Reeling back the Eurovision years…

Last Saturday night week – when the Eurovision Song Contest should have been happening – brothers Jimmy and Tommy Swarbrigg sat down in front of a video camera and with a three-minute performance acclaimed online, showed that they still have the magic that twice saw them represent Ireland at the contest.

We may now be accustomed to Ireland slinking home embarrassedly each year with points that put us near the bottom of the Eurovision table – when indeed we qualify at all – but in 1977 in London, the Swarbriggs were placed third with ‘It’s Nice To Be In Love Again’.

But for a political row raging at the time over – of all things – fishing rights, the reckoning was, they might have won: “We were actually winning with a few votes to go. But at the time there was a fishery war going on and some of the countries involved in that did not give us any votes. So we ended up third,” says Jimmy.

They weren’t disgraced on their first outing either, two years earlier in Sweden, with ‘That’s What Friends Are For’, when they ranked ninth..

Now well more than 50 years in Mullingar – and 60 in Tommy’s case – they are considered Westmeath men – but not to themselves: they were born in Cootehill in Cavan; Cootehill formed them, and it features large in the annals of their lives.

Indeed their sisters Angela and Margaret still live in Cootehill, Angela having just retired from her position as a senior nurse in the Outpatients’ Department at Cavan General Hospital.

There were four boys in the Swarbrigg family of 11 and, after Tommy made the move to Westmeath, all four ultimately ended up in Mullingar – Paddy running the landmark Swarbrigg’s Shoes and Martin working for Whelehan’s Chemist.

They remember their childhood as “fantastic” – but by today’s standards, it was incredibly short, as Jimmy emigrated to Britain at just 15 years of age, to follow his sister before him, and Tommy moved to Mullingar at just 16 after Joe and Ben Dolan and their manager, Seamus Casey, turned up at his door and offered him a job with The Drifters.

They might not have realised it as children but the environment in which they were raised was going to determine their future careers:

“It was a very musical family – even going back to our grandfather: he taught the local brass band and led the choir,” says Jimmy.

That talent passed to Tommy and Jimmy’s father John Patrick (known by all in Cootehill as Pa).

Pa’s talent was prodigious – he played saxophone, clarinet, and his main instrument, the trumpet.

Like his father, he too led the choir and the brass band. As well as that, he played three or four nights a week with a local dance band, although as patriarch of a 13-strong household, he also needed his day job in the local co-op to pay the bills.

“He was the best sight-reader I ever saw,” says Tommy – and coming from a man who has mixed and played with as many professional musicians as Tommy has, that is some praise.

“He used to come in from work at 6 o’clock and that day arriving in the post from Walton’s would have been the music from the latest hit songs. And while he was eating his dinner, he would be transposing from the sheet music that he received from Walton’s and writing out the parts for the other members of the band – the drum part, the bass part, and the piano part.

“He was an instant sight-reader. An absolutely marvellous musician.”

And he passed on those skills to others: “I remember sitting in cold winter nights in the library in Cootehill, while he was on the podium teaching us the rudiments of music,” Tommy continues.

Jimmy – older than Tommy by 18 months – didn’t attend: “I was more interested in football,” he admits.

As was common in those times, as soon as you were able, you moved out – and incredibly, in 1959, at just 15, after a spell in the local technical school, Jimmy left home for England.

“I went over to an uncle – and he was even stricter than my father. So I left his place and lived on my own then from the time I was about 16.”

Jimmy did not have the comfort of knowing there was a job awaiting him when he arrived in Britain, but he got one quickly and started work as an apprentice engineer. Not long after landing in England, he began singing with bands.

“I joined a band at a youth club and I used to sing with a young rock band,” he recalls. That was just the start: “Even as I was working, I still found myself singing with different groups, different bands.”

It was an exciting time to be in London; it was the start of the 1960s and some of Jimmy’s friends went on to considerable success – notably friends he had in the band ‘Mud’, probably best known for the song ‘Lonely This Christmas’.

“It was a fantastic time to be a young person in London,” he confirms, laughing bemusedly as he remembers the emergence of the mods and the rockers.

And which was he? “Oh I was a mod!” he says without hesitation.

When he came home to visit his family, he was cool – and there was no way he was letting brother Tommy slip behind in the style stakes: “Jimmy used to come home to us to Cootehill and he would bring all these lovely clothes – all these lovely shirts.”.” Tommy Tommy.

“I remember one time during the Teddy Boy era and Jimmy was home on holidays and there was this other guy in Cootehill who became a Teddy Boy and I was following this guy around with my mouth open and Jimmy pulled me aside one day and said: ‘What are you doing following that fellow around for? He’s a Teddy Boy!’ And he gave out to me.”

Joe Dolan

As Jimmy was finding his feet in England, Tommy meanwhile was practising his music – and trying to persuade his parents to let him leave full-time education and start working.

“I went to a technical school in Cootehill after I left national school – but I hated it because it was all this rural science, carpentry, metalwork – all the stuff you do with your hands. But I had no interest in it, so I begged my mother and father to let me leave and I went out working.”

His first job was in a cloth factory, where he worked for a year, and his evenings were playing with a local skiffle band.

“Then I went in as an apprentice electrician to a man who had an electrical shop in Cootehill and I was as bad at the electrical as I was in the tech and my only interest was in going out to the shop to sell records to customers – which he used to let me do because I had a great interest in all the music.”

Tommy was still only 16 when the invitation came to join Joe Dolan and The Drifters.

“I was aware of The Drifters because when we used to get the paper on a Friday or Saturday – The Evening Press or Herald or whatever it was – I would see the names of all the bands playing in all the big ballrooms around Dublin and sure I was fascinated by all this,” he recalls.

Featuring strongly in the listings were The Drifters: “And I thought - they must be some big band!”

It was remarkable that this big name and successful band had come to know about the talent of a teenager in a small town in Cavan. How that happened was that as The Drifters played a gig one evening in a ballroom at Rathcorry in Monaghan, about five miles from Cootehill, Joe Dolan’s manager Seamus Casey happened to mention to the ballroom owner that The Drifters were looking to recruit a new trumpet player.

“John McCormack, who owned the ballroom, said: ‘There’s a right good young lad in Cootehill’, and that was me,” Tommy recounts.

The Swarbrigg family did not have a phone at the time – few did in the early 1960s – but that did not deter the resourceful Casey, who made contact with the gardaí in Cootehill.

“And so the guards came down and said to me, ‘You have to ring this number’.

“So I rang the number and it was Seamus and he said ‘I heard about you: would you be interested in going professional?’ And sure – for God’s sake – my mouth opened, and I couldn’t believe it.

“So they came down, in the big car, I think it was Joe’s. I think it was a white Zephyr – a huge yoke. And they parked it outside and came in and auditioned me. And all the children outside were looking in the window.

“My mother loved Ben and Joe and when they rang back to say I got the job, I had only my father to convince to let me go because my mother thought they were just lovely people.”

Thus began Tommy’s life in Mullingar, and his first journey to the town was made via a lift from a lorry from the co-op where his father worked.

Through those years of the early and mid-60s, Tommy played with The Drifters, and he stresses his ongoing admiration for the late Joe Dolan: “He was a phenomenal artist,” he says.

Showbands

Tommy was still with The Drifters when Jimmy started sending over poems he had written.

“I started putting music to them and that is how we started the song writing,” says Tommy, adding that Joe Dolan would go on to sing some of the brothers’ compositions.

In 1968, The Drifters broke up, and Tommy and some of the others set about starting up a new band, The Times. Jimmy was invited back to Ireland to audition for the role of singer, and impressed Tommy’s band-mates, so he was in – and so began the Swarbriggs’ Times experience.

The showband scene was huge at the time and for the young men – and occasional women involved – there was a living to be made – but it was hard work.

“In the summertime, you would do 13 nights in a row and have maybe one night off,” says Tommy.

Christmas could see them with a 20-date run.

“And all that time we would be trying to write and to record,” adds Jimmy, going on to reveal that a lot of their recording was done at The Beatles’ studios at Abbey Road in London; and their producer was Norman Hurricane Smith, who was engineer for the Beatles.

Travelling to London was a bigger deal then than now, principally because it was so much more expensive.

“Flights were horrific,” says Tommy. “We could not afford them. We used to go by boat. Even in The Drifters we could not afford to fly because tickets to London would be £400 or £500.”

It was while playing a gig in the national ballroom in Dublin that the two wound up on the road for Stockholm.

At that time, the National Song Contest enjoyed almost the same stature here as the Eurovision, and in 1975, 3,500 songs were submitted. ‘Mr Eurovision’ – Tom McGrath – went to The National Ballroom to watch the Swarbriggs perform, and that night asked them to perform the shortlisted songs at the National Song Contest. He agreed they could also perform an entry of their own. When the contest voting took place it was the Swarbriggs’ own song ‘That’s What Friends Are For’ that won and they were on their way.

“We were young and we had a great time. We went to all the receptions and we met all the stars,” says Tommy, recalling Stockholm.

As they sat in a radio studio set for an interview with the great DJ Pete Murray, they even met Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus from ABBA, winners of the previous year’s event, and were gobsmacked to discover that the organisers had not invited Abba to attend the Eurovision even though it was only happening in Stockholm because of Abba’s success.

Two years after the Stockholm Eurovision, Jimmy and Tommy, along with Alma Carroll and Nicola Kerr, represented Ireland at the Eurovision in London – where they led for much of the competition and looked set to come out on top – until the fishery war revenge got them!

After their Eurovision appearances, the Swarbriggs were big news – but by the late 1970s Tommy started having health difficulties rooted in the years of playing music in front of amplifiers and without any sort of ear protection. Warned by a doctor that he would be deaf by the time he was 50, he made the decision in 1980 to retire from performing and he became Jimmy’s manager.

“I kept going for exactly a year but it just wasn’t the same, so I stopped,” says Jimmy.

Promotions

Free of the grind of the six-night working week, the two started the music promotions and management enterprise that they still run.

It was the Swarbriggs who discovered Richie Kavanagh – and believe it or not Kavanagh’s hit song ‘Aon Focal Eile’, which they produced, holds the record as the third biggest selling single of all time in Ireland.

“He was huge! He beat the Spice Girls for Record of the Year in the year Aon Focal went to number one. And they were there at the awards ceremony and they were great fun,” recalls Tommy.

Tommy Swarbrigg Promotions was also bringing in artists to Ireland such as Smokie, Leo Sayer, Meatloaf. “We were also doing shows with people like Mary Black, Dé Danann, and loads of others.”

The composing side of their operation has been successful: Smokie recorded one of their songs; Robert Mizzell has recorded an album of compositions by the Swarbrigg Brothers; a song they wrote called Sacramento went to the top of the charts in Sweden; and Looking Through The Eyes Of A Beautiful Girl was a number one hit in Australia for a group called The Strangers.

Although now 75 (Tommy) and 77 (Jimmy), the Swarbriggs’ composing days are not quite behind them although they write a lot less frequently now – but they are still busy on the promoting and management side and even do slots on stage, as part of their showband revival show, ‘Reeling in the Showband Years’, running now since 2010.

“It’s a massive show and travels right around Ireland and it sells out everywhere.

“We do two nights in Cork Opera House; we go to the Wexford Opera House and to the National Concert Hall and other venues right around the country,” says Tommy.

COVID-19

Due to Covid-19 rules, the two are cocooning: “My garden has never looked as well!” jokes Tommy.

Family is important to the two – Jimmy has two sons and four grandchildren, and Tommy and wife Geraldine have two children and just five months ago became grandparents.

Their siblings too are – happily – all still alive; only two live abroad – one sister in the US and one in Brussels.

The Eurovision this year did not, of course, go ahead due to the Coronavirus regulations and the two admit that for those in the music profession, it is a worrying time.

“Our business will probably be the very last to recover,” predicts Tommy.

“That’s because it is the most vulnerable, because people are sitting in the shows that we do, people are sitting right beside each other.

“The theatres are saying that they will only be allowed hold shows with 25% capacity – but you couldn’t run a show at 25% capacity. You would lose your shirt.

“I am also Nathan Carter’s southern promoter and we have had to put back all of his shows.

“Musicians the length and breadth of the country are completely out of work. It is the worst-hit industry of all.”