris Riots of ’68 and Che Guevara and the Chilean Revolution, you name it.’

When I left school in the 1960s, the route into journalism in Ireland was difficult, so I went into the glamorous world of advertising instead, got to wear better suits, and then drank with newspaper men, and the occasional newspaper woman, in the evening. But now, in real time, the situation had just escalated. I needed a plan.

Firstly, I would have to persuade famous people to agree to be interviewed. Then it would be necessary to prepare a bespoke questionnaire for each and later spend hours transcribing the responses. This wasn’t a drill. There was a lot on the line. Essentially, I needed to figure out how to ensure a double-page spread would be engaging, entertaining and enlightening.

The weeks that followed were a blur. Looking back, I’ve no idea how I managed it, but among those I engaged with over the first couple of months, were formidable All Blacks captain Wayne ‘Buck’ Shelford (during his captaincy, his side never lost a game) and celebrated couturier Bruce Oldfield, a charming individual who’d never known his Jamaican father or English mother and had been through the Barnardo’s care system. His creations were worn by Charlotte Rampling, Faye Dunaway, Joan Collins and Princess Diana, among countless others.

was ahead of me. She quickly assessed the situation, smiled one of her more dazzling grins and added, ‘There’s no problem.’

An archive, eh? Thanks for that, Bernadette.

The old rock’n’roll adage still applied: ‘You’re only as good as your next hit.’ I knew enough to know that I should try to launch the new column with a blockbuster, headline-grabbing personality. So the first name on my wish list of potential interviewees was Jack Charlton, the Englishman who’d guided the Ireland national football team to the 1988 European Football Championships. At a time when just eight teams had played in the finals in Germany, this was a very big deal. Ireland had beaten England in their opening match, at which point ‘Big Jack’ was elevated to the status of national hero in Ireland.

While the public embraced Charlton, some football pundits did not. His often gruff manner and abrasive style of football caused friction. He was both topical and fascinating. I visited the Sports Department, where teams of reporters for three titles – the Sunday, the daily and the evening newspaper – worked. Could anyone give me a contact number for Big Jack?

There was consternation. It was as if I’d stumbled into a medieval guild workshop touting a range of yet-to-be-invented acrylic paints. The sports hacks were aghast. Danger here. Why would the chap who wrote about pop music want the Ireland manager’s phone number?

My request was deemed a breach of etiquette. Nobody rushed to be of assistance, but when I announced that I was there on the editor’s instructions, a sub-editor reluctantly produced a number.

There were chuckles when, from somewhere else in the room, somebody jibed, ‘He’ll eat you alive.’

Even if no one recognised it, I had accepted the challenge. Unknown to the sports hacks, their music and arts correspondent probably had more competitive sporting experience than most of them, as he had previously spent five years playing Gaelic football with a demanding squad that included tough Hogan Cup finalists. He’d also been competitive as a sprinter and a basketball player.

I rang the number. The voice on the other end was the unmistakable gruff bark of the Leeds FC legend. ‘Bloody hell, have you not got enough fuckin’ interviews with me over there?’ came the reply when he heard my request.

My heart sank. I realised in horror that maybe I hadn’t given this enough thought. But the ball was at my feet. I could see the goal. I needed to get past this resolute defender. ‘I’m not interested in your players or your injury list, Jack,’ I blurted. ‘I just want to have a chat with you about some football heroes of mine: Stan Mortensen, Jackie Milburn, Stanley Matthews, Billy Wright. And players you looked up to as a youth.’

Not one to waste time, Jack didn’t miss a beat. ‘Right then, come and see me in the hotel on Sunday evening,’ he said signing off.

Hotel? Which hotel? Sunday? Someone had just thrown me into the deep end of the pool and we were about to find out if I could swim.

‘I’m just going in for a bit of dinner,’ he says. ‘Come in and we’ll chat.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t interrupt a man when he’s having his dinner,’ I reply. ‘I’ll have a cup of tea out here and we can have a quick chat when you’ve finished.’

‘Fuckin’ ’ell, you’ll come in and ’ave your dinner with me,’ insists Jack. New to the game, this was starting to look like an obstacle course to me. In the dining room, we join Jack’s assistant manager, Maurice Setters. As we sit down, Jack enquires, ‘Is Stan in yet?’

‘I don’t know boss,’ says Setters.

‘He’s in the bar,’ I venture, hastily adding, ‘drinking mineral water with his parents.’

A brief conversation follows about Steve ‘Stan’ Staunton, the young Liverpool full-back who’d made his debut for Ireland in a friendly against Tunisia a year earlier. While chatting, I recount a monstrous free-kick Staunton had taken from the Havelock Square corner in the old Lansdowne Road stadium during that match.

‘It was Yugoslavia,’ corrects Jack testily.

‘No, Tunisia,’ says I.

‘Yugoslavia.’

I haven’t even begun the first and most important journalistic interview of my career and already I’m contradicting international football’s most notoriously spiky manager. But I’m sure of my ground. I clearly recall both Charlton and Setters conferring in admiration as Staunton’s notable piledriver lofted past their dug-out heading for the opposite corner that’s closest to the Dart station. At a poorly attended match, I was sitting in prime seats behind them with my mates from The Hill pub. And I’m certain it was Tunisia because the blokes behind us were the staff from our local kebab shop. I play the diplomatic card.

to be careful that they don’t go into debt that they can’t recover from because of the amount of money that they’re being forced to spend to strengthen their team.’

As we chat about how the game has changed since the 1950s and 1960s, Jack talks freely about his football philosophy.

‘It’s got too much passion and not enough skill. The technical game has changed a lot.’ When he adds, ‘There are a lot of clubs who follow the idea that the more times you get the ball in the opposing 18-yard box the more likely you are to score goals,’ I venture, ‘Are you talking here about Bobby Gould [Wimbledon] and Howard Wilkinson [Leeds United]?’

‘Aah, well, some purists write them off as nonsense and say it’s not the way to play. When you break it down and look at it sensibly, you say, “Well, what is football about?” The game is not complicated. To make it as easy as possible, the answer is “to score goals”. If you knock the ball from the kick-off to the right, knock it wide. Put it into the box and have somebody in there to knock it into the back of the net. That’s what the game’s about. Scoring goals. How you go about it is simply a matter of opinion.’

He’s on a roll now. With me as his class of one, Big Jack takes the opportunity to restate his footballing beliefs and values.

‘We’ve adopted some of that philosophy and it works well for us,’ he continues. ‘Our philosophy is: play while you’ve room. But as soon as you haven’t got room, knock the ball behind them. It works very well for us. We’ll play when we’ve room to play. When it gets tight, you don’t want to play. Because if you move the ball in tight areas, you put a lot of players out of the game.’

Passion and enthusiasm are now in the mix. I’m getting a glimpse of the doggedness of spirit that Jack brings to the training ground and changing room.

‘If you’ve got room to play, then play,’ he barks. ‘If you haven’t room, don’t fuckin’ try. Get it up. Get it behind them. Make ’em turn and then close ’em down facing their own goal.’

He takes a breath.

‘It’s worked for us at international level. Because the philosophy of football throughout the world has been that you play from the back. We’d have never won the games that we have had we played from the back. Because people throughout the rest of the world have been doing that and their expertise in doing it would be greater than ours. Their leagues play that way. Our leagues don’t. The fans in England would never tolerate you playing square balls across the back for five minutes. So we put the best of what we thought would cause people concern together. And it does cause them concern the way we play.’

I’m listening to a manager publicly revealing his tactics. This seems like folly. Jack may have read something in my expression.

‘People have said to me, “Why do you keep telling people how you play?” But it’s there to see. Any coach can come and see it immediately. But they’ve got to upset their style of play to cater for ours and in doing that they spoil the way they play best. Most teams that we’ve played have had to do this and in doing it they’ve spoiled the way they play.’

As our chat continues, Jack tucks into his dinner and scans the dining room for players arriving for duty. Mick McCarthy comes in and, as he walks by, teases the manager, ‘The new haircut takes years off you, Jack.’

While things feel relaxed, it’s clear Jack’s on duty. The upcoming friendly match on Wednesday in Dublin against West Germany

will allow him to fine-tune plans ahead of Ireland’s last two World Cup qualifying matches.

The mood is good so I don’t feel I’m prodding a lion when I remark that in every public house there are punters who say that if Ireland qualifies for the finals in Italy, then the team will have to change its style of play to allow for the heat.

Jack responds with indignation. ‘We said that in the beginning,’ he thunders. ‘I said that after the games in Germany, when it was obvious to me that our type of game is not suited to playing in the heat. We had to play England in the heat. We had a game against Russia when we didn’t play in the heat and we looked a fuckin’ good team. We’ll play anybody at our type of game if the conditions are right. Then we played Holland, and Holland play a very spread wide game [forcing the opposition to run more], which made our game even harder in the heat. When we came back, we said that if we did qualify for the World Cup, we’d have to change our game a bit.’

In case I think he’s capitulating, he adds trenchantly, ‘We’re not going to change the way we play. What we said was, we’ll have to learn to take rests. We’re not going to change the way we play, but we’ll have to not do it as much as we did. I said to them when we went to play Holland, “You’re going to struggle in the heat with the way they play to keep up the pressure and the running, so we’re going to have to take rests.” So we said to Paul [McGrath], “When Packie’s got the ball and we push up front for the kick-out, you run back and have the ball played to the edge of the box and just stand there with it. Just keep it there until one of their players has to come to you and then give it back to Packie.”

‘That way we gave the lads a bit of a rest every now and then. We did this and the referee was becoming annoyed with us. He kept

fuckin’ shoutin’, “Play. Play.” Now, had Paul been knocking it to the full-back, to the centre-back, and from the centre-back to the fullback, had we kept it free and open doing that, the referee would have said nothing. But because he was a player actually standing with the ball, and he’s doing nothing wrong, having a rest and giving all our players a rest, the referee didn’t understand it.’

Referees aren’t the only ones to take issue with Jack’s pragmatism. Many pundits and commentators believe he’s underselling his players’ talent. But Jack isn’t for turning.

‘We know what we’ve got to do,’ he states. ‘We’ve got to play the type of game where we play in bursts. We’ve got to slow the game down in certain areas without ever putting the ball at risk. We’ve got a bit of work to do on that. It’s not going to be complicated. It’s just that we’ll need to take a rest, and the only way you can take a rest is for us to have the ball.’

As we speak, Jack is very much in the moment and becoming more animated as he considers the subject. ‘If you say are we going to start building it from the back and doing what some of the pundits over here talk about, the answer’s “No. We’re not.” We’ve proved that our game causes people fuckin’ concern. And I’ll tell you what, we’ve changed the face of European football. You’d be amazed how many of the European teams are now adopting more of our attitude to the game. There’s a lot of people now looking at our game and saying there’s a lot to be offered in the way we play.’

It’s time to steer back to smoother waters. So I head for the safety of Jack’s boyhood heroes. Would Jackie Milburn have been one of those?

The manager doesn’t appear to notice the abrupt gear change and he rattles off a litany of names: ‘Joe Harvey, Frank Brennan, Wilfie Mannion, Len Shackleton, all great north-eastern players.

Stan Matthews, Tom Finney, when he came to play at Newcastle, Sam Bartram. All people who became friends later on. When I sit down at a table with Tom Finney, and I do regularly, or Malcolm Barrass or Stan Mortensen, or if Stan Matthews comes over and says, “Hello, Jack, how are ya?”, I go, “Fuckin’ ’ell”. I mean they’re still me heroes to this day. I sit there talking football with the likes of Tom Finney and Stan Matthews and Nat Lofthouse, and they’re listenin’ to what I’m saying. Fuckin’ ’ell, I can’t believe it.’

I find it endearing how Jack’s voice drops in reverence and he sounds incredulous. ‘Your heroes are always your heroes. Now they’re all friends. It’s terrific.’

At heart, he’s a football fan like the rest of us, which begs the question, ‘Were there any of your contemporaries that you’d liked to have played with?’

‘I’d like to have played with our kid [Bobby Charlton] more. I think our kid was my type of midfield player. He couldn’t tackle, but he never knew when he was having a bad game. But if things weren’t going for him, he’d just work harder and harder. He’d run more and more. He’d want the ball more and more. He wanted to put it right. I played with most of the people on the England team that I’d like to during my era. Denis Law. I’d like to have played with Denis Law.’

‘What about Pelé? Or George Best?’

I sense possible trouble when there’s a pause. Jack clears his throat. ‘I’d never have tolerated George in my team as a player. I mean …’

There’s another pause. Jack could be about to change the subject, but he doesn’t.

‘George doesn’t like me and I don’t know him. I’ve only met the kid three or four times. And he started to get the idea that I

didn’t like him. I don’t like what he did because I always believed that within football there’s got to be a certain discipline as a player and George is totally undisciplined as far as the game is concerned. In the years that he was fartin’ about he caused a great deal of embarrassment because the wives and the people that you work with fuckin’ all got the impression that we all did the same as what George had done. And we didn’t.’

I find the thought that Jack and his teammates were discommoded at the prospect of being brought into disrepute by the antics of George Best highly amusing.

‘We did the things that all young lads do,’ he admits. ‘We’d get pissed on the odd occasion when we shouldn’t have done, but we prepared for a game and we knew the disciplines that were selfexplanatory in football. The lads here can have a drink tonight [Sunday], but they won’t have any tomorrow or Tuesday. And they won’t go anywhere. They accept the discipline. They won’t take advantage. They know if they break the rules they’ll have to suffer. And the rules are the way we were brought up in football.’

Jack scans the room, pushes back his chair and goes to chat to some of his players who’ve just arrived from England. This isn’t my first encounter with the Ireland squad. Months before Ireland’s trip to Germany for the European Championship finals, I received a call asking me to go to Windmill Lane Studios on a Sunday morning to take part in the recording of a new single by the squad. I immediately phoned a few of my chums who were ardent football fans, and so I arrived with Robbie Foy, George Byrne and Declan Lynch.