As usual Zig and Zag were spot on. It is a funny old rock'n'roll world.
Rock'n'roll is a place where it's par for the course to heap scorn on any musical act that opts to plough a middle-of-the-road furrow. In this same surreal universe, Joe Dolan is cool.
Don't you just love it?
You read that last bit correctly. Bushy-browed veteran crooner Dolan is about to reach new heights in his musical career attaining unparalleled (for an Irish star of the hotel circuit) credibility and kudos while he's at it. His first single from his impending compilation of covers, Joe's Nineties, is his version of Universal, one of Blur's finest tunes.
Imagine being an insider at EMI and hearing the news that Dolan was working on an album of covers for the label that included numbers from Pulp, Radiohead and Suede. Canny employees would have hotfooted it down to the local bookie to secure odds of at least 1,000-1 that by the end of the year Joe Dolan would have a smash hit with a classic Brit pop cover.
"Yeah," the unsuspecting bookie would have snorted, "and I hear Daniel O'Donnell is banking on being No 1 this Christmas with The Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up."
Then again, the wily bookmakers may have seen it coming. Pop fans did a double-take some years back when Welsh underwear magnet Tom Jones came on all curling lips and swivelling hips with a breathtaking cover of Prince's Kiss. Scottish 1960s phenomenon Lulu was handed another Warholian 15 minutes when she teamed up with Take That on Relight My Fire.
Reinvention, it seems, is the mother of pop necessity.
The Blur cover, say people paid to comment on such things, is actually rather good. One rock critic opined that it was "a good choice of song, and he does it justice. At the end of the day, it won't be taken seriously, but it is a surprisingly credible offering".
And a considerable turn-up for the books. Dolan won't say how old he is exactly. Last year he attempted to convince one interviewer he was 42, but a swift look at his career calendar suggests he is nearing his mid50s. He began singing on leaving school and had his first hit in 1964 with The Drifters. He also did a stint as a printer.
His star twinkled brightest of all those in the Irish showband firmament. He achieved dozens of No 1s in Germany, Holland and France. In 1969 and 1970 he even enjoyed hits in the slightly-less-easy-to-crack UK market.
Joe Dolan was born near the Westmeath town of Mullingar and owns a pub there. The town is also home to his own recording studio and office, Dolan Promotions.
For Joe, music has always been a family affair. Brother Ben was a constant musical partner and two of his cousins make up part of his current band.
Both parents died when he was quite young.
He doesn't remember either of them very well, he said last year in an interview. The man who sings a song called West Meath Bachelor is unmarried and has no children.
"My band are my children," he once said. His manager, Seamus Casey, has been around since the beginning of Dolan's career.
Past hits include Make Me An Island, More And More, It's You, It's You, It's You and his anthem, You're Such A Good Looking Woman. He is still one of the busiest singers on the cabaret circuit, able to pick and choose his dates while devoting as much time as possible to golfing trips.
A Dolan gig - he performs about 200 extremely lucrative ones a year - is not soon forgotten by the audience. It involves a sea of middle-aged women, and a good smattering of younger ones, swaying and singing and occasionally thrusting underwear at a Westmeath bachelor with a severe case of middle-aged spread. He wears Martin Bellesque white suits, so the sweat stains don't show, he says, and enjoys a pint or a vodka and Ballygowan after a gig.
The shrewd owner of the Gleneagles Hotel in Kerry extracted a promise from the singer several years ago that he would play the Killarney venue on New Year's Eve, 1999.
Dolan is keeping to that promise, and the gig is likely to be one of the most coveted end-of-century events in the country.
There is also a fair chance that Dolan's cover of Pulp's Disco 2000, which contains the potentially controversial line "She was the first girl in school to get breasts", could be that week's No 1.
A source in the hotel industry said that Dolan is well regarded when it comes to celebrity etiquette. "Joe will always stay around and take the time to say hello even to people who others would see as having no consequence. You can see that he cares about the fans."
Others regard him as ignorant and rude. Those not familiar with his music may remember an incident during which he was barred for several years from flying with Aer Lingus. In a Hot Press interview with Liam Fay he blamed the incident on an "old dog" of an air hostess and a flight captain who was "another gobshite". According to Dolan, the same captain hanged himself a year later, "funnily enough".
"I'd have willingly hanged him myself that night," he chortled.
In another long-running saga, Dolan was indirectly responsible for an unneighbourly feud which ended up in the courts. One Dublin man was driven demented by his next-door neighbours playing Dolan hits on an organ in the early hours of the morning. He duly issued legal proceedings against the musical couple and won.
The last word belongs to Dustin the Turkey, with whom Dolan performed a duet on last years Christmas No 1, You're Such A Good Looking Woman.
Reaching out to all constituents, the feathered one offers two tongue-in-cheek verdicts on the unlikely sex symbol who, he insists, is the man for the new millennium.
"He mightn't be as sexy as Damon Albarn [lead singer with Blur] but he has a better voice." Dustin belches for a while before offering another point of view. "I think he is to Irish music what Bertie Ahern is to politics. Absolutely brutal."