‘I hate pop like the devil hates holy water!’

Strauss, Status Quo and Jimmy Shand would top any personal playlist that Mick Foster would create. What wouldn’t feature is any pop act: “I never saw Top of the Pops until I was on it because I hated pop music with a vengeance. I still hate it – like the devil hates holy water!

“I’d like to see it on the television so I could turn it off!” he guffaws.

He came close to meeting Status Quo once as he and Tony left the BBC after doing an interview with the late Terry Wogan, but to this day, he regards meeting Jimmy Shand as one of the highlights of his life: “I’d been listening to Jimmy Shand since I was five or six. My grandmother had this old gramophone, the windup job with these 78s – as they were called – of Jimmy Shand, and I was obsessed with them. And then to get to meet him was a major thing… but to play with him! We even did a video with him, and no matter what I did after, nothing could equal that.”

For Tony, Mick reckons, a highlight was probably Top of The Pops.

Top of the Pops

Foster and Allen were on Top of the Pops twice, first in 1982 with A Bunch of Thyme, and a year later with Maggie. People may not remember much about the performance of 1982 but what they do remember is the green outfits the duo wore.

“When we started first, we were making a record and Mick O’Riordan, who later became the head of IMRO, and Jimmy McGee, ‘the Memory Man’, were chatting, and the boys were advising us and saying, ‘look, it doesn’t matter how good you are: you have to do something that will make people remember you’.

“So this film Barry Lyndon was after coming out featuring lads in 17th century Irish dress and we thought about it and said ‘Sure yeah, why not?’.

“There was a guy who was with The Cadet showband, a tailor who used to make all the outfits for the different showbands – his son is still doing it – so we went to him, Jas Fagan was his name, and he said yes, he could make the outfits and he made them in different colours beige and brown and whatever. That was in 1975.

“And in 1982, we were going to America. We used to go to America for the month of March because of St Patrick’s Day. So we said we’d get these outfits made in green.

“We got some and we went to America and as we finished America, we got word that we were on Top of the Pops, so we came from New York to Dublin and Dublin to London to do Top of the Pops.

“We had our green outfits. That’s all we had. So we wore them on Top of the Pops. And of course, even though we had been wearing them for seven years at that stage, the Irish media thought we dressed up specially as leprechauns for Top of the Pops and we got an awful slagging over it.

“It did work for us though. It was more important than a hit record. Because they might not remember our names. But if they saw us in these outfits they’d remember us.”

Sales

Although people may be accustomed to seeing Mick knocking about Mullingar or perhaps even playing music with a bunch of friends at Gunning’s of Rathconrath, in global terms he and Tony are big hitters. They were regulars on Terry Wogan’s show, and remain grateful to him; to Gloria Hunniford and to Eamon Holmes for the exposure they got them in Britain.

Foster and Allen have sold more than 20 million records and have recorded about 50 LPs or CDs.

They’ve done long tours of in Scotland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, America, Canada.

They’ve played in “about 12 countries” and are currently on a three-week tour of Scotland. While they no longer put themselves through the gruelling schedules of their earlier years, they still tour for two and a half months a year.

Future

Fans will be happy to know that Foster and Allen plan to keep playing:”We have no retirement date set – unless one of us kicks the bucket or one of us gets sick, and hopefully that won’t happen.

“Even if the tax man hadn’t hit us, we’d still be playing now. We’re playing music since we went to the national school, so we definitely won’t stop now.”