The Cedar Lounge Revolution

“Say what you want about him,” Pa Little declared over the breakfast table on the last day of my Christmas sojourn at the Little family compound, “but John Waters hit the nail on the head this time.” With Mrs Little, whose feminist inspired opinion of Mr Waters’ teachings is generally littered with expletives, on one side of him and me on the other it was a curiously provocative thing for my generally mild-mannered father to say but he was referring to this piece (Sub required) by Waters in the Irish Times following the death of Joe Dolan.

Waters describes Joe Dolan as:

“….one of a handful of key figures in a social movement that transformed Ireland while setting out with more modest ambitions.”

And further on:

“The showband/dancehall explosion of the 1960s and 1970s was the most radical and effective force in the breaking of the conservative monolith of post-Famine Irish Catholicism, which, by losing touch with human reality had reduced religion to a form of policing. Showbands were about music and entertainment in much the same way that Bewley’s was about coffee. Fundamentally they were about sex, about meeting, romancing and mating, and about extending to the first Irish pop generation the kind of freedom purveyed in the international arena by Elvis, Dylan and the Beatles.

“The 7/6 or 50 pence you paid to be admitted to the ballroom was not simply a tariff on the entertainment, or even a levy on floorspace, but an instalment on a licence to have a love life without attracting more than cursory notice. It was a nominal tax on freedom and one we gladly paid. (Part of the blame for our poor sense of history must be placed on the unctuously disingenuous nature of most of the chronicles of this era by those who were there. If you want to know what was really going on, read Derek Dean’s recent book, The Freshmen Unzipped .) Far more than Gay Byrne or Nell McCafferty or David Norris or Mary Robinson, men like Joe Dolan revolutionised Irish attitudes to, in a word, sex.”

Pa Little grew up the only son of a small farming family in a tiny village in rural Ireland. Radio was still a relative rarity for the Little family who couldn’t afford to have one. A trip to the big town was rare. A trip to the city unheard of and a trip to Dublin filled with romance and mystery. Most of his schoolmates emigrated and those that remained behind bore the full weight of the Roman Catholic Church and its intolerant attitude to sex.

And then, came the showbands. Joe Dolan is perhaps the most successful. But Pa Little saw most of them. Big Tom, (Both before and after his split with the Mainliners, at the time one of the biggest events ever in Irish showbusiness), the Miami Showband, Dickie Rock and all the others. Ballrooms sprang up in rural towns across the west and the midlands and young people for whom prior to this the pint after mass or the GAA was the only source of amusement had something else to look forward to.

Young men and women had an opportunity to mingle, to talk to each other and to have sex that had never occured to them before. Pa Little remembers one evening where he watched the local Canon jumping into the ditch along the road from the bandhall to the main street to physically haul out courting couples.

For those of us reared in the 80s and 90s, and generally in urban environments, it is difficult maybe for us to fully understand what the showbands and what Joe Dolan and others like him meant to people like my father. To describe him, as Waters does, as a ‘liberator’ strikes one initially as being completely over the top but the more I think of it, the more he might deserve it as much as any of the feminists, academics or TV celebrities often credited with dragging the country kicking and screaming into the 20th century some six decades after it began.

It’s probably in poor taste but I can’t help compare the passing of Joe Dolan and the passing of Katy French. As human tragedies there is nothing to choose between the other. Two families lost a loved one and it would be obscene, regardless of the circumstances of their passing, to make a comparison on the grief of their families. But I can’t help but note it was to Joe Dolan’s funeral that several thousand ordinary Irish people flocked to and to Katy French that the media darlings, and hence the media coverage, went to.

It’s a shame to realise that there’ll never be another ‘Joe Show’ again.