Cork singer Gina on touring again with the Champions, and the sad loss of Dale Haze
Gina and the Champions' upcoming gigs include an appearance at Cork Opera House.
When Mary Hurley looks back on her illustrious 50-year career in music, despite the many hits to her band’s name, there’s one song from the early years that still has lasting emotional resonance to this day.
Recently, Hurley, AKA Gina of Gina and the Champions, had cause to start listening back to their 1974 single, ‘Dreams are Good Friends’, while on a car journey, and found herself wiping away a tear at traffic lights.
“It’s not a great recording, because the studio wasn’t great, but that song meant so much to me,” she says. “When I listen back to some of my very early recordings with the late great Denis O’Brien, I sound very childlike because I was a child then. I had no experience of life, or romance, or boyfriends: of nothing. And it’s life that gives you what you deliver in a song.”
‘Dreams are Good Friends’ was a hit for Greek chanteuse Vicky Leandros in 1973, and was recorded by Gina and the Champions early the following year. Their second ever single, it reached number 12 in the Irish charts in February of 1974.
“Dreams are good friends, when you're lonely. For they let me be with you, although you're gone. That’s what the words are, and the song makes me very emotional, sad at times, because they take me right back to the way I was feeling then, and the things that were happening in my life.
“I would think of my mom, because she left us so early and it wasn’t long after that we recorded that song. In a loving way in one sense, but in a very sad way too, because that’s when all our lives changed forever.”
Growing up as one of ten siblings on Friar’s Walk in Cork city, Hurley remembers childhood as secure, loving and full of music. But when her mother died at 50, Hurley was 17. The family was rocked to its foundations. Hurley, who had been doing some singing with a cousin of hers, decided to stay home and help her father with her younger siblings.
All that changed when her father saw an ad in the Evening Echo looking for a singer: although Hurley told him she didn’t have the confidence for it, her dad thought otherwise, and went ahead and answered the ad on her behalf. Keyboard player Mossey Walsh, who Hurley could little imagine would become her brother-in-law within a few short years, came and knocked on her front door.
Hurley found herself, nervous and shy, at an audition. Just like any teen she was besotted with the pop stars of the day. For her audition, she sang ‘Puppy Love’, written by Paul Anka but a big hit for Donny Osmond, who had performed it on Top of the Pops in 1972, and ‘All My Life’s A Circle’, a hit for Harry Chapin the same year.
“They liked me, and we decided we’d give it three months and see how we got on,” Hurley says. “And the rest is history.” And what a history. Hurley’s reason to start listening back to old singles like ‘Dreams are Good Friends’ recently was that the band were preparing for their 50th anniversary tour at the tail end of 2023.
Including three sold-out nights in Seachurch in Ballycotton, where Hurley and her husband, Champions guitarist Pat Walsh, have lived for many years, and wrapping up at the end of December in the Charleville Park Hotel, the tour saw Gina and the Champions revisit many of the towns that welcomed them with open arms down through the years.
Hurley says the band were “blown away” by the reception to the tour. “Did I think that 50 years down the line, I’d be going out to do concerts packed full of people, who all came to see us and are singing all our songs?” she says. “I can’t believe it myself, to be quite honest. When we were younger, we wouldn’t have believed we’d do ten years. Then it was twenty years, and then 25 years: the milestones just kept on coming.”
A string of chart successes throughout the 1970s and ‘80s — including ‘Minnie Minnie’, ‘Give Me Back My Love’ and ‘You're the Greatest Lover’ — saw Gina, Dale Haze and the Champions become one of the country’s favourite bands. What that meant, in that era, was audiences that would seem unthinkable to many Irish bands today.
Although the heyday of the Irish showband scene had really been the 1960s, there were still dance halls in most Irish towns, and crowds of 2,500 were a regular occurrence, with one gig in Castlebar, Co Mayo, seeing 4,000 people turn out to see the band on a Sunday night.
“I think it’s much harder for an artist to get a break now than it was when we started,” Hurley says. “And it’s down to technology really. Everything is online, people don’t even have to leave their bedrooms and they can be anywhere they want, there’s all this entertainment available. When we started, there was one TV station, there was what you heard on the radio, what was on Top of the Pops, and everyone would go to see that.”
The music industry was a very male-dominated arena indeed for much of Hurley’s career, but she says that, even though she admires the confidence and professionalism of young female Irish acts now, she never felt disrespected.
“I wouldn’t say it was sexist, but it was a man’s world,” she says. “I was always respected by the band and we were like family. It was what it was, and it was of its time.” When romance blossomed between Hurley and her bandmate, guitarist Pat Walsh, early on in their rise to success, she says her father was initially less than impressed.
“It wasn’t something my dad was very keen on,” she says with a laugh. “He was obviously worried. But at that age, we were both doing what we loved and the music came first.” “I think it can be very hard for a girl to have a boyfriend who is a musician, because they’re away all the time, but we were together and celebrating our success together.”
With the 50th anniversary tour, the release of a triple album, 50 songs for 50 years, and Lord Mayors' receptions in Cork and Tipperary, there’s still a lot of success to celebrate, but unfortunately one man has been missing for the proceedings: although the original Champions line-up of Pat Walsh, Mossey Walsh, bassist Eddie Fitzgerald and drummer Tony Hornibrook are still around, Jerdi Mackey, AKA Dale Haze, Gina’s singing partner, died suddenly in 2020.
Having gone through various iterations of names from an early moniker of Gina and the Herdsmen, the band performed as Gina, Dale Haze and the Champions for many years. Now, in the absence of Mackey, they are Gina and the Champions.
“We still remember him, we still talk about him on stage, and we cherish his story,” she says. “He was a great human being, the funniest guy. Because we fronted the band, most people thought that he and I were married and there was great chemistry between the two of us. He was just great craic and he had the biggest heart. He was one of the good ones.”
- Reeling in The Showband Years with Ronan Collins and special guests including Gina and Red Hurley is on in Cork Opera House, Saturday 27 and Sunday 28 of January. See www.corkoperahouse.ie
