There are people around all of us that subconsciously you come to believe will be with us forever. Candy Devine was one such person for me. News of her death on the other side of the world caused me therefore to stop what I was doing and reflect upon this special person.
Born in either 1938 or 1939 (the records are imprecise), nothing in Candy’s early years in 1940s northern Australia even hinted that she was to become a household name as far from her home as it is possible to be. Except for one of her talents.
She was a good, even exceptional, musician and singer with a family background in showbiz — and musicianship is a kind of international passport. So she was immersed in music and singing throughout her teens and later studied both piano and cello at the Queensland Conservatorium, one of Australia’s leading music and performing arts schools. She went on to appear on stage in Sydney.
Did I mention that she was also an actor?
How did all this natural ability assemble in one girl, I often wondered. Part of the answer must derive from her very mixed heritage. She was born Faye Ann Guivarra of Spanish, Sri Lankan, Filipino, English, Danish and Torres Strait Islander ancestry. The Torres Strait islands are roughly halfway between the northern tip of Australia and Papua New Guinea.
Candy Devine pictured at her Belfast home in 2012 (Credit: Pacemaker)
In 1969, she decided to make a short visit to Ireland and it lasted over three decades. Showbiz was the reason because she met Donald McLeod who first became her agent and then her husband. Candy was singing in the Talk of the Town Club in Belfast in 1975 when I first met her. That club was then staging international cabaret shows compared by Frank Carson and Roy Walker.
It was a very difficult time in the Troubles of the mid-seventies, not least in showbiz. In mid-1975, the Miami Showband was ambushed by loyalist paramilitaries returning to Dublin from a gig in Banbridge, killing three of its members. This was also the time when I, as Downtown Radio’s inaugural programme controller, began assembling the team of broadcasters who would launch Downtown Radio the following year. I wanted new voices, different voices from those already established at BBC. Downtown was one of the first commercial stations in the UK and the studios were designed to be operated by the broadcasters themselves, very different from established practice.
I loved Candy’s outlook, personality and great experience and was convinced she would become an outstanding broadcaster. But at first she was not a natural twiddler of studio switches. She had to engage her own mike, play in her own disks on turntables with arms and needles, insert the advertisements on cartridge machines and come out exactly on time. At one point she collapsed into tears fearing she’d never get the hang of it all. But she did because she was a trouper.
But one celebrated time in the early days she had a guest in the studio for an interview. Annoyingly Candy had a hole in her stocking and her big toe was protruding uncomfortably.
She wriggled to rectify the nuisance only to notice that her guest was becoming alarmed at her antics just as she opened the microphone. She blurted out, “My next guest is looking at me oddly because I’ve been jigging about. The trouble is that I’ve got a toe in my hole…”
The programme nearly fell off the air. But of course, Candy, Faye to her friends, then mastered the medium and captivated Northern Ireland. This is a sad farewell to a lovely lovely professional.
Don Anderson was Downton Radio’s first programme controller.