John Keogh and Pat Egan

JOHN KEOGH

As a member of the Greenbeats, John Keogh, now a television producer, was one of the very first people pioneering the new rock 'n' roll sound in Ireland. "With the Greenbeats we decided to break away from the dance band/ showband type of group. I was very interested in rock 'n' roll and would have been listening to Eddie Cochrane, Little Richard and Elvis Presley," he says.

"There was a real curiosity about the Greenbeats when we started in the early 1960s. There was the very physical fact that we all had guitars and didn't have a saxophone player! We also wore jeans, whereas the showbands would all be wearing matching clothes. Our line-up confused people - when we were trying to get gigs we would always be met with the 'What, no saxophone?' line. We played wherever we could, in clubs or in school halls and then later on at the Number Five Club in Harcourt Street.

"We got a record deal and our first single was a ballad that I had written and on the B-side we did a cover of a Rolling Stones song. I really didn't want to release the ballad as a single because we were a rock 'n' roll band but the label wouldn't allow us to release a quick number on the A-side. Not long after that we broke up but I'm still playing music today with one of the other original members of the Greenbeats."

PAT EGAN

As a regular DJ in the beat clubs in the 60s, music promoter Pat Egan remembers how exciting the era was: "This was all young and new and people were really enjoying themselves," he says. "My whole interest started with listening to early rock 'n' roll music and then I had the page in Spotlight magazine which was all about the beat groups. The main bands at the time were the Creatures, Bluesville and Eire Apparent and then you had Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher around at the same time. It was all still very vibrant right into the 1970s but none of the bands were being signed up for record deals locally and it began to wane a little bit. I used to DJ in the clubs - I would go on before the band and back then you had to do the chat over the intros. These days DJs don't talk at all.

"I had a lot of contacts from my work with Spotlight so I was able to get the good records of the time. I was playing music that wasn't being played anywhere else. This was at a time when even Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher couldn't get on the radio."