Donal Corvin: An Appreciation

He looked a bit like the man in the Marlboro cigarette ads, only younger. Tall and gangly, with the lope of a cowboy. I knew him for 16 years and most of the time he had a moustache; once, for half a day, he had half a moustache.

I knew of him before I met him; his reputation had travelled ahead of him. I first heard of him after he got my job.

The editor of a long-since folded and forgotten weekly Belfast magazine sacked me over a strained lunch telling me he had discovered a lad who was a very talented writer and worked in an insurance office. His name, I was told, was Donal Corvin.

In the mid-sixties Belfast was a switched-on town, or at least that's what the most of us who lived there thought. Corvin's speciality was writing about rock music and he adopted the appropriate lifestyle. This included the wearing of a vivid purple suit and luminous yellow shirt, much to the horror of his family. Still, it helped feed the image he was creating around himself as a controversial semi-cult figure.

Corvin was creating quite a reputation among the teenage coffee bar set. Many an afternoon the coffee cowboy would sit with enthralling groups of teenage girls playing truant from school, uttering profundities about Bob Dylan and other contemporary heroes. For a while he managed Van Morrison. I think this professional collaboration lasted about three days.

I first met him when I was doing public relations work on the launching of a new show band called the Tara. Corvin was invited, along with other music writers, to the launching of the band in Derry. At that time Corvin thought of showbands as prehistoric predators. After the show drinks were served, Corv got sozzled and then sick. I shared a room with him and remember that the hotel porter let out a gurgled roar when he carried breakfast into the room at 8.30 the next morning.

When we drove back to Belfast he picked up a copy of Cityweek (the magazine he worked for) and saw an article he had written about a group in Australia. He had specified that it be printed on the page upside-down. It wasn't. He rang the editor in a fit of teenage pique and told him where to stick his job. That's when we became firm friends.

At this time the Corvin family were bewildered. A respected staunchly middle class family, they couldn't fathom his lifestyle, which was not in the tradition of decent Belfast lads with a good education. Corvin wore bizarre clothes: an Edwardian military tunic was one of his more outrageous garments. And that was not in keeping with Ormonde Park, a respectable Belfast suburb that gave the world such media notables as Dennis Tuohy and Valerie Singleton.

Corvin was a headline grabber as well as writer. I can remember his being involved in a stunted kidnapping and being flung, tied up in a sack, from a moving car outside the offices of UTV. He cracked under police interrogation and admitted it was a publicity stunt for a friend of his who owned a boutique. He was kidnapped while attempting to break the world marathon record of continuous disc jockeying in the window of the boutique.

A TV film showed him as the guru of a movement of people who believed that the consciousness could be altered by the use of lights. He attempted to climb a wall while the cameras filmed him and later gave a talk on camera that made idiots of all concerned. The TV film was set in the club where he was disc jockey.

Later Belfast, while engaged in war, was not for him and he moved to Dublin. The bigger city gave him greater scope for his non-inconsiderable talent of causing mayhem and an outlet for his natural gift as a journalist. Corvin could always turn a buck at writing. He found it easy, writing with great delicacy and sensitivity.

Sharing many flats and houses with him, I knew Corvin, mostly in the early days before he was seduced by Dublin's la dolce Vita, wrote short stories. He kept these in a big cardboard box under his bed. Not many people saw these stories. Eventually, in one of his nihilistic tantrums of inverted intellectual snobbery, he destroyed them.

In Dublin he wallowed in notoriety and made a lot of deep and lasting friendships. The Hand family were often his safety net.

Journalism bored him a lot of the time, although it was one way he knew to make a few pounds. He never really cared about money, and tried various ways to experiment in new careers. He dabbled in many paying pastimes. He tried insurance, being a boutique salesman, a stint as a disc jockey, taking on clients as a publicist, running a graphics company, promoting his own rock club, opening a record shop, an interlude as an assistant faith healer (failed), working as a New York barman. His gift was writing.

A varied life that snuffed out after 33 years. Now he's dead Cory would prefer that no high falultin' pieces of psuedery be written about him. Stories about Corvin's legendary capacity for hilarity, chaos and mayhem will be repeated and exaggerated. And one hopes they will make a lot of people laugh. He would like that. Anecdotes could be repeated ad infinitum.

But it would be to over-simplify the man and be dishonest to say Corvin was just a hell raiser with a highly developed sense of the ridiculous.

Me? I'll never forget his consummate counsel and good advice. He was one of the smartest people I've ever met. If I had followed all the advice he gave me, or if he had followed it himself, we would both be millionaires now, living on easy street.

Still, we would both have been that much poorer.

Sam Smyth is a reporter for the Sunday World.