I could have told you Vincent...
IT was Liam Mackey in Hot Press magazine who gave him the name Fab Vinny. This is a little-known fact of Irish cultural life, so little-known indeed that it wasn’t mentioned in an otherwise excellent appraisal of Vincent Hanley which was called, of course, Fab Vinny.
What is known is that Hanley liked it enough to take it as his showbusiness name, and it also gives us a sense of the broader forces which were at work in Ireland of that time, bringing the light of civilisation into our lives.
The Fab Vinny side of things would have involved the setting up of RTE Radio 2, and his rise to glory as the presenter in the 1980s of MT-USA. “Pop” music was now legalised, as it were, accepted by RTE and by Official Ireland in general as a normal activity enjoyed by normal people.
It had been coming since the late 1970s, with the long goodbye of the showbands, and the uprisings of punk and “new wave”, the arrival of Hot Press, the pirate radio stations which eventually provided RTE with men such as Dave Fanning, Gerry Ryan and Mark Cagney.
In that company, Fab Vinny might have been seen as relatively mainstream, and yet in the fullness of time he would connect with the spirit of the age, in the best way, and tragically in ways that he could never have imagined when he left his home town of Clonmel.
Fab Vinny was a half-hour Irish language programme with subtitles, yet it was powerfully evocative of Sunday afternoons in the mid-1980s, watching three hours of music videos on MT-USA, an indulgence which in itself seemed to involve some breach of the ancient codes of Irish broadcasting — had there been some mistake? Did they not know they weren’t supposed to be entertaining us at such length?
And Fab Vinny presenting it over there in Manhattan seemed to represent the height of Irish ambition — he had seen the future, he was not just going to be an RTE “personality” in Ireland, with some vague dream of international stardom, perhaps even a job at the BBC. He had flown past all that, he had gone straight to the top, to the Big Apple. And when he got there, nobody sent him away, nobody told him to stop.
This was perhaps the great contribution of Fab Vinny to our island story, the fact that he had overcome whatever issues of self-esteem affect most of us in some way, and had set himself up there on the streets of Manhattan introducing videos by Cyndi Lauper and Van Halen and ZZ Top… and he was getting away with it.
Indeed, it had clearly been his destiny, like that of many of the Irish before him who had triumphed in America, albeit in ways that perhaps involved more manual labour than was required of Fab Vinny.
So his story, for all its modernity, had some ancient echoes too, not least in the eventual discovery that he wasn’t really getting away with it after all — that the accursed Aids was about to destroy his life.
“I think he was taking full advantage of New York at that time,” said the producer Bill Hughes. But it seemed that the baleful gods would not allow it, and so the illness would eventually drag him all the way back to Ireland, enduring along the way the ultimate indignity of having to pretend that he was essentially someone else — homosexuality was still illegal here, so he felt he had to deny that he had Aids.
The viewers of MT-USA could see he was looking seriously unwell, but in the land that Fab Vinny had left behind, officially there was still no decent way of dealing with such realities.
He had escaped all that dismal obscurantism, and planted his flag on higher ground. For all the lightness of his being, his story increasingly seems like the material for some sort of epic ballad, with many victories and then this terrible defeat. The legend of Fab Vinny will endure.