Are You Dancing?: Showbands, Popular Music, and Memory in Modern Ireland

From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, showbands became all the rage among Ireland’s dancing audiences. Performing covers of rock ’n’ roll and pop hits from American and British weekly Top 10 charts, they riveted their audiences, dismayed parish priests, and offered Irish youth a taste of modernism and pop culture from outside of Ireland.

In Are You Dancing?, Rebecca S. Miller tells the story of how these working-class bands brought new sounds and provocative choreographies to the Irish and Northern Irish pop landscape. Both as a response to and an agent in Ireland’s changing financial landscape, showbands quickly grew into a hugely lucrative commercial industry. At the same time, they nudged open doors for Irish women to become pop stars, helped kick-start Ireland’s stagnating economy, and ultimately created the template for what has since become Ireland’s popular music industry. Miller draws upon interviews with more than 80 musicians, agents, managers, audience members, and others connected with the showband scene to reveal the vast interplay of social, economic, and cultural changes that ensued when showbands took the stage.

Drawing upon an extensive catalog of ethnographic and archival research, Miller presents an overlooked era of musical performances that revolutionized Irish entertainment.

Rebecca S. Miller is Professor of Music at Hampshire College. She is author of Carriacou String Band Serenade: Performing Identity in the Eastern Caribbean.