From hanging with Elvis to dodging Roy Rogers’ calls, the seasoned saxophonist’s life was simply epic
Cole was a legend in the Irish entertainment industry and one of the country’s most respected musicians. His professional career playing Dixieland jazz began at the age of 12 in Castleblayney, Co Monaghan, and lasted until his cancer diagnosis.
He also gave rise to one of the great anecdotes in Irish showbusiness, first told by Kevin Marron in the Sunday World.
While doing a residency in Las Vegas, members of his band, the Big 8 showband, became friendly with their boyhood hero, Roy Rogers — a famous TV cowboy with a horse called Trigger. One night, Rogers had gone to their gig, and was so taken with the band that he invited them to his ranch.
In time, the friendship became slightly irksome for the Irish band — and Marron was in Paddy’s apartment for dinner when the phone rang.
As his wife Helen went to answer it, Paddy shouted: “If that’s Roy Rogers, tell him I’m not in.”
The anecdote gave rise to the title of a biography of Cole by journalist Tim Ryan.
Paddy was a very decent man with an easy charm and ready smile, who formed friendships all over the world, from celebrities and VIPs to ordinary folk who admired him for his expertise on the saxophone and clarinet and his genuine love of life and music.
He also engaged in many charitable enterprises and was voluntary chairman of the royalty-collection agency Recorded Artists, Actors and Performers (RAAP), as well as presenting a well-received weekly radio programme on Sunshine FM.
In an RTÉ recording of Open House, singer Joe Dolan summed him up: “I’ve never heard Paddy say anything rude about anybody or talk behind anyone’s back… he’s just one of those lovely people that come around once in a lifetime.”
He’s just one of those lovely people that come around once in a lifetime
Paddy Cole was born into a musical family in Henry Street, Castleblayney, Co Monaghan, on December 17, 1939, the second in a family of seven children. His father, also Paddy, worked for the post office and played saxophone with the local Regal Dance Band and later the Maurice Lynch Orchestra.
“I often think back about my dad and I admire him a lot for working day and night,” he said in his autobiography, King of the Swingers, written with Tom Gilmore. “He was with the post office, driving a mail van, delivering letters and parcels to sub-post offices every morning, as well as being a musician by night.”
Butch Moore and the Capitol, with Paddy Cole in the back row
His mother, Mary Hughes, also from a musical family in Castleblayney, was the mainstay of the family and encouraged her son from an early age.
Listening to old 78rpm records on the gramophone, he became a fan of New Orleans jazz – something that would last his lifetime and make him a handsome living.
Billed as “12-year-old Paddy Cole, Ireland’s youngest saxophone player”, he played his first professional gig with his father in Maurice Lynch’s band, just on the cusp of what became known as the showband era.
While still at vocational school in Castleblayney, he rushed from classes to the band’s van waiting outside the school gates, collecting him for gigs.
“We were doing a cross-section of everything — a variety of music to suit all tastes,” he said, from Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock to Irish ballads and Glenn Miller dance tunes.
But there was also pressure on him to get a steady job, in case the music didn’t work out. He worked as a petrol-pump attendant, an apprentice electrician and a butcher. But the music of Count Basie, Duke Ellington and others held him in thrall.
With the advent of the showband boom and the money that it brought to rural Ireland, there was a demand for good musicians.
Two young agriculture students, Eamonn Monaghan and Des Kelly, had formed the Capitol Showband, and in 1961 they came calling on Cole, with an offer of £30 a week.
Paddy shrugged off obscurity to play all over the country in parish halls and the new ballrooms that were springing up.
“It was glamorous, and we were enjoying it all, even if we weren’t that conscious of how good the music was. We thought it would go on forever,” he said.
His first gig with the Capitol was at the Pavilion Ballroom in Blackrock, Co Louth. “It was so hectic in those early days with the Capitol that there wasn’t even time to think,” he said.
There were concerts all over Ireland and Britain, some before crowds of 4,000 people. The band did a programme on Radio Luxembourg, and recorded with Phil Coulter at the Tommy Ellis Studio in Dublin, and did publicity work for newspapers and magazines.
Their big break came when Belfast-born promoter Phil Solomon brought the band to London to record Sunday Night at the London Palladium, a huge televised variety show with an audience of millions. Solomon, who also recorded Van Morrison and The Dubliners, wanted the Capitol to be the show’s house band — and was miffed when they turned it down.
They were also the first Irish showband to go to the US, in 1961, at a time when there was no music or dancing during the Catholic season of Lent in De Valera’s Ireland.
The band had three number one hits in 1964-65 with Down Came the Rain, Born to Be with You and Walking the Streets in the Rain, which had been Ireland’s entry in the Eurovision Song Contest, sung by Butch Moore.
Helen and Paddy Cole
While playing a dance in Newcastle West, Paddy met a “fabulous-looking girl” – who a week or two later, he spotted walking along Westmoreland Street in Dublin. She was Helen Hehir.
The couple married in February 1965, but had to cut their honeymoon in Marbella short when Paddy got a call to get over to London to record for The Eamonn Andrews Show and Thank Your Lucky Stars.
When Butch Moore got an offer “he couldn’t refuse” and left the Capitol, the showband scene was coming to an end. Paddy Cole got a phone call to see if he would join the Big 8 with Brendan Bowyer and Tom Dunphy. The Big 8 spent six months of the year doing a Las Vegas residency at the Stardust.
“It was hard work,” he told Tom Gilmore for King of the Swingers. “We were doing three shows a night, six nights a week and each show was an hour long.”
But there was time off too, and Paddy recalled meeting Elvis Presley and attending Frank Sinatra’s legendary concerts in Caesars Palace.
Although they loved the lifestyle and climate of Nevada, the Coles returned to Ireland in 1974 and Paddy decided to leave the Big 8 — announcing it through the pages of the Evening Press, much to the annoyance of band leaders Brendan Bowyer and Tom Dunphy, and of manager TJ Byrne.
Cole, who had been teetotal in the early years, started “drinking a few bottles of Guinness” after shows, which became more than a few bottles as time wore on. He admitted to Gilmore that he was at this stage “a bad drinker”, ending up after gigs drinking late into the night with people he didn’t know, asking himself the following morning why he was doing it.
After he had some nodules removed from his throat, he was told by his surgeon not to drink alcohol for five weeks — and he never did.
“It was no big deal,” he once told me, “I never went to AA meetings or anything like that. But to be honest, it was then I realised that people attending my gigs were buying me so many pints…
“While it was my policy never to drink before going on stage, I felt at the jazz gigs that I had to have a pint from time to time. But I never drank after that cancer scare, and it changed my life.”
After stints with the Paddy Cole Band and the Paddy Cole Superstars, he bought a pub in Castleblayney, named it Paddy Cole’s Place — and moved home.
Due to back trouble he had to stop performing, and was eventually “sacked” from his own band and given a sinecure working in the office.
He credited the singer Twink with “bushwhacking” him into cabaret and after that he became a staple on the scene, playing with her on stage and television shows.
Reunion tours with the Capitol, The Showband Show and cabaret gigs at Clontarf Castle, the Braemor Rooms, the Harcourt Hotel plus gigs all over the country, kept him busy as a musician for the rest of his life.
After selling the pub, the Coles moved to a Victorian home in Ballsbridge, Dublin. Like many musicians he suffered from financial insecurity, which led in 2006 to him making a settlement with the Revenue Commissioners for €834,726 in relation to off-shore bank accounts — probably the one embarrassing blot on his long career in showbusiness.
Paddy Cole with former Sunday Independent editor Aengus Fanning. Photo: Julien Behal
While not playing music, Cole was a keen golfer and member of the prestigious Lahinch Golf Club in Co Clare.
“I cringe when I hear that word ‘retirement’,” he told one interviewer. “I want to ease back a bit and pick and choose where and when I’ll play. But there’s an old saying: ‘You don’t stop because you get old; but you get old because you stop’ — and that’s why I won’t be stopping.”
He put it another way to an old showbusiness acquaintance.
“When you have somebody offering you €5,000 for a couple of hours’ work doing something you really love, you’d be stone mad to say no.”
Sadly, when he was diagnosed with lung cancer, he had to stop.
One of his great regrets was no longer being able to play sax or clarinet. But he faced his illness with his usual grace, joking from his hospital bed that there was so much fluid on his lungs that “I need a plumber, not a surgeon.”
One of his favourite haunts was Gleesons pub in Booterstown, Co Dublin, where he would meet with friends for coffee, particularly Éanna Casey who worked with him in the musician’s royalty organisations RAAP.
Among his many lifelong pals were musician Eamonn Monaghan and comedian Noel V Ginnity and a host of others, including businessman Mick Sherry who drove him to and from hospital appointments.
Paddy Cole, who died last Wednesday, is survived by his wife Helen and children Karen, Paddy and Pierce. His funeral mass takes place in Castleblayney, Co Monaghan, at 12 noon tomorrow.
