Participating in a recent radio discussion relating to a book on Irish pop by the promoter Louis Walsh brought home to me that we have yet to even begin the process of comprehending our pop history, writes John Waters.
Once again, the lines were divided cleanly between those, like Louis, who venerate showband culture and seek to draw a line of descent between it and the latter-day boyband culture, and those who seek to dismiss this territory out of hand.
Either approach, I believe, is a recipe for bad history.
Knocking showbands is an integral part of the ideological mechanism of the entity we now call Modern Ireland. A lot of showbands were rubbish, but saying so is neither original nor helpful.
As with Fianna Fáil, the Catholic Church or the GAA, any attempt to see good in showbands is inevitably interpreted as indicative of sub-modern tendencies.
This is partly because of the prejudice of those seeking to denigrate the past cultural life of Ireland to all the more valourise their own alleged role in putting it behind.
The point of seeking to give the showband era its proper place in history is not to elevate the past by comparison with the present, but to give a more accurate sense of what it was like and what it meant.
Showbands were a central element in what we now speak of as the modernisation of Irish life, and all that conceals this from us is mindless snobbery. They were far more subversive of the old Ireland than any of the institutions - RTÉ, The Irish Times, the Progressive Democrats - we now think of as the key catalysts of social change.
The Ireland into which the showbands exploded was a subdued place, dominated by the Catholic clergy. Sex was forbidden except under licence, otherwise known as marriage, and clergy had the exclusive franchise on this permission.
After nearly 100 years of relentless moral policing, employing judicious use of both the confessional and the ash plant, the church had succeeded in curtailing all sexual activity outside marriage and done much to ensure that this state entailed the minimum fun.
By the 1960s, however, it appears to have occurred to the more inventive members of the clergy that there was more tangible benefit to be derived from other uses of their restraining power on the libido of the nation.
It became clear to many of them that their control of sensuality could be utilised to build essential infrastructure, like community halls, churches, etc. It was all a matter of supply and demand.
Showing an acute grasp of this fundamental economic doctrine, the clergy decided to exploit the scarcity they had created by making sexual activity available on a controlled basis to those willing to fork out a nominal sum.
By holding out the promise of even minor sexual activity, they had, by their own creation, the perfect money-spinner.
The ballroom became, in effect, a place where sex was available under the guise of entertainment, the antithesis of the church, albeit often under the same control.
On Sunday morning, the faithful trooped into Mass to be told why they should abstain from company keeping, self abuse and mutual gratification, and on Sunday night they handed over their pound notes to the same priest to be allowed into the local Dionysian citadel in the hope of finding a sexual partner for the night.
During certain hours, i.e., during and immediately after a properly-authorised dance, it became permissible to break the moral code. In the same town, in the same street, in which even a discreet kiss in the open air would at other times be frowned upon, it was possible, under cover of dusk, darkness or dawn, to engage in unabashed fornication, in the open air, the back seats of cars, shoe shop doorways and round the back of the dancehall.
Everything was permissible so long as Show Me the Way to Amerillo was wafting down the river from the dancehall.
Music was a necessary evil. The clergy looked with deep suspicion on the bands they were forced to engage, treated them as sub-species and paid them as little as possible, granting themselves special dispensations to steal money from mere musicians.
But they also, unwittingly and unwillingly, gave these musicians an enormous power.
For it was to the musician on the stage that the priest devolved the right to sanction and facilitate promiscuity.
On Sunday morning, the priest had the power to say "don't", "thou shalt not", or "woe to ye who fornicate".
On Sunday night, courtesy of the same priest, the singer or guitarist, or even occasionally the drummer, had the power to suspend this rule and say, "go for it, boys and girls".
Far more than Gay Byrne or Mary Robinson, people like Joe Dolan, Derek Dean, Billy Brown and Brendan Bowyer revolutionised Irish attitudes to sexuality.
Far from being evidence of sub-modernity, it is arguable that Big Tom was more central to the modernisation of Irish society than the First Programme for Economic Expansion.
jwaters@irish-times.ie