Bowyer, the Irish Elvis who sent them home sweatin’ night after night
IN Send ’Em Home Sweatin’: The Irish Showband Story, Vincent Power wrote: “In the 1960s, when Brendan Bowyer came to your town, he was Elvis.”
BP Fallon, one of the panellists on the Telefis Eireann programme Pickin’ the Pops, didn’t see it like that. “I said in 1964 that he was an Elvis would-be, an unoriginal copyist,” BP says now. “When I met Brendan, he had a chuckle and said ‘Ah, there you are!’ and gave me the warmest hug. A true gent.”
In 2000, Brendan was every bit the gentleman when we met in a hotel in Galway. He recalled how Elvis Presley had sang a few lines from Galway Bay to him in Las Vegas in the early 1970s.
Brendan preserved in vivid perpetuity a moment in Irish cultural history when he sang The Hucklebuck in 1965.
He said how in the 1960s when they started building ballrooms in rural Irish towns with “populations of 1,500 people — and they’d be 3,000 at the ballroom to see us play that song!” The “us” was the Royal Showband (which he was the lead singer of until he formed The Big Eight in 1971).
“The Hucklebuck was one of the first singles I ever bought,” says Louis Walsh. “I played it to death on the record player in Kiltimagh. Brendan, Joe Dolan and Dickie Rock were in my top three.”
“Brendan was a showband pioneer and one of the best performers to come out of that scene and do it successfully in America for many years. I will miss him dearly,” Dickie Rock said yesterday, echoing the thoughts of many about the Waterford boy who made his mark in and upon Ireland with his music.
Daniel O’Donnell was full of praise for Bowyer telling the Sunday Independent: “He was a terrific entertainer, one of the greats.”
Brendan hadn’t lost the showmanship when he walked into a hotel in Eyre Square 10 years ago. He didn’t so much walk as glide, even at 71 years of age. You could imagine
Elvis walking into a hotel on the Vegas strip in the early 1970s, hearing him perform You Gave Me A Mountain, and being so inspired by the performance that he recorded the song himself.
Bowyer was a man of reflection. “I remember Christ said to the Apostles: ‘Canst thou not wait an hour with me?’ I go to church every Sunday in Las Vegas,” he said of where he set up home with his wife Stella and their three children, Brendan Jr, Aisling, and Clodagh. “My father wasn’t Catholic,” he went on. “He ended up playing in Killarney. The Bishop of Killarney came up to him one day and ‘It has come to my attention that you may not be a Catholic.’ He converted to Catholicism after the chat with the bishop.”
Possibly because we were having lunch in Galway city, Brendan recalled how he “went to the Galway Races in 1975. My friend Tom Dunphy left Waterford that day. We were to meet in Bundoran for the Mary From Dungloe festival. Tom was killed in a car crash near Carrick-on-Shannon. I hit the alcohol in a big way after this.”
Bowyer stopped drinking for good after his doctor intervened a few days before a family holiday in Hawaii in November, 1983. “I wanted to have a piss-up in Hawaii,” Brendan told me. “The doctor told me that Hawaii would be there in six months but I wouldn’t unless I stopped.”
The performer said he met young Stella Brennan in July, 1964, at “a kind of hop” at the Oslo in Galway. The following day he called to see her at her family home. “I think at first I was a big deal,” he smiled referring to the fact that he already had three Number 1s in Ireland, Kiss Me Quick in October, 1963, No More at Christmas, 1963 and Bless You in July, 1964.
He and Stella married on June 22, 1967, at Galway Cathedral and had their reception in the Great Southern Hotel. Sitting in that very venue in 2010, Brendan laughed that long before thoughts of marriage could be even entertained there was a strict vetting process. Until they were convinced that the Irish Elvis was right for their daughter, Stella’s parents insisted he stay at the Oslo.
Stella’s mother eventually allowed him to stay at the family house. “I often remember coming back working from Sligo and I’d get in at three or four in the morning and her mother would leave a bit of chicken out for me. It was like going into my own house,” he said.
You can picture the real Elvis and the Irish Elvis having a singsong in heaven tonight. And sending the angels home sweatin’.