In the spring of 1965, thousands of people lined the streets of Cork to catch a glimpse of a man who had just done something no Irish person had ever done before. Butch Moore, lead singer of the Capitol Showband, had just represented Ireland at the Eurovision Song Contest in Naples — the country’s first-ever entry — and the whole nation had stopped to watch. When he came home, the South Mall had to be cordoned off. He was slipped out the back door of his hotel because the crowds outside were too large to manage.

Two years later, the young man who had written that Eurovision song — a shy, studious Derry musician named Phil Coulter — won the contest outright, writing Sandie Shaw’s “Puppet on a String” for the United Kingdom. The year after that he came second with Cliff Richard’s “Congratulations”. Within a decade he had written hits for Elvis Presley, the Bay City Rollers, Cilla Black and Van Morrison, won five Ivor Novello Awards, and become one of the most successful songwriters in the world.

And the Capitol Showband — the band that gave Coulter his start, that packed Ireland’s ballrooms every night for fifteen years, that became the first showband to appear on RTÉ television, that shared a stage at the London Palladium with Roy Orbison — had quietly ceased to exist.

A Dublin band like no other

The Capitol Showband formed in Dublin in the late 1950s under the leadership of Des Kelly, a meticulous bandleader with a sharp instinct for talent. The lineup that would define the band’s golden era brought together Kelly, the trumpet player and saxophonist Paddy Cole, and a young front man from Finglas named James Augustine Moore — known to everyone as Butch, a nickname that had followed him since he started singing in public at the age of three.

From the start, the Capitol were different. While most showbands were content to cover American hits note-for-note, Des Kelly pushed his musicians harder. They toured the United States in 1961. They released albums at a time when most Irish showbands didn’t bother. They recorded original material. And when RTÉ launched its television service in 1963, it was the Capitol who were invited on first.

That same year, a student at Queen’s University Belfast recorded a novelty song during rag week to raise money. The song was called “Foolin’ Time”. The Capitol heard it, liked it, and released it as a single. It became a hit. The student’s name was Phil Coulter.

Naples, 1965

When Ireland entered Eurovision for the first time in 1965, Butch Moore won the National Song Contest to represent the country, singing a Coulter composition called “Walking the Streets in the Rain”. He finished sixth in Naples out of eighteen entries — a respectable debut for a nation that had never competed before. The song reached number one in Ireland.

What happened next tells you everything about how quickly fame moved in 1960s Ireland. Moore arrived back from Italy to scenes that would not look out of place today for a returning sports hero. Thousands at the airport. Motorcades. Crowds so thick in Cork that the gardaí had to intervene. For a brief moment, Butch Moore was the most famous person in Ireland.

Coulter, meanwhile, took the lessons he had learned writing for Eurovision and applied them elsewhere. In 1967 he and his songwriting partner Bill Martin delivered “Puppet on a String” to Sandie Shaw for the UK’s Eurovision entry. Shaw famously hated the song — describing it as sexist drivel with a cuckoo-clock tune — but she won the contest with it regardless. It became the biggest-selling single of the year in Germany, was covered over a hundred times, and launched one of the most remarkable careers in the history of popular music.

The fall

The showband era, for all its glamour, was brutal on the people inside it. The circuit demanded constant travel — the length and breadth of Ireland, night after night, in draughty ballrooms and parish halls. By the late 1960s the scene was already shifting. Showbands were giving way to rock groups. The ballrooms were closing. Television had changed what Irish people wanted from a night out.

Butch Moore’s marriage broke down in 1969. His career began to stall. In 1970 he emigrated to the United States, where he would spend the rest of his life. He remarried, formed a successful double act with his second wife Maeve Mulvany, ran a pub in Massachusetts called The Parting Glass, and kept singing. But he never again had the kind of fame he’d known in 1965.

He died of a heart attack in April 2001 at his home in the United States. He was 63. His body was brought home to Dublin for a funeral Mass in Finglas.

What became of the rest

Paddy Cole went on to have one of the longest careers in Irish music — moving into jazz, fronting his own band, and remaining a fixture on the Irish entertainment circuit for decades. He was still performing when Butch died, and it was Cole who best captured what Moore had meant to the country: “There were thousands of people at the airport when he came back from Italy. It was huge.”

Phil Coulter’s story is almost too extraordinary to summarise. After “Puppet on a String” and “Congratulations”, he and Martin wrote hits for the Bay City Rollers, Cilla Black, and Elvis Presley. He later worked with the Dubliners, Planxty, and the Fureys, wrote “The Town I Loved So Well” — one of the most powerful songs ever written about the Troubles — and became the best-selling Irish recording artist of his generation. He still performs today.

Des Kelly, the bandleader who held it all together, kept a lower profile after the Capitol disbanded in 1972. The band’s story survives mostly in scattered archives tended by enthusiasts rather than institutions.

The connection

What the Capitol Showband’s story illustrates, better than almost any other from the era, is how tightly connected the Irish music world was — and how unexpectedly it could launch someone into the wider world. A student novelty record at Queen’s. A showband in Dublin ballrooms. Ireland’s first Eurovision entry. And then, two years later, one of the biggest-selling Eurovision winners of all time, written by the same man, for a different country.

The Capitol Showband aren’t household names any more. But the connections they sparked — Coulter to Shaw, Moore to Eurovision, Coulter to Elvis, Cole to a career that outlasted everyone — run through Irish music like a thread you keep finding in unexpected places.

That’s what this site is for.