Bowie, a hero just for one day

LARRY Kirwan and I had been trying to get a gig at Hurrah for several months, hammering away relentlessly to no avail. Eventually we were given a number that was guaranteed to reach the main booker. He wasn’t best pleased to hear me on the other end of his line. He had heard of us, and knew we were trying to get hold of him. He had a very prissy attitude, but for some reason, surrendered to our insistence and agreed to book us for a future Tuesday.

Hurrah was the top club in Manhattan during the 80s, with the capacity of a thousand people, and all the hip touring bands played there on their way to superstardom. Tuesday was a terrible limbo night to play, but we figured that our following would rise to the occasion because Hurrah was such a prestigious venue.

The gamble paid off, about a hundred and fifty people turned up, not a lot for that place, but not bad for a Tuesday, and we were Turner and Kirwan Of Wexford, not the most conventional band in town. As the name suggests, there were just two of us, Larry played bass drum and guitar, while I played keyboards and hi-hat with my left foot, we both sang. We were constantly described as being as loud as a four piece.

Our audience sat around the perimeter of the club on cinema seats. Hurrah had the appearance of a ballroom with a big parquet dance floor. But our audience was there to listen, the dance floor merely put a distance between us.

We were in our Sci-Fi uniforms; we had taken commonly worn blue workman’s shirts and trousers and had them adjusted to fit snugly against our young frames. Mary Ellen, my girlfriend at the time, cut the conventional collars off, which left them with a totalitarian look; she added an embroidered imitation of a military insignia to give us the appearance of belonging to a futuristic army. We only wore these outfits when we were doing serious gigs, the kind of gigs we wanted to do permanently, but couldn’t, because they didn’t pay well. Our other gigs paid the rent, and they consisted mostly of covers.

While we were playing that night, someone shouted up ‘Suffragette City’, a Bowie song that we played on the covers nights. Larry quipped without thought ‘Oh David’s not here tonight’. A few people giggled, and we carried on.

We had received a very frosty reception from the manager that day when we loaded in. It turned out that he was new, and wasn’t the one who had booked us, he had begrudgingly inherited us. Doing his best to make us feel unwelcome, he made sure to abolish any notions we had of playing there again. It was difficult to leave that behind when we were performing, but we had been through a lot since leaving Wexford, and weren’t going to let this twat get in our way.

After the performance we were met backstage by that same snot, now beaming and holding out two brandy snifters. ‘You said that David wasn’t here tonight, well he was, and he said you were fabulous. He left these two brandies for you.’

It was surreal; he was actually grovelling.

Bowie was the God of cool at the time, ‘Let’s Dance’ was massive. Apparently he had been given a list of bands to check out in Manhattan and we were on it.

And...we were asked with a smile to play there again, the following month!

David Bowie, you were our hero.

Our audience was there to listen, the dance floor merely put a distance between us