John F. Kennedy will always be with us. He just arrives in different ways. For years, there he was alongside the Pope, looking down from the sitting-room walls of Ireland. Then, when the news came in from Dallas, he entered the consciousness of an entire generation: the minutiae of peoples' daily lives suddenly frozen by that defining moment. After that, J.F.K. literally became part of the landscape. There's the J.F.K. Arboretum near New Ross, Kennedy Park in the centre of Galway, and the large charismatic painting in Shannon Airport of J.F.K. being greeted on his arrival in Clare.
It's July 1998 and John F. Kennedy is doing an Elvis: being sighted in a location where reason suggests he could not possibly be. Where is he? He's in the Irish Top 30, with a track called Theme From Green Machine.
The first week it was released, J.F.K. arrived into the charts as the highest new entry at No 23. At time of writing, its place during the second week is No 10; "the highest new climber," John O'Regan reports, not a little bemusedly.
O'Regan is a producer and director at RTE, who worked on the latest season of Kenny Live and Later On Two, after returning from a long stint at Granada Television last autumn. He and composer Mike Timoney together created Theme From Green Machine. Five years ago, the two were working together on a World in Action documentary for Granada, when they stopped for a break. Other lads on a break might nip out for a cigarette or a sticky bun or some other such interesting diversion, but these lads stayed on in the studio and started listening to J.F.K's 1963 speech to the Joint Houses of the Oireachtas.
"I'd heard the speech on some programme which was commemorating the 30th anniversary of J.F.K.'s visit to Ireland and thought it was very powerful," reports John. "We started setting bits of it to music. We were there for about four hours." Then they forgot about it and went back to the work in hand.
Fast forward to five years on. In his move back to Ireland, John found the demo tape in a box, mixed in among the Mohican haircuts, Tube maps, Beefeater hats and other sundry flotsam of souvenirs collected during his sojourn in London. He dug it out and listened to it again. So did some of his colleagues at RTE, who suggested EMI Ireland might be interested in it. They were. Hence J.F.K.'s current posthumous canter up the charts.
In Theme From Green Machine, a synthesised version of The Lonesome Boatman plays over and between the clips from that 1963 speech, evoking the sound of seagulls and splashing oars. J.F.K.'s voice sings out the words of his speech, some of which now sound both eerily dated and contemporary.
The world is small when your enemy is loose on the other side . . . Other people see things and say "why?" - but I dream things that never were and I say "why not?" It is that quality of the Irish - a combination of hope, confidence and imagination that is needed more than ever today . . . This has never been a rich or powerful country and yet, since earliest times, its influence on the world has been rich and powerful . . . Ireland's hour has come . . .
"Why did we call it `Green Machine'? Well, green because it's Irish. The machine bit because of the electronic backing," explains John. "Besides," he adds pragmatically, "we had to think of some name to give it when EMI said they'd record it. And we had to come up with a B side as well."
Theme From Green Machine is certainly a clever idea. On reflection, or should that be "mature recollection," many political speeches or orations seem to have been destined to have a backing track. Rhetoric, passion and bon mots, together with an impressive delivery and a historical context, is pretty much a performance art in itself.
Ransack the archives of RTE, remix a few speeches, and maybe we could have a Faith Of Our Fathers-type hit on the shelves by Christmas? "Well, it won't be me doing it," laughs John, who is openly astonished by the success of Theme From Green Machine. "Making music is not my day job."