EXCLUSIVE: Rock star Adam Clayton will explore the unique phenomenon of the Irish showband in doc series Ballroom Blitz. The show, from Dublin based Sideline Productions, has been commissioned by Irish pubcaster RTE. Seasoned international exec Michael Murphy will be at MIPCOM looking to attach a distributor.
The Irish showbands entertained young audiences in Ireland during a moment of growth and prosperity in the 1960s. They were normally a seven or eight piece outfit with powerful horn sections and they interspersed waltzes, Irish music and jazz with the pop hits of the day.
There is a U.S. dimension to the story. Sixty years before U2 played Las Vegas at the Sphere in 2024, Irish showbands entertained American audiences during residencies in Vegas and packed out Irish ballrooms in New York, Boston and Chicago. Their US success was managed by the mercurial Bill Fuller who ended up owning over thirty ballrooms in Ireland, Britain, and the U.S.
Icons including Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher plied their trade in Irish showbands before leaving to write and perform their own material. In Ballroom Blitz, Clayton delves into how the showbands were part of wider social and cultural change as ballrooms sprang up, offering the young generation a chance to meet up and lose their inhibitions.
The doc also takes in events in July 1975 when three members of Ireland’s most popular showband, The Miami, were killed by a British Army patrol in Northern Ireland. That was a year before U2 formed and in Ballroom Blitz, the band’s bass player, Clayton, also explores how showbands played an integral role in the development of the Irish music industry.
Murphy will be in Cannes to kickstart international sales, by getting a distributor on board Ballroom Blitz. The former General Manager at Beyond Distribution is an exec producer on the project. It was directed by Billy McGrath, who also helmed music docs including Citizens of Boomtown about Irish band The Boomtown Rats.