Prince show as easy as ABC for Declan!
January 1993
Like most people, Wexfordman Declan Lowney doesn’t welcome phone calls shocking him from sleep in the middle of the night. Unless, of course, it’s a call asking him to fly over to the U.S. to take the helm of a TV special on His Majesty of Rock, Prince.
Such was the request last month from television giants ABC for the London-based Wexford townie, who’s come a long way from his days with RTE, directing the likes of ‘Anything Goes’, ‘Megamix’, ‘TV GaGa’ and that memorable one Eurovision Song Contest.
Nowadays Declan works freelance and he’s much in demand. And, while his ambition is to work on more drama productions, music is still his top earner.
The Prince call from ABC marked the end of an eventful year and, as often happens, came right out of the blue.
‘It literally came out of nowhere, a phone call in the middle of the night. This guy said: ‘You wanna do Prince…give me a ring in the morning’, and I thought ‘was that a dream?!’
It wasn’t. The next week the young Wexford film-maker was in Minneapolis, in the director’s chair at Paisley Park with Prince at his side, putting together a one-hour TV event (as the Americans say) called ‘The Ryde Dyvine’.
So what was it like working with a true megastar, one of the greats? ‘Prince was very involved in the production and the whole experience was brilliant…very inspirational. To work with someone so focussed really was an education,’ says Declan.
Just why ABC would fly over an Irishman from London for a U.S. TV show isn’t all that clear, but Lowney’s reputation is obviously growing. He first made contact with ABC through a Commitments concert from Dublin’s Waterfront which he directed for them.
The Prince special, which will be sold to European networks over the next few months, was Lowney’s icing of the cake for 1992, a year which also saw him work on Eamonn Morrissey’s ‘The Brother’, now out on RTE video; a Lou Reed concert in London; a Tom Jones series for Central Television, and a number of commercials.
Just before Christmas he directed ‘Under Milkwood’ with Anthony Hopkins, a stage play for television. Later this month, he starts work on a TV sitcom by the team who wrote the screenplay for ‘The Commitments’. ‘It has a big Irish angle but I can’t say any more than that,’ says he, mysteriously.