Are You Dancing?
Showbands, Popular Music, and Memory in Modern Ireland
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Indiana University Press
Published:6th May '25
£27.99
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From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, showbands were all the rage among Ireland's dancing audiences. Performing covers of rock 'n' roll and pop hits from American and British weekly Top 10 charts, they riveted their fans, dismayed many parish priests, and offered Irish youth a taste of modernism and pop culture from outside of Ireland.
In Are You Dancing?, Rebecca S. Miller tells the story of how these working-class bands brought new sounds and choreographies to the Irish and Northern Irish pop landscape. Both as a response to and an agent in Ireland's changing economic landscape, showbands quickly grew into a hugely lucrative commercial industry. At the same time, they nudged open doors for Irish women to take to the stage as pop stars, rewarded a generation of entrepreneurs, and created the template for Ireland's popular music industry. Miller draws upon interviews with more than 80 musicians, agents, managers, fans, and clergy, to reveal the vast interplay of social, economic, and cultural changes that ensued with the Irish showband era.
Drawing upon an extensive catalog of ethnographic and archival research, Miller presents an overlooked era of musical performances that revolutionized Irish entertainment.
"This book is a must-read for anyone interested in processes of change and modern Ireland, and further afield in twentieth century popular music studies in a post-colonial context. The detail of the rise (and fall) of showbands, as the first home grown popular music on the island during the mid-decades of the twentieth century, paints an extraordinarily rich picture of a country and its people undergoing transformation. Foregrounding the voices and images of those musicians, moguls and managers who experienced it, the story is firmly grounded in Miller's ... incisive interpretation. Combining a wide range of critical tools including analysis of the sounds of showbands, this book comprehensively challenges and rewrites the narrative of showbands and their dancing public demonstrating their importance. And, no mean feat, it's a rollicking read to boot!"—Dr. Méabh Ní Fhuartháin, Centre for Irish Studies, University of Galway
"Before Bono, before Bicep, before Sinead O'Brien . . . came the showbands. And before the world of the showbands slips forever from view, we need a comprehensive account of how this extraordinary musical phenomenon imposed itself on the national consciousness of Ireland during the second half of the twentieth century. Rebecca Miller's Are You Dancing? is that account. Both scholarly and highly readable, this book tracks the fate of the showbands from their emergence in the post-Emergency era, through the crazy days of the 1960s and 1970s, down to their social, cultural and technological obsolescence towards century's end. . . . Incorporating testimony from many of the scene's key figures, Are You Dancing? invites us to listen again to the music that soundtracked a formative period in modern Irish history."—Gerry Smyth, Professor of Irish Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University
"What a wonderful book! Are You Dancing? captures the grit, glamour, innocence and uniformity of Ireland in the showband era. Scholarly yet intimate, you can almost smell the sweat, sex and shoe polish of a showband in full swing. A treasure chest for punter or professor."—Larry Kirwan, Black 47
ISBN: 9780253072368
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
290 pages