Medieval Rock
Juggler in the TownsInn 1980 photo: Jude Fitzgerald
I had a paperback with me when I met the Edge at a bus top in the autumn of 1982. In those days I always carried a book around. I liked to read on the long schlep home. The upstairs front window on the 32b bus was my favourite perch. That’s where a yellow light landed from passing street lamps and it was the best place from which to look up and get my bearings quickly, before diving into a story again.
That evening I recognised a fellow traveler at the bus top, a skinny dark haired guy with a clever looking face. He was a guitar player, about my own age, that I’d seen playing at a concert in my school a few years previously. We got chatting about his band and I asked if he needed violin on the record they were making. He said that he might have some work for me so I tore the flyleaf from my book and scribbled my phone number and name and handed it to him before jumping on the bus home to Sutton.
I had just recently returned home to Dublin from busking around Europe with my cousin Hughie. We left for Europe the previous January after quitting our jobs for music. Hughie was working as a plumber and I was a bank clerk. Most weekends we played together in a rock band called ‘Juggler.’ When asked at the time by people who needed a pidgeon hole (usually DJs, journalists and pidgeons ), we described our music as ‘Medieval Rock.’ Juggler sounded a bit like Jethro Tull (imagine a fiddle instead of flute).
Before we left Ireland, we recorded a demo in a four track studio run by two guys from a punk band called the Muff Divers. Their funky studio was in a garret. A tiny egg box and carpet clad room over The Foggy Dew pub, off Dame Street. We were proud of our work, two originals, ‘Medieval Dream’ and ‘Nice Hobbit’. Hoping for a break, we hustled the recordings around some record publishers and labels in Dublin. Alas we were ahead of our time or maybe six hundred years too late.
By the time we returned to Dublin that Autumn, Juggler was history and anyhow our musical tastes had changed. Hughie got a gig playing out in a nightclub in Spain, while I teamed up with two young neighbours, guitarist Ivan O Shea and pianist Martin Clancy from Sutton to start ‘InTuaNua’. We stole a magnificent bass and drum duo (Jack Dublin and Paul Byrne) from a local new wave band called Deaf Actor and found an amazingly gifted young singer songwriter called Sinead O Connor.
The book was Herman Hesse’s great book The Glass Bead Game.