IRELAND’S TRACKS HAVEN
When Brit rockers made new home here to avoid tax laws
FORGET the rare auld times — there was nothing like the glitz, hair and rock’n’roll aristocracy in Ireland in the mid-1980s.
It didn’t matter whether it was 10.15 on a Saturday Night or the weeks Inbetween Days — the country was teeming with young, gifted and British pop stars avoiding draconian UK tax laws.
Spandau Ballet, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Thompson Twins, The Police, The Cure, Simple Minds, OMD, Fairground Attraction and others roamed the country towns and city streets.
Rock writer Damian Corless was a chronicler of the city’s rhythm back then and has recalled it all in a new book Tax, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll.
It was the era of the British Tax Exile — facing being taxed at 90 per cent or more on earnings, who needed to stay out of the UK for a whole year. In the sixties, John Lennon — who bought Dorinish island off Mayo — contributed to fellow mop top George Harrison’s Taxman and The Kinks’ Ray Davies addressed the tax system in their song Sunny Afternoon.
So by the time we got into the 1980s, world-famous stars such as Status Quo’s Francis Rossi and Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott were part of the capital’s landscape — a nouveau riche band of pop acts, whose accountants were paying attention.
Ireland’s relative light-touch regulation coupled with the convenience of the Common Area travel with Britain made it appealing.
Show
So it was Wednesday night in Dublin’s celebrity club, The Pink Elephant; Thursday night on Top of the Pops, Friday afternoon filming The Tube, and then Friday night back in Grafton Street’s legendary The Bailey.
As Corless reveals, this was a pop star cadre netted and corralled as part of a plan by an ambitious former Ballymun and Coolock bartender turned man-about-town and nightclub host, Robbie Fox.
The fantastic Mr Fox had initially set up The Pink Elephant for ‘Trinity-types’ but he kept a reserved table for Phil Lynott and — on almost promotional visits to the Bailey each night — would remind the often hammered rock star where the free drink was.
On first contact in Dublin, any new band would likely be told ‘ah yeah, the Pink Elephant, sure Phil Lynott has a table — he is always there!’
Lynott was part of the opening up of Ireland to a changing world, the first Irish rocker on Top of the Pops at a time when the Irish on it featured forty-shades-of-folk, like The Clancy Brothers and the Dubliners.
Robbie Fox tells Corless: “I heard Tony Hadley from Spandau Ballet interviewed when they did a show here recently and the only thing he could talk about was The Pink Elephant.
“All of the Spandau guys really took to Ireland and Ireland took to them.
“That all started around 1984-85 and went on for about four or five years when there was a spotlight on here. “Every magazine in the world was writing about us. The New Yorker compared The Pink Elephant to Studio 54!”
But there was also a Pink Elephant-associated act starting to conquer not just the UK and Europe but the USA: U2.
By 1987, the Joshua Tree had turned them into the biggest band on the planet and, of course, it gave them access to Lear jets and a mobility only dreamed of by mere mortals.
“I got a phone call from Basel, Switzerland, as they were walking off stage: “Robbie, if we make it back to Dublin soon, will you still be open?”
Different bands and individuals reacted to Ireland in different ways, and not all went native.
“Joe Elliott got himself into Irish society very quickly as did the band’s founder member Rick Savage. The Spandaus not so much, they remained English.”
Holly Johnson was in the Pink a couple of times but didn’t mix with the party crowd. Other members of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, guitarist Brian Nash and drummer Peter Gill, led the charge.
“They paid their way, they paid their bills and Irish people being Irish people didn’t bother them,” adds Fox before explaining ‘the big nights’ were Monday-Tuesday — and black was the only colour.
“I would look over the club on a Monday night and not see a trace of colour. Monday night was like Saturday night because it was off-duty night for rock’n’roll. It was the only night rockers didn’t work.
“The club would be packed [everybody] wearing black. Fast forw to the actual Saturday night and all models and hairdressers get their nigh and there’s colour everywhere!”
Of course not everybody was their tax-haven as partyland.
Post punk auteurs The Police had, like their UK peers, broken the US m ket and money was pouring in.
Both lead singer Sting and guita Andy Summers booked passage ac the Irish Sea. enjo