took a taxi the night I went to see The Indians play The Tudor Rooms. The driver was determined to acquaint me with every detail of his elaborate and impassioned views on the issue of Zero Tolerance. To shut him up, I told him why I was headed for Barry s Hotel.
The Indians, eh? he mused, eyeing me suspiciously in the rearview mirror. I thought they were all shot.
It ain t easy for a band to maintain the esteem and reverence of a nation when their working clothes are feathers, beads, loincloths and warpaint. In a music industry where change is the only constant, The Indians have remained a sort of cartoon curiosity, a fancy dress pageant with electric guitars. If the smattering of other showbands still extant are dinosaurs, these guys are a herd of Barneys.
The average cowboy lives the life of a panda: he eats, shoots and leaves. The Indians have things a little tougher, and are only as good as their last scalping expedition. They are in the numbers game and have to keep filling dancehalls if they are to have any hope of keeping a tepee over their heads and a buffalo on the spit.
In that respect, The Indians are one of the most successful groups in Irish music history. In January of next year, they will have been together continuously for an incredible 27 years. That s about a quarter of a century longer than the career of your standard contemporary Dublin band and somewhere in the region of the combined ages of the members of Ash.
Originally known as Casino, the combo officially became The Indians on January, 16th, 1971. At that point, we were a band without a singer or a manager, recalls Sitting Bull, keyboard player and current manager. We were approached by Topline, the people who were responsible for The Miami and The Capitol. They told us they d look after us but they had one question: How would ye feel about dressing up as Indians? .
At the height of the showband boom, there were maybe 600 combos plying the roads of Ireland. In this Darwinian jungle, only the fittest and shrewdest survived. Musical abilities were secondary to stage spectacle. Songwriting talent was redundant because audiences only wanted to hear chart hits and dance music. What you needed to stand apart from the crowd was an image, any image.
In the late 60s/early 70s, one of the more popular country n western outfits on the circuit were The Cowboys, a 7-piece ensemble who performed in ten-gallon hats and carried cap-guns in their hip holsters. With the insight and reasoning for which their profession is a byword, the impresarios at Topline decided that there was obviously gold in dem dere wild west hills and decided to complement The Cowboys with a troupe called The Indians. This is exactly the same kind of resourceful ingenuity which has helped land humanity on the moon.
At first, there were too many Indians and not enough lead vocalists. Having received no convincing reply to the smoke signals they had sent up all over the country, the six former Casino men eventually found the young brave who would become their frontman at that famed Redskin reservation, The Drake Inn, in Stillorgan.
We spotted Big Chief Flaming Star at a talent contest in The Drake, recalls Sitting Bull, a moist shimmer of pride in his eyes. He was doing an Elvis number and we knew from his moves that he was the guy for the job.
Big Chief Flaming Star s real name is Noel Brady. He s a native of Cabra West. Noel has been an Elvis fanatic since he was old enough to curl a lip. Donning the flamboyant head-dress of the Big Chief, he christened himself Flaming Star after a Presley flick of that title. I have everything by Elvis, he proclaims. And I could safely say that everything that Elvis Presley ever recorded was a great song. Even the movie stuff.
With the Big Chief onboard, The Indians bandwagon was on a roll. The manager assigned them by Topline, one Paddy Burns, was an amateur graphics artist who researched a few books and came up with genuine Indian names for the band and an authentic stage image. Two of the lads travelled to London, to a theatrical outfitters called Berman s, where they rented seven Indian outfits for an initial six month period. The costumes, they were told, had just been returned to the shop having been used in the shooting of a spaghetti western.
As time went on, we ourselves also started to really delve into the Indian thing, asserts Big Chief Flaming Star.
Native American culture, indigenous traditions, tribal beliefs, that sort of thing?
No, retorts the Chief solemnly. We started to delve into finding Indian numbers, the likes of The Wigwam Wiggle , We re Just Indians , Shy Little Indian Girl and Travellin Indian Band .
o my incredulous eyes, the Indians show in The Tudor Rooms rivalled the battle of Little Big Horn for sheer savagery and bloodcurdling horror. It wasn t the musicians fault; they came over as a more than efficient MOR danceband with a finely-tuned ear for their audience s preferences.
It was the same audience, however, that caused the rat s feet of terror to skitter up my spine. We are all wearily familiar with indignant babble from the tightly-rectumed about the appalling behaviour of intoxicated teenagers at concerts and in nightclubs. Well, let me assure you, the boorishness of the young is the frisky gambolling of a new-born lamb compared to what one can observe in The Tudor Rooms after midnight of a Thursday.
I, for one, have felt infinitely more at ease standing up to my knees in puke and prepubescents in the moshpit of a thrash metal gig than I did during the 90 minutes I withstood this infernal netherworld.
Everybody in the place was either mouldy drunk or working on it. Fat, fluthered, middle-aged men in candy-striped shirts stumbled about, their pint glasses atilt in their paws, streams of Guinness refreshing the parts that other beers don t reach, like their shoes and socks.
When these behemoths collided with one another, as they did with knit-purl regularity, they exchanged glowers and spit-showers, and swung wide air-punches until they swerved themselves around full circle and blundered off in a different direction.
For the most part, the women didn t fight but nor did they do very much to preserve a dignified peace. Meat-armed, three-hundred-pounders, shrieking like kamikaze-pilots having second thoughts, went 15 rounds with others of their species on every spare inch of the floor. Their favoured style of movement being that dance that makes them look like they re trying to walk on artificial-limbs across an ice rink, a clenched hand held up beside both ears and shaken vigorously like fleshy maracas.
Inter-couple rows seemed to be erupting at each table and every three-foot length of bar-rail. Faces were slapped, drinks were flung, shins were kicked and fistfuls of hair were tugged, by both sexes. Somehow, though, the violent paramours unnerved me considerably less than the affectionate ones, many of whom were perched two-to-a-chair and bet into each other like great hulking, sucking blocks of Lego. A distasteful sight at the best of times, but some of these love birds were in their goddamn 50s!
Through it all, The Indians nobly paddled their musical canoe. Their set is the kind of ragbag of roadkill that is the staple diet of the middle-of-the-road devotee. Suspicious Minds followed by Galway Bay followed by Let s Dance (the Chris Montez one, not the David Bowie one) followed by some piece of dismal Tina Turner shit whose name I dare not speak followed by The Streets Of New York , and so on and on and on.
Bands like us have always been slagged for doing covers, Big Chief Flaming Star would argue later. But now, all the big groups are doing covers and everyone thinks it s great. The bands who went out and did original numbers didn t get anywhere. Nobody wanted to know. They still don t.
Sitting Bull nods in agreement. Originality is one thing but we all copy in some way or other, he asserts, whether it be in our dress, our hairstyle, the car that we drive. We all copy in some way.
We know what an audience wants to hear. An old time waltz sometimes is the only thing in some places. But we re always listening out for good new stuff. I would be listening commercially and, commercially, good stuff jumps out at you. I know if it s made for what we need it for. It mightn t be commercial for another band that s doing another style of music. We know what s middle-of-the-road and that s the line we ve taken.
The Indians believe that they have developed an unerring knack for shooting down the right covers with their discernment arrows.
Boyzone recently did a number that we ve been playing since we played with The Bee Gees in Dublin and Cork in the 60s: Words , boasts Sitting Bull. We ve been doing it for years, then it becomes a hit for Boyzone. We d never be saying, Jesus, we should have had a hit with that . We know how it works. Horses for courses.
It s happened before. We recorded Always On My Mind and, the next year, it was a number one for Willie Nelson. We had a song that Perry Como had a number one worldwide hit with it, For The Good Times . And we had done it before Perry Como had a worldwide number one hit with it.
We did Let s Dance before Chris Montez did it, and long after he did it too.
he Irish House, a pub on Dublin s Harold s Cross Bridge, is the venue for my pow-wow with The Indians. Now in middle age (there is at least one grandfather among the line-up), the band members have long ago pitched their domestic tepees in the four corners of the country. But Sitting Bull (aka Eamonn Keane) oversees the business end of their business affairs from an office on Harold s Cross Road, to which The Irish House is the most convenient watering hole.
In the harsh, fluorescent glare of the bar, with afternoon sunlight beaming through the windows, it s obvious that the tomahawk of time has etched its blade deeply into the faces of the four Indians before me. We re the four original members that s left, affirms Sitting Bull. If we stick at it for another 27 years, some of us will be in our 80s.
Allow me to make some introductions. To my left, sipping coffee and cleaning his spectacles with a tissue, sits Little Thunder, the drummer, better known to his family and the electoral register as Chris Mullahy. Beside him reposes Crazy Horse (Brian Woodful) enjoying a distinctly un-Crazy but very Horse-compatible glass of Tipperary Spring Water. Across the table, meanwhile, patiently waiting for their pot of tea to brew, are the aforementioned Sitting Bull and Big Chief Flaming Star.
Unable to be with us are the two young guys who bring down the average age of the group by a few decades : Wild Hawk (Stephen Smith) and Dull Knife (Tommy Hopkins). Perhaps, these youthful warriors are prohibited from giving interviews to the music press until they have attained the lofty enlightenment of their wise elders.
These days, The Indians play approximately 200 gigs a year. Dates in the Republic make up only a small fraction of their booking calendar. The rest of the time, they tour Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales. For the past 12 years, their most lucrative market has been the Cowboy and Indian Festivals that are staged throughout the summer in U.K holiday camps such as Butlin s and Pontin s.
The people who go to these festivals take them very seriously, Crazy Horse avers. They re-enact specific battles, with cannons and all the rest of it, and it s all very realistic. When we started going to them as The Indians, we felt under-dressed. So, we went around to the various stalls at the festival and bought loads of new, better gear.
The people who dress as Indians at these things divide into the various tribes. And if there was a war between those tribes, in history, those tribes will stay well away from each other at the festivals. They won t even talk to each other in the pubs at night.
After their six month experiment with theatrical duds back in 71, The Indians decided to cut their own cloth according to their measure. We re like the Japs were to the motor industry, laughs Sitting Bull. We copied all the original stuff. We get it made up ourselves now.
We just get shirts and take the collars and pockets off them. Onstage, you have to be careful of the colour scheme. Each fella has to be in a different colour. We try not to clash. The make-up was easy to learn. It s just warpaint stripes. We put beads onto things with Velcro and then take them off so that we can machine wash them.
The polyester drip dry and Crimplene stuff is very easy to dry. The fringing on the trousers is Velcroed too. We buy in some stuff from Canada, through the Rodeo n Rider store in Luton who supply western gear, Indian head-dresses and Indian beads.
The original suede stuff we wore was too heavy, recalls Big Chief Flaming Star with a grimace. We each lost three stone weight in those first six months. I had a fantastic shammy outfit but, when it got wet with sweat, it would stand up on its own in the corner, like a rock.
The beauty of being Indians, adds Crazy Horse with a grin, is that we can wear anything as long as it s colourful.
By the mid- 80s, The Indians had released somewhere between eight and ten (they re not quite sure themselves) studio albums. Though they recorded a live video, with which they were immensely satisfied, some time ago, they tend to keep their audio-visual product to an absolute minimum these days. As I m sure someone like Garth Brooks would agree, videos and albums are more trouble than they re worth for a constantly touring act.
The problem is people always expect freebies, sighs Sitting Bull, the grit of bitter personal experience in his voice. You have an awful lot of people coming along expecting something for nothing. Regulars are bad enough but the other night, in Rathkeale, a woman came up to us, and she hadn t been to see us for 17 years. Because she came back to see us after 17 years, she wants a free video. Instead of her giving us all the money that she should have been spending over the past 17 years.
Some of them, when they have a few jars on them, can be quite obstreperous. They think they deserve a freebie. You also have a lot of situations where the promoter expects a freebie or the woman in the tea bar who made you the tea earlier, the tea that you begged for. And if she gets it, where does it stop? Where does it end?
If you give away one video, it means you have to sell four or five to get the money for that one that you gave away. It s not really worth our while.
nd so to serious matters: Have The Indians experienced much racial prejudice over the years? Not really, replies Little Thunder, with a disturbingly straight face. People don t recognise us when we take the warpaint off.
Oh, we re well used to all the slagging from the punters, attests Big Chief Flaming Star. We ve heard it all: Where s the horses? The cowboys are after ye! Do yis work as well? .
What s the most annoying thing that people say to The Indians?
More! quips Sitting Bull.
Are the feathers and beads a help or a hindrance when it comes to pulling squaws after a show? They do, after all, say that women love a man in uniform. Anybody on the stage will attract women, contends the Big Chief, with the confident swagger of, well, a Big Chief. The business itself is that way inclined. From the outsider in, there s a glamour attached to it. Do you want names and addresses?
Yep!
Listen, interjects Sitting Bull, we re all married men. Not only settled, but cemented. All we need now are the headstones.
What about the firewater and the marching powders? Have The Indians seen much action on that front?
We all know how to drink, reveals Big Chief Flaming Star.
I don t know what it is about this band, says Little Thunder. I wouldn t know a drug if I saw one. I wouldn t know if a person was drunk or had drugs had taken. I don t ever recall, ever even once, anyone offering me drugs. There was one time in Glenties, in the middle of the hills of Donegal, and one fella came up and asked us did we have any drugs.
He obviously thought that we must be on drugs to be dressed the way we were, chuckles Sitting Bull. He wouldn t believe the fact that we didn t have any.
What s been the best thing about being in The Indians for 27 years? We haven t been out of work, states Sitting Bull firmly. When you hear of unemployment and situations other people have been in though those years . . . we ve seen a lot of bands come and go.
Oh, Jaysus, yeah, choruses Little Thunder.
We ve seen a lot of people come and go, continues Sitting Bull. Friends. We could even meet friends our own age now who look about ten years older. We ve been working and they haven t, so why are they ten years older? It s kept us young at heart, broadminded.
We ve missed out on quality time, family-wise. That s been a huge sacrifice. It s a thing you don t realise you re doing at the time. But you can t do anything about it. There are service men who are a lot worse off.
Nothing outrageous has really happened us but we have stayed together for 27 years doing what we re doing. I don t think we re going to make Las Vegas at this stage but we ll certainly make it into the next millennium. What else would we do? n