In early April 2019 I intend to start a campaign on Fund It to try raise the finances needed to digitise my cassette tape collections of thirty years of celebrity interviews. On an Irish national radio station I have a radio series called The Joe Jackson Tapes Revisited, during which I have taken a revisionist tilt ton interviews I did with, for example, the current President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, politician Charlie McCreevy, playwright Tom Murphy, comic Joan Rivers, Father Brian D'Arcy, and singers Glen Campbell, Eartha Kitt - in 2017, The Irish Times described this 1987 interview as 'a extraordinary hour of radio ' - Dolores O' Riordan, from the Cranberries, and Leonard Cohen. I became an interviewer in 1985, purely to meet my heroes, starting with Leonard Cohen.
Meeting Leonard was an experience that left me feeling so "transcendent," to quote my own diary on March 1st 1985, that I decided instantly, "I must go out and track down more of my music heroes to talk with." In this sense, I was very much guided by the following quote by Albert Camus: 'A man's work is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art, those one or two great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.' Some of the heroes I went on to meet, were the aforementioned Eartha Kitt, Richard Harris, Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records - and the man who discovered my ultimate childhood hero, Elvis Presley - Dory Previn, Dion, James Taylor, Marianne Faithful, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Joni Mitchell, Tony Bennett, Scott Walker, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Janis Ian, the Beach Boys, the Monkees, the Kinks, Paul McCartney, Pat Boone etc. In all, I interviewed sixty, or so of my original music heroes - I am currently pitching to a radio station a documentary series titled Conversations with my Music Heroes in the style of my 2018 documentary Conversations about the King which was nominated for an IMRO award in the 'Best Speech' in the music documentary category - and I made some new heroes along the way, such as Tori Amos, Dwight Yoakam and Nick Cave.
That said, this particular path I followed was private, funded by myself a pilgrim path, in ways. In my 'day job,' I became the first music journalist to get a weekly interview slot in The Irish Times, I wrote and presented a 26-part history of pop culture for RTE Radio 1, plus a 52-part millennial music series titled People Get Ready, about the greatest music acts of the twentieth century, and I presented for nine years the PPI-award nominated interview series, Under the Influence. I also did most of the major political interviews for hot press magazine from 1987 - 2003, plus similarly in-depth interviews with writers - another category of my heroes - such as Edna O' Brien, John McGahern and John Banville. I also wrote a Stage column for twenty-two years and interviewed nearly all major Irish actors and directors, such as Brendan Gleeson, Gabriel Byrne and Pierce Brosnan.
There, however, those who argue that the some of the most culturally significant, and historical, work I did as an interviewer were the seventy-six in-depth Q & A interviews I did with politicians between the years 1988 and 2003. Within weeks of my first such interview The Irish Times reported that the magazine in question was 'noted for its probing in-depth interviews by Joe Jackson.' Many of these in
trerviews, up until at least the Good Friday agreement, focused on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which I regarded as "the single most important issue facing our country as we head into the twenty-first century," as i said to Micheal D Higgins during our 1993 interview. He agreed. The politicians I interviewed, came from all political spectrums in Ireland, North and South and included, soon-to-be President Mary McAleese, Taoiseach John Bruton, Ken McGinnnis, Gerry Adams, David Irvine, Sammy Wilson, Ian Paisley Junior and Mo Mowlam. Furthermore, in my weekly interview slot in The Irish Times, I gave musicians space to articulate their view on the subject. Christy Moore choose that forum to declare that he was "renouncing" his "support for the IRA armed struggle." In 1996, I included in my book Troubadours and Troublemakers (Ireland Now: A Culture Reclaimed) that interview, and all interviews I conducted, and quotes I got on tape, related to the theme of Irish identity during the period 1986-1996, a decade I described as "one of the most important in recent times."
And so, summing up, when Adrian Moynes, in 2009, who was Head of RTE radio, said to me, "Those tapes you have of interviews with some of the most important cultural and political figures of our time are important social documents, it would be dreadful if they ended up in a skip after you die" it chilled me to the bone, particularly after a recent near-death experience. In fact, the comment inspired me to do the radio series The Joe Jackson Tapes Revisited. However, since then, I haver done less than twenty one-hour documentaries. There are 1,300 tapes. I need to raise funds to have the archive digitized in order to make the material available to the public and to ensure it doesn't end up in a skip.