It's 2018. The five of us are sitting in Heathrow airport, waiting to board a plane to New york where we have several interviews to give and a couple of TV shows to shoot for the promotion of our fourth album with U-N-I.
U-N-I, that's the name we gave to the group we formed over ten years ago. Our lives have been so crazy in the past ten years, sometimes I still have to pinch myself to make sure this is all really happening.
I always knew we would be famous one day. Ever since our first jam session in two thousand and five, I knew we would become the biggest rock band in the world...or I hoped so anyway. To be honest with you, if someone had told me back then that we would become this huge band, I would have had serious doubts about the truthfulness of that statement.
But one can always dream. My father had always told me not to dream. To dream was to be disappointed and it was a waste of time. I learned not to listen to my father though. To me, the power of imagination was priceless and at an early age I was determined to do everything I possibly could to make my dreams come true and to live up to my expectations.
Ok I'm getting a little carried away here but now that you know the end of the story, let's start with the beginning.
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I was born in Ireland from a French father and an Irish mother. We lived in the Dublin suburb of Rathmines, a cool suburban alternative to living in Dublin, according to our parents. It had its own high street, cool pubs, bars, restaurants and brilliant vintage shops. There were lots to do and we were not far from the city centre.
Growing up, I had a great group of friends. I couldn't even remember not knowing them. We had grown up together, started going to school together, practiced the same activities after school, enjoyed the same sports... but mainly, we all loved the same music and we were all playing instruments.
We had always been the best of friends, simply because we lived in the same street. None of us lived far away from each other, although Robbie and I were the nearest neighbours, with Jordan just around the corner. Damon lived only a little further up the street and Dylan moved to the neighbourhood and joined our group of friends when we were around the age of ten. We could walk between all five houses in under five minutes.
None of us were really Irish though. Jordan had Scottish parents who had moved to Dublin for work, Dylan had moved from Southampton in England, and Robbie's mum was Spanish, and his dad was English. Only Damon had Irish parents. He actually looked the most Irish, fair skin and all. The rest of us had darker skin and we could get a nice tan pretty easily when we went abroad. You don't get much sun in Dublin.
Jordan was the youngest, and Dylan the oldest, although we were all close in age and over the years, our respective birthdays were always a good excuse to have a party. Dylan was born in january 90, Damon in march, Rob and I were both born a few days apart in May, and finally Jordan in August.
There was also Rachel, who seemed to be the only girl in the neighbourhood who managed to put up with us. She always wanted to hang out with us and play our games. She was a great girl, funny, smart and even pretty. She was our number one fan whenever we'd perform live together. She was part of our little gang. We really liked having her around and when puberty kicked in, she and I had started dating. So, she had been my girlfriend for a couple of years already.
I loved her, and I loved my friends. I couldn't imagine not having them in my life. I was very close to Jordan, we often hung out together and we loved each other's company, we would always play music together whenever we hung out. He had acquired a bass and he was a quick learner. I played the piano and the guitar. I was quite musically versatile, but I had learned how to play the piano around the age of seven and I was very good at it, probably because my father was always forcing me to practice, not wanting to spend money on lessons for no results. But since we had begun playing together, I had started playing the guitar and it had become my instrument.
I was always carrying it around, playing it whenever I could really, and I was starting to write songs. I had a very good ear for music, I could find a melody in an instant. I was a bit embarrassed to show the guys, but in school, or in my spare time, I had started writing lyrics as well. It was becoming a habit. Anytime I thought of something, experienced something, or witnessed something, I would try to write about it. I was carrying this notebook with me and just scribbled ideas whenever I could.
Whenever I was not hanging out with Jordan, or with Rachel, you would most likely find me with Robbie, mostly at night. He was my next door neighbour, and he was always, always there for me, whenever things got too tough for me to handle at home. Indeed, to counterbalance with having the best friends I could possibly ask for, I had the worst family. Well maybe not, but it did feel that way to me.
My father was drinking too much, he was out in the pubs every night after work and would always come home late, drunk and often violent. He wasn't beating me up exactly, or even hitting me frequently, although it had happened a few times but the threat of violence was always there.
He would grab my arm a little too roughly, or push me against a wall, or slap my face. He was an angry drinker. Drinking was probably a way of avoiding other issues, such as feeling like a totally useless member of society, going to a dead boring job every day to buy alcohol or cigarettes or if need be, to feed a wife and kids he, from the look of it, didn't even love, although he was a lot nicer to my brother Thomas and my sister Amy, for some reason. I had made a promise to myself never to be like him. I didn't want to end up like that. I wanted my life to be exceptional.
The only good thing I had learned from him was French. He was born in France but had moved to Ireland with his parents when he was a teenager. He'd almost never speak to us in English and we had to talk to him in French most of the time or he'd get mad, telling us that we'd never learn if we kept speaking in English. Even between my brother, sister and me we spoke French to each other if he was around. He'd never really managed to teach my mum but despite not really speaking the language, she understood it pretty well so French was the language we usually spoke in the house. It was not the best way to learn a language because it was forced on us but we did learn it.
Unlike my dad, my mum didn't drink, but she was not a very loving mum. I couldn't really remember her cuddling me as a child. I didn't feel much loved in my own home.
She was a Christian, not that there was anything wrong with that, but she really had some pretty strong beliefs. She did not seem to be able to make allowances. She followed blindly the dictates of the church and she was very stubborn about it. She had to put up with an abusive husband and a pretty sad life I must add, doing the cleaning, cooking, shopping, taking care of the kids and receiving no appreciation or love for it, and I'm pretty sure that she believed God had intended it that way to make her stronger so she was just putting up with it. She was a strict mother and even though she knew how my dad treated me, she never said anything to him about it. Whenever I complained to her about him, she always told us that God had a plan, and that everything we went through in life had a reason to happen.
Consequently, I didn't particularly enjoy spending time at home.
Robbie lived in the house right next to mine. Our mothers were friends and had basically given bith a few days apart. Growing up, they kept telling us how they used to put us in the same playpen, so our friendship went way back. I really thought the guys were a pretty amazing bunch of friends, but Rob and I were best friend, and everybody knew that. I really felt the most connected to him, we knew each other so well, we spent so much time with each other, because every time I needed to escape my father when he came home drunk, I went to his. If my parents started fighting, if I had a fight with my brother or my sister, I climbed out of my window or walked out the door and went straight to Rob's. I used any excuse I could find to leave and go to his place. The peace and love in his house was priceless to me. Rob and his family knew what I was escaping from, I had started doing it at an early age, I must have been only seven or eight the first time I had run to his place in the evening to escape my father's violent outbursts. I had knocked at the door and Rob's mother had let me in, comforted me, as if she had known what was happening to me, and asked my mother if I could stay the night because I was too damn scared of going back home.
She knew and understood what I was going through, she was always there to take me in her arms and make me feel special and loved in a way that my parents couldn't. Over the years, it had become natural, I considered Rob's mum and dad as my second parents. I'm sure Rob's mother tried to make the situation better by talking to my mother and after a while it probably became an understanding, my mum would let me slip out of the house leaving me to be cared cared for by someone else. That way she knew I was safe and my dad was just happy that I wasn't home most of the time. He didn't have to bother with me.
So, despite spending most of my childhood nights sleeping in my best friend's bed I always went home after school, after all it was where I was supposed to be; but after dinner though there was always something that would make me want to escape and I often found myself knocking at my neighbour's door, hoping they would let me stay with them one more time.
It was during one of those nights that my relationship with Rob suddenly changed.
We were eighteen and about to take our leaving certificate. We'd had a pretty long hard day at school and we still had lots of revising to do so that day I didn't even bother going home; we just left school and went to his place, straight up to his room.
Instead of studying I started going through the new NME magazine that we'd just bought. We just loved talking about music, the bands we admired, the songs we loved. He was also very musical and played the guitar so we'd always play together and I'd show him the melodies I had come up with. We had started composing songs together and he was always supportive and admiring of my song writing abiliities, always telling me I had an incredible talent for it, and that if we ever were to become successful, they would have me to thank.
I had a good voice too, and I loved singing, but so did Rob. He was, however, a lot more confident than I was, I didn't mind singing behind closed doors but I couldn't bring myself to do it in front of an audience; Rob, on the other hand, loved performing. He had such a good voice and he brought so most energy and passion into his performance that whenever we played music with our friends he was always the one singing. Plus, it gave him an opportunity to show off, which he just loved to do.
