147
I’ve been chatting to the ‘other Eamonn’ about how we came to meet each other. It’s important to the story because without 147 there would never have been a Dead Elvis. My memories of getting to know him are very sketchy indeed. We met in 92 or 93. I was living in Phibsboro at the time and starting to get increasingly interested in making music videos. I had made a couple of quite crappy videos on Hi-Band video for Sack sometime in the immediate period before getting to know Eamonn. Then Donal Scannel, who lived in the same house as me in Phibsboro, together with a couple of friends of his - Dave and Niamh - made quite a lovely video on Super-8 for a Brilliant Trees song called ‘Home’. It looks crude now due to the passage of time but at the time, for something with barely any budget, it looked lovely compared to stuff shot on video. Donal was really into trying to make low budget music videos then. He realised that our other friend Donal Dineen presenting No Disco meant that there was an outlet for stuff if it could be got together somehow. The same crew later made a very well known low budget video for ‘Revelate’ by The Frames.
Anyway, that Brilliant Trees video, and my awareness of a potential outlet, inspired me to have another go at making videos for Sack. I was really really into their tunes at the time and they were coming up with very evocative songs. I plotted with John Brereton constantly at the time over a series of evenings in his house in Drumcondra. We were looking for ways to get his band noticed.
I was quite stunned by the fact that such an amazing band with great songwriting and an absolutely mesmerizing lead singer - Martin McCann hadn’t got a label or an outlet and we were trying to do something about this. One of the things we decided on was to make a set of abstract videos for four of the Band’s songs. These were to be based on filming very simple and hopefully resonant material which did not include band performance. They were to be shot on Super-8 - a couple of three minute rolls per song as there was no cash about for anything more. It’s easy to forget how absolutely broke everyone always was in the early 90s.
I wasn’t confident with anything to do with film at the time and I suppose I must have looked around for someone who might be a cameraperson. Myself and Eamonn Doyle most likely got together through a college friend of mine who is the one person we both knew before that period. I visited him in 147 asked him to help out. He worked on the two Sack videos with me. We used a Canon Super-8 camera which Filmbase had for hire to shoot videos for ‘What Did The Christians Ever Do For Us’ and ‘Superwierdo’. They came out REALLY well and we got to know each other slowly as a result - resolving to attempt to continue cranking out such videos. Barely anything we made together is available in any kind of decent quality online - something I hope to remedy with a trip to the RTE archives soon.
I would have been a quite regular visitor to 147 around the time of making those videos and can remember being fascinated by some of the cast of characters that were around there at the time. Alan Lambert, mentioned in several posts below, and Liam O’Callaghan were artists - and - though I was always interested in art - and had made a video about art in Dublin with my friend Joe just before this period - they were probably the first self-described artists I ever hung out with. Eamonn would have described himself as a photographer at the time. He had beautiful framed B/W prints on the walls of his room up at the top of 147 - some of them really exotic as he had been into travelling in the period before we met. I particularly remember this image from Jamacia which he’d shot on a kind of reggae pilgrimage to there in 1991. That would have been another thing we had in common. I was also interested in photography and had been doing BW shots for the Dropout publication described in the ‘Crush’ post below. He had loads of amazing photography books which would come in handy for raw materials for posters over the next couple of years. At some stage around then, for reasons unknown, Eamonn offered me a room in the building as a living quarters rather than a studio. I jumped at the chance despite the fact that the interior of the building was pretty seriously run down despite Eamonn’s ongoing efforts to improve what was there.
My early memories of the building, as I’ve said, are very sketchy. The one thing I do remember is the fact that Eamonn, in a makeshift kitchen at the top of the stairs, made coffee with a percolator. I had NEVER seen that being done in someone’s gaff previously. It was great coffee and made for endless buzzy conversations.
The snap below is of John Brereton - Sack’s main songwriter - and Martin McCann - their lead singer. It’s taken from a video made by someone other than me and the other Eamonn at a time unknown in the 90’s.
