Des Smyth?
Tune Smyth: Frank, Sammy, Dean. Des? Think of the great swing-era singers, and Irishman Des Smyth isn't the first name that comes to mind. Even in the annals of great Irish showband singers - Dickie Rock, Brendan Bowyer, Joe Dolan - Smyth is a somewhat forgotten figure, a relic of an Ireland dead and gone, when Radio Éireann ruled the airwaves, and rock 'n' roll was some quare new fad practised by degenerate teens in the US. In fact, when you hear the name Des Smyth these days, you'll probably think of the Drogheda-born golf champion rather than the Dublin crooner. But if Des had chanced his arm in Vegas, he could well have elbowed his way into the Rat Pack, and become a household name from LA to Lahinch.
Band of brothers: Des was brought up in the tough alleyways of the Liberties, so that's his street cred sorted out. He sang with the Catholic Boys Brigade Choir, but longed to lead his own singing group, and so recruited his brothers Frank and Jimmy to form a trio, the imaginatively named Smyth Brothers. In those pre-internet days radio play was everything, and in 1955 the brothers bagged a gig at the Phoenix Hall with the Radio Éireann Light Orchestra, which was broadcast all over the country. It was like getting on Big Brother - instant celebrity. Soon the Smyth Brothers were playing all the big venues, touring the UK, appearing on popular radio series Odd Noises, and playing at the Las Vegas of north Co Dublin - Butlin's in Mosney. Des was so taken with the glitz of Butlin's he went back there the next year - as a Redcoat.
Telly tally: Fifty years after his first radio appearance, Des Smyth is back on the air, and still singing the songs we (or our grannies) love so well. Last night, RTÉ Radio 1 broadcast the first of three programmes, Sing a Little Smyth, in which Des looks back on his long career, and reminisces about the days when he sang with The Collegemen showband, trod the boards with Maureen Potter in Gaels of Laughter, appeared in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, played the cabaret and supper club circuit, and appeared on The Late Late Show more times than Brendan O'Carroll. The next two parts will be broadcast on August 4th and 11th.
Larger than life: In recent years, Des has followed Frank, Sammy and Dean onto the big screen, as the central character in the 2002 short film Just a Little Bit of Love. Made by Corkman and Dún Laoghaire film school graduate Peter Foott for the princely sum of €700, JaLBoL takes the Frankenstein legend and transposes it to the Irish showband scene. An obsessed young lady, frustrated by love's fickle ways, decides to build her own artificial lover out of mannequin parts - the result looks exactly like our debonair Des.
