A ten-day festival with bands playing indoors during the week had a wide range of fun events, talent competitions & sports events appealing to locals & visitors alike.
The Macroom Mountain Dew Festival lasted for seven years, from 1976 to 1982, & I was privileged to interview many of those involved to bring back memories of a festival many remember as their first ever wondrous, exciting, music experience. Here are just a selection of those memories from the book:
Majella Elliot, ladies’ committee:
“Nobody thought the festival would be such a great success. For the first of the Rory Gallagher concerts in 1977, we baked queen cakes & scones & gave them out as young people arrived looking very tired, having walked or hitched from Cork. It may have been a culture shock for the town, but the crowds that came in for the festival were all lovely.”https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
John Martin FitzGerald, festival director:
“We had a good relationship with the gardaí. There were older guards who were very sensible. If anyone was causing trouble they didn’t bother arresting them. Instead they would drop them six miles out the road & let them walk back in to cool them down.
“We got some minor negative publicity at the time, but what would happen is that anyone the drugs squad wanted to catch in Cork would be watched for in Macroom, & they would arrest them there. There was more dope smoked on the streets of Macroom at other times than during the festival.”
Anthony Murphy, festival director:
“I had to deal with the backlash of the Idi Amin [brutal Ugandan dictator] brainwave which was purely devised to bring attention to the festival. & there was quite a backlash. Once we got the idea of inviting him in 1977, we decided there was no time to waste.
Late in the night, John O’Callaghan drafted a letter & Pat Kelleher went home for his typewriter & typed it up while the rest of us stayed on to read & tweak it.
We delivered a copy to the Evening Echo within hours, at the same time as posting the original to Uganda. The paper picked up on it & wrote a story that appeared the next day.
“We wrote to the Ugandan president, inviting him to attend the festival. We never expected him to come, of course. We ended up having interviews all over the world & with all the Irish media who picked up on the Echo article. Mission accomplished!”
Donal Gallagher, brother of headliner Rory Gallagher & also part-organiser of the festival:
On flying to Cork with John Lydon — then Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols — where he was to receive a Hot Press award in Macroom: “Despite being offered a seat with us, he sat with two nuns, one elderly, one young. He made them feel particularly uncomfortable when, under his big coat, he revealed he was dressed as a priest. There was nearly a mutiny on the plane. When we arrived in Cork we were keen to play down the fuss as an arrest would have played into Rotten’s hand and, even though he wasn’t our responsibility at all, would have been bad publicity for the festival.
“A press area around the stage had been created & I went to Woolworths in Cork & bought replica medals that I gave to everyone as backstage passes.”https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
The Cimarons (Jamaican reggae band):
“An eight-seater plane was chartered for us. It was a very rocky flight so we had to smoke our weed to calm us down.
“The space was so confined that we probably smelled of it a lot when we arrived. We took a chance bringing in our own stash & had no trouble at customs, but we just missed going to jail in Macroom. We were stopped by a plain clothes officer who saw us smoking when we were amongst the crowd. He asked us where we had got our spliffs. We didn’t have a clue as a fan had proudly given us his homemade ones. The fan said: ‘There you are, I’ve grown it myself. I call it Kerrygold.’
“That was real Irish hospitality!
Brendan Grace, entertainer:
“My assistant roadie then was a funny little wiry young fella by the name of Brendan O’Carroll who much later in life would have a sex change operation — in fact a very successful one indeed — to become Mrs Brown. We drank the night away in a well-known hostelry called The Hooded Cloak. We slept the night in our VW van & I woke up to the wafting aroma of rashers & sausages.”
Niall Stokes, editor of Hot Press:
“I remember the excitement that greeted Gallagher’s arrival in an Aston Martin. Rory had a straw cowboy hat on. He bounded on to the stage, & from the moment he struck his first chord, the atmosphere was just electric. People like The Edge were there. It was part of what inspired him to become a musician. You had a whole wave of bands that came along after that who were inspired by Rory, Van Morrison, & Thin Lizzy. There was a sense that if they could do it, then other bands could too. It was a watershed, a moment which, more than any other, marked the changing of the guard.”