Clothes don't make the man.

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It all started with an advert in the ‘personal column’ of Hotpress, Ireland’s only music paper. ‘Gentleman Punk seeks intelligent Punkette’ read the ad. It was 1978, I was almost 17 in my last year of school bound for college and imagining myself quite the intellectual I replied. And no, I didn’t make a habit of it. It was the only ad I ever answered. And yes all you Generation Zers, that’s how we found love in the bygone days of the 70s.

We had no telephone so by letter we arranged a date at 8 on Saturday night under Clery’s clock, where all Dublines have met with their beaus for generations.

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He told me he’d be wearing PVC trousers and a multicoloured jumper I later found out was knit by his mother, which didn’t sound too promising to start with. Plus he was from the country 80 kilometres from Dublin, a 2-hour drive in the days of bad roads and potholes, another black mark against him, but when I rounded the corner and saw his curly hair-do, totally uncool, I panicked, ran off to the nearest phone box and called my best friend and singer in our band, who was posh enough to have a phone.

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Could I, guitarist with ‘Of Xerox’ Ireland’s only all-girl band, be seen in the company of someone with such a rum ‘do’? We were planning to go to a gig where there were bound to be a lot of people from my crowd.

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_{some of the only memorabilia I have from my band days}

Fortunately, I decided not to be a monumental cow, I went to meet him and he was a gentleman. We bumped into quite a few of my acquaintances and he took their jibes and slagging with good heart, he delivered me to the bus stop after the gig and didn’t try to paw me.

On the bus, I felt quite ill. I don’t drink alcohol but as I found out later one of my ‘friends’ had spiked my drink. There were all sorts of pills doing the rounds in those days, uppers, downers and the like. A couple of hours after I arrived home there was a knock on the door and there he was. Chris. He’d driven halfway home, was worried at how ill I’d looked and had driven back to my house to check on me.

He slept in my room that night on a blow-up bed my brother used for camping. My parents didn’t bat an eyelid, nor did I expect them to. In fact, my father took a photo of him which later took its place in our family album, sadly lost in the mists of time, with the caption ‘escaped from Macca’s concrete gang . My father thought himself quite the wit as Chris was training to be a brickie.

From that day on he more or less moved in with us and we were rarely apart. Later when our drummer left, Chris became the drummer in our all-girl band. He had to wear a dress of course but hey…_{I’m only kidding.}

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