The Boogaloo, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2004

           Tonight is officially the party night of the year, in London.  It’s the middle of summer, and the weather is lousy, but the West End is absolutely awash with the A-list.  Jude and Sienna, Charles and Nigella,  Hugh, Jemima. David Frost is having a garden party, and Prince Charles is there.  There’s Bellinis at the Savoy, sushi at the Tatler party.  The Evening Standard have worked out that the average cost of the canapes alone will be ten thousand pounds per party.
Meanwhile, in an Irish pub, at the top of the Archway road, a different kind of party is taking place.  There’s no champers and there aren’t any things on sticks.  There were plans to fry up some cocktail sausages, but these were abandoned due to lack of interest.  This crowd will settle for beer and peanuts.  But wait a minute.  There’s a sexy blonde in the bar, dancing very enthusiastically.  And she’s swigging from a bottle of what looks like Bolly.  She looks like Kate Moss.  It is Kate Moss.  And look over there, that guy in the stripey shirt.  Isn’t that yer man from Jackass?  Johnny Knoxville?  It is indeed.
 Gerry O’ Boyle is saying a prayer.  He’s thanking St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes for sending him a limo, any limo.  Just a limo with a celebrity inside.  Moments earlier, Gerry had been pacing up and down outside his pub, The Boogaloo, in a bit of a panic.  Tonight  he’s hosting the launch of Shane Mac Gowan’s new single, in aid of the Jimmy Johnstone Motor Neurone Fund.  Gerry, (who is a man with better contacts than Tara Palmer Tomkinson) has been on the phone for three days, letting the right people know about the launch.  And to his credit, the pub is filled to bursting with Members of the Press.  The Times, The Telegraph, The Standard, The Mirror, even OK magazine are here.  A veritable panoply of celebs had promised to come.  Sir Bob, the Gallaghers, Bobby Gillespie, Nick Cave,  Girl’s Aloud and David Soul were expected to put in an appearance. 
At ten thirty, after Shane and his band have played, only playwright Martin Mc Donagh and painter Sebastian Horsley had showed up.  Talented as they both are, they could not hope to compete for coverage with the likes of  Jemima Khan on party night of the year.
  Gerry receives an apologetic text from Sir Bob, who is delayed at the airport and won’t be able to make it.  At that moment, being a deeply religious man, he decides to call upon St Jude.  And it is at that very same moment that not one but two limos pull up, one decanting the delectable Kate and the other one simultaneously unloading Johnny from Jackass.  A miracle.
 Shane, utterly oblivious to all of this, has come off stage and failed to recognise either of the VVIPs.  Kate, miffed, tells him he’s a rude b******,   and quite rightly.  She points out that she has been coming to see him since she was a kid.  Shane apologises on bended knee, and plays another set, just for her.  The next morning the Mirror carries a photo of him with his arms around her, under the headline ‘Kate finds a Mate.’  They also run a photo of Johnny Knoxville. 
All of this, you might think, a job well done for Gerry O Boyle. The Boogaloo party may have had no nibbles, but it was definitely the coolest place to be. The Mirror has reported that the gig was so secret and VVIP that you needed a code word, to get in the door.  And that only the hippest of the hip were invited.
But Gerry doesn’t like that word “cool”.
 Cool comes and goes, Gerry says and what he wants is to keep it real.  Besides, he’s worried.  The Mirror journalist has been bitchy about Kate.  She has said that Kate was too busy snogging Knoxville to watch the gig.  This is, in fact, a blatant lie, as the two had barely spoken to each other all evening.  Gerry isn’t sure if she will be upset.  He likes his customers to be happy, he says.  There’s a very fine line that you tread, in this business of dealing with celebrities and the Press.  But he’s good at it.
‘I’ve met a lot of them over the years,’ he explains, bleary eyed, as he feeds Starsky and Hutch, his fluffy black cats and peruses the papers with a cappuccino and a croissant.  ‘ If you can make it easy for them to understand what you are selling, they are more likely to write about it.’
          For the purposes of research, I have been living in the pub for the past week, watching him work.  He’s got the insouciance of Andy Warhol, combined with the guts of Louis Walsh.  A true Svengali, he informs the media quietly, with the air of someone passing on a particularly good racing tip.
‘When you start these things you do tend to ask yourself what the f*** have I got myself into?’ he admits. ‘Everyone knows that people who say they are going to turn up might not turn up for whatever reason.  There’s nothing you can do about that.  Especially celebrities. Unless you pay them, they are not guaranteed to come. And we never have paid them, because if you were paying anyone to turn up, you wouldn’t be the real deal.’
Gerry is a trained chef from Sligo, (although you might not think it, if you saw what’s in his fridge) who fell into this business quite by accident.  It all started back in the late eighties, when at the age of twenty two he acquired a place called Molly Malone’s in Islington, purely in the interests of property speculation.  ‘You buy these places when they’re on their ass,’ he explains, simply.  ‘And you turn them around with your energy and enthusiasm.’
          In the early days, it was Kate Bush, Brian Robertson, Eric Bell, and the guy from Motorhead who became regulars.  Then Joe Strummer started to drink at Molly, followed by the Pogues, the Stone Roses, Phil Daniels, and Buster Bloodvessel. 
‘It was a rock and roll Irish bar,’ Gerry explains, from the sanctuary of his office in the stables at the back of the Boogaloo, the engine room of his organisation. ‘I always wanted to have a rock and roll bar where bands could hang out.  Venues are places where you go to work, but a bar is a place where you hang out.’
          Like Vince Power, ( one of his role models) a quiet Irishman who started small and went on to be one of the most influential players in the British music, Gerry moved slowly but surely. From Molly Malones, he progressed to Filthy Mac Nastys, also in Islington.  The new pub opened at a time when, as he puts it, all you had to do in London was paint a couple of shamrocks and pay an accordion player and you were turning people away, every night of the week.  Irish-themed bars were being franchised worldwide and making millions, but making millions was not on the mind of our hero.  He wanted something more.  And by chance he found himself re-creating the very thing that had made Irish pubs famous in the first place. The literary scene.
          In the good old days, in Dublin, you had to trip over literary geniuses like Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, Donleavy, Cronin, and Miles Na Gcopaleen, just to get a pint anywhere in town.  But by the eighties you would have been hard pushed to find anyone who had read a book, let alone written one, in a Dublin pub. In London, where once the Bloomsbury set had gathered to drink and listen to each other’s poetry, now yuppies gathered to discuss stocks and shares.  Thanks to Gerry O Boyle, that was about to change.  
‘I wanted to bring writers into an environment where real people drank,’ he says, earnestly.  ‘Plumbers and chippies and people like that, who also read.  And the young hipsters who were out partying, who were never going to Waterstones of a Friday evening.’
In 1996, together with Richard Thomas, a concert promoter Gerry started ‘Vox and Roll’, a series of events where writers would read aloud from their work and play their favourite music, in short, sharp sets of no longer than seven minutes.  As long as the modern attention span.  At first, it had seemed like a great way to promote books, but it looked doomed to fall flat on its face.
‘We couldn’t get anyone interested, none of the publishers would give us their writers.  They didn’t trust what we were doing.  They were afraid of anything different,’ he says, bemusedly.
Not to be defeated, Gerry used his contacts and got hold of Pat Mc Cabe, who was having success with ‘The Butcher Boy’, and asked him to come to Filthys and read.   Pat said he would.
‘He’s a true believer.  And he did the first show.  It was sold out, The Times wrote a rave review, it was a huge success.  But still the publishers wouldn’t support us.’
Continuing with guerrilla tactics, Gerry also enlisted Jim Hawes who wrote ‘A White Merc With Fins’, and Ian Sinclair, who delivered three sell-out shows.  But still the publishers ignored his calls.  The turning point came at  a Vox and Roll event in Whelans, in Dublin, with Nick Cave, Ronnie Drew and Roddy Doyle.  The venue was jammed, Bono came backstage, blown away by Nick’s performance of ‘The Word Made Flesh,’ the reviewers raved and the event was a success.
‘  After that, we got publishers calling us up, offering us writers!” Gerry laughs, sardonically.
Filthys is a tiny place, but the list of famous, infamous and genius artistes and writers that have appeared there includes Sinead O Connor, John Cale, Nick Cave, Kylie Minogue, Jah Wobble, Ken Keasey, Eddie Bunker, Bill Drummond, Irvine Welsh, and Roddy Doyle.  About nine hundred names, Gerry reckons.  I myself was one of the nine hundred, and it still remains the high point of my career to date, because Nick Cave bought me a pint, and handed it to me during my set.  Ken Keasey of the Merry Pranksters was Gerry’s personal favourite.  Keasey led a procession of four hundred fans through the streets of Islington while banging a bodhran, to announce his own show. 
As well as being a magnet for established talent, O’ Boyle, (who admits to being a bit of a man for the horses) has a knack for spotting a potential winner.
‘We launched Howard Marks at Filthys,’ he tells me.  ‘And we launched Helen Fielding with ‘Bridget Jones Diary.’ 
Filthys also launched an unknown school teacher called Frank Mc Court who had just published a book called ‘Angelas Ashes’.  Only thirty people showed up. 
‘His publisher asked me to take a punt on him and I liked the story, so I said yes,’ Gerry says.  ‘Frank was very grateful to us.  Recently, I bumped into him in the Berkeley Hotel, and he told me he had sold a million copies of that book!”
          Part of what made Filthys exciting was the mixing of sleazy rock and roll glamour with the worlds of film, journalism and literature.  You never knew who you might bump into in Filthys, who might be sleeping over, who might decide to serve behind the bar.  Bill Drummond, Jake and Dinos Chapman, The Farm, perhaps.  One afternoon, I popped in to find Johnny Depp acting as the bouncer, while Kate sat eating chips and chatting to the ‘Rabbi’, an old gent who collected the glasses.  Someone had given her a t-shirt which read ‘Your Pretty Face is Going Straight To Hell’. 
With his extensive Hollywood contacts Gerry decided to try his hand at a film festival.  ‘The Mavericks’ took over a cinema in Camden town, and was designed specifically to promote screenwriters.
          ‘Most of time, the writers never get recognised, ‘Gerry says.  ‘They are the most under-rated people in the business because they look at a blank sheet of paper and they have to come up with the story.  And afterwards, nobody knows what they look like.’
          The film festival was a sell-out, but it was hard work, Gerry says, having to watch all those films.  He didn’t repeat the experience.  The next experiment was a Vox and Roll event in HM Maidstone, home of the Krays.
‘It was quite a controversial show, because we had Howard Marks, who was a convicted dope smuggler, Jimmy Boyle, who was a convicted murderer, David Soul and the Barefoot Doctor,’ he laughs.
There was a great deal of red tape to be got through.  And eventually Howard Marks was banned from appearing.
‘The governor didn’t like the idea of having Howard, even though they weren’t worried about Jimmy Boyle. I decided to chance my arm and bring him anyway.  But when we got there they wouldn’t let him inside.’
Photographs were duly circulated of Howard Marks trying to get into prison.
In the year 2000, Gerry made the unusual decision to sell  Filthy Mac Nastys.  He had taken it as far as he could, he reckoned.
‘Filthys is unique, it’s a legend and it can’t be duplicated,’ he says.  ‘To make money you have to be able to duplicate.’
After he’d sold up, he moved to Sligo and spent three years working in the family business, as an auctioneer.  It was a time to reflect, he says.  A time away from the glamorous world of the London social scene, which was beginning to bore him.  Too many nights in the Groucho, too many premieres and parties.  He was becoming jaded.
.         ‘Over the years you meet a lot of people,’ he says.  ‘I remember meeting Joe Strummer for the first time and getting a real buzz.  And Ronnie Wood.  You get excited meeting these people for the first time.  And then you get to know them…’
There came a stage, towards the end of Filthys when Gerry found himself unable to have a cup of tea in his own living room, without the company of a rock star.  The novelty wore off.
‘  Even though those people are real stars.  Shane is a real star, Bono is a star, Johnny Depp is a star. But we are living in an age when there are far too many celebrities.  It’s a Godless age.  I think all that will change when Pop Idol ends and when Big Brother ends.  And it will end.  When it ends you will have all these out-of- work celebrities.  What will they do?’
Will there be a special VIP dole queue?  
‘Celebrities on the dole wont be as exciting as real stars,’ Gerry philosophises.  ‘I think we are going to have a cull.  Real music is coming back.  The days of the boy band will come to an end.’
In Sligo, Gerry had a vision.  It was to be the antidote to manufactured pop and Big Brother.  It was to be a chain of juke joints, in the traditional Tennessee style.  Places where real rock and roll could be nurtured and thrive.  It was to be called The Boogaloo.  Within months, he had joined forces with a Corkman called John Keane, a premises had been located and the first one was up and running.  With total dedication to real music, the Boogaloo offers live music several nights a week, literary readings with music, a pop quiz in which Jarvis Cocker has a regular team, a movie night, a singer songwriter night and above all, a juke box, which has been programmed by a selection of rock stars.
‘And it plays the greatest tunes you ever heard,’ Having sampled it, I have to agree.  There’s nothing on the juke box that’s less than ten years old.  ‘No room for Britney,  I’m afraid,’ Gerry says.
The Boogaloo, O’Boyle predicts, is history in the making. 
‘It’s all about the scene,’ he muses.  The danger is, of course, that like Andy Warhol, Gerry will become a celebrity in his own right..
‘I don’t want to become a celebrity,’ he insists.  ‘I’ve seen what fame does to other people.  You need to know how to handle fame, and you need to have a reason to be famous.  I like to be behind the scenes.’ 
There is no room for a personal life, in this business.  Gerry is a self-confessed workaholic.  There is no girlfriend, although I have witnessed girls throwing themselves at him, and him grinning at them, shyly. Dinner is a pizza, eaten on the bar.  And living above the shop means you are never left alone.  This morning, there was no peace to be had.  Shane (who has unofficially decided to live here) was watching a Hitler movie at full volume in the sitting room, so I took my muesli down to the bar and was interrupted by ‘Lady Lucan’, ( the wife of ‘Lord Lucan’, a Boogaloo regular,) who barged in during my breakfast, convinced that her husband was hiding a mistress in the pub.  ‘Where is she?” she demanded to know.  ‘Our marriage is over.’  Later on, ‘Lord Lucan’ appeared, dangling the keys of his dark green Bentley.  The wife had had him busted for drink driving, as revenge.  And generously, he offered me custody of his car.  So I made him a nice cup of tea and listened to his problems.
The Boogaloo is a rock and roll bar, but it’s not the ‘Hard Rock Café.’  There are no signed guitars or platinum discs.  That would be tacky.  Neither is it a place to be cool.  This concept is more subtle.  The morning after Kate has been here, a nice middle class couple sit exactly where the supermodel sat, reading their ‘Guardians’, totally oblivious to the perceived glamour of their surroundings.  On singer-songwriter night, the place is packed with female footballers, eating crisps and drinking cider.  If this place were a play, it would have been written by Pat Mc Cabe, who comes here, he tells me, for the company and for the fun. 
‘The thing I love about my work,’ Gerry tells me.  ‘Is the characters.  Only last night this fellow came in the bar.  He was a quiet man, from Athlone and he announced that he had very important news for me.  I was busy and I said I didn’t have much time, but what was the news?  ‘Rome has fallen,’ he said.  ‘There’s a new pope.’   ‘Really?’ I said to him.  Why are you telling me?”  ‘You needed to know,’ he said. That’s the kind of thing that makes it all worth it, for me.”
www.theboogaloo.org