It Occurs To Me:  Radio, romance, and rock ‘n’ roll

Tonight in the Guildhall in Derry, to celebrate the opening of this year’s Jazz Festival, Colum Arbuckle’s memoir (a sort-of autobiography, as he calls it) Radio, Romance and Rock ‘n’ Roll, will be officially launched. 

Letterkenny people may remember Colum’s travel agency, World Travel, located beside Blake’s bar in the ‘70s. 

Colum was born in his mother’s town, Convoy, and as he recalls in the book: “...3 June, 1947, the day I was born, in Convoy, County Donegal. My mother, who was living in Derry at the time, went home to her mother’s house to have me, and brought me back to Derry six days later. During those six days I was taken to Convoy Chapel and christened Joseph Columba Arbuckle. My father and grandfather were both Joseph, so to avoid any confusion it was decided that I would be called by my middle name, shortened to Colum without the ‘b’ at the end. And, apart from Mrs Breen the midwife who delivered me, reminding me, to my great embarrassment many years later, that she had seen something which I would never see, referring to a birthmark on my bum, that’s about it. I have no other details.”

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It was in Convoy, while visiting his granny, that he first heard The Shadows playing Apache on the old wireless, and he was hooked. From then on, he just wanted to be a professional guitarist, and played his first gig in Termon with the Willie Campbell Band.

He subsequently joined the Gay McIntyre Band, played with lifelong friend, bass player and legendary broadcaster, Gerry Anderson. He recalls one hall, “...during the slow dances, the parish priest used to walk among the couples, reading his breviary, and separating them if they danced too close.” 

Colum Arbuckle’s musical career includes playing in Bridie Gallagher’s band 

One hall had a sign that read “No Jiving Allowed”, but the band’s singer, Jim, decided to have a wee jive with his girlfriend before the big dance, and the priest caught him and demanded that he leave! It took a bout of delicate negotiations to ensure poor Jim got to stay. Colum’s maternal uncle was the famed Willie Ponsonby of the acclaimed William Ponsonby Orchestra, so music was very much in the blood. Subsequently, the Gay McIntyre Band got a year’s weekend residency in a Manchester Irish dancehall, and Colum and Gerry Anderson shared a small bed-sit. As he recalls: “We had our own space, but it paid very well. £12 a week, in fact, but each of us sent that home, leaving just £12 between us to buy food, clothes and pay the rent. We both had good Donegal mothers, so we had no personal experience looking after ourselves or managing a budget…the mammies would look after us.”

                                                  Meeting Bridie

Bridie Gallgher was a huge star at the time, and she liked the band, but only needed the rhythm section, “so Liam, Gerry and I would often go in her car, with Liam and the driver in the front, and Gerry, Bridie and me in the back. We played with her in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Wolverhampton and a few other places which had Irish halls. The journeys were long and tiresome, and we would occasionally doze off. I can claim, with some legitimacy, that I often slept on Bridie Gallagher’s bosom in the back of that car, when returning to Manchester. 

When I wrote home and told my mother that I was playing with Bridie Gallagher she couldn’t wait to get telling all her friends and family. It was as if her belief in me was being vindicated.”

In due course Colum joined what had been, arguably, Ireland’s biggest band, The Clipper Carlton, but six months in, they travelled all the way to Macroom in Cork, to find they were a week early for the gig. As Colum recalls: “Administration was the eventual cause of the downfall” and when they returned north, there was a parting of the ways. 

                                         Canada and America

In 1965, he received a telegram from the US  which simply read: “Can you come to America and join the Emerald Showband?”

He jumped at the chance, and, in due course, after an emotional farewell with his wife Margaret, who was pregnant, and his parents, Joe and Kathleen, he headed for Canada as his first gig was in Toronto.

After a few more shows there, they headed to New York, and mercifully, as there was no serious equivalent of Ice in those days, Colum got through after a second attempt. One of the many ballrooms they played in New York was The Tuxedo, built by an Inishowen man, and exactly modelled on the dance hall he left behind in his native Culdaff.

One of many hilarious incidents involved Colum filling in for Paddy Clancy of the Clancy Brothers, who had fallen ill.

The only one of their songs he knew was The Holy Ground, so he gave it his all when the famous chorus went Fine Girl You Are!

He got through it and Tommy Makem slipped him a fifty dollar note and gave him a hearty thanks. Margaret came over to New York in April and their first born, Julie, was born in September.

The band had a few very busy years, including TV appearances, but when Rachael was born in October 1971 with medical complications, the cost of the Caeserean section and postnatal treatment just about wiped away all their savings to date.

So when baby number three was due the following year, the online alternative was for Margaret to return to Derry and the NHS. In a very poignant paragraph Colum writes about sitting in his empty house, and “I cried like a baby for a considerable time”. To add to his misery, Margaret had an emergency operation and their third  baby Anne-Marie died. It was time to return to Derry.

                                                        Toejam

Groovers of a certain age will need no introduction to a great group, Toejam, who rocked their way around the north and beyond. Colum, Gerry Anderson and Jim Whitside, all contributed to a band who, on one occasion, had a young U2 playing support to them in Dublin.

One story, which Colum shared with me some thirty years ago, concerned the one and only Sean O’Beirne from Kilcar who booked them for the first Donegal Rock Festival in the GAA grounds in Donegal Town. It didn’t go according to plan, but as Colum recalls: “Sean was such a nice guy that we told him to forget about the money and no one was more surprised than me when he turned up, soaked to the skin, at my front door in Derry one evening the following November when a tremendous storm was blowing outside - with the full, albeit a bit damp, fee in an envelope.”

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Colum and Gerry never forgot that gesture and regarded Sean up as a particularly decent and honest man. Sadly, the Troubles were at their height during this time, and when an incendiary device destroyed the band’s equipment in Mason’s Bar in Derry, two happy years of playing and travelling were over. In time, he would tour with the new manifestation of the legendary Drifters, and I had the pleasure of introducing them in the jazz festival. 

                                                    Radio days

I first got to know Colum in BBC Radio Foyle where he had worked as a presenter/producer from its early days. 

He was a co-producer on Radio Ulster’s Frankly Anne Marie programme and produced my morning programme on Foyle, The Nine Line. 

When we did outside broadcasts, and had singers or bands playing live, his vast musical experience was a godsend, as indeed it was in the studio. He tells a very funny yarn (and undoubtedly has dozens more) of the occasional confusion that arose when we presented Frankly Anne-Marie from different studios, me in Derry and Anne Marie McAleese in Belfast. 

As Colum recalls: “It worked very well, and many guests who had heard the programme, were surprised that the pair were not sitting beside one another. One older man, however, who was in the unattended studio in Enniskillen didn’t seem to grasp the dual presentation concept, and when Anne-Marie joined Frank who was talking to him at the time, he said, quite abruptly, ‘Excuse me Frank, could you introduce me to that woman who keeps interrupting us!” 

As UTV’s Joe Mahon says in the book’s intro: “His memories are not always happy ones, there are several moving passages wherein he describes the pain and anguish of loss, but every event, happy or sad, public or personal, is recalled with a great eye for precise detail and also with remarkable candour and honesty.” 

Colum remarried in 2004 and he and Sharon are parents to 14-year old Gracie. Happy days!

The book is  published by Colmcille Press in Derry and is a wonderfully engaging read. 

Mick Jagger said it all…“It’s only rock‘n’roll but I like it!”