Martin Doyle

I saw him at the Olympia, I think it was last October.

And, you know, they're just a magnificent band.

And it's obvious that, you know, he loves Ireland and he kind of gets us.

Like, you know, he did a two-hour set.

I thought I was going to miss my last dart home to Greystones because the encore lasted almost half an hour.

And towards the end of it, he says, have you got no second homes to go to?

So I kind of think he has our measure.

um but you know he does love songs unashamedly um you know about you know his wife who they've been together 30 odd years you know like to me i've got an affinity i guess with i've always had an affinity whether it's fiction or or music to you know probably northern working class england and and stretching up to scotland as well and he is kind of to me the act

me of that.

The House Martins who are another band that I love.

Yeah, so I saw the House Martins in Edinburgh in either late 1985 or early 1986.

I was at Queen's in Belfast looking to get the hell out of Dodge and was visiting a friend who's a university in Edinburgh and I saw them in a teacher training workshop

college, um, club, uh, Frank two 50 or something.

It is before they'd had a, a single in the charts and they were brilliant.

And I bought, um, the support acts t-shirt for some reason it shrank.

And for some reason I thought I was entitled to write to the house Martins to sort this issue out.

And even more surprisingly, um, uh,

They wrote back.

In fact, Fatboy Slim, Norman Cook himself, wrote back and sent me, denied all responsibility for the T-shirt.

I let that one slide because he also included a cassette with 90 minutes of live recordings and demos and a kind of a potted history of the band, which I still have.