The season is nearly over in the seaside town of Tramore, Co Waterford, and although the sun is struggling hard to break through the clouds, the main attractions are closed. Except for one on the main street down near the shore - a primrose yellow, 1960s Buick convertible, built as wide and sleek as only the Americans knew how.
Yet despite the fact it takes up half the street and is as out of place as an American starlet, the locals don't give it a second glance. This is because it's Vince Power's car and they're used to it. The founder and head of the Mean Fiddler organisation (music bars and festival promotion) keeps it in the garage of his house near Tramore to use solely on his trips home.
"When I was a young lad growing up I always used to dream of cruising along the coast in the sunshine in a big American car and here I am. I've been doing a lot of that in the last week and the kids are like `You're in your element, dad'. And they're right, I am." It's the typical flashy gesture of a poor boy made good, but it's curiously atypical of Power, who is renowned as a quiet, softspoken man. He comes across as astonishingly down to earth for one of England's most powerful concert and festival promoters with an empire worth £40 million.
From his first Mean Fiddler bar in London's Harlesden, Power is now the main man behind 20 bars, concert venues and festivals including the infamous Reading festival and the international Fleadhs. At the end of September there is also the Homelands dance event in Mosney, Co Meath which he is staging with fellow club promoters, John Reynolds of the PoD nightclub and Darren Hughes of international club venture, Home.
More than once, he has been referred to as a gentle giant, a cliched description that nonetheless fits Power rather well. He says he is always trying to lose weight and points approvingly to the bench seat in his Buick as a reason why the 10-mile-to-the-gallon car is a practical choice. Power is also known to fight shy of the press and starts our interview by telling me he doesn't like interviews.
"It's not that I hate the press or anything. I just think that there's plenty of people who've done what I have," he protests later. "I did just as well in the furniture business for 10 years before I got into music and nobody seemed very interested in that." Whatever Power thinks, his rags to riches story is a good one. He was born in Kilmacthomas, four miles north of Tramore in the 1940s. His mother gave birth to 11 children but only seven survived. "It was kind of expected in those days. I had a twin sister that was born but didn't live." Power is obviously wary of playing the poor mouth but is quite blunt about the fact that his background was one dominated by poverty.
"I make a joke of it with the kids about how I came from such a poor family, but we did come from a typical poor family. My father was a hard worker. He worked in the forestries around Carrick-on-Suir all his life. He retired, got cancer and died. So don't retire." It is sometimes difficult to know when Vince Power is laughing, as it is all in his eyes.
He departs from the popular "we were poor but happy" script beloved by so many memoirists when he admits he doesn't recall his childhood as particularly joyous. "Not very many happy memories to be honest, although a lot of it is blurred. At my age now - I'm over 50 - you still go on harping back to your childhood. I still try and, I don't know, I go out to the old house which is derelict at the moment, has been for a few years since my mother died and I try and really think of any happy days. I'm sure there were loads," he says uncertainly.
There were the times when his mother and father would hire a car and take the family to the seaside or to the Tramore races on August 15th. Four years ago, he bought that race course with some local investors and he has just finished running that race festival himself.
He did not enjoy school and left at the age of 16 after a year in the technical school in Dungarvan. At that point he had two options - he could emigrate or he could take up a scholarship to train as an artificial inseminator in Galway. "That was all the craze then. I would have been trained to do the job the bull was supposed to do." He didn't take it up. His mother was disappointed.
Instead an aunt took him back with her to Hemel Hempstead in England. Power says he always knew he would leave Ireland at the earliest opportunity, fed by letters and magazines from relatives in England and the States. "When you're a kid looking at the magazines and you see pictures of big cities, you think `God wouldn't it be just great to have a shop near where you lived?' Every time we needed something we had to walk two miles to the shop. So the idea of cities fascinated me from a very early age."
A year later, a friend from Tramore joined him and they moved into an African rooming house in Kilburn. "It was great because I wasn't aware that that would have been a downmarket house. When you came out of Ireland in those days, you weren't aware that prejudices existed. I would have seen what I now know was prejudice - remarks, statements or signs like `No Irish allowed' - but I was naive. I just accepted it."
A string of jobs followed but Power's only ambition was to do the least work possible while earning lots of money. Understandably, gambling appealed to him and large tracts of time were spent on schemes whereby a stake of a few pounds would make him a million.
Then he met a Kerryman who got him into the demolition trade. It was the 1960s and hundreds of houses were being knocked down to make way for high-rise flats. Business was booming and soon Power noticed that huge amounts of furniture were left behind as people shrugged off their old lives and embraced high-rise living. But Vince liked the old stuff and began to take it to an old garage, do it up and sell it on. Soon he got together enough money to take on the lease of a shop in Harlesden, his first move into the area where his organisation is still based today.
It was a struggle at first but Power soon realised that once he was working for himself, he liked putting in the hours. He has not worked for anyone since. The lucky break happened like a fairy tale. Included in the contents of a house, bought for £10, was a small painting left discarded on the floor.
No sooner did Vince put it in his shop window, than a dealer came in and offered him £200. He thought that was rather a lot of money for one painting and decided to hang on to it. By the end of the day he had had four offers for it, so he took it down to Sotheby's. It sold for £7000 "which was an awful lot of money in those days".
With that money, Power moved to a better shopping area and his business really took off. He married his first wife, Theresa, at the age of 19 and had three children by the age of 23. They are all now in their 30s and work for the Mean Fiddler organisation.
