Scratch almost every person in the media and just under the surface you’ll find someone who used to be in a band.
Ask them why they didn’t make it and a whole host of reasons will bubble up: band members hated each other, manager let them down, hearing was destroyed, near death experiences on stage, their art not being appreciated by the general public, girlfriends trying to kill each other and finally the realisation that starvation can be cured by regular employment.
Eamon Nancarrow experienced all of the above and still kept going. He was also able to find humour in every situation. In his autobiography ‘Holywood Star’ you will discover a story that makes failure funny, very funny.
Like thousands of others it’s been a combination of bad luck, nutters and self-inflicted idiocy that ensured his destiny was never going to be rock and roll fame. Here’s a brief glimpse from an early battle of the bands competition…
We had a great crowd with us, we were rehearsed and honestly we were good. We played a blinder and went down a storm with our contingent; we, however, were causing a little bit of concern with the punks, who could see their favourites’ title slipping. They decided to take matters into their own hands by doing what punks do best: they gobbed at us. I was always very active on stage; I would do a strange sort of dance, which was kind of like a mixture of Paul Stanley, David Lee Roth, Arthur Mullard and Champion the wonder horse. Some commented that I looked like someone waking from a six-year coma and trying to get out of bed. It really didn’t look as good as I thought it did. As bad as it was however, it did have the advantage of making me a difficult target to hit.
Eamon grew up in Holywood, County Down a small town on the outskirts of Belfast. Born in 1965 he lived through the worst of Northern Ireland’s bitter divisions and, as a Catholic living in a Protestant council estate, he was able to witness the ‘Troubles’ from the discomfort of his living room.
This book has some telling insights into what life was like for Eamon and his family but, as you can probably guess, Eamon also brings a great deal of humour to a terrible situation.
His father Marcus was a natural on guitar and used to play with the young Van Morrison. He was also a member of the Irish folk group the ‘Travellers’ who would rehearse in the Nancarrow family home. Through this musical upbringing Eamon discovered Rock and he worshipped bands like: Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Motorhead and Whitesnake.
Eamon’s ‘career’ began in the 80′s when Rock music was all about spandex trousers, perms, ripped t-shirts and bandanas: ideal attire should you want to blend in to a population made up of hard men and Dockers. When he booked an appointment for his first perm…
The girl on the other end of the phone felt the need to remind me that it was a woman’s hairdressers that I was calling, not a barbers. Holywood still hadn’t really taken to the idea of male grooming as such. Men only went to the barbers when absolutely necessary or in Specky Beard MaCaffery’s case when his nasal and ear hairs became the talking point of the kids in the street. The thought of a male asking for a cut and blow dry nearly had the local priest visiting the family home with a little pamphlet about the birds and the bees and the benefits of the Rhythm Method.
In almost every situation Eamon encounters he finds the funny side, admittedly there are occasions when he has to dig deep. This proves to be a blessing, many others would have cracked under the weight of the lunacy that befalls him and decided that enough was enough.
This book will take you on one of the funniest rock and roll tours you will ever encounter and you will meet all the people that fame has left behind: they are the cast of ‘Holywood Star’.
You won’t have heard of any of the bands Eamon has formed but by the end of the book you’ll feel like a life long fan and probably relieved that
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