Man who brought Meat Loaf to Moate remembers ‘gentle giant’

It still seems surreal to many that a star of the calibre of Meat Loaf played Moate – but it happened – on February 6, 1990.

Two thousand people attended the gig at the town’s community hall, thanks to the vision of Mullingar concert promoter Tommy Swarbrigg, who twice brought the star over to tour Ireland.

Tommy and wife Geraldine remember the night clearly, and were deeply saddened when news broke on Friday of the death of the “gentle giant” Meat Loaf, whose real name was Michael Lee Aday, and whom Tommy regarded as a good friend.

Sadly, the news came as Tommy and Geraldine were heading to Yorkshire for the funeral of another dear friend, Terry Utley of Smokie, who died in December.

Smokie were regular visitors to Mullingar – and indeed their last gig in this country was when Tommy brought them over to play in Cork last October.

Meat Loaf was, however, the first big American name that Tommy promoted, and there was great excitement in Moate over the gig, which was followed by 10 months later, on November 22, 1990, by a concert featuring UK rockers Status Quo.

“I started promoting in 1980 and I was doing Irish acts like Christy Moore and Mary Black and Dé Dannan and bringing them to Mullingar, usually to the Bloomfield.

“Jimmy [Tommy’s brother]and I had quit music in 1980 – I was on the road for almost 20 years with Joe Dolan and The Times and then The Swarbriggs. So we stopped and we started promoting shows.

“I got Smokie in 1985 and they were a massive hit for me, so I started looking for more names because I was getting a real feel for the promotions business and I really enjoyed it. I started to look around and I realised nobody had brought Meat Loaf in, even though he had one of the biggest selling albums of all time.

“So I got in touch with his manager in New York – a lovely guy – and I said, ‘Would Meat Loaf be interested in coming to Ireland to do a tour?’ and he said ‘yes, he absolutely would love to’. So we agreed a deal and I set up the tour.

“I found out afterwards that Meat Loaf actually, at that point, had lost his record contract because he had let the contract lapse without delivering an album that he was supposed to deliver. So he had no income.

“He was trying to straighten out his life at this stage and the record company simply would not pay him. And there was nothing he could do. He did not even have the money to fight them.

“He told me when he came over to Ireland that he was doing the tour to raise enough money to make a comeback album with Jim Steinman, who wrote ‘Bat out of hell’.

“So he came for two years touring with me and they were a phenomenal success. He was an amazing performer and his bands were just out of this world, and we just had one fantastic show after another.

“At the time, the biggest theatre in Ireland was the national boxing stadium on South Circular Road. So I put him in there for two nights and we absolutely sold out the two nights no bother at all, and then brought him around the country.

“The biggest theatre in Cork was the Cork Opera House, but we did not put him in there and instead of that, we put him into the Neptune basketball stadium and places like that.

“We had to compromise and just find the biggest halls we could, and Moate was a huge ballroom; we did a big community centre in Carlow; we did Castlebar – Breaffy House. I can’t even remember all the places we did but it was a comprehensive tour.

“We did the biggest rooms available throughout the country at the time – and he came back the following year and did it again for me.”

Tommy can’t speak highly enough of Meat Loaf: “’Meat’, as we used to call him – was an absolute gentleman; a complete gentleman.

“We used to go out together on his nights off and he was a real gentleman, a real gentle giant and very courteous and very civil and a great character and an amazing performer. He just blew me away every time,” he says.

A third tour looked like a goer – but it was not to be: “We were about to do the third year but we had yet to agree on the dates. Then I got a call from his manager, and he said: ‘Tommy: do you know a company called MCD?’ in his New York accent, and I said ‘yes, I do. Why do you ask?’, and he said well, ‘they have just rung me and offered me more money for one show than you have for the entire tour’ and I knew I could not beat that.

“And that show, historically, was the very first Féile.”

There was no animosity over the issue: “We parted the best of friends. And in fact, the next time he came in to Ireland – for MCD – he invited myself and Geraldine to The Point and we went out and we had a bite and we chatted and he was in wonderful form,” says Tommy.

A nice twist is that the tours Meat Loaf did for the Swarbriggs did enable him to record the album he dreamed of – ‘Bat Out of Hell II’.

It opens with the hit ‘I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)’, and Tommy admits that like the rest of the world, he doesn’t know what ‘that’ was.

“I think nobody will now ever know what he would not do for love,” he laughs.