Butch Moore: Showband success.
Butch Moore, lead singer with the Capitol Showband, was at the height of his success in 1965, when he won the National Song Contest to represent Ireland in the Eurovision Song Contest, in Naples, singing Walking the Streets in the Rain.
He was born in Dublin in 1938, the son of Thomas Moore and Nora (née Fay). His father worked in Leinster House for 50 years.The family lived on the North Circular Road, and Butch attended O’Connell Schools, where he sang in the choir. He also performed as a boy soprano on Radio Éireann. He acquired the name Butch because of his resemblance to a character in one of the popular films of his youth .
He began his working career as an apprentice printer but his real interest was in music and singing. He played with a number of bands before getting his big break with the Capitol Showband in 1958. Its line-up included band leader, Des Kelly, and Paddy Cole, who is still involved in music, and an early songwriter for the band was Phil Coulter.
The Capitol achieved a considerable degree of success in the early 1960s. It toured America in 1961, and two years later became the first showband to appear on the new Irish television service. The Capitol played in the London Palladium in 1964 on a night when the lineup included Roy Orbison.
After Eurovision his celebrity status grew in the dance halls. He would later recall narrowly escaping injury at the hands of fans in July 1965, when he was pulled off the stage by a surging crowd in the Arcadia Ballroom, in Bray. But the showband world was to prove a fickle and volatile business for the Eurovision hero. His marriage to Nora Sheridan, with whom he had three children, Karen, Gráinne and Gary, broke up. And his career nosedived after he left the Capitol.
He emigrating to the United States in 1970. There, along with the folk singer Maeve Mulvany, later to become his second wife, he developed a successful cabaret act. They had three children, Rory, Thomas and Tara.
They subsequently owned a very successful nightclub – The Parting Glass – in Millbury, Massachusetts. Butch Moore was employed as chief deputy sheriff, Worcester County, Massachusetts, from 1990 to the time of his death, and was described by a former colleague there as “probably one of the most popular and well-liked people in a county of over 750,000 people”.
Butch Moore died on April 3, 2001, and was survived by his wife Maeve (died 2004), children, Karen, Gráinne, Gary, Rory, Thomas and Tara, brothers, Brendan, Desmond and Thomas, and sister Marie.