THE TIMES WE LIVED IN:'IT'S HOLIDAY (Camp) Dance Time!" croons the headline on the entertainment page of the Time Pictorial magazine. It's June 1954. The summer dance season is on the horizon. Eager young Dubliners are polishing up their winkle-pickers. Over the coming months, many will flock to band venues by the seaside – the Red Island camp in Skerries, in north Dublin, and Bray's Bar-B ballroom just over the border in Co Wicklow.
At Red Island a bandleader by the name of Jack Ruane is challenging the popularity of Tin Pan Alley with his arrangements of Danny Boy and Cottage by the Lee. There’s a buzz in Bray, too: a new singer has joined the Johnnie Butler Band.
Our photo shows Pat Montana being introduced to the orchestra’s drummer, Johnnie Butler Junior, by the bandleader, old JB himself.
X Factor, nothing. The Bar-B represents Pat Montana’s shot at the big-time; he has just quit his job as a call-boy at the Theatre Royal to try and make it as a singer.
He looks awkward in his spanking new outfit, half lonesome cowboy, half overgrown boy scout. He also looks incredibly baby-faced – as, indeed, does the 18-year-old drummer.
Between them they hold the orchestra’s future in their hands.
If you’re going to keep discerning dancers on the floor, your drummer and your singer need to be first-rate – especially now, when musical change is in the air.
Is there an anxious edge to the smile of proud dad Johnnie Butler Senior? Just below our photo, the column Dancing Times – by the tireless Dancalot – notes that “the really beautiful colour changing in the lighting system on the Crystal bandstand” has created “a really romantic atmosphere for dancing at the South Anne Street rendezvous”.
In his Clark Gable moustache and dark suit, Butler senior already looks old-fashioned compared to the shining young faces on either side of him.
By the summer of 1954, the song which will change the face of popular music forever is already in the can; by the summer of 1955, Bill Haley and the Comets will be all the rage, their recording of Rock Around The Clock nudging the Glenn Miller big band from the top of the dance charts. But not in the Bar-B. Not yet.
Arminta Wallace
Published on June 19th, 1954 Photograph by Dermot Barry irishtimes.com/archive
