When Big Tom appeared on stage, it was like turning on a switch – the floor was heaving
THE County Hall in Mullingar was heaving that Sunday night and it is still lodged in my mind as a seminal memory of a bygone era in Ireland. Big Tom and The Mainliners had come to town.
In those days Mullingar was a showband town. You’d see Joe Dolan driving down Dominick Street to meet his manager Seamus Casey in a flashy yellow sports car. Tommy and Jimmy Swarbrigg and The Times showband were the pretenders building up a following of their own, playing a brand of pop music that would take them to the Eurovision.
And there were other bands coming and going in their white Transit vans in the early hours of the morning from venues far and wide.
Although I was born in Longford, I grew up in Dublin and had worked briefly as a reporter in ‘New Spotlight’ magazine, then the bible of the music business, before coming to write a so-called ‘pop column’ for the ‘Westmeath Examiner’.
With the youthful superiority of a semi-city slicker, I was inclined to look down on the showbands. At the time my uncle owned what was known in those far-off days as ‘a singing lounge’ called The Ennell in Mullingar and I moonlighted as a barman on busy nights.
Monday was the “showband night off” and band members of The Drifters, The Times and other lesser bands congregated in the big back lounge and played the music they liked, rather than the music they had to. It was then I realised that these were not ‘three-chord trick merchants’ but superb musicians who could play pop, jazz, rock and soul.
The lounge was always packed for those Monday night performances – but that wasn’t what the dancing public of that era wanted to hear.
Big Tom and The Mainliners were in another bracket altogether – in a way they were the real heirs to the céilí band, and it was music the more sophisticated ‘townies’ looked down on.
Observers often looked at the ‘urban/rural divide’ as Dublin versus the rest of the country. But there were other hierarchies, and if Mullingar was a showband town, the vast rural plains of the midlands tended to favour this hybrid brand of music created by Big Tom and Larry Cunningham.
It was a peculiar mixture of country and western chords and timing combined with sugar-coated sentimental Irish ballads, typified by Big Tom’s hit song, ‘Gentle Mother’.
It was Johnny Cash without the sophistication.
What became known as the ‘Swinging Sixties’ hadn’t really arrived in Ireland, yet. With just Radio Éireann and Teilifís Éireann, it wasn’t even two channel land. It was an era when the Catholic Church called the shots and the dance bands disappeared to England or America during Lent, because dancing – always viewed with distrust and suspicion by the Church – was banned during the ‘holy season’.
The night Big Tom came to Mullingar was unusual in some respects. He and The Mainliners usually played the Lakeland Ballroom, which had been built, like the Lidl or Aldi stores of today, by Jim and Albert Reynolds, on the outskirts of Mullingar. It was a big hangar of a place with a car park in front and more suited to the vast crowds from all over the midlands who followed Big Tom.
The County Hall, on the other hand, was a more intimate venue, right in the middle of the town.
That night Paddy Dolan, Joe and Ben’s brother, who ran the dances, was on sentry duty at the entrance, making sure nobody was getting in without paying their entrance fee.
AT first it seemed that he had miscalculated as the place was half full, but straight away I noticed that most of those present were women and girls and they were still coming in at a lively rate. They were either congregated around ‘the mineral bar’ or lining the walls as the warm-up band went through their desultory routine. A few of the more energetic and outgoing were already jiving on the dance floor.
Then, when the pubs closed at 10pm, as they did on a Sunday night in those days, there was a surge of people, mostly men, through the door. It was a simple calculation, they might not have cared too much for the music, but they weren’t going to miss the biggest congregation of women gathered in one place, apart from last Mass in the Cathedral.
Then suddenly The Mainliners were on stage and the twang of country guitar and the wail of saxophone split the air.
When Big Tom took the stage after the first tune ended, he appeared on stage in a velvet suit full-formed, launching into ‘Ashes of Love’ and a stream of hits, ‘The Sunset Years of Life’, ‘I Love You Still’, ‘Old Love Letters’.
It was like turning on a switch. Suddenly the dance floor was packed with a swirling mass of humanity, men and women jiving in circular patterns, skirts swirling, hair flying, arms aloft as bodies twisted in intricate rhythms.
The tempo rarely changed. The music and lyrics were simply, rhythmic and sentimental. When the set ended, the crowd seemed to part like the Red Sea.
Apart from married couples who stood together, the men went to one side and the women to another until the music started and there was a surge from the male side of the hall to the female side.
“Not you ... you,” I heard one man shout, as he tried to seize the partner of his choice from the melee.
What became known as ‘the dance hall days’ were no place for the faint-hearted or sensitive.
In the years that followed, I saw Big Tom in other places, like the Granada in Granard and the Cloudland in Rooskey.
It wasn’t my cup of tea, or even bottle of lemonade, which was the only form of liquid stimulation to be had in those far-off days. But I always leaned against a pillar mesmerised at the effect this big Monaghan man with a smiling slab of a face had on the dancers.
The music rarely changed although he added ‘Four Roads to Glenamaddy’ and other songs that reduced the emigrant dancers in The Galtymore and elsewhere to tears.
Years later, when the lemonade had given way to stronger stuff, we used to sing a verse of a song borrowed from Big Tom which ended in the chorus:
‘When there’s frost on the rooftops
‘There’s fire down below’
I never discovered who wrote these particular lyrics, but perhaps I should have paid closer attention.
Maybe there was more to the Big Man than I realised all those years ago.