We didn’t even release it with that intention.īell: I played Sean the songs and he freaked. We didn’t really think it would do anything. Wade: We’re both professional songwriters but this song, for us it was just a memory of something that happened a long time ago. I said we needed something that sounded like an old Irish ballad and had this idea about going to watch Wexford with my dad.
‘There was priests and christian brothers, there was nuns and reverend mothers, there was guards and drunks and others, but everyone was just the same’īell: I said to Brendan that we needed another song to offset the kind of yee-haw aspect of it. In his apartment in London we changed all the names and it just fit so perfectly. Paul was a great driving force behind the whole thing I have to say. We hadn’t done anything like that before. Paul Bell: After we beat Dublin in the Leinster semi-finals, I said to Brendan, ‘I have an idea.’ He said, ‘That’s f**kin crazy, ridiculous. When the ’96 team came around and started doing really well, Paul said to me, ‘what was that song we wrote? That might make a good song for the team.’ We used all the names from the ’68 team: Tony Doran and John Quigley and those lads. This was way before the ’96 team was on the trail of winning the All-Ireland. We said we’d try to write a song about it and we came up with Dancing at the Crossroads. We were over in London working on some material and we were reminiscing about being kids in Wexford and the last time they won the All-Ireland back in 1968. ‘Well I remember as a young boy, the beginning of September, we were standing at the station waiting for a train’īrendan Wade: About a year beforehand I started working with Paul. This is the story of that song and that summer as told by the Wild Swans, Brendan Wade and Paul Bell, and Irish World journalist Sean Meaney. Though it was only released on cassette, the song swept the country and went to number one, knocking the Spice Girls’ hit Wannabe from the top of the charts.
The heroes of that glorious summer - manager Liam Griffin, captain Martin Storey, the veteran George O’Connor and more - were immortalised in the song ‘Dancing at the Crossroads’, written by the Wild Swans. IN 1996 WEXFORD’S hurlers bridged a 28-year gap and won the All-Ireland Championship, bringing Liam MacCarthy back home with them for the first time since 1968.
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