Going to see Dickie Rock perform back in the mid-2000s, it was too easy to approach him as a man out of his time. Back then, it was hard not to be fascinated by and, in all honesty, a bit sneery of the look, the tan, the hair (obviously the hair). You might wonder about him continuing the old act well into his ... actually, he didn’t want his age published back then. The showband singer died on December 6th, aged 88.
“Would you not put that in?” he asked in our 2005 interview. “Everybody wonders how old Dickie Rock is. It’s a great mystery.”
It was the tail end of a time when irony had taken a firm grip on pop and a handful of 1960s crooners had identified an opportunity in arch takes on modern songs. Of Ireland’s showband stalwarts, Joe Dolan had done what we might now call “a Rick Astley” and found a new and delighted audience by throwing his supposedly anachronistic act at a covers album of tracks by Blur, Pulp, Radiohead and the like.
Dickie Rock veered away from that path. Anyone can do those songs, he explained. Not everybody could take on the standards, the songs sung by Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. He had recently spent a decent amount of money making an album of classic songs and, while admitting it hadn’t been a big seller, was proud of the result.
“From an artist’s point of view it was fantastic, and it’s a thing I have that I can stand up with my children and their children through the years and can say ‘this is my dad’.”
But it was on stage that you saw why he was still in the business. These were the stages of the Noggin Inn and the Spawell, but he treated them like Carnegie Hall, belting out the classics as the jacket came off, the shirt buttons were undone and the audience grabbed at him whenever he wasn’t high-kicking.
And yes, people shouted “spit on me, Dickie”.
Frank Miller’s backstage photographs of Rock are striking. Under the orange lights of the redundant bar that serves as his dressingroom, the singer poses topless. Lean, smooth and mahogany from head to trouser belt, against the dourness of the setting his Vegas-level confidence – and absolute self-awareness – is glorious. Now, you can’t open Instagram without seeing acres of varnished Irish flesh. Not back then.
“When I hit the stage I change. I metamorphosise. I become a different person. I give off a different vibe, if you know what I mean. I wasn’t born six foot one and fantastic looking, like Elvis; still, neither was Sinatra or Tony Bennett. But something happens, you give off something, whatever it is.”
Rock didn’t know why anyone wouldn’t get a kick out of that life and intended to keep going “for as long as the audience wants me”. He clearly understood something now taken for granted: a singer or band never needs to be out of their time. As long as Rock had an audience and the appetite to perform, time could stand still for a couple of hours.
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