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Arts > Music > Rock, pop > 1960s-1970s > Ireland
The Miami Showband
warning: graphic / distressing
The scene of the Miami Showband massacre on the A1 between Banbridge and Newry on July 31st, 1975.
Photograph: Independent News and Media/Getty Images
Miami Showband massacre 50 years on: ‘The trauma lasts for ever’ – Stephen Travers British collusion was systemic in Troubles, survivor says, and went far higher than UDR foot soldiers IT Thu Jul 31 2025 - 12:35
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2025/07/31/
The last official photograph of the Miami Showband before the 1975 massacre in which three members were killed
No credit
Miami Showband massacre 50 years on: ‘The trauma lasts for ever’ – Stephen Travers British collusion was systemic in Troubles, survivor says, and went far higher than UDR foot soldiers IT Thu Jul 31 2025 - 12:35
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2025/07/31/
Related > The last photo of the Miami Showband before the shooting, (l to r) Tony Geraghty, Fran O’Toole, Ray Millar, Des Lee, Brian McCoy and Stephen Travers.
Photograph: Courtesy of Des Lee
The Miami Showband massacre: what led to the killing of the ‘Irish Beatles’? The band were as big as it got, topping the Irish singles chart seven times. Then they were stopped at a bogus checkpoint in County Down – and three were shot dead. Fifty years on, survivor Des Lee looks back on that terrible night G Sun 17 Aug 2025 06.00 CEST
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/aug/17
The Miami Showband
The Miami Showband were an Irish showband in the 1960s and 1970s led firstly in 1962 by singer Jimmy Harte, followed by Dickie Rock and later by Fran O'Toole.
They had seven number-one records on the Irish singles chart.
The band's career was interrupted at the height of their fame when three members – Fran O'Toole, Tony Geraghty, and Brian McCoy – were murdered in 1975 by loyalist terrorists,
in a botched attack initially intended to convince the British government that the band had been involved in smuggling explosives across the Irish border.
The band reformed in 1976 but disbanded in 1982, later reuniting and reforming.
The Miami Showband played their final gig in 2015.
Wkipedia - 17 August 2025
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Though the attack carries strangely little traction in Britain, the Miami Showband massacre of 1975 is deeply etched into Irish cultural memory.
Even amid the context of the Troubles, whose bleak statistics – more than 3,600 dead, more than 47,500 injured – made slaughter almost normalised, the killing of three members of the Miami Showband left Ireland in shock.
(...)
The Miami Showband entered the summer of 1975 in an optimistic mood.
The band had scored major hits with Charlie Rich’s country standard There Won’t Be Anymore and Bonnie St Claire’s bubblegum-glam nugget Clap Your Hands and Stamp Your Feet.
O’Toole was being groomed for solo stardom, and had been booked to play Las Vegas to launch his Lee-penned single Love Is, with the intention of positioning him as the next David Cassidy.
But that show never took place.
On Wednesday 30 July 1975, the Miami played the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge, County Down, about 10 miles north of the border.
“It was just a normal night, nothing untoward.
We came off stage and did the usual thing: signed autographs, chatted to the fans, then we had a cup of tea and a sandwich, and got ready to do the journey back to Dublin.”
Road manager Brian Maguire went ahead in the equipment van.
Drummer Ray Millar drove separately to visit family in Antrim.
The rest of the band – O’Toole, Lee, Brian McCoy bassist Stephen Travers and guitarist Tony Geraghty – climbed into the Volkswagen minibus and headed south.
Eight miles into the journey, at 2.30am on Thursday 31 July, they were flagged down by the red torch of an army checkpoint, a commonplace occurrence in the North.
“You would be asked the same questions: ‘Where are you going, where are you coming from?’” says Lee.
“We would be sitting in the van with a bottle of brandy or whiskey, and we’d occasionally offer a drop to the soldier who stopped us.”
They were asked to step out of the van – again, not entirely unusual – and made to line up facing the roadside ditch.
At first, the soldiers chatted casually, but their demeanour changed when someone with an English accent joined them and began giving orders.
McCoy found this reassuring, telling Travers that they were dealing with the British army rather than the less predictable, locally recruited Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR).
Before the search, Lee asked permission to fetch his saxophone to show it wasn’t a weapon, laying it on the road a few feet away.
Suddenly, an almighty explosion tore through the van, throwing all five musicians across the ditch into the undergrowth.
The soldiers had not been soldiers at all – at least, not on duty.
The fake army patrol were members of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), although at least four of them were also serving with the UDR.
Their intention was to plant a briefcase bomb under the driver’s seat, timed to explode further down the road.
The timer malfunctioned, instantly killing two members of the UVF’s Mid-Ulster Brigade, Harris Boyle and Wesley Somerville.
In the chaos, an order was given to shoot the fleeing musicians to eliminate witnesses.
Lee lay still with his face in the grass, slowing his breathing and pretending to be dead – a trick he had learned from watching Vietnam movies – as he heard the murder of his friends taking place around him.
First to die was McCoy, 32, shot in the back with a Luger pistol.
Travers, 24, hit by a dumdum bullet, was seriously wounded.
As Geraghty, 24, and O’Toole, 28, attempted to drag him to safety, they were caught by gunmen, pleading for their lives before being executed with Sterling submachine guns.
O’Toole was shot 22 times, his long-haired head so badly mutilated that a doctor would later ask Lee if there was a girl in the band.
Travers lay next to the body of McCoy and, like Lee, played dead.
Once the attackers had apparently left the scene, Lee cautiously went to fetch help.
“The main road was the most horrific scene I’ve ever seen in my life,” he remembers.
“There were bits of bodies lying all over the place. It was horrendous.”
The first passing vehicle, a truck, refused to give Lee a lift.
Eventually, a young couple agreed to drive him to nearby Newry, where he alerted police.
“My hand was on the door handle just in case, ready to jump out, because I didn’t trust anybody at that stage.”
The killings stunned Ireland, and thousands lined the streets for the funerals of the murdered musicians.
The Miami Showband had represented hope. Not only did their shows unite communities, but their membership was mixed: McCoy and Millar were Protestants, the rest were Catholics.
Is it fanciful to suggest that they were targeted because someone, somewhere, resented this pan-sectarian fraternisation?
Lee doesn’t think that was the motive.
“We were the No 1 band, and this gang wanted maximum publicity. If that bomb had exploded when they intended, the Miami Showband would have been accused of carrying weapons for the IRA.” (Indeed, within 12 hours, the UVF accused the band of being bomb-traffickers, describing their killing as “justifiable homicide”.)
Lee agreed to testify at the trial in Belfast on condition he was helicoptered to and from the Irish border, with 24-hour protection.
His life was threatened by relatives of the accused; he has, he says, been looking over his shoulder ever since.
Lance corporal Thomas Crozier and Sgt James McDowell, both of the UDR, were sentenced to life in the Maze prison, as was John Somerville, brother of the deceased Wesley and a former soldier. (They were released under the Good Friday agreement.)
Everything pointed towards collusion: covert collaboration between paramilitaries and the organs of the British state.
(...)
Through the years, the finger of suspicion has repeatedly pointed at two men:
Capt Robert Nairac of the Grenadier guards (later executed by Republicans), and Robin “The Jackal” Jackson, a former soldier from County Down and a key figure in the notorious Glenanne Gang, were believed to have planned the ambush.
Both were named by British intelligence whistleblowers, and Ken Livingstone named Nairac as a conspirator in his maiden speech as an MP.
In December 2017, 80 documents were released including a 1987 letter from the UVF to the then-taoiseach Charles Haughey on headed notepaper, which openly admitted collusion with MI5 in the attack.
The evidence was now overwhelming.
The historic activities of the Glenanne Gang, including the Miami Showband Massacre, fall under the purview of Operation Denton, due to report this year.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/aug/17/
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/aug/17/
https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2025/08/01/
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2025/07/31/
https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/courts/2023/06/01/
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/14/
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/14/
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/
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