Gerry O’Boyle and the legend of Filthy MacNasty’s - Taken from ‘The Times’ profile, March 2000.

In August 1993, Gerry O’Boyle opened a North London drinking den called Filthy MacNasty’s Whiskey Café. O’Boyle, a former horse dealer from Sligo, dreamt of creating a bar that would eventually rank alongside such legendary rock n’ roll joints as The Whisky A-Go-Go and the Rainbow Bar and Grill on Hollywood’s sunset strip. O’Boyle even took the name from one of the most infamous dives on the strip – the original Filthy MacNasty’s, at 8852 Sunset, had been used by Flamingo Hill, the girlfriend of the notorious Las Vegas gangster Bugsy Siegel, as a front for laundering money to the mob, but had recently been resurrected by Johnny Depp, who re-opened it in that same year as The Viper Room.

With the Hollywood dream in his heart and a copy of the rock n’ roll autobiography Bill Graham Presents by his bedside, O’Boyle lined the walls with Irish Catholic iconography: Pogues gold disks, the words of St. Augustine (Oh Lord, make me pure but not just yet) and, taking pride of place above the fireside, a framed photograph of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, flanked on either side by two Popes, John VVII and Paul VI. The stage was now set for the good to meet the bad and the ugly; for the sacred to collide with the profane. “If Filthy’s was a movie,” says O’Boyle, “it would be about sin and redemption. I wanted to create a place where the baddest boys in the world could all come together – Joe Strummer, Shane MacGowan, George Best, Lemmy, Joey Ramone – just people who were hellraisers, wild ones who would take things as far as you could take them. It was all about telling the greatest stories ever told.”

After recruiting a colourful cast of bar staff who were strategically trained to provide fast, efficient service and simultaneously deal with real-life tales of the unexpected, Filthy’s quickly began to attract O’Boyle’s rock n’ roll dream team and the accolades followed. Within the first 16 months, NME had named Filthy’s Rock N’ Roll Bar of the Year and the then recently launched Loaded magazine declared it Pub of the Century, memorably describing it as “the kind of place where you’re far more likely to get thrown out for being boring than for being drunk.”

By 1994, a new breed of Irish theme pubs were springing up in London, but history had long since ensured that none of them would ever have what Filthy’s had. “Merlin the Wizard is buried under the bar,” says O’Boyle. “Filthy’s was built on a ley-line that is directly linked to Glastonbury and is an energy line for artists. So it’s no coincidence that I found myself here or that Shane MacGowan did, or that I came home one night to find Johnny Depp pulling pints behind the bar and Kate Moss sitting in the corner. Filthy’s has always been about anything happening anywhere, anyhow, anytime. It’s magical and you can’t stop the magic or the madness. Merlin is constantly firing stuff up.”

With Merlin kept as a well-hidden secret, O’Boyle came up with a more visible way of making Filthy’s stand out from other Irish pubs. He devised a series of literary readings, beginning with an all-dayer dedicated to James Joyce, on Blooms day, 1994, followed by tributes of JFK, Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett. Then, in February 1997, O’Boyle teamed up with Richard Thomas, an experienced rock promoter, and launched a new literary event called Vox n’ Roll. “The basic idea was to take writers out of book stores and turn them into rock stars,” says O’Boyle. “When we did the Joyce event, we started off with a reading at 11am for Blooms day breakfast and continued through to a final reading at 9.30pm. As a result, people would be getting locked and the grand finale would be either completely brilliant or an utter disaster. So with Vox n’ Roll, the idea was to make it sharp and fast, like a great gig, with the author reading from their work and playing nine of their favourite songs – three readings, three pieces of music. It was a simple idea and it worked.”

Patrick Macabe, author of the Booker-nominated The Butcher Boy, was the first writer to step onto the Filthy’s podium, setting a high standard that enabled Vox n’ Roll to attract a stream of first class names including Frank McCourt, James Elroy, Roddy Doyle, Ken Kesey, Alan Warner and John Cale. In the years since it’s inception, Vox ‘n Roll has presented some 600 shows and the publication of a companion book, Vox n’ Roll presents: Hot Sauce With Everything, a compilation of 20 best nights, featuring one-off stories by Filthy’s regulars such as McCabe, Howard Marks, Will Self, Irvine Welsh and Kevin Sampson.

After successfully taking Vox ‘n Roll to Dublin, where the audience included Bono and the journalist covering the event was famously arrested and had to spend the night in Mountjoy Prison, O’Boyle aimed at the big screen. He hooked up with Frank Murray, the former manager of The Pogues, and established a writers and film festival called Mavericks. The first Mavericks festival was held at the Jazz Café in Camden Town in October 1997, and the capacity crowd turned out for the opening bill by Patrick McCabe (with Jack L), Edie Bunker and Nick Cave, who was joined onstage by Kylie Minogue. “The idea behind Mavericks was to highlight the effect that writers have had on movies and give them some time in the sun,” says O’Boyle. “Again, it was all about creating a great story for later on. For the history books maybe.”

After a second, larger scale Mavericks Festival at the Truman Building on Brick Lane in November 1998, O’Boyle realised that he wanted to produce his own stories rather than just promote other people’s. As time went on, film producers and directors were increasingly being drawn to Filthy’s, checking out Vox n’ Roll writers and generally hanging out there. Neil Jordan shot scenes for The End of the Affair in the area, and used the bar as a cast and crew base.

In June 1999, O’Boyle set up his own production company, First Show, and a few months later he was asked to produce Coney Island Baby, the first feature film by a young American actor called Karl Geary. ”Like me, Karl’s got a bar in New York and a home in Sligo – we’re similar guys on both sides of the Atlantic,” says O’Boyle. “He’s a cross between Jimmy Dean and Johnny Depp and he’s been getting rave reviews for his role as Horatio in the movie Hamlet. Coney Island Baby is a bittersweet love story, along the lines of Bonnie and Clyde but without the blood, about an Irish scallywag who tries to get his girl back.”

By this time, O’Boyle had also begun to develop an idea for a comedy chat show, “One Night at the Carlyle is a fictional bar named after the New York hotel, but based on my own experiences,” he says. “It will be part Saturday Night Live, part-Cheers, with David Soul (of Starsky and Hutch fame) as the host. It will all be very true to life. In fact, David gave me a very good piece of advice. He said, ‘You should always keep the comic truth, because when people stop believing they go home.’”

Having witnessed six and a half years of comic truth in Filthy’s, O’Boyle is unlikely to run out of storylines, “There was one Sunday night,” he says, “when a very famous Irish rock star was sitting in the bar with his entourage. He was completely loaded and should very well have gone home. Into the scene enters another very famous Irish rock star, this time a lady, dressed in priestly robes and accompanied by her publicist. They were going to have a word with the loaded rock star but decided against it and retired upstairs to the office to write a letter to a higher power. Meanwhile, two visiting psychics had arrived from Devon on a quest to find the last burial site of Merlin and they were walking around the bar independently of one another looking for the sacred spot. Later on that night, the lady rock star came down stairs and went into the bar to ask the loaded rock star if he knew the email address of the Pope. As she was asking for this, the two psychics appeared on either side of him and simultaneously agreed that Merlin was buried directly beneath him. People do say that fact is stranger than fiction.”

With both Coney Island Baby and One Night at the Carlyle in pre-production, O’Boyle decided that it was time to call last orders at Filthy’s. “When you create something like Filthy’s you could carry on doing it all your life,” he says. “But it’s like if you’re in a brilliant band, such as The Clash, then sometimes its good to go out on top and leave something great behind.”

The end credits, however, have not rolled yet. The legend of Filthy MacNasty’s will live on under new management, with many of the same faces behind the bar, and O’Boyle will continue to run Vox n’ Roll from the office upstairs. “In my head, I really did think of Filthy’s as a movie,” he says. “It was about great people and great stories and great nights, a place where everyone could together and no one would ever be left out. So you’d walk in and see Mick of the 50’s, an Irish exile with a sad look in his eye, reading his newspaper, or you’d find Joe Strummer asleep on the couch, or Phil Daniels drinking at the bar, or Suggs locked in the upstairs’ toilet, or Huey from Fun Lovin’ Criminals cooking food in the kitchen. There were no bouncers, no velvet rope and no such thing as ‘Are you on the guestlist?’ And that’s why everybody loved it. Mick of the 50’s loved it for his reasons, and Johnny Depp loved it for his. Style bars come and go, but Filthy’s was forever.”