Hunting around the 'net for more Bernelle stuff I found this: it tells some of the tale in the 1985 cutting in more detail. You have to register with the site to get the text so I'll paste it here -
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/ ... e_id=10924
The Sunday Independent
Sun, May 30 04
Songs from a survivor
ALL the world's a stage . . . and one man in his time plays many parts, wrote Shakespeare. Something of a bard himself, Philip Chevron has been child prodigy, actor, composer, record producer, rock star, author, homosexual, football fan, Agnes Bernelle's apprentice, alcoholic and flawed genius. He's been a Pogue and a Radiator From Space, two epochal bands in which he claimed memorable status. Admittedly, it hasn't always been a joyous journey - drink, death and many dark nights of the soul - but living legend Chevron has not only survived but prospered.
From the late Eighties until midway through the next decade, Chevron had cause to see life through despairing eyes. That sense of almost insufferable gloom began on April 15, 1989, when Philip and fellow Pogue Darryl Hunt saw 96 lives lost in a crush of people at an FA Cup semi-final football match taking place at the Hillsborough stadium, Sheffield.
"I had survivor's guilt," he says. "I justified it to myself 100 times over and still can't make sense of it all." He associated the sadness of that time with a whole chain of events: his longterm boyfriend Achim became terminally ill; his father suddenly took sick; and Philip himself wasn't in great shape either.
"My boyfriend actually died in the middle of that period," he says, adding that things just got blacker and bleaker as he started to feel himself being "tugged into this dark hole. The more difficult life got, the less able I was to cope."
From 1993 onwards Philip realised he had to leave the group that had made him famous because it was doing his head in. "But I also realised it wasn't The Pogues' fault." He had put himself in that position. He was hiding behind this "thing of being a rock 'n' roll star. It wasn't me."
To mask/numb the pain of his abject existence Philip was drinking like a fish. And it suited his purposes that Shane MacGowan was the wayward drunk whom everyone worried about. That was convenient, he says, because if "they are not looking at you, that's just what you want. Being that ill is a very lonesome place to be and you don't necessarily want people to notice you. You think you're getting away with it."
He wasn't, of course. He nearly died from drinking when his liver "almost capsized". Twice in 1994 he found himself in an A&E ward being told that if he didn't stop drinking he would die - and sooner rather than later. "I was addicted. Drinking in order to get out of bed is a problem. I had a problem and I needed to stop," he says.
To this day he hasn't touched a drink. He finds it funny that Shane MacGowan still asks him: "What's this giving-up-drink lark?" "I hope after 10 years he realises I have actually given up," laughs Philip.
Chevron is reforming the Radiators, his first band, for a show at the Village in Dublin on June 16. "I never left any of my bands," he says with a chuckle. "I'm still in The Pogues really." Even the original eight-piece Pogues will probably do a Dublin show later this year.
But he's here today to talk about Songs in Her Suitcase, a puppet show for adults, all about the life of the incomparable Agnes Bernelle, a show for which he compiled the music.
Philip had always wanted to work with puppets ever since he saw the Lonely Goatherd number in The Sound of Music. Being a huge Julie Andrews fan as a child, he had a little Lonely Goatherd puppet which Santa had brought him one year. In fact, he's still got it. His name is Hansel, he says.
"It's great to have the opportunity to work with puppets because you may never be asked again to do a puppet show. And that's one thing Agnes always taught me: 'You may never get a second opportunity to say yes to something . . . '
"It wasn't difficult, because the project was so dear to my heart. I was so involved in the research side of it, in finding them the right music. I am a physical keeper of the music anyway, because she bequeathed all the tapes to me."
A lot of people knew Agnes Bernelle, the cabaret performer and friend of Gavin Friday, Elvis Costello and Tom Waits - but, he says: "I don't think many people knew who the woman was. Even the people she worked with didn't know her that well in many cases. She had a very close circle of friends."
Philip and I both have good memories of the late Bernelle. I remember being in her car many a time, with Agnes at the wheel - and remind him of the vehicle's inability to turn left. "It was lucky if it moved forward," he says, laughing. "Being in a car with her was an experience that everyone should have once in their lifetime, but not many people wanted to repeat it.
"She was a shockingly terrible driver. The number of one-way streets she would drive up was countless. 'Agnes,' I would say, it's a one-way street!'
"'Yes, darling, but I'm only going one way!'"
In many ways, Philip has been going the one way since he first heard Agnes in 1974 on the radio during a lunchbreak from school and was lifted by what he heard. Even more so, when he realised that this incredible woman actually lived in Dublin.
By coincidence, not long afterwards RTE screened a production of Brecht on Brecht - starring Agnes. It further convinced him of this woman's extraordinary gift.
"At this time Dublin was so grey and dull and awful and priest-ridden. Church and State were joined. So the notion of somebody as exotic as Agnes living in the same city was tremendously exciting, especially for someone like me. I felt distanced from all of this anyway, because at that stage I was beginning to come to understand that I was gay," he says.
And that made you doubly an outsider?
"Of course. Because now I was a sinner and a criminal as well. The Hirschfeld Centre was burnt down. Nobody knows who did it but it was widely believed to have been arson. But also around that time - and indeed after I left Dublin - there was serious queer-bashing in Dublin. It was a very f**king dangerous place to be gay. There was that kid murdered up in Fairview Park. It was a dangerous environment. But that wasn't the main problem, though that problem was quite serious," he recalls.
"I got over the sinner bit reasonably quickly. I thought: 'F**k that. That's just a load of shite.' It took me very little time to work out that if you haven't done anything wrong you haven't sinned. But all of that crap hangs over you. And also the illegality of it."
He first realised he was gay the first time he thought Marlene Dietrich was great - when he was about six. So it was perhaps inevitable that the sexually-confused teenager would be drawn towards Agnes Bernelle, Dublin's own Berlin-born cabaret superstar, and would, in time, set out to meet her.
AT the time, she was directing a play at the Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar. He positioned himself in the foyer one day and waited for her to enter. When she did, in sunglasses and a cigarette dangling from her mouth, his opening gambit was almost his undoing.
"Excuse me, you're Agnes Bernelle . . . "
"Yes, I know that," she replied.
In the course of the chat he told her that he was also a pop star, a record producer and could get her a record deal (lest we forget, he was 16 going on 17). He was, he says, scrawny, spotty and unlikely looking. But Agnes took to him in what she called "his father's clothes". (For the record, he was trying to effect his best "Gatsby look" - attempting to look like a Seventies version of a Twenties person.)
Some weeks later, they met again and Agnes invited the young pretender out to her house in Sandymount to hear her music.
"It was like The Graduate," he remembers. Agnes's bedroom could only be described as a boudoir. There was a tape machine at the end of the bed and she pointed.
"Sit there," she said.
She reclined on her pillows while Philip sat on the furthermost point of the bed, listening to this amazing music - all the time filled with the fear that Agnes Bernelle was actually Mrs Robinson.
"It was scary as hell. I didn't tell her about my sexuality because I didn't have a word for it then. But she probably knew. She'd seen this before. I suspect she had seen this outsized affection for her work in young men before."
She gave him a crash course in Weimar cabaret music, playing him all these tapes dating back to the first performances of her show at Peter Cook's Establishment Club in London.
"And all of this while propped up on the pillows of her bed!" he remembers with a laugh.
Eventually, Philip turned to Agnes and said: "I think I really can get you a record deal."
She looked at him very doubtfully as she handed him some tapes. When Philip left, Agnes turned to her husband Maurice Craig and announced: "Darling, I'm never going to see that young man or those tapes ever again."
She was wrong. Philip played the tapes to Eamon Carr of Horslips, who at that time was starting a small independent record label with Jackie Hayden. Within weeks Philip was phoning Agnes from the call box outside his school, saying: "I've got you a record deal."
"Who is this?"
"Er . . . Philip! I came out to your house."
"Oh you!"
Indeed it was. Born Philip Ryan in the Rotunda Hospital, Dublin, on June 17, 1957, Chevron had the arts in his blood. His father, Philip B Ryan, wrote biographies of both Jimmy O'Dea and Noel Purcell after being involved in Dublin theatre in the Forties and Fifties. He left the arts world, ostensibly to get a proper job and bring up a family.
Philip now feels his father's illness in 1989/90 was one of the best things that ever happened to him, as it allowed him to concentrate on writing books. "It forced him to take early retirement from this poxy job as catering manager of the Mater Hospital," he says.
Ryan Snr's last book, The Lost Theatres of Dublin, was unfinished when he died in May 1997. Philip finished the book after he passed away, fulfilling a deathbed promise by piecing together and editing his father's book.
The effort proved worthwhile. "In this loving testament to live performance, Ryan communicates the vitality, glamour and sometimes tawdriness of popular theatre, and variety in particular," ran the Daily Telegraph review.
"I promised my father I'd make sure it came out - he spent a lot of time and energy on it, and a lot of love," says Philip. "His passion for Irish theatre was boundless. He was somebody who at the age of 14 was buying threepenny seats in the gallery of the Abbey. He started writing sketches as a young man for the Theatre Royal. He was embroiled in it from the beginning."
You could say much the same for young Philip. He can remember writing tunes on his toy piano at the age of three. He was always at loggerheads with his piano teacher because he wanted to compose, rather than learn scales, he says.
His restless creative bent was given further exposure at the Brendan Smyth Theatre Academy, where - again - he rebelled against the formal training. He now says that they only taught how to walk in through a door, or how to speak "tongue-twisters proper". He felt that this wasn't acting, wasn't theatre. "It wasn't creative," he recalls. "My impulse was always to make theatre or to make music."
In some ways, he says, both his parents were the major influence on his life, nurturing his interest in theatre and music. They probably regretted this after taking the three-year-old Philip to see a Jimmy O'Dea pantomime - Robinson Crusoe with (naturally) Agnes Bernelle as the principal boy.
What his parents hadn't realised was that the young child would refuse to leave the theatre after the performance.
"I wailed and cried and stamped my feet when the curtain went down. They had to get the usherette to promise me that if I was a good boy and went away and had my tea, I could come back afterwards. I accepted this bargain and left the theatre. That was my first realisation that adults lie to you. Because they didn't take me back after tea." And I suppose he's been compensating ever since in trying to get back . . .
Barry Egan
Posted: Sun Jul 23, 2006 8:14 am
