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Staying a step ahead after 25 years Aubrey Malone meets Riverdance co-creator John McColgan
Original cast of 25 years ago on the left and the current cast on the right hand side.
Silence is golden, they say, but musical impresario John McColgan may have spent some worrying moments as he sat in the audience during the intermission of The Eurovision Song Contest of 1994 when the original Riverdance, which was produced by his wife Moya Doherty and composed by Bill Whelan, was first staged. After the seven minute set finished, there was what he describes as ‘an audible gasp’ from the 4000-strong audience. Four seconds later they erupted into rapturous applause. Riverdance: The Show, as we all know, went on appear in The Point Depot and its Eurovision debut came to be known as one of the most famous interval acts in the history of the of the Eurovision song contest. Ireland won the contest again that year (with Charlie McGettigan and Paul Harrington’s Rock and Roll Kids) but the following day’s headlines were reserved for Riverdance. The Sunday Press hailed it as ‘Seven Minutes That Shook The World.’ The following year he and Moya mortgaged their house to turn the Eurovision interval act into a full-blown show. It was a bold move; the enthusiasm of the audience on the night gave them a feeling in their gut that it would be a success. Along with Bill Whelan Moya and John set about developing the show. Success? That’s one of the biggest understatements in show business history. The show in the Point was the talk of the town for months if not years afterwards. A video of the music went viral and Bill Whelan’s single went to number one in the charts. It also won him a Grammy Award. A quarter of a century on, the show still takes people’s breath away as a cavalcade of feet clicking in unison creates a kind of electric charge. It’s like a colossal army march.
John Mc Colgan with his Riverdance co-creators Moya Doherty and Bill Whelan reading ecstatic reviews after the show was premiered in New York 1996 not overly enamoured of it. Everything was taught through Irish so his grades were not as good as they had been in Wexford. The discipline was also much more rigid. He endured a particularly brutal beating inflicted by a lay teacher over his failure to decline a Latin verb successfully one day at the age of 14. He didn’t cry, preferring to put on his ‘John Wayne’ persona, but his injuries were so bad he found he wasn’t even able to cycle home from school. ‘My hands swelled up like sausages,”’he says. That was the moment he decided he wasn’t going back – ever. When he told his parents his mother was saddened but she accepted it. His father didn’t. He knew how important education was for anyone’s future. To placate him, John said he’d go to night school. He told him he wanted to be an actor. His father wasn’t interested in either suggestion. He didn’t speak to him for a year afterwards.
The eldest of nine, John was born in Strabane, County Tyrone. His father had been in the army in World War II. He found it difficult to get work after the war ended but he eventually got a job as a manager in a leather factory in Ferns, Co Wexford. The factory was actually located in a castle.
John’s decision led to a plethora of the kinds of jobs that seem de rigueur for any self-made man. He started off as a telegram boy with the P&T and stayed there for two years. A raft of other jobs followed. He became a salesman in Best’s Menswear and Saxone in O’Connell Street, a lounge boy in The Yacht in Ringsend, a grocer’s assistant in Cabra.
The family moved to Wexford when John was four and subsequently to Dublin. He went to school in St. Josephs’ (‘Joeys’) in Fairview but was
A post was then offered to him in Unidare in Finglas. He thought he was going to be on the white collar staff there so he bought himself a brown Senior Times l August 2020 l www.seniortimes.ie 5
