Adam Clayton was always the cool one in U2 – not that it’s any great boast, considering the competition. He’s a decent documentary presenter, to boot, having first displayed his chops in 2022 with a thoughtful film about artist Francis Bacon’s emotional connection to the west of Ireland.
Ballroom Blitz (RTÉ One, Wednesday), his two-part celebration of Irish showbands, is less assured and suffers for never clearly explaining Clayton’s interest in this 1960s Irish peculiarity or why he’s criss-crossing the country to interview veterans of the genre, such as Linda Martin and Eileen Reid.
It is also worth asking if the idea of the showbands as an unexplored and misunderstood chapter of Irish social history hasn’t been flogged to death slightly. It seems that people have been banging on about the importance of showbands for decades – certainly for far longer than these acts were actually going concerns, which means that Ballroom Blitz doesn’t score very highly on the originality front. Unlike Clayton’s Bacon documentary, it lacks a central thesis – the U2 bassist come across as vaguely appreciative of the showbands, but the film fails to set out a coherent case for their rehabilitation or tells us how they impacted on the Irish music industry in the decades that followed.
That said, Clayton is great fun to hang with – and has managed to produce intriguing interviews. Bob Geldof is to be credited with sticking to his guns and continuing to criticise the showbands, saying that many talented musicians were stifled by the need to churn out bland pop hits night after night. A similar point is made by Hot Press editor Niall Stokes, who recalls how the Dublin beat scene of the 1960s suffered because its brightest musicians were headhunted by showbands with the promise of a full-time wage.
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Others have a more positive spin. Historian Diarmaid Ferriter argues the arrival in the 1960s of the showbands represented a break with the drudgery of the 1950s – and was a reflection of Ireland’s image of itself as a “young, dynamic, trusting nation”. There are interviews with Paul Brady, Phil Coulter (who got his first start in showbands before writing Congratulations for Cliff Richard) and radio presenter Ronan Collins, who pays tribute to the great star of the scene, Dickie Rock, by saying “he wanted to be Tony Bennett – he was actually Eddie Cochran”.
Later on, Clayton talks to Aideen O’Brien, whose father Brendan O’Brien was the superstar father of Cork’s Dixies until he was electrocuted on stage. Unable to perform, he became a heavy drinker – which prompts Aideen to ask Clayton about his own issues with addiction.
“It was a real struggle I knew something was wrong: it wasn’t until I missed a gig that I realised it was really wrong,” he says – a fascinating teaser for the documentary you want Clayton to make about the burden of being in U2.
It is the curse of every generation to believe the music of their youth was uniquely magical. In that respect, the mania for showbands has parallels with the 1990s rave scene and all those ageing Gen Xers who are to this day banging on about the joys of acid house – to the bafflement of those too young to have first-hand experience of all-night gurning or Vicks VapoRub as fashion accessory.
But to justify its airtime, Ballroom Blitz has to do more than simply reel in the years. It needs Clayton to parlay his enthusiasm into a cogent argument on behalf of the showbands – one that draws on his unique perspective as one quarter of U2. Otherwise, what is the point of having him drive around Ireland glad-handling Phil Coulter and Linda Martin?
Did the showbands lead to U2? Or does Clayton agree with Geldof that they were a negative force, keeping Irish music in the dark ages? Should they be celebrated or held up as a warning about the triumph of commerce over art? Lacking an opinion on any of this, the first part of the two-hour documentary (the second lands next week) leans too hard on nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake and ends up feeling like a glorified Wikipedia entry.
