18th October 2009
This Sunday Miriam O'Callaghan talks to legendary showband star Dickie Rock and his wife Judy on Miriam Meets.
In the first ever interview the couple has given together, they talk frankly and very movingly about the highs and lows of their lives together. During Dickie's hugely successful career as an entertainer, behind the bright lights, their marriage of forty three years was devastated by a series of personal family tragedies, too often lived out under the glare of the media.
As a young man from a Dublin working class background Dickie trained as a welder and at seventeen emigrated to work in Manchester where he was desperately unhappy and homesick: "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."
Back in Dublin the shy and introverted Cabra welder gradually began to be recognised for his extraordinary singing voice and by the mid 1960's was a star attraction and mobbed sex symbol on the hugely exciting and popular showband scene.
Behind the glamour and fame, however, Dickie and Judy's marriage of over forty years was shattered by a series of personal family tragedies, many lived out in the
the full glare of the media. Speaking of the seemingly endless blows fate dealt them, Judy says: "They happen to you and you have to deal with them .... You just have to carry on .. We had a lot in common and a lot going for us and I didn't want to throw it all away."
Now in his fiftieth year of show business and still entertaining audiences all over the country, on Monday 19 October (day after broadcast) Dickie Rock will receive The International Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award in The Radisson, Athlone for being one of the longest and most enduringly successful stars in Irish show business.
He tells Miriam what still excites him about being in the business after all these years:
"I can't wait to get on stage with the band and perform and sing and see people enjoying themselves and having a bit of fun. All those years later I feel very lucky. In the words of the song I'm Still Here!"