22 Big Tom

If music is prophetic – as Jacques Attali persuasively argued – then the mood of present-day Ireland was best anticipated not by the nation’s ancient tradition of folk music, nor by the folk boom of the 1960s, and not even by the latter-day rock giants like Sinéad O’Connor and U2, but by the maudlin, self-pitying oeuvre of Big Tom and the Mainliners. The connection, of course, is not so much with the content of lost lovers and dead mothers, as the tone depicting what was approximately an emotion: a deeply, inconsolably felt condition of self-pity, expressed in the most direct and inarticulate way.

What is absent today is irony, a quality of ‘Country ’n’ Irish’ that most people – not excluding Big Tom himself – seemed to miss. And yet, in the 1960s and 1970s, Big Tom unselfconsciously brought irony to parts of Ireland that other purveyors of cultural content could not reach. Until his audience dwindled away around the end of the 1980s, he enabled a whole generation of youngsters to see the same thing simultaneously in two different ways. This was partly because of an unacknowledged cultural divide between town and country, and partly because of the absence of choice for young people in those days. At least half of Big Tom’s audience comprised the newly minted pop kids of post-Lemass Ireland, who had grown up listening to Radio Luxembourg and John Peel. Very often, the ‘country’ showband was the only show in town, so if you wanted to go out, that’s where you had to go.

There were mixed feelings about this. At the one extreme there was the committed and uncritical fan; at the other was the refusenik epitomized by the character Tom in Tom Murphy’s play, Conversations on a Homecoming: ‘The real enemy – the big one! – that we shall overcome, is the country-and-western system itself. Unyielding, uncompromising in its drive for total sentimentality. A sentimentality I say that would have us all an unholy herd of Sierra Sues, sad-eyed inquisitors, sentimental Nazis, fascists, sectarianists, black– and blue-shirted nationalists with spurs a janglin’, all ridin’ down the trail to Oranmore.’

Like it or not, Big Tom was a central element in the cultural formation of a majority of Irish people born between the Emergency and the Mary Robinson presidency. Some of those affected or afflicted were volunteers, but most were conscripts. Some people went to his gigs to ‘square’ a member of the opposite sex. Some, although claiming to hate the music, went because they liked to jive. Many truly loathed the music, while others regarded it with an arched eyebrow. But, no matter how you heard it, the music seeped into your soul.

It was difficult to tell if Big Tom was for real or not. He was a strange phenomenon to look at – a mountain of a man with blond hair, dressed in incongruously colourful clothes, who sang a succession of odd songs without saying much besides, rarely communicating at all other than by means of the occasional theatrical wink. Apart from the clothes and the guitar, he looked as if he would have much happier behind the wheel of a Massey Ferguson.

But there was, too, a sense of mystery about it all, a suggestion of a ritualistic celebration of something felt at a very slightly deeper level. The mood was always carefree, even raucous, but the songs were all about pain and loss – so much so that it became funny. He called himself once ‘a singer of sad songs’. He said: ‘We’re a sentimental race of people . . . We’ve had a lot of trouble down the years, so maybe we have reason for it.’

Big Tom had been born plain Tom McBride, in Castleblaney, County Monaghan, probably early in the 1930s. He left school at 14, got his first job working on a neighbouring farm for five shillings a week. He spent a decade or so going between Monaghan, Scotland and London, eventually settling down to a mix of farming, steel-erecting and music. In the early 1960s, Tom began playing with a local group called the Fincairn Ceili Band, performing mostly at dinner dances and weddings. He was the rhythm guitarist, singing the odd song, but eventually became the lead singer, singing a range of songs about love and exile that he’d picked up on his travels. His first hit was ‘Gentle Mother’, a country dirge about a dead mother. Tom had first heard it sung in London a decade before.

Country music Irish-style was to acquire a specific context as the folk music of a generation traumatized by involuntary emigration, and without any other means of expressing itself. Through the 1960s and 1970s, pop co-existed alongside this odd Irish hybrid, seeming to articulate the dichotomy of fear and hope that characterized the Lemass era and its messy aftermath. Pop became the voice of optimism and forgetting; ‘Country ’n’ Irish’ that of apprehension and remembering.

The problem with Big Tom was not so much that he was shite, although he was in a way. The problem was that, underneath what he did there was the shadow of something else, something that might have been great if he had had the vision to excavate it and his audience had the intuition to demand it. The ironic response the music engendered was not without basis: there was the makings of something good rattling just below the surface. Had there been a Shane MacGowan happening along, capable of giving the music a root in the arse, who knows what might have come of it?

It would be a mistake to overlook the fact that it was in the 1980s, when emigration started up once again, that Daniel O’Donnell emerged to become an international star. His oeuvre owed something to ‘Country ’n’ Irish’, but it lacked roughage and Daniel thought irony was a pill you took with your breakfast.

A few years after the ballroom boom died down, an American country singer called Garth Brooks started coming to Ireland for occasional performances. Brooks sang of a pain that was manageable and shallow. His voice did not penetrate like Bono’s or Sinéad’s. He allowed a little of the pain to show itself, but also enabled it to be covered over in a coat of sugary syrup. Within no time at all he had sold 500,000 albums in Ireland alone, a level of sales unequalled in any other market.

The truth of this phenomenon, which has never been named, is that Brooks appealed to the pop kids of the 1960s, for whom ‘Country ’n’ Irish’ had had an attraction that they were loath to own up to. Now they were finding themselves experiencing a new appetite for sentimentality as they accompanied their own children to the airport. Brooks told a tale that few were willing to admit to: that just under the surface of the Irish psyche lay a melancholia that sought a particular form of expression. But, because of the 1970s backlash against country music, no Irish artist was at that time capable of meeting the needs of a generation caught between a fragile optimism and the renewed plausibility of despair.

People thought Big Tom was thick, perhaps because he looked thick. But he was a lot smarter than most of those who thought him unintentionally funny. There’s a story about Mick Jagger, who used to visit Castleblaney in the 1970s, asking Tom for his autograph after seeing him signing for a gaggle of young women who Jagger had first supposed would be more interested in himself. Jagger proffered a beermat and Big Tom, studying him carefully, enquired, ‘Who’ll I make it out to?’

‘Mick Jagger, man!’

Tom regarded him carefully. ‘Aye,’ said he, ‘an’ you look like him too.’