Don't put your daughter on stage, Mrs. King
An interview/profile of Adele King (nee Twink), by Jack Moloney.
There is a saying in Italian dolce fa niente, which means how sweet to do nothing, it is that sweetness I derive from Oliver", is how Adele King explains the fluency and variety she brings to the part of Nancy in the production in
the Olympia at present.
By almost universal acclaim her performance is a spectacular accomplishment. She and others have said it has been as though she has waited all her life to do this part but the comment underestimates the range of talents and vigour she brings to Nancy. Adele King possibly has the innate ability to be as good as any singer/actress not only here but
in London, New York or even Hollywood but whether she will ever realise that potential is problematic.
Noel Pearson who produces Oliver agreed with the assessment of her potential but with characteristic reserve points out that she lacks the refinement of subtlety which many big parts demand, that her voice is not sufficiently outstanding to command the attention on its own.
There is also the problem of her own limited horizons. She still hasn't recovered from the thrill of realising that she could make it outside the world of show bands, she is unremittingly promiscuous with her talent in that she will accept almost any gig anywhere and any television slot any time. All these help to consolidate her deficiencies, probably dooming her to remaining a dazzling fish in a murky small pond.
That she should ever have got onto the stage - in a theatre that is - comes vaguely as a surprise. A few years ago she did an audition for a part in Jacques Brei and afterwards Noel Pearson told her "you were brutal, you know, just brutal. You're a belter (as in showband) and will always be a belter, so you'd better forget it". He was dead right for she had gone into that audition without any thought as to what she was about, as though she thought she was in a hall in Drimoleague trying to make herself heard above the midnight hubbub.
She says. "Although there were many great times on the road with the Big 8 and the Paddy Cole Band, I can
hardly believe my luck that I've managed to break away and survive. The mind-blowing dreariness of the endless travelling, the same old male chat over and over again reliving the Norman conquests and my God the same old songs and that dreadful country and western music."
In over 8 years of travelling around the dancehalls of Ireland there were no more than two or three gigs that she enjoyed. It was so bad at the end that she opted out of the Paddy Cole band and went into the Gaiety as a backing singer to Philomena Begley for two weeks. She likes Philomena Begley on a personal basis but the country and western music she finds anathema.
Her first ambition was to be a vet. She had grown up in a very musical household and at the age of 6 starred in pantomime in the Gaiety Sinbad the Sailor and did so for eight years afterwards. She also did the Jury's Cabaret during the summer months. She went to S1. Louis Convent, Rathmines, where there was a great musical tradition and from there joined the "Young Dublin Singers" and became a soloist with them.
The Maxi, Dick and Twink group emerged out of the Young Dublin Singers. They were playing in the Gaiety one summer and Fred O'Donovan came onto the stage one night after a performance and said he wanted backing singers for recordings. He broke the girls into groups of three and then chose one group. Adele King was not one of those three but almost as an afterthought Fred made a switch and that became the trio. The other two girls were Irene McCoubrey and Barbara Dixon.
Initially the three did vocal backings for showbands in recording sessions and then in 1967 Fred O'Donovan suggested they do a spot in Gales of Laughter and they were launched as a group. It was probably the unusual name and their youth which attracted a lot of the press attention initially. They did light pop numbers, a lot of the Mary Hopkins variety and starred in cabaret shows all over the place and, had a ball.
They were still in their mid-teens and inevitably there were clashes over formal education with teachers and parents. One of the teachers kept saying to Adele "you are the one that wants to be a doctor, how do you expect to get anywhere if you're out all night?" She didn't carry much weight.
She explains: "Can you just imagine us as teenagers flitting about the cabaret spots like we were? It helped us wonderfully with the boys at the time as well. We fancied a few fellows who played rugby for St. Mary's College and used to manage to be outside the grounds after their practice sessions. We kept this very quiet from our parents.
"I remember after being on the Late Late Show one Saturday night walking along the road near our home in Templeogue with my father and mother on the following Sunday afternoon. Suddenly around the corner the group of fellows we knew at St. Mary's were walking towards us. I think they noted the look of panic that registered on my face and they passed by without a twitch of recognition but just as they were getting out of earshot one of them turned around and said 'don't put your daughter on the stage Mrs. King.' I explained it all away as the price of fame."
It remained her intention to be a vet. They always had dogs and horses at home and she wanted to work with animals. ("I know, I know, I did end up working with animals, but I mean the four legged type.") She had always prided herself on her horsemanship and indeed still does - "I am better on a horse than on a stage." In spite of the distractions she did well academically at school but by the time she had done her Leaving her singing career had taken over.
They were massively ripped off in the Maxi, Dick and Twink days. She remembers ending up with one shilling and three pence after a week-end of cabaret gigs. "Our manager got, shall we say, a substantially larger take from our efforts."
There was another occasion when they had done a series of programmes on RTE and months afterwards they found a cheque for £900 on the floor of the manager's office, which they had. never heard about and clearly were never intended to hear anything of.
Her experience with managers has been universally bad. "There aren't any managers in Ireland, what they are is mere booking agents. They don't take any interest in an artist's career, they don't concern themselves with the development of an artist's talents, they don't even keep press notices or reviews.
"I feel you people in journalism let off these managers too lightly. There is a lot of petty corruption going on in this business and it never gets exposed. The musicians, who are the victims of this, can't speak out because they know they will lose their bookings if they break line and the journalists seem to be in the pay of the managers for the most part, and if not in the pay of the managers, at least in cahoots."
The Maxi, Dick and Twink group came to an end in Canada in the freezing snows of the winter of 1970. They had grown up by then and to a certain extent had grown apart. It was no longer fun then and there was a great deal of bickering and rowing. They couldn't agree on costumes, on music, rehearsals were nerve-wracking. They were beginning to hate it. Their humour wasn't improved by the terrible climate in Canada and the gigs they were booked on were out of this world - almost literally. "We seemed to be on an endless safari through the most abandoned outposts in the arctic part of the country. Our nerves got more and more on edge."
They were accompanied on that tour by four fellows from the "Bye Laws" band. Together they were known as "The Toybox". The boys got more and more disillusioned by the bickering and the tension which affected them all and they announced that they were breaking away. "This was in the William Pitt Hotel in Chatham, Manitoba, a one horse town which even the horses had left!".
They invited Adele to go with them and she decided almost instantly to do so. Naturally the other two girls were upset but they too realised that it was over for them as a group.
When they came back to Ireland that Spring they started to play around the cabaret joints as "The Bye-Laws" and then one night in The Embankment in Tallaght Brendan Bowyer. Tom Dunphy and their manager, T. J. Byrne, came in and sat in the audience. The boys knew immediately why they were there but it never dawned on Adele. Afterwards T. J. Byrne and Brendan Bowyer came and joined them at the bar and Bowyer asked if she would like to join the Big 8 as their female vocalist for their season in Las Vagas which was just about to begin.
"Naturally my head was turned by such an offer but I had vowed never to return to America because of our terrible experience in Canada. I was assured that Las Vagas was different but it took a while to persuade me. There were several meetings in the Northbrook Hotel, where the band used to stay at the time, and several telephone calls to home before I eventually agreed ."
The Royal Show band had broken up and Bowyer was forming a new band which was to include Paddy Cole who had come from the Capitol.
The first year with the Big 8 was wonderful. They had to be escorted by Gardai into packed dancehalls with hundreds outside unable to get in. There was a great deal of media attention because the Big 8 was the leading showband at the time and showbands in the early seventies were still news. And then of course there was Las Vagas.
"It was a throbbing, vital, fantastic place, totally unreal of course and mostly phoney, but nevertheless exhilarating for somebody prone to unreality and excitement."
They were genuinely a big hit there. They starred in The Stardust complex which consisted of a casino of course - the whole point of all the entertainment in Las Vagas is to attract people into the casinos to lose their money - a hotel, bars, night club, restaurants, etc.
They did three shows a night, the first starting around 8 o'clock and finishing around 3 .00 am.
After the show it would be daylight only then did the fun begin. "We used to go out playing tennis or skiing on a nearby lake or hold pool parties or other kinds of parties. It was hectic. I did everything one could possibly do
in Vegas - and more. And for the first two years I loved every minute of it.
"But bit by bit the whole thing began to pall and I became very unhappy. I have tended to blame Brendan for it all and I'm sure this is unfair but I still can't explain otherwise what went wrong.
"In the first place the music was mostly bland. Some of us, notably Paddy Cole and myself, tried to slot in more interesting music to the shall: but bit by bit Brendan would have it removed. He wanted the stuff which he was sure would go down well with the punters. He then started to take away my favourite numbers from the act. He seemed to get jealous of my popularity and reputation. It was an very petty and I'm sure I went paranoid but gradually I became very unhappy.
"I wasn't the only one upset however. Paddy Cole for instance was disillusioned by what appeared to us as the complete abandonment of musical standards. He used to be introduced each evening by Tom Dunphy as the band leader and eventually said he wanted this practice to stop as he was ashamed of the gunge that was being churned out.
"I also began to put on a lot of weight at this time. I can't explain why it happened - it may have something to do with my depression generally. However it occurred over two or three months and added further to my unhappiness. Brendan kept on making references to it as though he himself were some waif-like nymph and this annoyed me ever more."
She actually physically collapsed one night before going on stage and woke up in hospital - the time had come for the Big 8 and her to part. But her woes didn't end there. She had done frightful damage to her vocal chords during the four years in the band and had to undergo the operation recently undergone by Dana and Anna McGolderick to have the damage corrected. It was a very delicate operation but proved entirely successful for Adele King - she spent about 8 months in all recovering from both the operation and the exhaustion and depression caused by the Big 8 experience.
She was entirely disillusioned with the showband scene and determined that she was finished with it until one afternoon there was a knock on her front door in Templeogue. She answered it in jodhpurs and an anorak looking "like the wreck of the Hesperus." It was Paddy Cole to say, he had left the Big 8 himself, four others had broken away too, that they were star ting a new band and wanted her to front it.
"I don't believe I would have entertained anybody else in the world with a suggestion like that other than Paddy Cole at the time. He had been my closest buddy in the Big 8 and had been a great morale booster in the depressing times. He was a wonderful musician, the kind of person I wanted to work with but the thought of going back on the road was absolutely preposterous."
"Paddy said I had to do it and that I had to make up my mind quickly. I enquired how long I had to think about it and he said half a minute, the lads were waiting in The Old Stand for the news. I said "no Paddy I can't do it" and he disappeared out the door saying 'I knew you'd' be with us Twink, the lads will be delighted' and that was that."
She went on the road to dancehalls all over the country, night after night, week after week.
She recalls: "With the Big 8 we used to travel all the time in a wagon. The fellows would talk all the time about their women and the sports results. Each had a higher success rate than the other, each had a more incredible story than the other. Not indeed that there wasn't a good deal of fact behind a lot of it. It is true that there are hundreds of groupies around the country whose sale purpose in life seems to be to make it with a showband member in the wagon after a dance - there was no availability problem.
"Some of the chat about it all was entertaining but a lot of it was monotonous and a little of it sordid. But it went on and on and on.
"There was a lot of great crack in those days in spite of the tedium. There was a great camaraderie among the musicians of all bands then and very little rivalry. Frequently we used to bump into other bands on stay overs. For instance if we were playing in two venues in the Limerick area we would stay at the Parkway Motel there, which was a centre for showbands. It would be quite usual for four or five bands to be staying there on the one night and the crack would go on often until 7 o'clock or 8 o'clock in the morning.
"The kind of music that was played got worse and worse as the years went by, at least from my point of view. There was constant pressure from managers and ballroom proprietors to tend more and more towards country and western and I hated it. I was regarded as a bit of a snob by some of the lads. The Susan McCann and Philomena Begley type stuff is fine for those who like it, and I didn't.
"Most of the audiences were rural and, partly for that reason, most of the musicians were from rural Ireland also. I often felt somewhat an outsider and certainly there was a fairly consistent theme in ridicule of me "too smart for us country folk", etc.
"The fact that I couldn't disguise my abhorrence of many of the physical conditions we had to endure probably didn't help either. We were expected often to dress for a show in in outhouse or shed. Where there was provision in the dancehall it was invariably appalling 'with compensation running down the walls' as one of our lads used to put it.
"I remember one night doing a gig for a carnival committee. The entire committee came into my dressing room with bottles of stout and sat down just as I was about to undress. When I protested they said 'ah ha, sure we're all married men ourselves'.
"My costumes weren't much appreciated either. I used to dress up in these very jazzy outfits which certainly fitted the type of music I would have liked to sing. You'd be in the middle of a number when you'd notice an old trollop down the hall say to the boyfriend, feeling a little insecure, you'd think she was wearing that for a bet. You got good at lip reading in the showband business and there were many times I felt like going down and smashing their faces.
"Singing to a dance audience is basically a very demoralising occupation. The vast majority of the audience aren't interested in the music, half of them have their backs to you, the same old faces come round again and again with the same vacant look and the comments about the women singers are almost always derisive - the boys want to make a point at the girls to prove they aren't distracted, the girls want reassurance.
"I remember doing a gig in Drumkeen, this must have been sometime in 1975 when I was nearing the end of my tether. I had persuaded Paddy Cole to include Evergreen the theme song from A Star /s Born by pointing out that there was a great flute solo in the middle of the song. Paddy knew that this wasn't punter stuff but he agreed - I think because he was keen on the solo, which he always played magnificently.
"The opening four bars of the song were also on flute and Paddy had just played them. I was about to begin singing when I suddenly became conscious of what was happening around me. It was the beginning of a set, the boys were scratching themselves on one side of the hall about to .lurch across to the girls at the other side who were busily preening themselves. Nobody had the remotest interest in what we were doing on stage, nobody had heard Paddy's beautiful opening bars and nobody was going to hear the song I was about to sing, although I had put a lot of rehearsal time and effort into it.
"It was a moment which remained frozen in my memory: the absolute absurdity of what it was we were doing" .
It is this background which gives dolce fa niente now with Oliver special significance for her. The times were rough for a while when she made the break but she couldn't have gone on and Paddy Cole had known this instinctively for even longer than she had. He actually had begun to hate it himself and shortly after she left, he did too.
She started to do cabaret spots. She got a good break with the Earl Gill television series in 1977 and then almost by accident got into comedy. She was invited to do voices for the satirical radio show Taking Off. She had always been into impersonations since her childhood - and knew she was good at them. But the thought of doing anything like that professionally never crossed her mind.
"During the years on the road I used to take off our managers, other members of the band, hotel managers and the like. I had great fun in Las Vagas doing this. I used to take off the band members wives, always behind their backs of course.
"One night we were in one of the Stardust restaurants between shows and one member of the band was up at the bar with this huge buxom blonde chatting her up ferociously. There were telephones on all the tables and at the bar, so I phoned through and had this person paged.
"I put on his wife's voice and said I was absolutely shocked to walk in and see his carry on, that I was returning home to Ireland the following morning and that I had never been so humiliated in all my life. He was completely terror struck and fumbled his way towards a pathetic explanation of what was going on but he was completely taken in by the impersonation. He was looking around the bar and restaurant frantically to see where his wife was calling from when he saw me and Anglea Lamey, one of the Royalettes attached to the Big 8, nearly under the table with laughter. It was only then he copped it and went absolutely out of his mind with fury." (By the way, Angela Lamey was introduced from the' stage every night at every show by Brendan as "Angela Lamey from Killarney" - she was from Drimnagh and there was no disguising it.)
"I think I am a fairly observant person of other people's mannerisms, voice inflections, nervous habits and the like. I just find myself watching these things in other people almost unconsciously. Impersonation is merely a caricature of people's eccentricities both in physical mannerism and voice. It's an exaggeration of these elements. "
While the Live Mike show displays her versatility it also somehow cheapens her. It never seems to occur to her why on earth she's doing what she's doing.
She has become a huge success in cabaret, largely because of the Live Mike exposure. She does private gigs for large business organisations - for instance she flew to Florida last year for a week to do just one cabaret spot during a Smurfitt company business conference. She is very pricey nowadays but her expenses are considerable - sound equipment, a band, costumes, etc.
She talks about these engagements with a naive enthusiasm. It seems to have nothing to do with the progression of her career and draws out all those elements in her make up which will militate against her emergence as a great singer/actress. It was completely fortuitous that Noel Pearson decided to do Oliver, although once he did so decide he was in no doubt about who should get the Nancy part. Nevertheless this underlines the entirely accidental nature of her career's development.
In spite of all this there is a lot of mischievous pleasure in observing somebody come out of the raucous, course background of the wild showband business here and compete with the best from the "theatre" world. One only hopes that the confined horizons and ambitions of the dancehall environment won't stifle a talent which deserves so much.