Born: October 10th, 1936
Died: December 6th, 2024
Dickie Rock, who has died aged 88, was Ireland’s original pop idol. Known for his expressive singing voice and incendiary stage presence, he blazed a trail through the sleepy world of 1960s Irish music – first as frontman of the Miami Showband, later as a solo artist. Where Britain had Beatle-mania, Ireland was swept aloft by “Dickie-mania”.
Rock grew up worshipping Frank Sinatra. But it was Elvis to whom he would be compared when the former welder from Cabra in Dublin was recruited to lead the Miami Showband in 1963. Shy offstage, he seemed to come alive when the music struck up and the crowd roared. “When I hit the stage I change. I metamorphosise. I become a different person. I give off a vibe,” he would observe.
Is going to court worth it for personal injuries claimants? A lawyer and insurer go head to head on the issue
If there’s so much buyer’s remorse about Brexit, why is Nigel Farage the rising figure in UK politics?
Smoking ban has important lessons for Ireland’s approach to climate issues
Civil War was won using local knowledge and very good political and military leadership, new book argues
Success came quickly. Music in the 1960s was a production line, and the Miami Showband churned out singles at a blistering rate and with immediate results. In December 1963, Rock enjoyed his first number one when the Showband covered Elvis’s There’s Always Me.
Over the next two years, they would top the charts on four more occasions. In 1964, From the Candy Store on the Corner to the Chapel on the Hill made history as the song with the longest title to reach Irish number one. Twelve months later, they smashed the record books all over again when Every Step of the Way became the first release by an Irish band to go straight to the top.
Rock was a superstar in a country where celebrity remained a largely unfamiliar concept. “Spit on Me Dickie” became the unlikely byword for rock’n’roll mania, Irish-style. Meanwhile, the revelation, years later, that he’d fathered a child out of wedlock after a backstage assignation with a fan confirmed the domestic music scene to be wilder than its staid image.
Then there was his unlikely 2020 feud with Johnny Logan. Here was an Irish style Blur v Oasis ding-dong that briefly dominated the news cycle, after Logan made remarks about Rock in an interview with The Irish Times. That was before the two parties made peace in the traditional Irish fashion of saying nice things about one another on Joe Duffy’s Liveline.
Rock was born Richard Rock on North Strand, Dublin in October 1936. His great-grandfather was a clockmaker from Germany, while Rock’s father was a blacksmith who worked in the docklands.
It was a tough, working-class upbringing, blighted by tragedy when Dickie’s younger brother, Joseph, was struck by a motorist and died. “He got a bang of a car, while he was just sitting on his bike, he died,” Rock would recall.
But he also remembered there being great love in the household. The 1966 RTÉ documentary, Dickie: Portrait of an Artist, begins with the rest of the family at the breakfast table. Rock’s mother calls him, and the star pokes his head shyly around the corner. Of the superstar who had dance-hall crowds swooning to every hip-swivel, there was not a sign.
“We were working class,” he recalled in 2016. “I remember before central heating was a fixture in most Irish houses, my da used to go upstairs and lie on each of his five kids’ beds for 10 minutes a piece, so they would be nice and warm for us when we went to bed.”
Like Elvis, his singing talent was evident from a young age – and as was the case with Presley, he never regarded music as something to which he could realistically aspire. His first job after leaving school was as a jeweller’s assistant in Talbot Street. He emigrated to Manchester at 17, though he didn’t settle and pined for Dublin. “I used to walk up to Manchester Airport to hear the announcements of the planes leaving for Dublin. I used to be crying. I just missed home.”
He returned to Dublin and became an apprentice welder. “I was approached by a fellow worker, who used to hear me singing while I was working and he asked if I wanted to join his band, as lead vocalist,” he recalled.
By the time he joined The Miami Showband in 1963, Ireland was ready for a musical star to call its own. A new optimism had replaced the moribund economy and mass emigration of the 1950s – and a generation of young people saw a life for themselves in Ireland. They also saw something in Rock – a forceful singer who could move as wildly as Mick Jagger and had a better voice than all of The Beatles combined.
“I wasn’t born six foot one and fantastic looking, like Elvis,” he would reflect. “Still, neither was Sinatra or Tony Bennett. But something happens, you give off something, whatever it is.”
Whatever it was, people couldn’t get enough. In 1966, he was invited to enter Ireland’s first National Song Contest and was chosen to represent Ireland in Luxembourg, where he placed fourth.
That same year, he married 20-year-old Judy Murray, whom he had met at her uncle’s ballroom, The Ierne, at Parnell Square in Dublin. “He was on the bill and came down to the kitchen to get a drink,’ Judy would say, “and we’ve been together ever since.”
Rock was a showman, but unlike many of his peers, he understood that music was ultimately a business. It was obvious to him that the Miami Showband was bringing in huge sums. “I’m walking down the street and people are asking for autographs, yet I’m thinking, ‘What good is being Dickie Rock, having hit records, if you’re not having the rewards?” he would reflect. “I’m still getting the same money as the sax player. You can replace the sax player. Don’t dare say you can replace me!”
He officially left the Miami Showband in 1972 – three years before the group was ambushed by loyalist paramilitaries while crossing the border from a gig in Belfast, resulting in the murder of three of the musicians. He had a moderate smash with his first solo single, The Last Waltz, which reached number 15. But his biggest hit would be a cover of John Denver’s Back Home Again, which went to number one in 1977, when punk was sweeping Ireland and U2 were bringing Irish music kicking and screaming into the future.
Dickie and Judy had six children: sons Joseph, Jason, John, Richard and Peter, and daughter Sarah Jane. Joseph, the eldest, had a developmental disability and died in 1992 after accidentally scalding himself in a care home.
Another son, Richie, was briefly a member of Louis Walsh’s Boyzone, featuring in the group’s notorious 1993 debut on the Late Late Show, where they mimed and danced for a speechless Gay Byrne.
There was further turmoil in Rock’s private life when a tabloid revealed that he had fathered a child with a 17-year-old fan in 1975. “I’d only met the girl a few times over the years,” he wrote in his autobiography, Always Me.
“The first time was when she approached me and told me I was the father of her child. Initially, I didn’t believe it, but when I heard all the facts I eventually realised it was true. When I accepted this, I suppose I panicked. I was terrified, realising the hurt it would cause Judy if she found out. I knew it would be like a knife slicing through her heart.”
His wife was “extremely upset”, though the marriage survived. “You just have to carry on,” Judy said. “We had a lot in common and a lot going for us and I didn’t want to throw it all away.”
Tragedy struck in 2001 when his foster brother Vincent (43) died from a heroin overdose. Rock would be heartbroken all over again when Judy died in 2022 from Covid.
In his later years, Rock became notorious as a skinflint – a reputation he embraced. In an interview with the Irish Sun, he jokingly recalled an exchange about his tightness with a friend, comedian Sil Fox. “Sil says I’m so mean even the pockets on my pool table are tight,” he told the Irish Sun. “My fridge has a lock on it. I put a fork in my sugar bowl when visitors come around, to save money.”
Dickie Rock’s popularity never waned. Unlike many showband singers, he remained a household name and continued playing to packed rooms. He was Ireland’s first rock star and blazed a trail to the end.
He is survived by children Jason, John, Richard, Sarah Jane and Peter.
