Still one step ahead after 25 years

Profile Staying a step ahead Aubrey Malone meets Riverdance after 25 years 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. 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. 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 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.

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.

John on stage in Radio

City Music Hall, NYC tweed jacket and a pair of corduroy trousers. ‘I thought I was the bee’s knees,’ he says, ‘until they told me I was going to be working on the factory floor. That was a bit of a shock.’ Dickie Rock was one of his co-workers and was moonlighting as a singer. He’d just supported Cliff Richard at the National Stadium and was bursting with confidence, telling people he was a better singer than him. John got a job as a boy messenger in RTE Radio In 1960. He saw it as a gateway to television. Here he hoped to fine-tune his acting talent and also to learn about directing and producing. Delivering post to The Actor’s Studio in Henry Street he spent much of his time talking to the actors there. He was ticked off by his employer for fraternising with ‘play actors.’ When he was asked to appear in one of the rep’s plays he was delighted but it came to the attention of the employer and as a result he was fired. Ironically, his next job was as a vision mixer in RTE. He was effectively getting what he’d always wanted in the very same week as he was being let go from the more subservient post. He took great delight in telling the man who fired him where he was going next. He The big opening of the Green Lounge Disco on Stephens Green in 1963. L to R John McColgan, Maura McColgan, Tom Hickey, B P Fallon, Bridie McColgan and Larry Gogan

John presented a pop show called Saturday Spin on RTE in 1968

John’s first time on radio, age 16, Chivers Top Ten Tips - On the left Presenter Niall Boden and on the far right 16 year old John

McColgan

John directing an RTE Christmas Special,

Joy to the World 1980 was earning the princely sum of £12 a week but it was what he wanted to do. That was all that mattered.

He stayed in RTE for over twenty years, spreading his talents over the roles of cameraman, floor manager, producer, director. During these years he acted in plays with an amateur dramatic society called the Young Dublin Players. These were directed by a man called Ivan Hanley, a member of the Radio Eireann Players. He appeared in plays like Night Must Fall, Shadow and Substance and The Plough and the Stars.

‘RTE was my university during those years,’ John says, ‘I worked with great people like Chloe Gibson, Sheila Richards, Lelia Doolin, Tony Barry and many others.’ He did documentaries, variety shows, you name it. He also produced shows for Mike Murphy like Murphy’s America, Murphy’s Australia and The Likes of Mike.

One of the shows he most enjoyed producing at this time was the candid camera one where Mike caught people out in various ruses by taking on different identities. The most famous was probably when he repeatedly interrupted a broadcast Gay Byrne was doing in TCD when he pretended to be a French tourist. It’s hilarious to watch Gay becoming more and more infuriated before he finally snaps with some very uncharacteristic expletives.

When Mike announced who he was, Gay proved to be a good sport about it all. John also got to know both of them well. He worked with Gay often and Mike recently interviewed John for a Senior Times podcast. In the course of these years he married a

John with Costume Designer Joan Bergin

John with Mike Murphy and the crew from The Likes Of Mike

First Lady Michelle Obama and her daughters with the Riverdance cast and executives at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin in 2013

In 1968 John married Tolka Row actress, Virginia Cole, but the marriage broke down within a decade and he put divorce proceedings in motion. There were two children, Justin and Lucy.

A meeting with Moya Doherty in 1981 led to a new romance. He was Head of Entertainment in Network 2 at the time. Moya also worked in RTE but they both felt in need of a change. Together they took the plunge and moved to London. There they got jobs in TV-AM. Moya worked as a reporter and John produced shows with Michael Parkinson and David Frost. He interviewed people like Elton John, Van Morrison and George Best and also worked for a time with Chris Tarrant on a programme called By the Seaside. The tax situation was more amenable to the couple in London than it had been in Ireland. The city also had a more liberal zeitgeist. They were comfortable financially during these years and also had a thriving social life. They became friendly with Gabriel Byrne, who was then living with Aine O’Connor, and Liam Neeson, who was dating Helen Mirren. It was a time of great cultural ferment despite the fact that Margaret Thatcher was in power. John and Moya got married in 1986 after John’s divorce came through. The following year they came back to Ireland. They had two children together, Mark and Danny. They now set up Tyrone Productions, a highly successful company that produced shows like The School Around the Corner, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and Ros na Rún. In 1989 they bought a luxurious holiday home in Martha’s Vineyard.

A new phase of his life began when he cast Michael Flatley and Jean Butler in a show he was directing in the National Concert Hall that year. After casting them, what would become the Riverdance phenomenon began to take shape inside his head. Moya was just as much a part of this as he was. She pitched the idea of doing an interval dance act at the following year’s Eurovision, which she was producing. After some initial reluctance by the top brass she got the green light for it.

The rest is history. The show stopped the world in its tracks and John and Moya became household names. Did he always believe he’d become famous? ‘I had a naïve self-belief in my ability,’ he tells me. It wasn’t quite naïve in view of what he achieved.

Creative differences with Michael Flatley followed. They went their separate ways afterwards but there were no hard feelings between them. Each carved an individual path without resentment about the parting. It was a win-win situation for them both.

It wasn’t roses all the way for John in the aftermath of Riverdance. He spread himself in many directions and it was perhaps inevitable some of his projects would falter. Moya and John produced a 2007 Broadway show The Pirate Queen written by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg ( creators of Les Misérables ). Despite that talent and a stellar cast the show failed to ignite. A negative review from a man called Ben Brantley in The New York Times killed it. It ended up costing them over $10 million. He took this on the chin, describing the business he’s in as being as much a lottery as any other. ‘Failure is built into it,’ he says. ‘The secret is to get back up on your horse after a disappointment’. He cites Andrew Lloyd Webber as his role model in this respect. He points out that he had more flops than is generally recognised. Working on extravagant budgets as he does, if something doesn’t succeed he takes a bigger hit than most people. It’s the nature of the business he’s in and it’s the chance he takes. He likes gambling. He always feels there’s ‘a golden egg’ down the road.

Both he and Moya set great store by respecting their casts and audiences and ensuring that both sets of people get as much out of their shows as they do. ‘We treat every night as an opening night,’ he says.

In 1997 they built a house near the Baily lighthouse in Howth with spectacular views over Dublin Bay. Such acquisitions seemed to be less fraught with danger to them than investing their wealth on the stock market. They later revised that view. They enjoyed surveying

John McColgan and Moya Doherty

properties in various corners of the globe. ‘We were like children in a sweet shop,’ he says. As time went on they sold most of these, tax and maintenance headaches making them too cumbersome to hold onto.

In May 2003 both John and Moya were conferred with honorary Doctors of Law from NUI Galway in recognition for their contribution to Irish Culture.

John and Moya also won the Jacobs awards Moya for her documentary on sexual abuse The Silent Scream. John for the consistently high standard of his entertainment programming.

In 2011 he set up worldirish.com, a website that brought social media content from Facebook, Twitter and other websites together to create a global online Irish community. It attracted investors to Ireland’s cultural and business sectors. Two years later he devised a sequel to Riverdance called Heartbeat of Home. Working with composer Brian Byrne and writer Joe O’Connor. It proved to be another enormous success, being staged in London, Germany, China and North America as well as Dublin’s 3 Arena. A kind of Riverdance with diaspora, it expanded the musical range of the original show to embrace Spanish, African, Latin tango and Cuban elements.

Riverdance has now been performed over 12,000 times and seen by over 27 million people. Even so, he still wants to re-imagine it. He can’t sit still; his mind is always working overtime. Moya shares his determination to press on despite the Coronavirus and a recent brush with cancer. John and Moya at NUI conferring Julian Erskine, Executive Producer Riverdance, with John and Bill

called MyTunes ( a pun on iTunes). Listeners are in for a treat with this. It’s a series of eight 90 minute programmes in which he meanders through his life using music as the link. It will also feature people like Gabriel Byrne, Peter Sellers, Tommy Tiernan and Seamus Heaney.

My Tunes is inspired by his love of music he’s nurtured since the age of five when he looked into a radio and imagined the people in there. ‘I wanted to know where they were,’ he says, ‘what they looked like, everything about them.’

His musical tastes are, he describes as ‘eccentric and eclectic’ - rock, pop, classical, soul, country, indigenous. When I ask him who his favourite singers are he lists Elvis, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. They happen to be mine as well.

He is very excited about the podcast series. ‘I wanted to go down the rabbit hole like Alice in Wonderland,’ he tells me, ‘It’s going to be a rambling, freewheeling journey through my life inside and outside music’.

John is Irish Ambassador for TROCAIRE and he travels the world filming and taking photographs to support their mission. Bill Whelan, Moya Doherty, John McColgan at the Riverdance 25th Anniversary special in the 3 Arena

currently the chairperson of RTE - is producing the Riverdance Animated Feature with Cinesite, a UK/Canadian animation company, with a new score by Bill Whelan.

On March 13th of this year John and Moya sold out two 25th anniversary tours of Riverdance, one in the UK and one in the US. After the third performance of eight scheduled shows in Radio City Music Hall the Coronavirus necessitated a shutdown and everyone was sent home. When they’ll get back on stage again isn’t clear but it’s probably going to be the spring of next year at the earliest.

Covid or no Covid, one thing is sure with this man: he doesn’t know the meaning of the word retirement. John sure does live to our Senior Times motto ! For people who don’t act their age...

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