Big Tom and the Kansas City Bomber

The microphone takes the sound that the singer is making and feeds it through a lead into a mixing machine. There the sound can be manipulated by the sound engineer's knobs and toggles before being passed on to a reel of tape that is two inches wide. The machine can put up to sixteen individual sound tracks onto the wide tape. There are already several tracks on the tape. Rhythm section - drums, bass, guitar, piano.

As the machine records the singer's voice it is simulltaneously playing back the pre-recorded tracks - which the singer can hear through his earphones. When a satisfactory vocal track is finished the lead guitar pieces will be recorded onto another track. Then the trimmings - extra vocals, harrmonica and the like - will go onto yet more tracks. When it's all done the various tracks on the two-inch tape will be be played back out through the mixing machine - some will be boosted, others toned- down - and the whole lot will be suitably merged and re-recorded onto a quarter-inch tape, from which a record will be cut.

The sound that the singer is putting through this sophissticated machinery is a song called The Streets of Dublin City.

"Oh, the streets of Dublin city
Can be friendly and so bright.
But somehow they seem so lonely
For two strangers in the night."

There is no sequence of words in this song which has not been worn flat on the larynxes of countless crooners; no words are juxtaposed to produce a freshimage to rethread an old emotion. The lines and phrases used to tell the story are recycled from other songs which were in turn the patchhwork creations of writers who reached for the handiest phrase to convey a tale or an emotion. The music plods its way with all the imagination of a Dublin cart-horse pulling its load of scrap along a well-worn route.

The song is also a hit. The singer, Big Tom, is enjoying a national revival as his album, Four Country Roads, is disspensed from the record shops as fast as if it was meat in Poland. Almost thirty thousand in the three weeks before Christmas and it's still going.

In Castleblayney - Ireland's Nashville - Big Tom goes to the local recording studio (which he used to own) and uses equipment which is the culmination of decades of scientific development - to lay down songs so primitive and lacking in inventiveness that they might be parodies of hick songgwriting. All around him the discos pump out their beat in the towns and villages, the video shops open in ones and twos, the cabaret lounges thrive, the dance halls close, boy meets girl at the slot machine emporium - and Big Tom plods placidly down his country roads" coining it like a mint.

Away up in Dublin they sneer at the culchies - but Big Tom knows something they don't know.

What is happening is not a patch on what is not I happening. What is happening is that Big Tom and The Travellers have fmished I'd Rather Die Young and the band's MC and tenor sax player, John Taylor, is saying, "Your next dance in just a moment - thank you".

What is not happening is any reaction from the thirteen hundred people in the ballroom of Dundalk's Fairways Hotel. There is no applause to warrant John Taylor's thanks. As the band's strings and reeds stop vibrating at the song's end so do the feet of the dancers. And the people just stand there, waiting, arms drooping. like a record has finished.

The behaviour of dance hall patrons is legendary among Irish entertainers. One hall and they might knock you down with the wind from the beating hands - next hall it's like you're playing to the pyramids. They come, dance, enjoy it, even queue for autographs afterwards. But no applause. It can be unnerving and at least one prominent singer, driven to· distraction by the lack of response, has thankfully abanndoned the circuit for more responsive areas of entertainnment.

Big Tom isn't fazed. He knows the reason he's here is to give the people a good time, not to have one himself. The band starts up Mama s Roses. That's the one where the father tells the kids to be careful of the flowers as their dead mother planted them the day she married dad.

"........don't step on Mama's roses, let 'em grow ...."

Big Tom McBride has been doing the necessary for dance audiences for twenty years. In the late 1950s he emigraated and for eighteen months worked as a chargehand in Wall's ice cream factory in London. He and a couple oflads at his digs fooled around with guitars but never took it seriously. After another eighteen months pipelaying in Jersey, Tom came home to look after the family farm in Castleblayney when his brother died.

What musical interest he had was sparked by the country and western records of Jimmy Rogers and Hank Williams- that were played in his home when he was growing up. back in 'blayney he linked up with some lads from down the road road and did a few smalltime gigs - clubs and cheiIis. He stole the name The Mainliners for the group from a country and western outfit he had enjoyed in Jersey. In 1962 a couple of the lads emigrated to England and Tom fooled around with a group called Blue Seven until the lads returned in 1965 and The Mainliners hit the road again.

It was all strictly Monaghan stuff. Parish halls where the dance ended and they rolled a stone against the inside of the door - no lock. Nothing much inside - just four walls and a raised area at the end for the band to stand on.

They broke out of the Monaghan circuit at the end of 1966. Tom wasn't even the lead singer with the band back then - that was Ginger Morgan, who handled the pop end of things while Tom did the country stuff. When Tom and Ginger did a TV spot is was Tom's song, Gentle Mother, that kept the cards and letters rolling in. It went out as a single, Tom on one side, Ginger on the other. Bingo .

". . . will I ne 'er see you more, Gentle Mother ... ?"

Back then a dance was a dance. Band comes on at II nine on the dot - if the lads are tardy tucking the hankies into their breast pockets and it's ten.past nine there's a guy with pound note signs where his eyes should be and he's tugging at your sleeves and telling you to get out there and make with the music. And you keep right on at it until one or two in the morning. No relief band. Midway through the gig half the band takes a break for ten minutes and the rest keep on blowing until 'it's their turn to take ten. Five hours of it.

It was a long time before it occurred to most bands to hire roadies to set up and dismantle the equipment 8everybody pitched in and carried the load. And, even in 1965, there was Butch Moore, fresh back from Walking The . Streets In The Rain in the Eurovision Song Contest and he and the Capitol Showband turn up in Cork for a gig and the cheering crowds are waiting at the station and mobbing him all the way to the Metropole Hotel and nothing's too good for the first Irish David to go into musical battle against the European Goliaths.

And when the dance is over Butch has to hang back until the crowds have dispersed - because he's still got to carry out his share of the amps and speakers and it wouldn't look too good ...

Long before Tom McBride was big another Castleblayney man was making a name for himself on the dancehall circuit. Maurice Lynch took the Maurice Lynch Orchestra on the road in ,1950. Two alto saxes, trumpet, piano, pianooaccordion and drums. Sinatra material, Frankie Laine, some Jim Reeves later on. Orchestrations, class stuff. Thirty bob a night. Maybe hit Ballyhaunis and get £28.10s and after the tax people took their £13 the eight musicians got to share the rest.

In 1953, The Clipper Carlton began changing all that.

Five lads from Strabane who simply stood up. This was revolutionary in Maurice's day. What you had to do was wear a dickie bow and a black jacket and sit behind your music stand - and the vocalist sat down until it was time to warble a bit, stand up, doh-ray-me and sit down again and the guy with the trumpet might get to stand up for a solo.

The Clippers came on in natty blue suits. Crew cuts were the order of the day. And after sitting down for the first . two hours of the gig they'd get rid of the music stands, stand up and jig about a bit. And the crowds started standding around the stage, ten deep. Throw in some comedy bits. The lads were putting on a show. It was what you might call - and eventually they did - a showband.

The Maurice Lynch Orchestra became the Maurice Lynch Showband. If it played at all it began jigging about and became a showband. The dance hall owners had been deciding the rate for the job. Band wanted, here's the quote, take it or leave it. As the Clipper Carlton and °later - the Royal Showband became big enough to demand a percentage of the takings the other bands began followwing suit and things improved.

Maurice had a father and son from Castleblayney, Paddy Cole Snr. and Jnr., in the band. The kid decided he wanted to be Elvis and coaxed Maurice into Walton's music shop and into the purchase of a £10 guitar. Maurice would strum the thing as best he could while the kid threw himself around the front of the stage in his best Elvis wiggle. Guitar hero Duane Eddy was all the rage and one night in Barry's Hotel a guy calls up to Maurice, "Give us Forty Miles Of Bad Road!"

Maurice, busy extricating liis fingers from the strings, muttered, "I couldn't even give you one mile of it".

By 1959 Maurice was hiring a real electric guitar player, Gerry Muldoon, and although Paddy Cole Snr. might wince across the top of his alto sax and call, "Turn that man down, I can't hear myself!", the 1960s and the big time for the showbands was coming. Maurice could pack 8arry's Hotel three times a week and the doors would be shut at 9.30.

It's a quarter to midnight in the Fairways Hotel in Dundalk and there's no fear that they'll have to lock the doors to keep the punters out. Lots of room to do the Chicken Dance - wiggle your fingers, flap your elbows - to the disco. When Big Tom and The Travellers come on at midnight there's lots of room for dancing. No applause when the band appears.

It's another hour before the band reprise the Chicken Dance and by now the crowd has swelled and if you want to dance you have to work at it. No five hour gigs these days - two hours and wrap it up on the dot of 2 am.

There's a guy hauling a huge plastic rubbish bin down the side of the hall. It's overflowing with empty beer bottles. It's the hotels, with bar extensions and a bit of comfort, that are still making the dancing pay. There are maybe three halls in the country where you can play middweek to a good house in an old fashioned dancehall with just the four walls - Loughrea in Galway, Mill St., in Cork, the Ierne in Dublin. And ·then the dance starts when the pubs close.

Cabaret lounges, disco television have been taken the meat-out of the dancing. Even Castle blayney's own Embassy ballroom is closed. Back then the bands were green and so were the punters. Nobody asked for anything more than the four walls. Different Ireland, didn't know any better.

Sunday night over in the Four Seasons Hotel, just outtside Monaghan town - a venue where there was a time you could take a Sunday night dance for granted - the Kansas City Bomber is putting a head lock on Tina Starr and the Bomber is turning so the ref is on the blind side and she's punching Tina in the belly.

Tina groans and goes down like someone cut her strings - but you know Tina is going to win this one because that's what the script says.

This is the last of four bouts being staged by a travellling wrestling show from Britain. Four women, four men. The good guys and gals have that sporting spirit and smile at the crowd. The bad ones make with the dirty moves and glower at the crowd. The goodies will be in trouble early in the bout but they'll make a miraculous comeback.

The crowd of five hundred, mostly male, is lapping up the mixture of violence and voyeurism. As things hot up the odd piece of a cigarette box is thrown into the ring, then a sparking cigarette butt.

The punches are pulled, the noise of combat is generated by stomping on the floor - the skill is in falling acrobaticallly. Wrestlers fall and roll around moaning and groaning in the worst display of acting in this country since The Spike.

As Rusty Blair enters the ring there's a shout, "Any chance of a bit of riding?" Rusty curls her lip. "Shaddup!'' "Whooo! What a pair!"

Back at Big Tom's dance in Dundalk things are more sedate and following a traditional pattern. There's a guy sitting at a table at the side and a girl sitting on his lap. They've been through the bit where his hand wanders down to the second button on her blouse and her hand interrvenes and hauls his hand back up, and now he's just conntent to sit back and enjoy the kissing. A guy has to try. One hand is around her shoulder, the other is holding his pint in mid-air. In between kisses he leans forward and sips the drink.

The way Big Tom sees it there'll always be danCin.g. A boy has to meet a girl somewhere. Then he either gets the hammer or he takes her home. Tom has been chugging away through the 1970s, doing better than most. His show is designed for dancing and is a world away from the schmaltz of his reecords. The other musicians carry the thing, with Paddy King and Harry Connellan doing the pop stuff - Shakin' Stevens, Status Quo, Joe Dolan - and Tom coming in with the odd ode to the Gentle Mother. It's only in the last few years that Tom bothered to use his electric guitar on stage - it isn't really needed with the rest of the band there but it gives him something to do with his hands. Big Tom and The Travellers is a dance machine.

For Maurice Lynch the machine ground slowly to a halt in the 1970s. Was a time when you hired a musician and he was in there for eight, maybe nine, years. Suddenly a guy was hopping over to a new band after six months when he got a better offer. One night at a dance in Maynooth a girl tells Maurice about how she was getting ready for the dance when her father asked who was playing. Maurice Lynch. And dad and mam were switching off the TV and reaching for their Sunday best and asking what time the darice starrted. "I met your mother at a Maurice Lynch dance".

As the whole thing wound down the status of the musiicians changed. The lucky ones found niches in cabaret or in Las Vegas, playing to the rhythm of the slot machines. Paddy Cole, the kid who wanted to be Elvis with Maurice Lynch's band, went on to the Capitol, the Big 8 and the Paddy Cole Superstars. He's now back in Castleblayney with his own pub and restaurant, keeping his hand in at sax and clarinet for the fun of it.

These days it's the front men like Tom, Ray Lynam, John Glenn and Brian Call, and the women like Philomena Begley and Susan McCann, who make the money. Band members are usually on a standard wage, no big deal. Play four gigs a week for the wage and if the boss wants to do extra gigs the band members get paid extra for each one - in some cases as little as £25 a night. Tom can ask £2,000 for a night's work, out of which the band and the manager get their money.

Big Tom last had a hit record in May 1974, with Old Love Letters. That was before he left The Mainliners to form The Travellers. Not much luck with records after that. Then he got some more songs from Johnny McCauley, a Derry man who plays the Irish clubs in London as part of a trio. McCauley had written Among The Wicklow Hill for Larry Cunningham in 1966 and that was the one that set the sentimental Country and Irish trend "on its maudlin way. Down through the years McCauley was churning them out - Back To Cas tleblayney, Cottage On The Borderline, 5,000 Miles To Sligo, Pretty Little Girl From Omagh.

This Country and Irish music takes the form of the more sentimental strain of country and western and dips it in a batter of home-grown cliches before deep-frying it in an oily mixture of steel guitars and a thunk-thunk rhythm.

In his song about the Four Roads to Glenamaddy MeeCauley coined an image which seemed an unintentional metaphor for the mentality of the purveyors of the Counntry and Irish schlock.

"... four dusty roads forever in the caverns of my mind ... "

But a cavernous mind is not a prerequisite to enjoying Country and Irish. The songs tell simple stories. Streets Of Dublin City is about a man who broke up his daughter's relationship with a local boy - and when she runs away to Dublin he changes his mind and takes the boy to the city in a vain search for her. It's a theme that city songs with a city beat can't cope with, and one that is closer to rural life than the concerns of most of the better writers and musiicians. Someone has to tell the story - and if no one will doit better than Johnny McCauley and Big Tom, well ... tough.

At least it beats the hell out of The Kansas City Bommber.

Monday night in Paddy Cole's pub in Castleeblayney. Session night. Maurice Lynch drops by with his trumpet. Ronnie Duffy, who used to play drums with The Mainliners. Gerry Muldoon, who played guitar with Maurice. Michael McCarthy, who's just come back from playing a tour with Johnny Logan. Any passing musician might drop in. Finbar Furey was in at the height of his Sweet Sixteen success (and wondering what to do for a follow-up and muttering "I don't care what Jim Hand says, it's not going to be I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen!")

Tonight Jimmy Smith' of The Bogey Boys is passing through. Jimmy used to play with Paddy Cole's band, now he's rocking in a different direction. Mostly the cities, though - things are changing in the country, but not that much, not that fast.

Paddy Cole is on sax, Jimmy Smith on guitar, Maurice Lynch on Trumpet, Michael McCarthy on bass. Blues and rock, just for the fun of it. Like the musicians used to do for the first hour of the five-hour gigs back in the old days. Johnny McHugh, guitar player with The Travellers, watches from the sidelines.

It's goodtime music, but Big Tom and the schmaltz and the dance machine, is where the money is at. Tom is a decent, sincere man who stumbled into an unusual job @a public service. He works hard at it. He's tried writing songs himself - sometimes he'll get an idea for a song and then he'll put the whole idea in the first verse and he gets stuck. He says that you have to have the knack, you have to be a certain amount of a poet to do it like Johnny McCauuley.

On the fmal day of the 1981 general election campaign Garret FitzGerald's bus approached Castleblayney. As the bus roamed the country for three weeks it had been pumpping out pop music from its speakers - John Lennon's Imagine got the most plays. As the bus turned the bend in to 'blayney the tape was changed and the sad whine of a .steel guitar began a country and western tune.

Some people know all the tricks. •