Dublin Opinion

I’m doing a bit of research for an upcoming series of programmes on DCTV which will look at left-wing media in Ireland from the 1970s to today. Basically, I’m taking photos of old newspapers and journals and putting them into pdfs so people can read and talk about them. In order to copy the documents I got a lend of a fairly-decent digital SLR - a Fujifilm FinePix S5800 - and I’m taking advantage of it to digitize some stuff I have at home, such as these three copies of the Dublin-based Heat Fanzine from the late 1970s.

Heat has the dubious distinction of having been shut down by Paul McGuinness of U2 fame. He took them to court over a piece of slander which wrongly accused McGuinness of having gotten a band taken off a support gig in Trinity College to make room for U2. Here. I’ll let Declan Lynch take up the story.

Back in the summer of 1979, it was U2’s manager Paul McGuinness who had had enough, and who wasn’t going to take any more. A Dublin fanzine called Heat had libelled him, and he wasn’t inclined to let it go, just because it was a fanzine.

The fact that it was a very good fanzine may have worked perversely against it here. After all, if Heat had been a completely useless rag in every respect, it might have gotten away with it on grounds of general wretchedness.

But Heat had a touch of class. It had a strong aesthetic and a party line which fiercely championed Ireland’s punk originals the Radiators From Space, along with esoteric local pop combos such as the Sinners and the Fabulous Fabrics.

It looked like something put together by professionals, but it was still, ultimately, a fanzine. And fanzines were allowed to be libellous and scurrilous and abusive, were they not?

So soon after the punk revolt, you would surely not expect a fanzine to be subjecting itself to the tyranny of fact? If they wrote some bullshit about you, surely you would just treat it with a certain lofty disdain?

Not if you were Paul McGuinness, back then, when U2 were far from being a global superpower, but were developing the attitude that would take them there.

“McGuinness (Isn’t) Good For U2″ was the headline, above a story which was later accepted to be wrong, this yarn about McGuinness allegedly using some subterfuge to ensure that U2 got a prestigious support slot at Trinity, bumping a rival band from the bill.

Yes folks, in the light of subsequent events, such local intrigues may seem as insignificant as the proverbial bucket of warm spit, but it didn’t appear like that at the time, not to Paul McGuinness, and not to Heat when they realised that he wasn’t just going to laugh it off like a good lad, in the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll.” (Full article here.)

A fundraiser was organised for Heat’s defense. It was held in the National Ballroom in July 1979, with Eamonn Carr and Charles O’Connor from Horselips playing with the Defenders, along with various other Irish bands and local stars taking part. Heat, however, lost the case and McGuinness’ sullied name was clean once again.

I know McGuinness was within his rights to right a libelous wrong, but reading the story after so many years, I can’t but think of this:

Anyhoo.. back to the issues.

The files are pretty big, by the way. It’s because Heat used quite a small handwritten script. It means that it’s hard to limit the quality and still make it readable. So, I thought it best to put them up “as taken” in pdf form. Also, some of the words near the end of the page are a tiny bit blurred, but you should be able to make them out with the zoom option.

So. Vol.1, No.5. Dec 1977/Jan 1978. Download by right-click here.

Vol.2, no.1. No date, but sometime end of 1978, start of 1979. Download by right-click here.

Finally, Vol.2, no.2, sometime, 1979. Download by right-click here.

And that’s about it. The rest of the stuff which I had, I’ve lost over the years. The downside to not having a home of my own. No bloody storage. These magazines I was only able to hang on to as I gave them to one of my sisters years ago and she came across them when she moved house a couple of years back and so passed them on to me again.

Oh well.

Also, I wasn’t able to track down the copyright holders for Heat fanzine. If they’re out there, and if they object, of course I’ll take them down immediately.

¡Hasta Luego!