FINDINGS
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FROM A GROWL TO A SCREAM Joseph O’Connor
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From Brick 85, published in 2010. Joseph O’Connor is an Irish novelist and former journalist. He is the author of Cowboys and Indians and The Secret World of the Irish Male, among other works.
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can remember the moment she came into my life. It was on the afternoon of my fourteenth birthday, September 20, 1977. I was in a record store called Freebird, a murky little basement that reeked of mould and patchouli oil, on the north quays of the Liffey. An aunt who lived in London had sent me ten pounds as a gift, and I didn’t know what to buy. I was flicking through a rack of second-hand punk rock records, with their splatters of graffiti and blackmail-style lettering, when my fingers stopped at an unusual sleeve. It showed an: extraordinary-looking woman of skeletal build. It was like a still from one of those cool French movies. The record was Horses by Patti Smith.
Bang-bang, play A list of battle-themed, hockey-related terms from Hockey Talk: The Language of Hockey by John Goldner, published by Fitzhenry & Whiteside in 2010. Growing up, Goldner’s favourite hockey player was Henry “Pocket Rocket” Richard.
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agitator bang-bang play blast brawl cannon chase around the block collapse enforcer extra-attacker firewagon hockey fly-by gauntlets grinders goon
hack handcuffed heavy shot helicopter job ice breaker laser beam live grenade load up the cannon pulling the trigger radio shot rearguard riding shotgun run-and-gun shoot-in
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shooting gallery shootout silencer slapper smashmouth hockey sniper solo mission staged fight submarine sudden death tomahawk chop x on his back
I had never heard of this Patti Smith. I’d never seen anyone who looked like her either. You couldn’t have called her pretty; she was something much more troubling. Yeats wrote that Maud Gonne had “beauty like a tightened bow,” and the old priest who taught us English (and who had himself once seen Maud Gonne on a Dublin street) would try to explain the phrase. But when I saw that photograph, I knew what it meant. Androgynous, sullen, unconventionally gorgeous, she had the air of a young Keith Richards about to embark on a night of debauching debutantes. Her confidence was enthralling, her raffish self-possession. It sounds mad to say it now, but in the 1970s you just didn’t see women presenting themselves in this way. This was an era when the monthly Top of the Pops anthologies still featured models in crochet bikinis simpering on the covers. Patti didn’t strike you as a bikini kind of gal. On a beach, you imagined she’d be wearing Doc Martens, sipping absinthe, and kicking sand into the faces of passing skinheads. Camille Paglia would later write, of the cover photograph of Horses (taken by Smith’s then lover Robert Mapplethorpe): “lt was the most electrifying image I had ever seen of a woman of my generation . . . It ranks in art history among a half-dozen supreme images of modern woman since the French Revolution.” I confess I wasn’t pondering the art historical implications, but in thirty years of buying records, it’s still the only one I’ve ever bought purely for its cover. In every life there are moments remembered in a kind of emotional slow motion. The first kiss, the first heartbreak; the first time you lost out; that instant when your eyes met across a crowded party. The first time I heard Patti Smith singing is one of my moments. I grew up in a home where there was music of all kinds, but I had never encountered anything quite like this. The band was on fire. They sped up songs to a punkish thrash, then slowed them to a ginsoaked barrelhouse blues. Over this extraordinary sound came Patti’s voice like a whip crack: mischievous, scheming, prowling, transgressive. It was like listening to someone holding their heart in their hand: so stark and raw, so beautiful and yet so violent. It demolished Van Morrison’s
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