Romeo Challenger looks back at the success of Showaddywaddy and tells Tim Hughes why the rock & roll magic goes on today

Romeo Challenger laughs as he looks back at his four decades in the music industry.

“I just don’t know where the time has gone,” he smiles. “One minute I was a kid running around and I’m still doing it at 64!”

A drummer from an early age, Romeo had his break when his pop band Choise teamed up with another local act, Golden Hammers, in a pub in Leicester. Playing 50s and 60s-style doo-wop and rock & roll, they went down a storm, and decided to make a thing of it.

They called themselves Showaddywaddy, donned colourful teddy boy-style jackets and hit the big time. By anyone’s standards Showaddywaddy have had an impressive run – with 300 television appearances, their own BBC TV special, 22 hit singles, 10 top ten records, seven successive top five entries, and a number one, Under the Moon of Love in 1976, which sold 985,000 copies.

“We were two four-piece bands which amalgamated for a rock & roll review, and it went down better than all the shows we had done before, so we started playing together,” says the Antiguan-born musician, relaxing at his home in Woodhouse Eaves, a prosperous stone-built village in Leicestershire’s Charnwood Forest.

“Word soon got around about this fun-loving band playing old-fashioned old-school rock & roll with doo-wop vocals. We were very different to everything else around at the time – bands like Genesis and Pink Floyd – but we built a reputation in Leicestershire.

“The name came from the backing vocals of doo-wop songs: ‘bap bap, showaddy-waddy’, which suited the band.”

Their big leap came with an appearance on TV talent show New Faces, the 1970s version of today’s X Factor. They won one show and came runner-up in the finals. Their fame propelled their self-penned first single Hey Rock and Roll to number two in the charts in 1974. They followed that up with covers of tunes by Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Curtis Lee, Chubby Checker and other rock & roll legends – but with a harmonic twist. They went on to sell more than 20 million records.

In recent years the band has replaced many of its original members, Romeo and bass player Ron Deas being the only two remaining from the initial line-up.

Frontman Dave Bartrum left three years ago but remains the band’s manager. Current guitarist Paul Dixon joined in 2008, while singer Andy Pelos, keyboardist Dean Loach and drummer Rob Hewins all joined three years ago. Yet, despite the change in personnel, Romeo insists it is the same group. “We are still Showaddywaddy,” he says. “All the people who left have been replaced.”

And, he insists, they are on great form. “There was a time when the band wasn’t firing together. We weren’t on hiatus; we were still performing, but not to our best abilities. A couple of guys had serious illnesses and left. They decided they couldn’t do it any more. There was no animosity though, and no one was sacked. Now, for the past two or three years we have been kicking again.”

Tomorrow the band play the New Theatre Oxford, in a set studded with hits – songs such as Hey Rock and Roll, Three Steps to Heaven, When, Heartbeat, Pretty Little Angel Eyes and, of course, chart-topper Under the Moon of Love.

“We split the show into halves,” says Romeo. “The first half is album favourites and singles that didn’t make the top ten, and the second half is our top five hits and all the things we played on Top of the Pops. It’s pure nostalgia. After all, if people are coming out to see us, they want to hear what we have done, not what we are going to do.”

For a period the band were a fixture on Top of the Pops, playing it 50 times. “They were great times,” says Romeo. “We were blase at the time, but looking back it was a dream come true for all of us.”

So how does he sum up the band’s enduring appeal?

“It’s just great music,” he says. “That’s what attracted me. But we don’t do the songs the same way as a blues singer would. We do them our own way.”

A keen sportsman, Romeo very nearly missed out on a career in pop, instead looking for glory on the football pitch. As a young man he played for Leicester Boys with England legend Peter Shilton and Leicester, Coventry and Arsenal’s Jeff Blockley.

“I loved the game,” he says. “But I wasn’t to be a professional footballer. I was very disappointed but thought ‘if I’m not going to be a footballer, what else can I be?’ “I’d been playing the drums since the age of 12, so that was the obvious choice.”

Sport still runs in his family; his son Ben is a Commonwealth Games silver medal-winning high jumper.

But Romeo insists he’s glad he stick to music: “If I’d been a footballer my career would have been over by 30, and as a musician it started when I was 30. There’s no regrets; I’m 100 per-cent glad.”

GO ALONG
Showaddywaddy play the New Theatre Oxford tomorrow.
Tickets £22.90 plus £2.85 transaction fee from atgtickets.com

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