Their voices fill the cellar room but does anyone care? "With a song in my heart" carol the three tenors - Ciaran Nagle, Anthony Norton and Tom Cregan. "Some day, when I'm awfully low...I will feel your glow, just thinking of you." The Supper Club at Killiney's Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel is full of the melody when a voice cuts across the music. "We'll set up here," says Michael Cassidy, camera man with RTE's Nationwide. "We'll have to go wide." He and John Conway, manager of the tenors, discuss sound-feeds and camera angles as the notes rise again - "And the words in my ears will resound for the rest of my years . . . with a song in my heart." The soundcheck carries on and the champagne begins to flow.
The evening marks the launch of "A Celtic Journey", the first Irish tour by The Tenors. Tonight they're giving an invited audience a sneak preview. Before the show they mingle among their friends, fit and slim, weighing in at 12st 7lbs (Cregan); 11st 7 lbs (Nagle) and 11st (Norton). Yes, On the Town is not afraid to ask the tough questions.
Nagle's father and mother, Joe and Eileen Nagle, are here as well as his sister, Aisling Nagle. Finbar Furey and his wife, Sheila Furey, arrive. Norton's opera-singer girlfriend, Elizabeth Woods, comes along with her sisters Mary, Ursula and Eleanor and their mother Mary Woods.
The tenors will perform throughout the summer, in a tour sponsored by Swiftcall, singing tonight in Clonmel's Regal Theatre, tomorrow in Cork at the Everyman Theatre. Next weekend, watch out for them in Kilkenny on Saturday and in Enniscorthy on Sunday, July 2nd.