My brother Patrick, the last of my parents’ six children, was born in March 1966, on the night a crazed offshoot of the IRA blew up Nelson’s Pillar that had long marked the centre of Dublin. That night, twenty young Dubliners were injured and taken to hospital. But not in the explosion at the pillar which, in spite of the recklessness of the bombers, killed nobody.
For that was also the night that Dickie Rock, who died last Friday, arrived back from his heroic quest at the Eurovision Song Contest in Luxembourg with Ireland’s entry, Come Back To Stay. The kids who were injured were not in O’Connell Street but at Dublin Airport, in a mob of teenagers that had gathered to welcome our hero home.
He had finished joint fourth. This may not seem like much of a triumph, but the British had finished ninth, and that was enough to make this a moral victory for Ireland. Perhaps there was also an unintended poignancy in the title of the song. It was a standard, soupy love ballad with the gushing crescendos that suited Dickie’s showy vocal style.
But staying and coming back were notions that touched other nerves in the Ireland of 1966. The great hope was that teenagers and young adults like those fans would indeed stay in Ireland and not emigrate – and that families who had emigrated might even come back home to a place that now promised new prospects for them. Dickie’s emotional plea, “Please, come back to stay/ Oh darling, please come back to stay”, had an added piquancy in a society pining for, but as yet unable to reach, a state of modernity in which staying in Ireland could be the norm.
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Ireland was preparing for the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, and the blowing up of the Pillar was intended to encourage the young to rededicate themselves to the national crusade. But the young were much more obviously dedicated to Dickie. There was wild fervour all right, but it was not for the recovery of the fourth green field.
While the real violence of the bomb at the Pillar was treated as a harmless joke, the scenes at the airport that night were genuinely riotous. Gardaí linked arms in front of both the arrival and departure terminals to prevent about a thousand fans from smashing through the glass doors. Young boys and girls carrying placards declaring We Want Dickie, We Love Dickie, Welcome Back, Dickie and Come Back To Stay, shouted and screamed, hammered on the glass walls, and rocked parked cars. They lined the terminal balconies and pressed five and six deep against the barriers.
As Dickie stepped down from his plane on to the tarmac, the Ballyfermot Boys’ Band struck up Come Back To Stay. Immediately, hundreds of teenagers crowding the balcony waved their banners and screamed: “We want Dickie!” When Dickie looked up and waved, the crowd on the balconies pushed forwards and the kids at the front were crushed. That’s when the injuries occurred.
The thing about those kids is that they didn’t give a flying feck for the IRA or Nelson or eight hundred years of oppression. They wanted freedom, but not that kind. And for one brief, feverish moment, Dickie embodied it.
I remember, though it must have been a few years later, a Christian Brother coming into our class with his veins bulging and his face like a pressure gauge going into the red zone. He had heard, he said, that some girls in the locality had stood at the front of the crowd at a Miami Showband gig and screamed “Spit on me, Dickie!” This was The Exorcist before The Exorcist – pubescent girls possessed by the Devil who had taken the human form of Dickie Rock.
But I suspect this “Spit on me, Dickie!” story was an urban legend. For in spite of the edge of danger that bared itself that night at Dublin Airport, Dickie was more safety valve than satanic threat.
This mimicry was what Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s needed. We didn’t really want our own Elvis
The miracle of Dickie was that he was both in name and body a diminutive version of something much bigger that was going on in the outside world. He was a scrawny little fella. He didn’t look like Elvis Presley or Cliff Richard, who were well-fed and glowed with sunlight and glamour. Dickie was underclass gaunt – not fashionably skinny but underfed. There were loads of kids in the Corporation estates (his Cabra, my Crumlin) who looked like that.
He was thus teenage rebellion packaged in a homely form. He inhabited the world of the showbands and their uncanny ability to copycat anything American or English. Whatever was making the charts on Friday, they had learned by heart for Saturday night, note for note, sob for sob, darling for darling.
But this mimicry was what Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s needed. We didn’t really want our own Elvis. Such a creature would have been too large to be contained. He would have seemed like a real threat to the ruling order of Catholic Ireland. What we needed was a pint-sized, sawn-off imitation of an imitation of Elvis.
And this was Dickie’s peculiar appeal. He was no sex bomb. As he himself acknowledged: “I was always amazed women would be interested in a guy like me.” But he was, as The Who sang, a substitute for that other guy. He was, in Charles Haughey’s deathless phrase, an Irish solution to an Irish problem: how do you wave in the general direction of filth and sin without openly suggesting that such things were acceptable in our Catholic Eden?
He filled the gap between who young Irish people were supposed to be (patriots in love with the national ideal) and who they really were (teenagers like those in America and England who were inventing new ways to be young). As that gap narrowed, he ceased to matter so much – there were soon much more exotic ways to be a teenager than going into violent hysterics for Dickie.