The Passing of Big Tom McBride

barryqwalsh

Gold Member
Sep 30, 2014
3,397
250
140
Nobody could fill a hall at the height of the showband era like the late Big Tom McBride.


Long queues would form outside the local ballroom when Big Tom and his band, the Mainliners, came to town. Generally, dancing was 9pm to 1am, with a relief band getting proceedings underway.


In the 1960s, as Ireland was slowly changing, the ballrooms replaced as dance venues the parish halls, which had been frequently run by the local parish priest, whose task sometimes was to guard against the perils of close dancing.


Not so the ballrooms, where close dancing ceased to be a moral threat.



‘He was a lifeline for a dispossessed people’: Big Tom remembered
 
Last edited:

Forum List

Back
Top