"The crowd loved him the minute he walked out on that stage. He had them!" said entertainer and artist Adele King, best known as Twink, as she reflected on the passing of her good friend Dickie Rock.
The family of the legendary Irish singer confirmed his death yesterday. He was 88.
"I've lost a great old buddy who's been there since forever," she said, adding that the singer had been adored by his family.
"Dickie was the ultimate pro. He turned up on time, he rehearsed, he was always impeccably groomed. He had a killer voice, he had a dynamic stage personality and most of all, he was what everybody needs, he was a crowd-pleaser."
She said it was this professionalism that allowed him to stay at the top for as long as he did.
She said there was a great saying in Las Vegas that you knew someone was a megastar, when "their fame walks out before they do.
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"And I think that was Dickie Rock, everywhere he went, his fame went out before him."
Twink said she agreed with Louis Walsh's assessment that Dickie was probably one of the first big stars in Ireland, and she believed that in a different era he could have been an international star.
"I think he was a major star. He brought a new sense of glamour and pop and the mohair suits and the tan and the white teeth and the enigmatic smile. I think he brought a sense of international pop stardom to the Irish scene, I think he just stood out from the crowd."
She said everyone had great management back then, but the infrastructure for international fame that followed for many Irish artists later was not yet there.
"It was very closed doors internationally unless you had the set-up now of Louis Walsh, Denis Desmond... and all these international managerial camps that rotate artists around. He would have been snapped up."
However, she said: "I don't know that Dickie would ever have taken up offers of abroad because he just wouldn't move the family and he would never leave them to go to another country. So I think in a curious way he was happy being a big star in his own land."
She said that in the past, the age difference between her and Dickie Rock had seemed considerable because she was just a child when she first rose to fame and a teenager when she met him.
Some years later she said that age gap had just dissipated. "We sang, I did a great show out of Portmarnock with Dickie and Red Hurley - oh did we have fun! We laughed on-stage and off-stage."
She said both families, including their children, had then got to know each other very well.
"We never lost touch. That was the lovely thing with Dickie, there was no way I could lose touch because I was friends with Judy and the kids."
She said Dickie's wife Judy had been the love of his life.
"I think when Judy passed, the bottom fell out of his world."
This Christmas she had been planning to give him a gift of a portrait she had drawn of Judy.
She said his passing really is the end of an era. "There's a few of them left from that era that I'm dreading parting company with."
Becoming emotional she said: "I think my luck was when they were all in their 20s and 30s, I was only a kid, and the saddest part about that is there's a price to be paid for living longer, in that you have to watch all your beloved friends and colleagues leave.
"And the quality of life is poorer without them on the end of the phone for a cup of coffee. Life is a strange old thing and saying goodbye to people, I think everybody out there will agree, never gets any easier."
Read more:
Legendary Irish singer Dickie Rock dies aged 88
Louis Walsh says Dickie Rock was 'a proper star'
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