Den Hegarty
Denis Hegarty is an Irish rock and roll, doo-wop and a cappella singer, television presenter, and psychology lecturer. He is best known for his role as bass vocalist in the 1970s doo wop group Darts, and for working as a presenter on Tiswas.
Early life
Hegarty was born in Dublin, Ireland. At an early age Hegarty moved to Brighton, England. Hegarty met two of the singers he would later work with in Darts as a teenager, he met Lydia Sowa when he was thirteen and a year later met Ian Collier.Hegarty went to University and studied English, but dropped out in his final year due when he started suffering from major epileptic seizures.
Career
Early career
In 1972, Hegarty was a member for four years of the rock and roll group Rocky Sharpe & the Razors. The group dissolved in 1976 when lead singer Rocky Sharpe would lose his voice after every gig. A year later, Sharpe reformed the group as Rocky Sharpe and the Replays.Darts
Hegarty formed the 1950s styled band, Darts in August 1976, along with vocalists Rita Ray, Griff Fender and sax player Horatio Hornblower, all of whom he had played with in Rocky Sharpe & the Razors. His role in Darts was as the bass singer, songwriter, arranger and music director.In 1978, the band had three singles that all peaked at number two: "Come Back My Love", "The Boy from New York City" and "It's Raining".
Described as "wild eyed", "wild haired and manic", "maniacal", and as a "kinetic and charismatic performer", Hegarty gave the group a distinctive, anarchic edge. As the former BBC radio executive Lesley Douglas later recalled of a 1970s gig: "I remember sitting in the front row terrified of the Darts singer Den Hegarty, because all the papers had said that he was the mad man of music and that he would dive into the crowd". Music journalist Will Hodgkinson recounted another incident, during a Spanish eurovision TV show in 1979, where "the grandiosity of the whole affair proved too much for the bug-eyed Hegarty, who felt compelled to jump into a fountain and roll around in it, mid-performance", before taking off his socks and wringing them down the neck of actress Sylvia Kristel. Dave Haslam recalled how Hegarty "had a thing for clambering on the speaker stacks at the side of the stage ".
By late 1978, Darts' touring schedule was so full that Hegarty was completely unaware at the time that his father had nearly died until after he had left hospital. Hegarty then asked the bands manager if they could cut down on touring so he could tend to his father, but according to Hegarty, their manager, who he described as "a total shyster, because he ripped the rest of them off absolutely mercilessly" made it out that Den was "betraying everybody", so he ultimately left Darts in September 1978.