Stuart Clark is a music journalist, broadcaster, author and deputy editor of Hot Press. He talks about the magic in music …
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR PARENTS? My dad came from a very working class background. He won scholarship after scholarship and went to what is now the London School of Economics. He provided brilliantly for me and my brother, but sadly he died when I was 15. He had a heart attack one Christmas. I’m now 61 and I think about him more than ever before. As I get older, I become more like him all the time. If you’d told me that at 15 I’d have been horrified, but now I’m quite pleased. My mum came from sort of wealthy farming stock. She’s fantastic. She’s 95 and still rocking and rolling. She was a mum and a dad combined.
WHEN DID YOU DISCOVER MUSIC? When I was nine, I saw David Bowie doing “Starman” on Top of the Pops and after that, life was in colour. Everything was possible. Punk rock and The Sex Pistols came along when I was just the right age for it, but I was quite a middle-class boy. I hadn’t really seen the other side of the tracks, and suddenly I was going to Brixton to see The Clash, which was an awakening – first to music, but then politically, too.
WERE YOU GOOD AT SCHOOL? I grew up in Kent and I was lucky because it was a really lovely environment. I went to a progressive, brilliant school that was co-ed very early on. I enjoyed it, but I was so obsessed with punk rock that I just disengaged. I started a little radio fanzine, and started selling transmitters and tapes, broadcasting from fields. About 15 or 16, I just didn’t go back. My mum was like, “You want to be a disc jockey?” Maybe some parents would have said that was a bit of a pipe dream, but she said, “Okay, I’ll help you.”
WHAT BROUGHT YOU TO IRELAND? It was the late 1970s and (as operator of private shortwave Radio Mercury) I’d been nicked on Christmas Eve broadcasting in the woods in Kent. We were always running away from the police and that had been a bit of fun, a bit of cat and mouse, but I wanted to do (broadcasting) a bit more seriously. A friend of mine told me about this place, Tramore, where we could have a good summer and make some money (with a pirate radio station). Ireland had no licensing laws then, so we got a mobile home and slept in the back, broadcasting from the front. Waking up in the southeast, I’d do the breakfast show in my Y-fronts. I did that for a few years, then I went off and did the boats – The Voice of Peace on a ship off the coast of Israel, Radio Sovereign just inside the Italian border and then Radio Caroline. Eventually, pirate radio dragged me back to Ireland and then into writing.
“To me, music is still magic and alchemy. To this day, I can hear a record and get giddy.”
WHAT WAS YOUR CAREER BREAKTHROUGH MOMENT? I suppose it was getting to write for Hot Press. I started that a good 25 years ago and there were so many amazing journalists there – Bill Graham, Liam Fay and Liam Mackey, Niall Stokes, Declan Lynch, George Byrne – that I thought, “I could really learn from these guys.” It was a job I’d always dreamed of and it’s been good to me. I still go in every day kind of excited.
WHAT’S YOUR BIGGEST STRENGTH AT WORK? I’m mindlessly enthusiastic, sometimes too much so, but that also means I’m generally interested in whoever I’m talking to.
DO YOU EVER CONSIDER LEAVING IRELAND TO GO BACK TO ENGLAND? No, I think I’ve gone native. The only thing that I still am very English about is when the sport is on. What has happened in England has broken my heart. I think Brexit was the biggest act of self-harm, fuelled by racism and xenophobia. I don’t recognise the England that I grew up in. It used to be quite a tolerant, inclusive place and now I feel there’s an edge.
THE MOST IMPORTANT FEMALE RELATIONSHIPS IN YOUR LIFE? Well, my mum, but I’ve been very fortunate with wonderful relationships and great female friends. Last year, I married my partner of twelve years or so in Naples. It was such a magical day.
YOU’D LIKE PEOPLE TO REGARD YOU AS … Sincere, enthusiastic, grateful. I’m very grateful for the breaks I’ve had. I’m very grateful for the people around me.
YOUR FRIENDSHIPS ARE, FOR THE MOST PART … Extremely important. What has been nice is that in the last couple of years, I’ve suddenly got a couple of really close new friends and I love that.
DO YOU WORRY ABOUT GETTING OLDER? I don’t sit around worrying about dying, but when you start seeing Sinéad and Christy and Shane going, you can’t help but feel mortal. I want to work for as long as I can. I think I’d stop when I didn’t understand what I was writing about.
YOUR STYLE SIGNIFIER IS … I’m probably known for my hair, which is getting thinner and thinner. At some point, I’m going to have to stop wearing the ponytail because it’s going to run out!
DO YOU USE SKINCARE PRODUCTS? Yes, I’ve been known to buy Clarins and steal my better half ’s concealer if I have a zit on my nose.
YOU MOST RECENTLY READ … Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter. Kevin’s an old mate, so I’m a bit biased, but I think that’s his best book. I could spend my life trying to write as well as him and never get near it.
YOU MOST RECENTLY LISTENED TO … The English Teacher album, “This Could be Texas”. I put a tenner on them to win the Mercury Music Prize in the UK at 10/1 and they came through. Usually, if I say someone’s going to be famous, they break up a week later, but they’re just a great band. I’m pretty evangelical about them.
WHERE IS YOUR HAPPY PLACE? Going to see my mum makes me very happy. She’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, but she’s still her. That’s always a pleasure. I go a lot to Tarragona, south of Barcelona, and Naples. The islands around it fascinate me.
WHAT DO YOU COOK AT HOME? I do all the cooking. I have no other domestic skills. I’m a bit obsessive and I probably have 250 cookbooks. I do everything, a lot of Lebanese, Indian, Mexican, Thai. The more stressed the day is, the more involved the recipe I’ll cook. It helps me to decompress.
WHAT’S YOUR IDEAL WEEKEND? Sometimes, I like a really frantic weekend with two or three gigs, but I also love to have nothing planned and just roll with it. We live very close to Raheny and I adore the market in St Anne’s Park. Recently, someone asked what I was doing for the weekend and I found myself saying, “Just pottering in the garden.” The old punk rock me would have been outraged.
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