I walked the Line... ...and the Line won

This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this certainly ain’t no foolin’ around. From the moment the doors of Break For The Border, on Dublin’s Lower Stephen’s Street, swing open, at 8pm sharp, it’s clear that everybody here means business. Coats and handbags are immediately stashed in corners. Sleeves are briskly rolled up. Limbering and stretching exercises are initiated. The session, after all, lasts only three hours, and there’s a lot of ground to be covered.
The first record of the evening is ‘The Bubba’ by Shanandoah. A line of eight girls, each wearing a plaid shirt, denim jeans and a black Stetson, has already formed directly in front of the stage. They’re squirming with impatience to get started. Tuesday night is for people at intermediate and advanced level. Wednesday is for beginners and improvers. This is a Tuesday. There’s a lot of ground to be covered.
The floor of the Break For The Border concert room is completely bare. All tables and chairs have been removed. The idea that anyone might want to sit rather than dance, even for a short while, isn’t countenanced. The drinking of alcohol is another tradition that has little place in this environment. Most of those with thirsts seem content to slake them with fluids called Coca Cola and 7 Up.
No glasses, bottles or cigarettes are permitted on the dancefloor. “The only smoking allowed is from the burning soles of your hot country leather boots,” declares the deejay. There is, you see, a lot of ground to be covered.
Before ‘The Bubba’ reaches its second chorus, over a dozen full lines have been formed. By its third, there are almost thirty. The night’s work has begun in earnest. “Yee haw!” shouts a woman to my left.
There’s no turning back now. Slowly but distinctly, I can actually hear my hair turn grey.
Step, step, kick, step, step, clap. This isn’t dancing, it’s physiotherapy.
There is something horribly depressing about watching young folk waste the best years of their lives on a craze as mundane and moribund as Line Dancing. If these people wore red noses, revolving bow-ties and honked loud horns, they couldn’t look like bigger clowns. It’s not only that their hops, skips and jumps are so hopelessly prim and twee. It’s that they have to labour so hard to make them that way.
The scowls of humourless concentration on the dancers’ faces are truly frightening. Not a single person smiles. They all just stare intently downwards, solemnly scrutinising every step as though they were tip-toeing through a minefield. I haven’t seen so many people so totally absorbed in their feet since Twink performed at that Fine Gael Ard Fheis and there was nowhere else to look.
Whatever happened to slow, quick, quick, slow? Line Dancing seems to go slow, leisurely, leisurely, slow. Each dance line moves at the speed of a Dáil debate, albeit with a greater degree of deliberation, and at least you don’t have to read about it in The Irish Times the next day.
The sluggish pace may be due in part to the fact that the participants are keeping time by counting beats, and numbers aren’t necessarily their strong point. Nobody here is over thirty, yet each individual has evidently calculated that his or her age is somewhere in the late seventies. Why else would they be pitter-pattering around like a bunch of pensioners unsure of whether or not the stoppers are properly tightened on their colostomy bags?
What Line Dancers lack in speed, however, they completely lack in style. Right now, the ensemble is performing a dance (or, if you prefer, a “tush push”), which they have christened The Alleycat, to Mary Chapin Carpenter’s ‘I Feel Lucky’. The routine is simple, one more variation on the geriatric step-kick-toe pattern except that it involves a little spinning around and the (optional) use of the arms in a lariat-throwing motion.
Directly in front of where I am cowering from the heaving throng, there is a bespectacled couple who I take to be brother and sister. He bears an uncanny resemblance to Eamon O’Cuiv and has ears that make his head look like a taxi cab with both doors open. She too is an Eamon O’Cuív clone but has an arse of sufficient size and asymmetry to suggest that Sam Stephenson had a hand in its design. In the three odd minutes it requires to complete The Alleycat, they collide with each other four times. When they start hurling their imaginary lassoes, the male Eamon O Cuiv topples over onto the boards with a loud thwack.
In the interests of common decency, I decide to go to another side of the room and stare at somebody else.
Like the New Country music which enkindled it, Line Dancing is chiefly favoured by people who think that rock music is too loud but who haven’t got the bottle to go the whole hog and admit that who they really like is that nice Daniel O’Donnell. In Ireland, it appears, this is a huge constituency.
One of the first people to realise the vast potential audience for Line Dancing over here was the Country music journalist and broadcaster, Howard Dee. If you say the name Howard Dee very fast, it sounds a little like ‘Howdy’, the traditional greeting of cowpokes and fringed-waistcoat wearers everywhere. Of such things are legends made in the world of Country music.
Howard Dee attended the annual Country Music Awards in Nashville in September ’92, and underwent something of an epiphany.
“Shay Healy, Bill Hughes and myself went on the piss one night and ended up in a place called Rodeo’s in Nashville,” Dee recalls. “I saw this Line Dancing for the first time and it blew me away. The idea of bringing something like that to Ireland started to germinate from that night on. However, I sat on it for over a year before I did anything about it.”
It will be a source of national tragedy for many decades to come that Mr. Dee does not have a more highly-developed ability to sit on things and for much longer periods of time. What was his hurry? Didn’t this poor benighted isle already have enough problems?
Apparently not. Last Spring, a truly catastrophic chain of events was set in train, a chain of events that would ultimately result in one of the most unpleasant Tuesday nights of my life.
“My partner, Geraldine Halpin, went on a tour of the States,” explains Howard. “There are several generic Line Dances over there but there are also localised versions. Nearly every state has its indigenous dance. After much searching, Geraldine settled on the dances she saw on the West Coast, in Nevada and California. She figured that they were the dances that suited Ireland most. They were more stylish and less hick.
“We wanted this thing to appeal to the 25 to 35 age group, people with disposal income. We knew it would have mass appeal in the country but we also wanted to attract an urban audience. We wanted Line Dancing rather than partner dancing, because we felt that that too closely resembled the dreaded jive. We wanted to eradicate the whole gingham mentality from the production.”
Together, Howard and Geraldine formed Step In Line, now the most successful Line Dancing production company in the country. Last August, with the help of sponsorship from Wranglers and Coors Extra Gold, Step In Line launched a Line Dancing roadshow which took them all over Ireland, from Cork to Dublin, Kildare to Limerick. It was around this time too that Step In Line devised their corporate motto: We’re Hip, Not Hick.
“It was an immediate multiplier,” Dee insists. “We’d have seventy people the first night we did a venue and then three hundred and fifty the next time. It took off like wildfire.”
To ensure that everybody got off on the right foot, so to speak, Step In Line enlisted the services of the Nevada state Line Dance champion, one Angelique Fernandez. For two months, Angelique travelled with the roadshow, teaching her gospel to the unconverted. Before she left, Ms. Fernandez found an apostle to carry on her mission in the shape of Skip Jennings.
An African-American dancer from New York, Skip had already been living in Ireland for some time. Before acquiring the Line Dancing gig, he’d been earning a crust by strutting his stuff with the 2FM Beat On The Street (talk about frying pan and fire!). With Howard Dee acting as deejay/emcee and Skip as instructor/choreographer, the Step In Line first team was now complete. Meanwhile, demand for their services had grown to such an extent that they were working full steam ahead, seven nights a week.
“I don’t think the reason for the popularity of Line Dancing is that difficult to work out,” asserts Dee. “It’s the same reason that Country music became popular. Baby-boomers had nowhere else to turn. They’d didn’t find much solace in the beat-driven music which is all you hear in the nightclubs, that gorilla choking on a chicken bone sound, uh-uh-uh. They also got tired of the classic hits formula, ‘Brown Sugar’ rehashed a million times. They found shades of stuff like The Eagles and James Taylor in what Nashville is pumping out at the moment, and they liked it.
“The market was also there from the social point of view,” he continues. “Not everybody in Ireland has a partner and, in Line Dancing, the whole floor is your partner. It’s safe sex, dancing style. Women, particularly, are not preyed upon by guys just looking for a piece of meat for the night. The highest proportion of people going to Line Dancing are women, the gender balance is about 75 to 25.
“There are songs like ‘Trashy Women’ by Confederate Railroad where the guys get a chance to show that it’s not just a packet of Rolo in their pockets. They do a dance called ‘The Shimmy’ where they can strut their stuff in front of the girls and show off the goods. But, for the most part, it’s the dancing itself that counts.”
Every week, Step In Line stage fifteen shows throughout the country, with an average of 600 people at each show. And, while they may be the largest of the Line Dance groups (purveyors of what they modestly claim is, “The ultimate hot country dance experience”), they are far from the only one.
“That’s the problem,” Dee avers with a sigh. “There are some very karaoke-like productions doing the rounds now. There are some fairly good ones too but there’s a real danger that the Mickey Mouse operations will dilute the audience. That’s happening already.”
The fear of strangling the goose which has laid such a richly-carated egg is understandable. There’s gold in them there hillbillies. Aside altogether from the lucrative box-office on dance nights, there’s the hats.
“Yeah, I had a very good Christmas thanks to the hats,” laughs Howard. “Ten years I’ve been trying to scratch a living out of Country music and it’s the first time I ever made a few bob out of it. I sold 1000 hats just before Christmas, at £20 a pop. They weren’t your regular Stetsons. They were cattlemen’s hats which add a bit of style to the thing. They’re more like the hats that Bono wears. The brim is totally different. We’re trying to put a bit of glitz into it. It’s difficult for some Irish people to wear a hat but it’s becoming safer to come out of the closet now and to dress Western style. We don’t say, ‘dress like a cowboy’ because that’s the mentality we want to get away from.”
There is also an academic dimension to the world of Line Dancing of which you may not be aware. Between discs at the Break For The Border show, Howard announces details of the “Line Dancing Weekend” which takes place in The Gleneagles Hotel, Killarney on the 3rd and 4th of February. Amidst a positively bulging programme of events, there will be (and I quote), “Afternoon workshops at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels.”
Topping the syllabus for the advanced students is everything you ever wanted to know but were afraid to ask about the dance they call ‘The Achy Breaky Heart’.

“Kick, back, change, Step, back, toe, Right shu-ffle, left shu-ffle.” Skip Jennings is talking us through the moves of tonight’s new dance, The Tumbleweed. “It’s called The Tumbleweed because it goes all over the place,” warns Howard Dee. “This dance is at the intermediate level so I know you Tuesday gang can handle it,” adds Skip, in that very camp but very firm voice that only a New York dance teacher could get away with. “Let’s get started, there’s a lot of ground to be covered.”
The atmosphere during this “instruction session” reminds me of nothing so much as the heinous Irish dancing lessons I had to endure in primary school. Everybody lines up, faces múinteoir and rehearses the steps by rote, over and over and over again. Whenever there’s an outbreak of talking or the slightest appearance of a crack in concentration, Skip claps his hands and recites his mantra about the acreage of ground that has to be covered.
To complete the nightmarish scenario, I spot a couple of definite classroom ‘types’ among the Break For The Border troupe. Foremost among these are those bossy, goody-two-shoes girls who always seem to master the manoeuvre being taught before everyone else, and who then take it upon themselves to patronise those around them who still haven’t quite got the hang of it. I hated these people in school and I hate them now.
“There are eight types of swivel,” one Ms. Know-It-Fucking-All tells anyone within earshot. “You should practise them at home.” She then proceeds to prissily demonstrate all eight, waving her arms in the air to indicate that while some swivels turn towards the right, others, believe it or not, turn towards the left. The virago in question is wearing a Stetson which she has secured around her neck with a yellow ribbon, just in case it might happen to fall off. Some people think of everything, don’t they?
And then, there’s the lads. By lads, I mean those surly, disagreeable youths who loiter at the back of the room and josh about in that boisterous, macho manner which they obviously feel endearingly conveys the message that they are too cool to participate. The burden of their extreme coolness does not, however, prevent them from enjoying a delightful little game which requires one player to whack another in the testicles with the back of his hand before running like hell.
There are several such lugs here this evening. Each of them at least seven foot tall and endowed with the kind of facial features which proves that Darwin’s theory of evolution is a libel on the ape. While Skip Jennings daintily demonstrates The Tumbleweed, they glare at him with looks of incomprehension and obvious distaste.
Happily though, it transpires that most of these yahoos are here with the ball-breakers I mentioned above. Just when the louts look as if they might be about to get out of hand, they are swiftly scolded and brought into Line by their matronly dominatrixes. A few whispered threats, a bit of finger-wagging and the boys are as sweet as pie, meekly heeding Skip’s every command.
And, believe me, there are few sights more delicious than watching a mincing, black, male dancer from New York explain the finer points of the swivel spin to a gathering of thick-necked hayseeds for some of whom walking upright would be a challenge.
“Try everything once,” counselled the celebrated English conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, “except incest and folk dancing.”
Well, personally, I’d rather have a Highland fling with my mother any day of the week than ever again brave the terrors of a night of Line Dancing. Howard Dee believes that Line Dancing mania will continue at least until the end of next Summer but that it could well become a permanent part of the Irish social scene. “My fondest wish is that the music survives even if the dancing doesn’t because, at the end of the day, that’s my love,” he proclaims. “But the dancing is incredibly popular and who am I to argue with that?”
Maybe I’m just an old eccentric but I‘m resolutely with the school of thought which holds that the whole point of dancing is that it’s a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire. Line Dancing is nothing but a perpendicular expression of the fact that lines are sexier and more fun in geometry class than they are on the dancefloor.
Far from inciting any kind of horizontal desire in this reporter, the experience is more likely to have me on my feet twenty four hours a day from now on, switching around all the signposts in my locality just in case the Line Dancing roadshow ever ventures within a Stetson’s throw of where I live.
Ye can haw all you like, but count me out.