The Showband Must Go On

The man shook his head, sighed, and then nodded resignedly, as if trying to decide which expression of disgust best suited the occasion. "Where would you get it, Brendan?", he asked. "My God. Where would you? Coast to Coast." He made a noise like he'd just discovered a fly in his drink. "Bbwatttshhh!!!!"

"I'm sick", said Brendan Bowyer, looking up from the autograph he was signing.

"I'm sick, too", said the man. "It's deplorable."

"They were number eight tonight", sighed Bowyer, and continued signing autographs.

Coast to Coast is the group which recorded The Hucklebuck, Bowyer's old hit, and took it up the charts in Britain. This is the Embankment in Tallaght and it's pushing 1 am. Bowyer has been doing a one night stand and he's now at the side of the stage signing autographs, bestowing hugs and trading expressions of affection with the stragglers. A man pats him on the shoulder.

"Brendan, you were as good as ever".

"John! How are you doing? How about the kids?"

The man points to a group around a table twenty yards away. Bowyer, at 41, is at an age when the kids of old friends have stopped being kids and are old enough to come along and see what all the fuss was about. Of the names to be conjured with on the show band circuit in the 1960s Brendan Bowyer was the one that seemed to have landed the biggest prizes. Dickie Rock and Butch Moore may have cracked Eurovision and settled successfully into cabaret, Joe Dolan records may be big on the black market in Russia - but only Bowyer had earned the right to finger snap his way on stage to the strains of Viva Las Vegas. The name that had filled the Crystal and the National and every other ballroom of note was now up there in lights alongside Sinatra, Tom Jones, Sammy Davis. . . Elvis.

It started at the Desert Inn in 1967. Bowyer and the Royal Showband had been making trips to the States to play Bill Fuller's circuit through the "Irish" cities, New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia. Fuller arranged to book them into the Desert Inn in Las Vegas for the first season - and the Stardust the following year and every year until 1975. Then they moved to the Aladdin, where they stayed until last year. Then, they made a deal in October to move into the MGM Grande, a step up - until the hotel went on fire two weeks later.

The band had changed in the meantime, from The Royal to the Big 8. But that didn't mean much to the yanks. They remained "The Irish Showband", a name they have registered and trade under in the States. They now remained The Irish Showband in search of a venue. There's an outside chance of The Tropicana in Las Vegas in July, but it will probably be September before Bowyer goes back to the States to perform, and then it may be on tours of the Irish cities.

In the meantime, the old reliable, The Hucklebuck, was re-released in Europe and EMI told Bowyer's manager T. J. Byrne, that the record was doing fine, and Byrne told Bowyer that Dutch TV wanted him for three shows, and Bowyer went on The Live Mike and when asked about the record said that it was, uh, oh, Number 3 in Holland. Three TV shows, in the confusion, became Number 3 . . . so the story goes. And then it turned out that it was another group, Coast to Coast, that was having the success and they haven't got the real Hucklebuck dance steps, the original ones, says T. J. (The Hucklebuck was recorded in April 1949 by Frank Sinatra and there was at least one other version before Bowyer's) and if what we have here isn't a streak of bad luck T. J. doesn't know what is.

So, Brendan plays the Embankment tonight and The National next week and dancehalls and cabaret wherever and whenever in between. Tonight, RTE producer John McColgan is here to talk about a one-hour 'Special. Earlier tonight, Coast to Coast have been performing The Hucklebuck on Top of the Pops. Everyone who has seen Bowyer's version swears there's no comparison. None.

It begins very loud, very fast. Bowyer pushing through the curtain at the back, bouncing down from the front of the low stage, the three women lining up behind him, the chant of Vivaaaaaaah, Las Vegas! snapping out across the audience like a whiplash, every limb moving with the beat, every instrument in the band at full throttle. And immediately into another Presley roarer, Suspicious Minds. And, in an old but still honourable tradition, the jacket is thrown off, to the accompaniment of whistles from the audience.

The three women are the Hucklebuck Girls. In the audience tonight are two of the originals, Phil Cahill and Bernie Keogh, who wriggled like snakes, waddled like ducks, cause that's what y'do when y'do the Hucklebuck, when Bowyer first had a hit with the song in 1965. Today, the choreography has been updated by Phil Cahill to include what T. J. calls "the punk thing, the things the kids do with their hands". The women go backstage to change after the first song.

A Brendan Bowyer show is like a play. It has clearly defined acts, pacing, dramatic tension. After the whambang opening there is a pause for reflection, for a calming down, an injection of substance, for giving the excitement an overlay of sentiment. The Rare O ul Times, Summer In Dublin and another recounting of the bold exploits of brave Father Murphy at Boolavogue.

No warning, bang! into the Presley medley. Shirt collar turned up, one arm windmilling before stopping to point dramatically at nothing in particular on the ceiling. Since my baby left me . . . Blue Suede Shoes, Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock and his shirt buttons are open to the top of his paunch, he's sliding across the floor on his knees and a woman from the audience is reaching out to rub the hair on his chest below the big gold "B" that hangs from the chain around his neck.

All Shook Up, I Can't Help Falling In Love, and the Hucklebuck girls are back again, dancing behind Bowyer. their hands jerking away at the air as if they were milking extraordinarily tall cows. Bowyer throws in a bit of karate, a standard item in Presley medleys. Then, American Trilogy, a yankee tear-jerker that follows Dixie (the South), Glory Hallelujah (the North), with All My Trials. In Vegas, Bowyer usually finishes with this set, adding on America The Beautiful. And there's an old Shakin' Stevens number while the Girls, this time wearing clothes with holes torn in the most unlikely places, go through their shimmies again. And it's time for another change of pace.

The classic showband format, in which all the members of the group get to do their party pieces, is part of the show in Vegas, but tonight there are changes due to illness. D. J. Curtin, who specialises in Torn Jones imitations, and Frankie Carroll, who provides a Country and Western input, are not here tonight. But the showband must go on.

Paddy Reynolds moves down front for a bit of fooling about with his clarinet. And then plays Annie's Song on a tin whistle and the theme from Dallas on a coronet and sings Shaddapya Face. And Mary Clifford, another of the Big 8 (there are for some reason only seven behind Bowyer), sings Super Trouper and Bowyer is behind her doing harmonies and if the guy who used go around taking your picture and putting it in a plastic keyring and selling it to you for ten bob would just come in now we'd all get our youth back. . .

Then it's time for the wind up. First, the nostalgia bit. Don't Lose Your Hucklebuck Shoes, the 1965 follow-up to his big hit; Kiss Me Quick from 1963, his first chart success; I Ran All The Way Home, the flipside of the big hit; The Holy City, from 1968. And arms are raised in the audience, hands linked, swaying. A couple of women in their late thirties, with ringside seats, are smiling and shaking their heads and their lips know the shape of every word Bowyer is singing.

The Hucklebuck, and the Girls are back and Bowyer is putting everything into it. He sometimes pauses before attempting a musical phrase, approaching it as if it had the weight of a train. And then his throbbing voice, his extraordinarily mobile face and every whirling limb or twist of flesh on his frame seem to be straining in unison to lift the musical train and hurl it out there at the audience. A half dozen women jump up from the audience to join Bowyer and dance along.

And every artifice is employed in the final stretch, the patriotic bit. The Town I Love So Well, in which he shakes his head and stares at the floor in wonder at the fix we've got ourselves into, like someone who has had an overdose of Robert Kee. "And it's my hope that with a little luck and a little prayer we'll get to see a little peace in our lifetime. . . and, so, I'd like you to join me . . " And many in the audience are standing, more with arms raised, a few with fists clenched, for A Nation Once Again.

In Las Vegas the band has to throw in some other stuff during this section of the show. Danny Boy is an essential. Galway Bay and the like. And the Hucklebuck Girls dress in green and do hornpipes and' reels. And the Las Vegas audience likes it as much as the Embankment audience liked tonight. A song for sadness, one for happiness, another for nationalism, a bit of humour, pacing and a good strong beat backing the whole thing up. And the effort and commitment written on Bowyer's face is the clincher. Can't go wrong.

The showband wave has long receded, the twilight culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s which gave birth to it having passed on. The best of the sometimes bizarre talents which the showband era demanded were left after the wave subsided and found their niches where they could. Bowyer's is in Vegas most of the year, doing his lounge act three times a night, six nights a week.

As the final note of A Nation Once Again died away, Bowyer was thanking the audience and doing a flit through the back curtain. Before the audience could get going a decent encore chant, the band had started up the National Anthem and you don't argue with that. An old trick you've well learned if you've been twenty years on the road.