Women threw their underwear at Big Tom. Men just saw a trusted neighbour
HIS funeral on Friday was not the final gig in Big Tom’s 2018 diary. A festival is planned for September, when a statue of the local hero will be unveiled beside the Market Square in Castleblayney. The bronze figure was to have its first public outing at a country-music festival when Big Tom made a guest appearance on stage. But after his death, it was decided to honour the old showbiz tradition that the show must go on – and it will, probably on September 22.
Sculptor Mark Richards travelled twice from the UK to meet Big Tom at home in Castleblayney, and a preparatory model was finished before Big Tom died last week. Cast in bronze, the statue (it will be 130% of Big Tom’s size in life) will remind passers-by of Blayney’s bestloved son for the next century or more... And as would be expected of a street art project in Monaghan, a rigorous competition meant a low ceiling budget was secured at €85,000.
It was not a State funeral, but it was a great funeral, a fitting send-off by his friends and neighbours on Friday for a man of no malice who was utterly without pretention or guile. His popularity and achievements were rarely reported in the metropolitan media without a condescending sneer or a sly kick.
It was heartening last week to see his family, friends and neighbours mirror the countless thousands who saw Big Tom as one of their own when he appeared on stage. No one was more surprised at his phenomenal success than Big Tom who was still asking: ‘Why, why me?’ for 52 years after his first number one hit Gentle Mother in 1966.
I first saw him as a teenager in a hall called Pond Park near Lisburn in Co. Antrim, with my then-girlfriend Florence. The big man’s perers formance on the baritone sax, which needs a lot of wind to get a satisfactory rasp, was not as compelling as his country ballads. Florence was not impressed, but I was fascinated by how the band’s backto-basics performance and presentation seemed to gel with the dancers in the venue.
As a teenage promoter, I dressed to impress my city-born peers rather than seek solidarity with a rural country band. So persuading Big Tom and the Mainlin- ers to play for me was more a matter of cash on the table than small talk about tractors. The band filled the ballrooms and meeting them was an early education, worth more to me than a PhD from the Harvard Business School. Their manger, John McCormack, who drove the local bread delivery van also managed the GAA team in Oram where Big Tom played football, and he gave me dates with the band. I also saw them in ballrooms around Ireland and across the UK; and realised that they had something almost indefinable, but essential, for a successful band: total empathy with their audience.
No one, not their predecessors as kings of country and Irish the Mighty Avons, faced such a deluge of sneering and dismissal as the Mainliners. And no one, not Larry Cunningham or any of the other big-name country singers was ridiculed as mercilessly as Big Tom.
Their box-office numbers soared over other top bands and that led to scurrilous rumours from rival band managers and musicians. But harsh criticism of their musical abilities was overshadowed by darker lies.
Big Tom’s father was a Protestant and his mother a Catholic and at the height of the northern Troubles in the 1970s, word went around that Big Tom was a member of the B-Specials, the paramilitary-style auxiliary police in Northern Ireland, long since discredited and disbanded. It was a malicious lie specifically designed to damage the band and destroy its singer. And potentially lethal at a time when very bigoted and stupid people had access to military-grade weapons.
Even more incredible stories had Big Tom close to political parties but, when reduced to acronyms, I believe that the big man from Oram was more GAA than FF or FG. Yet none of the salacious gossip ever got traction: what you see is what you get with Big Tom – sectarianism, or partisan party politics, just wasn’t in him.
The long march of Big Tom and the Mainliners took them to the UK,
THE BRONZE SCULPTURE WILL REMIND PEOPLE OF CASTLEBLAYNEY’S BEST-LOVED SON
to ballrooms where the clocks stopped when the dancers left Ireland, sometimes decades before. Back in the 1970s, navvies who worked on the roads and the women in domestic service in London crammed the Irish ballrooms to meet other rural Irish people and dance to Irish showbands.
The Galtymore in Cricklewood north London particularly fascinated me: it could have been rural Cavan, Mayo or Kerry in the 1950s or early 1960s. The communion between Big Tom and the dancers was almost holy: he was their kind of man and they were his sort of people. As manager, Mr McCormack made sure his clients got every penny they were due and the band took the lion’s share of the box-office takings, in cash, everywhere they appeared. Their earnings didn’t match the poultry-and-egg industry in Monaghan, but Big Tom and the Mainliners were earning probably 10 times more than the Taoiseach’s salary through those lean years.
They wore their success lightly and the only suggestion of material comfort or wealth was their big new cars lined up like private jets beside a big barn of a ballroom.
Big Tom and the Mainliners were only one of many popular bands who made a lot of money from the showband boom in Irish ballrooms through the 1960s and 1970s. Without naming them, it is safe to say that the most famous of them all drove flashy cars, bought expensive houses and lived pop-star lifestyles.
They owed their good fortune to the Catholic Church who lobbied the government to outlaw dances in houses, claiming them to be ‘unhygienic, fire hazards’. It was a cover story for the hierarchy who were worried about a loosening of public morals when young people of both genders danced to the devil’s music: jazz. The Public Dance Hall Act of 1936 required any building used for dancing to be licensed – and church and parochial halls became the new entertainment centres.
After the Clipper Carlton and Royal Showband, Joe Dolan and the Drifters and the Miami filled the licensed ballrooms and provided a matchmaking service for an entire generation.
After a decade of phenomenal success, Big Tom left the Mainliners in 1975 to front his own band, the Travellers. The hit records continued, and so did a relentlessly punishing schedule of playing ballrooms around the country. At its most hectic, he said he had worked every single night for a month; and the nightly grind was taking its toll.
It has been reported that women threw their underwear (Bridget Jones-style knickers, according to jealous rivals now) at him on stage. And men saw him more as a trusted neighbour than a libidinous lad.
Almost inevitably for a rich and famous performer in the 1990s, he found himself in a very sordid court case that found no fault with him. And in 2004, Big Tom made a €125,000 settlement with the Revenue when he was found to have a bogus non-resident account.
He sold records by the skipful – more than a million by 1980 – and he was a business partner in his record company. He also continued as a farmer on the family land in Oram and he quietly bought the pitch and pavilion for the local GAA team he had played for when he was younger.
Weariness and threatening ill health prompted Big Tom’s departure from the Travellers in 1989, but there was always another television special or charity gig and he found it hard to say ‘no’.
Still, he was a regular around Castleblayney passing the time of day to passers-by or stopping for a chat with neighbours. Last year he took it easier or, more likely, wife Rose, who was much more worldly and sophisticated, deflected requests for favours from him.
Last November sculptor Mark Richard travelled from the UK to meet Tom at the family home in Oram, and this is when the idea for the presentation of the sculpture struck him: ‘Big Tom will be sitting, as he often did at the end of a gig to speak to fans. I came over to meet him again three weeks ago and something had left him.’ Rose died in January.
Mark Richards is concerned about getting the statue finished in time for its unveiling in September.
The statue will not make the mighty Monaghan man immortal, but Big Tom will have an honoured place in Castleblayney for who knows how long... a century? Maybe even longer...