Crotty Avenue revisited: a tribute to Frank Murray
The renowned music figure, who sadly died 12 months ago, was a hugely proud Irishman full of culture,
THE black-and-white photo, taken in the mid1960s, shows two teenage youths slouching against a windowsill in Walkinstown. Neither is smiling. They look defiantly at the camera with all the bravado and recklessness of youth. Their smart shirts, ties and suits suggest that they were wearing, what was then called ‘their Sunday best’.
Frank Murray and I were friends since early childhood when he stuck a magnet to the steel pole outside his house, 23 Crotty Avenue, Walkinstown and I went to investigate. From that time on we fished for minnow north of the Dodder weir at Old Bawn, made slings and bow and arrows, exchanged comics and played marbles and toy soldiers. We kept racing pigeons, developed a passion for bird watching and regularly visited the Natural History Museum in Merrion Street, Dublin to sharpen our powers of observation.
We both attended Drimnagh Castle CBS and, since Frank was six months my junior, he was in the class below me. Both of us studied our subjects in an all-Irish stream and were successful scholarship winners before Donagh O’Malley introduced free secondary education. While in secondary school, we visited the Connemara Gaeltacht, sharing a house with two school friends in na hAille Thiar Indreabhan.
There we improved our Irish, feeling a little superior to the local youths as we strutted about in our Beatle boots toting transistor radios. Frank, who was a Rolling Stones fan first and a Beatles fan second, always enjoyed the dances in the local Moeran Hall where he followed the Black Eagles band and befriended its front man, Phil Lynott.
After secondary school we parted ways as I went on to study Arts in UCD and Frank emigrated to England to begin a career in the music industry. Starting out as road manager for Thin Lizzy, he went on to manage such luminaries as the Woods Band and Kirsty MacColl. When he would return briefly from England, we would meet up and drive into the Dublin mountains in the huge Mercedes van which he used to ferry group members about.
In time he went on to manage The Pogues which was not a task for the faint-hearted and was instrumental in persuading Kirsty MacColl to sing with Shane MacGowan in that iconic Christmas classic, Fairytale of New York .I bumped into Frank during Christmas week in 1988 and he invited me in to the Olym- pia Theatre where the Dubliners and The Pogues were both playing in a charity show in aid of Temple St Children’s hospital.
There I was highly amused to be backstage with The Pogues listening to Shane MacGowan’s anecdotes punctuated by his ‘death-rattle laugh’, while the late Philip Chevron looked frantically for a capo. I witnessed the late Barney McKenna, who was still dawdling in the dressing room, being called on stage to the final duet when Mary Coughlan sang Fairytale of New York with Shane, to rapturous applause.
Frank went on to manage The Frames, having recognised the talent of a young Glen Hansard and also managed the young rapper Temper-Mental MissElayneous as well as the close harmony duo, The Lost Brothers. In June 2016, he contacted me to ask if I would give a Bloomsday talk on Joyce in the Red Bank Bar in Duke Street. I was happy to oblige and there I met up with such old Walkinstown friends as the poet and historian Michael O’Flanagan and Frank’s class mate, Brian Fleming. The actor Patrick Bergin delighted the audience with his readings from Ulysses while Pete Cummins of the Fleadh Cowboys also performed. It was such a successful event that Frank was already talking about a more ambitious format for the following year.
On December 22, 2016, shortly after I had emailed him to suggest a drink and chat in the New Year, I was devastated when my brother Brian rang to tell me that Frank had died suddenly that morning. His funeral, on January 3, 2017, was a celebration of his life, with musicians and actors in attendance. His daughter Shannon made a beautifully moving speech about Frank quoting his motto ‘Live and enjoy the present. Now is where it’s at’.
As I look at the black-andwhite photo, taken by Michael O’Flanagan all those years ago, I am back again with Frank in front of the window of my house in Crotty Avenue and the journeys that we were both to undertake were as yet undefined and uncharted before the attrition of life and death, friends then, as ever.
‘His daughter Shannon made a beautifully moving speech about Frank’