The Noggin Inn, in south Dublin, on Easter Sunday, and the closest references to the Rising are Sil Fox's seemingly endless supply of Viagra jokes. For most of the audience this could constitute topical material. Fox briefly hits a wall of a silence in a gag about a Muslim stripper. He hits the punchline. "Show us your face!" Glasses stop clinking. People stop chatting. "Is this thing on?" says the comedian, tapping the microphone and looking at the sound man. The crowd clicks into gear again, gives him the forgiving laugh he was looking for, and he is back up and running.
In the foyer at the back of the room, Dickie Rock waits for his cue. Sandwiched between the smokers who clutter the doorway and the drinkers who fill the room, this is the purgatory before he gets to step into the thing he finds most heavenly.
A drunken punter and his wife appear through the doors. Spotting Rock, the drunk puts his arms around his wife, squeezes her close and motions as if he wants Rock to photograph them. But he has no camera. Rock is as polite as he is baffled. The man keeps gesturing drunkenly. Rock tries to ignore them. Finally, the MC announces the star guest. The doors open. Rock strides towards the stage, just as he has thousands of times before.
Things are slow to get going, the audience reluctant, a few lone dancers braving the dance floor. Then Rock removes the jacket of his pale suit. As if reacting to a special signal, the floor fills and the night takes off. He sings Saturday Night at the Movies, with some crowd-pleasing amendments. "Saturday night at the Noggin . . ." He undoes a couple of buttons on his shirt during Sweet Caroline, and the whoops go up. He high-kicks. He dances with the crowd. He reads requests. Women of a certain age grab at him. He lets them.
He plays for 90 minutes, with hardly a pause. Twenty-five songs at least. When it is over he makes his way back through the crowd, signing autographs, posing for photographs. He squeezes through the smokers outside and heads upstairs to the redundant bar that is doubling as his dressingroom.
Downstairs, in the tobacco fog, a group of women are chatting. "Wasn't he great? Ah, Dickie, he's still got it." says one. "Spit on me, Dickie," says another, and they laugh like chainsaws.
Easter Monday, and this time it's the Spawell, in nearby Templeogue. A couple of smokers loiter outside Sizzlers Restaurant Bar. Who's on tonight? Dickie Rock? They'll be lucky to get an hour out of him, says one.
Rock arrives, rested and ready. He is pointed to his changing room. It is a corner of the cloakroom. No light-bulb-framed mirror. No star on the door. Only a partition between him and the gathering rows of ticket-tagged coats. He puts his suit on a chair without fuss, as if he's seen worse.
He's been performing for 40 years, and people always ask him about his heyday. This might be it, he believes. The voice is better than ever. He's as fit as ever. He has faced the exit door of his career more than once but never been ushered through it.
"I could go back 25 years when I thought I was nearly gone. You know the way. The bands were changing; the business was changing. And then I started going into Clontarf Castle, in 1984. The place was packed out for three weeks, and it went on from there. And then you think, by the time I'm 60 . . . But, obviously, it has to come to an end. When? I don't know. I feel good. Sometimes I feel so good I don't believe the age I am."
What age is that? He tells but asks for it to stay between us. "Would you not put that in? Because everybody wonders. Everybody wonders how old Dickie Rock is. It's a great mystery."
For, whatever age he is, he looks better than you might expect. There's the beat-up face but also a boyishness that doesn't always come across on television. The skin is tanned, the hair is, well, the hair is fresh. He spends chunks of the year in Spain, where the dryness and the heat are good for the rheumatoid arthritis of his wife, Judy. He plays golf when he can, and the optimist in him is sure he could lower his 16 handicap if he played more than just a couple of times a week.
He likes the odd glass of wine with his meals, doesn't smoke. Show business, he tells you, is his drug. He sees the faces, recognises some of them from down through the years. Most of them have grown up and grown older with Rock. He loves the atmosphere he can create, thrills to the fun they have. There would have to be something wrong with you not to get pleasure out of that, he reckons.
"I said to the guys in the band last night, before going on, I intend going on singing and performing for as long as the audience wants me. People say, when are you going to retire? You don't retire from this business. The audience tell you and you know, that's it now. You don't want to be making an idiot of yourself, or be too old or not able to do it any more. So I said to the fellas last night, I don't want to see you guys getting grey and old, and I'm the eldest of them. I don't want you guys looking older than me, so keep the grey hair to a minimum."
As well as the pub gigs, he plays weddings, corporate nights and charity shows, although he doesn't unbutton his shirt for every audience. He plays Belfast each Christmas, revisits the places loyal to him year after year and was grand marshal in Toronto's St Patrick's Day parade a couple of years ago.
He has not been tempted to go the Joe Dolan route, to do the Blur covers, to mine rich seams of irony. Anyone can sing those kinds of songs, but not everybody can take on the standards. The songs sung by Sinatra, Bennett, Como and Martin. He would dearly love to take a 20-piece big band to Vicar Street or somewhere for a night and unleash those songs.
"About six years ago I did an album of 41 songs, the greatest songs ever written. About £30,000 was spent on it at the time. But from an artist's point of view it was fantastic, and it's a thing I have that I can stand up with my children and their children through the years and can say this is my dad. More than doing Blur numbers or doing rock numbers. This takes performing and singing and how to interpret great songs. Do you understand what I'm saying? It didn't sell anything. It cost me money, but I think it was little bit before its time, because after that all that music became popular with the young people. But we did it a few years ago."
The showbands have been uncool for so long that it hardly registers with him any more. Besides, there have been far more painful moments, when the personal became public. There was the death of his disabled eldest son; tabloid revelations of a secret daughter; the death of his foster brother from a heroin overdose; the convictions of two of his children on drugs charges. Each was devoured by the press.
"I've got to accept that. Unfortunately, when it involves my family I feel very bad. And I feel very bad that it's my fault, because I'm Dickie Rock, and it falls back on the family. In a way it's unfair and in another way I understand it."
Famously, his son Richard was in Boyzone for the boy band's Late Late Show debut but was gone by the time they made it on to Top of the Pops. He recently played his father in a showband tribute show, inhabiting a shadow that may have previously inhibited him. It was tough for his children, Rock imagines, growing up with a famous father, dealing with the bit of slagging. But they've seen the benefits, just as he has.
"I have no great desire for material things. I like to have a nice home and decent clothes, but it's for my family, to make sure they're comfortable. My father would not have had that opportunity. To be able to give as much as I do give and have given to my family, that's the main thing for any man or woman who becomes successful. It's for them, not just for me."
As we talk, he is regularly interrupted by fans, all women. "My mother's your biggest fan. Can we have a picture?" "Remember me, Dickie?"
He does not miss the old days, he insists. They were fantastic, but they are gone. They were wild for others but not for him. He had his hits, but the business changes, the curve levels out for everybody. But it doesn't mean it flattens out. He's a long way from the exit door.
"I change when I'm on stage. I think I metamorphosise," he says. "When I'm at home I'm the father of my sons and my daughter, and husband to my wife. I'm not Dickie Rock. I'm Richard Rock, brother of Lillian and Marjorie Rock, and Brian Rock and Joseph Rock. That's who I am. Richard Rock from Cabra West. But when I hit the stage I change. I metamorphosise. I become a different person. I give off a different vibe, if you know what I mean. I wasn't born six foot one and fantastic looking, like Elvis; still, neither was Sinatra or Tony Bennett. But something happens, you give off something, whatever it is."
It’s time for the show. “I’m a tradesman,” he says. “It’s a great trade. It’s been very good to me. But you have to serve your time, too.” And he heads to his changing area, in the corner of the cloakroom. To throw on the white suit jacket so he can throw it off later. To button the shirt so he can unbutton it later. He takes the stage. And the people who doubted they’d get an hour out of him get two.
