Brendan Bowyer (12 October 1938 – 28 May 2020) was an Irish singer best known for fronting the Royal Showband and The Big Eight, and who had five number one hits in Ireland. He was also renowned for having The Beatles open for the Royal Showband at a concert on 2 April 1962 at the Pavilion Theatre, Liverpool, some six months before the release of The Beatles first single “Love Me Do” in October 1962. Bowyer was regarded as one of the first headlining Elvis impersonators. Elvis Presley himself was a big fan of Bowyer’s performances and would often attend Bowyer’s concerts in the Stardust Resort & Casino, Las Vegas during the 1970s. [Wikipedia]
Irish
BBC4 “Showbands”- an Irish cultural phenomenon explained
By Veronica Lee, The Arts Desk
Ask most people what a showband is and they’ll give you a blank look. But ask any Irish person (or those born in the Irish diaspora) who is north of 50 and they will probably look misty-eyed. For between the late 1950s and 1980s showbands were a huge Irish cultural phenomenon, and Ardal O’Hanlon was our amiable guide through this brief but illuminating history of them.
Taking a break from his Caribbean sojourn in Death in Paradise, in Showbands: How Ireland Learned to Party O’Hanlon explained that Ireland in the 1960s was very different to the young, outward-looking country it is now – poor, mainly agricultural and rural, and living under the yoke of the Catholic Church. America had Elvis Presley, and the UK The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but none of these acts played Ireland’s small rural villages – and out of this musical vacuum came showbands, whose sets were a curious musical hybrid of covers of pop, country & western and traditional Irish ballads.
Showbands were distinct from the four-man beat combos elsewhere; they were larger for a start, typically numbering between six and eight: drums, guitars and brass, fronted by a lead singer who was usually the cutist-looking fellah. As O’Hanlon said: “They were versatile, hardworking mobile jukeboxes in shiny suits.”
O’Hanlan, who is from the border county of Monaghan in the Republic, got in a VW camper van to travel around the island of Ireland (showbands were a cross-cultural, cross-border phenomenon) to recreate the days when the musicians would chuck their instruments in the back and drive from gig to gig, six days a week. It was an unnecessary contrivance, as he spoke to his interviewees when they were both safely ensconced on sofas.
Initially, the bands played in church halls, managed by the local priest (who would measure the distance between couples to make sure the Holy Ghost would be able to fit between them), and where nothing stronger than soft drinks (“minerals” as the Irish have it) were served.
But pretty quickly promoters realised there was money to be made and commercial dance halls started springing up all over the place. At their peak, it is estimated there were more than 600 showbands working in Ireland – including the Royal Showband, the Miami Showband, Big Tom and the Mainliners, and Margo and the Keynotes – and they were household names, regularly pulling crowds of more than 1,000 people to ballrooms, six nights a week.
O’Hanlan spoke to several members of the best-known bands, who spoke with affection about their time on the road, not just in Ireland but in the UK too. Anywhere there was an Irish community there was a dance hall and many showbands were as popular here as back home. Some, like the Royals and the Miami, even went to Las Vegas, though with differing success.
O’Hanlon pointed out that showbands managed to work through the Troubles in Northern Ireland – their fans, from either side of the religious divide in Northern Ireland, didn’t care they were from the Republic. As Steve Travers of the Miami Showband said: “A showband is a perfect blueprint for integration,” while his bandmate Des Lee said: “We stayed away from politics. Our aim was to deliver two hours of entertainment.”
But then sectarianism did affect them. On 31 July 1975 when the Miami Showband were returning to Dublin late one night from a gig in County Down, a group of loyalist paramilitaries from the Ulster Volunteer Force attacked their van, killing three of the band. Some would read the attack as the beginning of the end for showbands, but in truth it was Ireland’s steps towards liberalising licensing laws – bars and hotels could now serve alcohol while live bands were playing, for instance – that did for them, as well as a new wave of emigration from Ireland’s rural areas, which took away much of the showbands’ fanbase.
There was little in the way of backstage gossip and it was a lot to run through, but O’Hanlon, with some excellent archive material and interesting reminiscences, made this an enjoyable hour.
Source: Showbands, BBC4 review – an Irish cultural phenomenon explained
Watch the complete BBC Four documentary
Review: That They May Face the Rising Sun is a poignant rural meditation on life and friendship
In this adaptation of the John McGahern novel, about a middle-aged man who has returned, with his wife, to the countryside of his childhood, makeshift friendships are forged and life’s grand rhythms observed
By Phil Hoad
Does anything happen, or is it the usual?” asks a regular loose cannon in Pat Collins’ rural-set Irish drama. “Not much in the way of drama, just the day-to-day stuff,” replies his writer friend. That’s very much the lay of the land in this film, with squirely novelist Joe Ruttledge (Barry Ward) serving as a proxy for John McGahern and his early-Joycean realism, and from whose lauded final 2002 novel this is adapted. By extension it speaks for Collins too, who remains a faithful follower of that approach – almost to a fault.
At some point in the 1980s, Joe and his wife Kate (Anna Bederke) – who is from some unspecified European country – have quit London to return to the Irish countryside of his upbringing. With him racking up the pages of a never-finished book, and her twisting local plants into art creations, there’s a bohemian tint to their household that attracts neighbours to their kitchen table. There’s “the Shah” (John Olohan), the big-eyebrowed garage owner tiptoeing into a new romance; Bill (Brendan Conroy), a subdued labourer condemned to working in slave-like conditions because he was “illegitimate”; and the aforementioned loose cannon Patrick (Lalor Roddy), never short of a chippy observation but always popping by like a man who needs company.
Ever-present in this tangle of middle-aged, makeshift friendships is an undertow of faint but inexorable melancholy, occasionally articulated in words (presumably) straight from McGahern. “The rain comes down, the sun shines, the grass grows, children grow old and die – that’s the holy all of it,” reflects the Shah. Nothing too purple, which would violate the terms of the quiet stoicism in the face of life’s grand rhythms admired by McGahern; Collins, more usually a documentarian, keeps in lyrical step with simple, stirring compositions of cloud-swept hillsides, rams teeming down lanes, and one especially moving sequence when Joe lays out a deceased acquaintance for his funeral.
This reserve means the drama verges on indistinct, with bravura camerawork out of bounds and sometimes timid characterisation that threatens to blur the multiple visitors into one Irish version of Ted, The Fast Show’s groundsman. The reticence is a particular issue with Joe and Kate, whose London allegiances, artistic aims and marital state of affairs are alluded to, but never fully explored. But, despite its somewhat diffuse centre, Collins’ film still has a straightforward poignancy, with subtle and dignified performances across the board.
Beyond the Page: Rediscovering Sinead O’Connor
As two recently released books seek to uncover the truth behind the life of the late Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor, Stephanie Phillips delves into both texts to reveal why O’Connor was more than the stereotypes ascribed to her
By Stephanie Phillips
For years when I was younger, I was consistently overcome by this innate sense of unease that often occurred when the late Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor was brought up in conversation. My feelings weren’t really connected to anything O’Connor had personally done or even based on my opinion of her music, which I hadn’t heard much of at that point but I did like. No, instead O’Connor vicariously made me uncomfortable because of how the world reacted to women like her. They were stereotyped as difficult, uncompromising, complex women, whose unconventional lifestyles and unfiltered opinions made them constant targets. My teenage reactions to O’Connor weren’t because I agreed with how society viewed her, but rather because the judgement she and others like her received demonstrated how little society cared about women.
O’Connor was an iconoclast whose voice could switch between sounding akin to a lilting siren call and then transform into the primal wail of a woman scorned. In any case, her voice was always mesmerising. Her inarguable talent and enthralling personality granted her everything she needed to become famous, a fate sealed following her worldwide hit in the career defining 1990 single ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. Despite O’Connor’s musical gifts, for much of her career she was more well known for being too much. She was too controversial, too divisive, the person people roll their eyes at when they talk. Her most gossiped about ordeal occurred in 1992 during a performance on Saturday Night Live in which she ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II to protest child abuse in the Catholic church. Her appearance was met with anger, celebrities like Joe Pesci threated to attack her, and her career in the US was practically destroyed.
Recently her life has been re-evaluated following her untimely passing in 2023. In scores of obituaries, her friends, contemporaries, and fans of her work have all tried to summarise who Sinéad O’Connor was. Now in death she has been commended for her rebellious spirit, her bravery in talking about child sex abuse, and her wickedly sharp sense of humour. Although her life was now given more context than merely the flurry of controversies she had previously been defined by, much of the writing about her felt like her memory had been flattened, removing all of the sharp edges and contradictions that were a huge part of who she was.
Two recent books have tried to recontextualise O’Connor beyond the black and white depictions of her that have dominated media so far. The Real Sinéad O’Connor by Ariane Sherine attempts to present a thoroughly researched version of O’Connor’s life, plodding through each event in chronological order. Although Sherine uses archival research and new interviews to construct her narrative, the book is too factually rigid to truly delve deeper into O’Connor’s mindset. As a result of this approach, The Real Sinéad O’Connor never picks up the pace to become more than a straight forward document of O’Connor’s whereabouts over the years.