At 85, he’s still singing and touring – despite surviving a near-fatal car crash and a life-threatening battle with sepsis. Tom Gilmore speaks with the man behind the hit song 21 Years.

 

Singer Dermot Hegarty is still touring at 85 and, apart from his silver hair, he looks little more than 55! But his career was a series of high highs in the charts and low lows in an almost fatal road crash during his youth plus sepsis in later years, with both incidents almost ending his life.
However, among his highs was having a hit song that is one of only five in the history of the Irish pop charts to spend the most weeks in the hit parade with 39 weeks in the Top 20.

That was with his 1970 number one song 21 Years. Four years later his next number one, titled 19 Men, must hold the record for the shortest amount of airtime of any record ever on

RTÉ Radio as it was played for only 15 seconds before it was banned because the lyrics were deemed subversive. But a week later it also was a number one for Dermot and it spent a further 9 weeks in the Top 20.

In between those two number one records he had seven other Top 20 hits, including another that he also wrote titled After 21 Years. On that disc his backing vocalists in London were The Ladybirds, who were also backing singers for Cliff Richard.

He grew up on a small farm in Longford and at 17 came home one night from college in Dublin but later he was awakened by his mother as his father had a heart attack. Dermot ran for the local doctor. Sadly, he was present a short time later when his father died at 59 years of age.

He had to start running the small farm but farming was never his forte, not even as a child when walking cattle to the fair in Longford on cold dark nights/mornings from their 19-acre farm in Keenagh.
“My memories include our mother cooking the fry-up breakfast for us at 1 or 2 am in the morning. It was a 7 mile walk and unless daddy was driving ahead in his van IX266 to close all the neighbours gates along the road, the cattle would escape into fields and woods!
“The breath of the frosty air as well as the breath of the cattle and the clatter of their hooves on the stony, sandy potholed roads are still vivid in my memories,” he says
“I gave up farming after a year or two and became a successful bible salesman and later a supervisor, traveling Ireland in a publishing company’s Morris Minor car. We saturated Ireland with bibles but failed miserably to repeat the success when I moved to Germany,” he roared with laughter.

Dermot ended up broke and had to thumb a lift back to Dover and then to London where he ended up sleeping, albeit very briefly, on a park bench until his brother got him a job on the buildings there.

Shortly afterwards he returned to Ireland to find fame and fortune as a singer, but misfortune too in his 20s in a road crash near home that almost cost him his life.

He was driving to a pub in Roscommon, where he sometimes played as a solo act, when his car went out of control and hit a tree. He had to be cut from the wreckage and during a six month recuperation in Navan Hospital it “was touch and go” if they would have to amputate his right leg.

In the end they put the leg in a metal frame named ‘a Thomas splint’, designed to immobilise a leg and help it heal after major femur breaks and fractures. After six months of nursing, confined to bed, the doctors saved his leg from amputation.

Later on Dermot and The Plainsmen did a free outdoor concert for the staff, patients, families and friends of the Navan Hospital in gratitude for saving his right leg.
Dermot and his first wife Maura have two sons – Niall, who is in a managerial position with AstraZeneca in the UK and Diarmuid, a physiotherapist who lives and works in Ireland.

During his years at the top of the Irish showband scene, and when touring in the UK and America, Dermot turned down an offer of a year’s residency in Las Vegas as it was unsuitable at the time for the family to move there.

After a plethora of hits in the 70s, Dermot moved to live in Stockton-On-Tees in North East England with his second wife Geraldine (Geri).

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own