A new exhibition celebrates the showband era, when musicians and groups sent 'em home sweatin', writes Lorna Siggins

Here's a question for Larry Gogan's inimitable Just a Minute quiz: "Name the Irish band that The Beatles played support to in the early 1960s?" The heavy clock ticks, there's silence on the end of the phone. Sympathetic listeners wonder about Gogan's sense of humour. However, a jeweller down in Waterford knows the answer. In fact, not only does Eddie Sullivan know. He was actually there.

"We had just bought a new Mercedes wagon, and Val Doonican was performing as well. There we were in our shoes and smart jackets, and there they were - a group of young fellas in leathers and long hair." It is just over 40 years since that memorable gig in the Liverpool Empire, with Sullivan on trumpet as part of the Royal Showband.

Less than a decade later, he and his colleagues were to turn their backs on it all when they played their last date together in the Stardust in Las Vegas. Now his trumpet is among a number of instruments, equipment, clothing and memorabilia mounted behind glass cases for the next three months in the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) - Country Life in Co Mayo, as part of the Hucklebuck Time exhibition.

There's a 1950s valve radio, an echo chamber, a saxophone owned by Mick Delahunty, and a pair of hucklebuck shoes. There are LPs, a trumpet and mutes used by Frankie King, and the first six-string bass guitar owned in Ireland by the late Tom Dunphy - who died in a road accident on the way to a Big 8 performance at the Mary of Dungloe festival in Bundoran, Co Donegal, in July 1975.

Much of the material for Hucklebuck Time was collated in the "home" of Irish showbands, when Eamonn McEneaney, curator of the Waterford Museum of Treasures, opened the exhibition there last year. Eddie Sullivan, and Royal colleagues Michael Coppinger, Brendan and Aisling Bowyer, and the late Tom Dunphy's son contributed to what NMI head of collections Raghnall O'Floinn describes as "an important element of Ireland's cultural and musical history".

This was the post-Ballroom of Romance era, when the country was emerging from economic depression but emigration was still a fact of life. Showbands such as the Blue Aces and the Derek Joys, with their cover versions of everything from pop and rock'n'roll to Dixieland, country and western, waltzes, skiffle, ballads and even céilí music, "blew away the high banked clouds of resignation", in the words of President Mary McAleese.

The phenomenon grew out of the big bands and orchestras of the 1940s and 1950s, according to Raghnall O'Floinn, and the Clipper Carltons from north of the Border are attributed with setting a trend. The line-up was based on the old Dixieland jazz format, with drums, keyboard, double bass and brass ranging from trumpet to saxophone and trombone.

"Showband musicians were always neatly dressed and all wore the same type of suit," Nuala O'Connor records, with a little less nostalgia, in the book she wrote for her BBC television series, Bringing It All Back Home. Such was the monopoly that venues were not open to groups performing other material, she notes.

Music such as rock'n'roll and rhythm and blues was often excluded by a system which also "forced good musicians" into formats, when their musical preferences and talents may have lain elsewhere. Thankfully, clubs opened up in cities, nurturing different types of music, and third-level institutions provided venues for fledgling bands.

IT WAS A TIME synonymous with an emerging sense of personal and sexual freedom, as encapsulated in the lyrics of the Paul Williams 1949 hit, The Hucklebuck, which reached the top of the British charts for the Royal Showband in January 1965.

However, social life below the glittering mirror-balls was still very much dominated by the Catholic church, with only mineral refreshments and Kerry creams on offer, no alcohol, and no dancing on the eve of Sunday Mass.

Throughout the six weeks of Lent, most of the more successful Irish bands crossed the water to play to Irish emigrants. Some of the groups were even dispatched by managers to Britain to perform there on Saturday nights. Such was the scale of the industry that there were 800 bands and an estimated 450 dance halls, with some of the top bands commanding up to £100 a week when £10 to £12 constituted the average industrial wage.

The "1960s phenomenon" continued into the 1970s with groups such as Gina, Dale Haze and the Champions. Solo artists such as Colm Wilkinson, Van Morrison and the late Rory Gallagher also started out with, or played support to, the cover groups. The role of the managers and venue owners - former taoiseach Albert Reynolds being among the best known - is also acknowledged in the exhibition, and George Murphy, the manager of Tramore's Atlantic Ballroom, was among the guests at last week's opening.

"Fellows were coming out from under motor cars and down from trees," to become managers, Des Kelly of the Capitol Showband is quoted as saying. "The managers were that very important eighth share," Eddie Sullivan recalls. Television coverage from 1961 was also influential, and RTÉ's The Showband Show from 1963 became one of the most popular programmes.

Sullivan was able to play bass guitar as well as trumpet, and the Royal performers were also the first band to use an echo chamber. "I didn't miss it when we stopped," Sullivan says of the band's split in 1971. "We weren't interested in the money. It was the arriving - the buzz of coming into town and seeing how our audience might have grown. Then we used to move our families to Las Vegas for six months, and after five years of that it just became too much."

Six of the Royals are still around, with all but Bowyer, still a Las Vegas resident, back in the south-east. Writers such as Vincent Power, author of Send 'Em Home Sweatin', have recorded the era, but Sullivan still believes there's a proper history to be written of that time.

Hucklebuck Time runs at National Musuem of Ireland - Country Life, Castlebar, until June. Irish folklife division curator Clodagh Doyle has planned a series of events, including: a Reminiscence Workshop with James Reddiough on Apr 11; a talk and viewing of The One Nighters, a documentary by Peter Collinson about life on the road, on Apr 14; and Dancehall Dazzle, a talk and workshop on showband fashion, by Stacey Gallagher of the Grafton Academy of Fashion and Dress Design on Apr 22. Tel: (094) 9031755 or www.museum.ie