A Different View with Dave O’Connell

In the way that you should never meet your heroes, you should also never look behind the curtain if you don’t want to see the magic of television for the bottle of smoke it actually is.

Take Top of the Pops, the iconic chart music show from the sixties to the noughties, where – on television – it looked like the biggest party, with half a dozen bands just bursting to play one song.

In reality, it was little more than a handful of exuberant teenagers jumping around in the middle of a fairly small studio while the bands did their best to mime to the soundtrack of their single.

Back at the start of the nineties, Cork’s music scene was gripped in the middle of a mini-Madchester – or Corkchester as the locals dubbed it. The Sultans of Ping FC and the Frank and Walters, Fatima Mansions, Cypress Mine, later Emperor of Ice Cream – a golden era by any standard.

The Sultans and Franks in particular were the Oasis and Blur of their time – except they all got on famously. And while the Sultans hit the heights with Where Me Jumper?, for the Franks it was the wonderful After All that ensured their place in the Real Capital’s musical history.

That hit the charts at the start of 1993 and that January, the band was invited to appear on Top of the Pops. Working with what was then the Cork Examiner, myself and photographer Dan Linehan made out pitch as to why this needed to be covered – and off we were to London.

Neither of us were globetrotters and, if memory serves me right, Dan had to get a passport because this was his first excursion abroad.

Top of the Pops was recorded on a Tuesday for transmission on the Thursday evening – so we headed off to London early on Monday in case we’d miss out on anything.

It was a rainy night, but we weren’t going to be put off by the weather, so Dan hailed a taxi and asked him to take us to a popular night spot of his choosing. He must have thought we meant something else because he dropped us off at a strip club.

As they used to say in the tabloids, we quickly made our excuses and left – but because it was a rainy Monday night in London, the same taxi man was still loitering outside, and he took us to another night spot which we left just as quickly for much the same reason.