Working in Television, Again and Again Ric Salmon relives the success of The

With a career spanning more than 40 years, Phay ‘Phaymous’ Mac Mahon is one of the go-to production managers in the international touring business. Gordon Masson talks to this year’s Gaffer about his journey to the top and his simple but effective Covid protocol that allowed Ricky Martin and Enrique Iglesias to get back on the road last year.

Having grown up in Shankhill near the port of Dún Laoire on the outskirts of Dublin, life could have been very different for Phay Mac Mahon, had it not been for his big brother, Mick, and a local punk band with ambitions to see the world.

“Mick was a DJ in the 70s, and he’d built up a lighting system and stuff for his mobile disco,” recalls Phay. “Although I was really young, I started helping him set up and everything, until he decided he wanted to wind things down a bit.”

Professional equipment was a scarce commodity in Ireland at the time, so it wasn’t long before Phay was approached by club promoter

Smiley Bolger who was running the Much More

Music gigs in Dublin. “It was on a Tuesday night, and it turned out Boomtown Rats were regulars.

One night, Bob Geldof and I were chatting, and he asked if there was any chance of them using the lights and the van to take them around the country. And that's literally how it started.

“The lights were very basic, just Par 36s on homemade boards. And because I didn't have a switcher, I used to literally plug the lights in and out in time with the music. In fact, when I turned 60, halfway through the party, the music went down and Geldof and all the [Boomtown]

Rats marched into the party. And they presented me this golden plugboard, which they’d hastily made in their hotel because that's how they remembered me originally.”

Phayze 1

Without each other, The Boomtown Rats and Phay may never have left the Emerald Isle. When they met, Phay was an apprentice toolmaker, but as The Rats began to build momentum, they tried to persuade Phay – with the van and lights – to take a risk and move to England with them.

“He was a kid working in a no-hope job in a lightbulb factory,” says frontman Geldof. “Phay drove us round in his brother’s mobile disco van and started doing the lights for us – plugging and unplugging each lamp from a standard domestic extension cable. When he wasn’t blinding us, he was shorting the house and amps.

“I told him he should come with us on our mad bid to get out of Ireland. He said he didn’t know if he was allowed and I’d have to ask his mum. So, over a tea-time pork chop, peas and mash, Mrs Mac Mahon said she wasn’t sure: the job was steady and he could easily be a foreman by the time he was 32 – in 13 or 14 years’ time. I assured her he could still do that. ‘Give it a year,’ I said. ‘We either do it or we’re all coming back to Dún Laoire.’ Phay had one condition; that if we did make it, besides the lights, he’d be allowed to drive ‘wunna dem big troox dey have.’ So off we went. He got to drive the truck, us, and everything else. We never went back to Dún Laoire.”

Thus started a lifelong relationship and Phay switched his apprenticeship from toolmaking to everything involved with taking artists on the road – with The Rats’ frugal nature and Phay’s clappedout vehicle very much at the centre of things.

“Geldof did all the dealing on everything,” explains Phay. “One day, before a gig, he told me that Richard Branson and Simon Draper were coming to see the band, ‘So let's get this set up quick so we can go out and pick them up in the van.’ I pointed out that surely when it's a record company, you should be sending a limo or something. And Geldof looked at me like I had two heads – he was always cheap,” he laughs.

“At the time, I was stockcar racing and having fun with old cars. So we had a bench seat from an old Zephyr that I'd thrown in the back of the van, and of course it would slide around on the floor, and the band would all moan and groan: I'd hit the brakes and it would slide forward, their knees up in their mouths. So… Richard Branson and Simon Draper found themselves squashed up against the sidewall of the van when I had to do a sharp turn, and there's Geldof just staring at me, about to kill me.

“But that night, they saw the show and offered Geldof a cheque for nearly a million pounds, and he turned it down because he thought the band could do better. We thought he was mad, but he got a deal with Ensign and we did better.”

Part of that deal involved a house in Chessington, Surrey, where bass player John Giblin already lived in the garden flat while Allan Holdsworth was in the attic. “The house had a huge rehearsal room, a tiny sitting-room and a tiny kitchen, so it was a little community, and it was hilarious, to say the least,” says Phay.

Ricky Martin, Puerto Rico, 2020

Stars’ Truck

“When the Rats weren't touring, I’d go off and do my own thing. My brother Shay taught me to drive trucks properly and I finally got my HGV license. This allowed me to legally drive trucks for Edwin Shirley, and I ended up doing two Queen tours and a Rolling Stones tour on the steel team.”

He also learned more about lighting, working with Pete Clarke’s Supermick Lights. “I did tours with Pete and all sorts of one-offs, as well as the Roundhouse every Sunday.”

As his skills repertoire grew, Phay realised that work elsewhere meant moving out of The Rats’ Chessington home. “It was 1980, and Simon Austin from LSD called to say this young band from Sheffield were looking for a lighting designer for a theatre tour. So I met Def Leppard’s manager, Peter Mensch, and he offered me the job. Jake Berry was the production manager, and we got along great, but it came to the situation where he had to go back to AC/DC, who Mensch also managed, meaning he couldn't do Leppard’s first tour in the States. Mensch also needed a lighting director that he couldn't afford. But Jake pitched the idea that I could do both. It was kinda true – with The Rats I did everything be-

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