Paddy Hanrahan Oklahoma Showband
Paddy also played with The Sahara Showband,

Patrick McCabe
Patrick McCabe was born in Clones, County Monaghan in 1955.
After a brush with the "music business" in the mid-seventies
(playing piano in Country and Western bands such as Paddy Hanrahan and the Oklahoma Showband),
he started on what was eventually to become his forte, writing.
The Butcher Boy
Link
: "I was badly stuck for a keyboard player," says Paddy Hanrahan, founder and leader of the band,
"and I heard of this teacher who played Keyboards, so I called in to see him.
 I knocked on the door and asked him did he play the Keyboards and he said he did,
so I said 'Be ready at four o'clock, we're going to Cork'."

McCabe recalls that the music itself left quite a lot to be desired:
"It was country and western mostly.
When sung by Kenny Rogers they sounded great but when they were sung by us,
with the rinky-dink piano, they were god awful."

What interested McCabe most was the camaraderie of being on the road:
"He was some character," remembers Hanrahan,
"coming home at night he'd be rabitting away, talking about nothing but still you'd have to listen.
And the boys would be dead tired and would want to sleep.
In the end they would tell Pat to shut the fuck up."

From the files of John Bairds collection
  bairdart@iol.ie

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