Culture That Made Me: Robert Ballagh picks his favourite artists and music 

Rock Around the Clock

In 1956, my father brought me to the Carlton Cinema in Dublin to see Rock Around the Clock, which was the first example we had in Ireland of rock’n’ roll music. In those days, there was no TV. Suddenly this movie arrived. In retrospect, it was an awful movie, but it had Bill Haley & His Comets music in it.

As kids, we were transfixed. It was new and so different and challenging. I immediately loved this music.

Little Richard

In those days, we hardly knew what people looked like. I remember going to a movie called The Girl Can’t Help It, mainly because Little Richard sang a few songs in it. Suddenly I got to see this mad-looking fella playing the piano and shouting and roaring. I remember being enthralled by him. He seemed so crazy.

Beethoven

With a few exceptions, I tend to listen to classical music now, especially in the studio working. I’m fond of Beethoven. His stuff is so stirring. Contemporary music seems to have given up the notion of writing good tunes, but Beethoven could write great tunes.

John Steinbeck

When I was a teenager I loved John Steinbeck. I read all his books. They seemed to strike a chord. A book like The Grapes of Wrath was about the unfortunates in Oklahoma in the Depression. They all had to hit the road and move to find a new life in California. His depictions of ordinary poor people are fantastic. And his smaller novels like Of Mice and Men are powerful.

Essential Ulysses

I’m rereading at the moment James Joyce’s Ulysses. If you’re Irish, it’s essential reading; if you’re a Dub, it’s obligatory reading. When my father was a kid, the Dublin he grew up in was so accurately described by Joyce in Ulysses. In the 1950s, the Dublin that I grew up in was completely unchanged.

When my children were growing up in the 1970s that Dublin was starting to disappear. Now my grandchildren can go around Dublin and three-quarters of the places that Joyce writes about are gone. For me, apart from the wonderful writing, it’s an extraordinary nostalgia trip. For instance, in one chapter there’s billboard men walking along with HEALY’S, which was a shop in Dame St. As a kid, I made model airplanes. Healy’s sold the wood, glue and stuff for making them. All gone now.

Michael Farrell

The person who catapulted me into the arts was the Irish artist Michael Farrell. I retired from the showband business in 1966. I was dossing around the place. In Toner’s pub in Dublin’s Merrion Row one night he came in. He had a prestigious commission for a bank to paint two huge mural-sized pictures. He was looking for someone to work with him. He was introduced to me and he said, “Can you draw a straight line?” Having studied architecture, I could do that.

He offered me a £5 or a week and all the drink I could take. As a young man, it was an attractive proposition. His work was fresh, with new acrylic paint from New York, which we didn’t have here. He did bright and bold pictures. It was exciting to see his work and to be around him.

Roy Lichtenstein

I had no training as an artist. I realised pop art was something I could master without any training because I was fairly good with my hands. When I saw work by an artist like Roy Lichtenstein, who specialised in comic-book illustrations, he influenced me in the early days. His work was so clear, so precise. He did big, bold comic-book illustrations. They looked so fresh and challenging. Technically, they didn’t look too difficult.

I knew instantly I wouldn’t be able to paint like Rembrandt or Velázquez or the classic artists, but I knew I could have a fair go at this new pop art thing.

Robert Indiana

Robert Indiana was another pop artist. He did the famous image of LOVE in bright colours. In 1967 at Dublin’s RDS there were a couple of his paintings. I was taken by them, how cleanly they were painted, how powerful they looked. There’s a big difference between looking at a reproduction of a painting in a book and actually seeing it up close in a gallery. I was impressed by their physical quality.

Eugène Atget and Robert French

Two photographers that influenced me were Eugène Atget, who photographed the streets of Paris towards the end of the 19th century, wonderful photographs, and the other was a commercial photographer called Robert French, who photographed Ireland for a postcard company. It was only years later people discovered that this one guy took all these marvellous photographs which are all in the National Library collection, gorgeous photographs of Ireland at the turn of the 20th century.

Samuel Beckett

I’m fond of Samuel Beckett. I did the set for Endgame at the Gate Theatre in 1991. I love that play. It’s so well written. The interplay is extraordinary between Hamm, the master, who is blind and in a wheelchair, and Clov, the servant who scampers around the place. Then you’ve got the parents in dustbins. It could be a metaphor for the society we live in today – a lot of old people are put in the equivalent of dustbins to get them out of the way. Beckett is often seen as depressing, but his work is powerful and also very humorous.

Federico Fellini

I love Federico Fellini. He made a wonderful memoir movie called Amarcord. I went to see it time and time again. It’s set in an imaginary town – which is actually Rimini where he grew up – during Mussolini times. The politics are hanging around the fringes.

Mary Raftery

There have been extremely important documentaries on some of the terrible things that happened in our state over the years such as the Magdalene Laundries and the Mother and Baby homes.

They affected social change which is extraordinary. A documentary series like States of Fear by Mary Raftery had a huge impact in its time.