In the course of this excellent account of the showband era in Ireland – roughly the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s – Rebecca Miller quotes John Waters to illustrate what was a common attitude among those alive at the time who disdained the entertainment on offer in the dancehalls.
Waters suggests that the “imitative” approach of the showbands was the result of a postcolonial mentality, an inherited sense of “inferiority, fatalism and self-hatred”. It was an attitude expressed more succinctly by Bob Geldof in the recent RTÉ series, Ballroom Blitz: the showbands were “crap”.
It might be argued that it is Waters’ and Geldof’s view that is most suggestive of the postcolonial: the belief that the local must be inferior and that modernity – the good stuff – must be found elsewhere.
Irish popular music has always had the distinctly mixed blessing of a powerful neighbour. The proximity, particularly through the 1960s and into the 1970s, of the rapidly changing and inventive pop and rock scene in Britain could not but highlight the apparent shortcomings of the native offering. In fact, it was Britain that was the exception – popular music elsewhere was often as focused on entertainment, on competent reproduction of covers, and on versatility as the showband scene in Ireland.
Miller, who is American, discovered the showbands long after the fact; when booking a festival of traditional Irish music in New York in 1986, a musician told her he wouldn’t be available as he was playing with a showband. She was intrigued, and close to 40 years later this book, the fruit of exhaustive archival research and hundreds of interviews, is an admirable example of the best kind of academic writing: fluent, authoritative, free of either nostalgia or embarrassment – and beautifully illustrated.
She looks closely at the business side; in a society that was underemployed and lacking in industry, the showband industry was a big fish, even if much of the cash went into, as Eamon Carr puts it “the biscuit tin”, and beyond the reach of the Revenue Commissioners.
She is revealing also about the social background of the musicians and on the ways in which the expectations of the wider society regarding gender roles played out on stage, backstage and on the dancefloor.
Stan Erraught lectures in music at the University of Leeds and is author of Rebel Notes: Popular Music and Conflict in Ireland (Beyond the Pale)
