Joe Dolan is the showband star who refused to become extinct. 'Send 'em home happy' is his motto.
Joe Dolan is telling me about his childhood in Mullingar. Every Saturday night there was a traditional music seisiún in the house - "not corny stuff," he says, "but high-class trad. It was the real thing." His mother, as he puts it, "scraped the fiddle" and his father would lift him out of bed and bring him in to dance for everyone. But far more than his remembered embarrassment of doing a hornpipe in his nightshirt, his most vivid memory is of a man called Johnny Gorry, a neighbour who would play tunes like The Coolin on a tin whistle. The man was so moved by his own music that the tears would stream down his cheeks as he played. "I could never work out," says Dolan, "how he could cry with his eyes shut."
On other occasions, lilters would provide the music - "scat-trad", as Dolan calls it - or the radio would be turned up full for The Gallowglass Céilí Band broadcasting from Scotland. John McCormack, Josef Locke and Father Sydney McEwan were other favourites and when it was time for Dolan himself to sing, his first party piece was The Anniversary Waltz. He later sang An Maidrín Rua at a feis, but he didn't know the words, and tried to bluff it and immediately gave up on trying to win medals.
"But I was lucky," he says. "My voice never broke!" As Dolan was quickly starting to fizz with an excitement for pop music, his brother Ben made him a guitar of his own design. It had no frets, but it made the appropriate noise and soon Dolan and his pals were making music of their own - tea-chest bass, saxophone, Mullingar guitar and vocals. Joe Dolan, superstar, was, quite innocently, on his way.
"Well, we just played whatever we fancied playing," he says. "Honest to God, I didn't want to be like anyone. It was independent of everybody. OK, we knew what was going on, but we were messing around on our own. We played all types of stuff we heard on the radio and anything that caught our ear. We went from skiffle to the early Elvis Presley to Chuck Berry and, at the time, we reckoned that we sounded pretty good.
"But we never set out to be anybody else. Then, one night, we played at a wedding just for the fun of it and people loved it."
But Dolan was not entirely isolated from musical realities. And it's certainly not that he didn't know what a real band sounded like. Not only did he listen to the radio, but he regularly went to see "pretty impressive bands" such as The Royal Showband and The Clipper Carlton. And when Dolan finally gave up his job as a compositor on the Westmeath Examiner to go full-time with his Drifters Showband, he knew exactly what he was up against and the standards that had to be met.
"The shame," he says, "is that a lot of these bands never recorded. The Clipper Carlton was a classic, classic, classic band. The Johnny Quigley Band never recorded either and they were really fine musicians too. It's a shame that now there is nothing there for you to listen to - to hear the brilliance of the musicianship."
Dolan made his first record in 1964. It was a cover of a Del Shannon song, The Answer to My Prayers, and it went to number four in Ireland. More hits followed, including the oddly titled Tar and Cement and The Westmeath Bachelor.
Then, in 1969, he signed to Pye International and, with the Hammond and Hazelwood song, Make Me an Island, he went to number three in the British charts. A rush of hits followed (Teresa and You're Such a Good-Looking Woman, to name only two), which saw Dolan permanently placed in various European top 10s and inevitably at number one in Ireland. It might not have been as cool as The Rolling Stones, but it was working.
"And I was into the Stones too!" he laughs. "More so than The Beatles, in fact. People now say that the showbands weren't cool because they were doing covers, but so were The Rolling Stones. They covered Muddy Waters for 10 years! We were doing the same thing.
"And there's another thing you have to remember too. When Make Me an Island came out first, it climbed up to number five in Ireland and then went back down again. But then, when it went to number three in England, suddenly it's number one here! So we were always in a situation in Ireland that we were dedicated followers of fashion. If it happened overseas, then it had to be good."
There's no doubt that the role of the showbands in Ireland is the source of considerable debate. There are those who dismiss the whole thing as a period of national embarrassment and there are others who mourn their passing to the point of hating all subsequent music. There is certainly nothing worse than a showband veteran moaning about everything post-Beatles, not that you'll ever hear Dolan complain. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has always managed to deal with the new realities and just get on with it.
"Well, I always believed in fair competition," he says. "And I always knew that if I wasn't doing what people wanted, then they would go somewhere else. But don't forget that when the showbands started there was nobody going out in Ireland - and then suddenly the local hall wasn't big enough. People had to build 4,000-capacity halls. They were running every night in the different areas - say, a great Tuesday night in Moate and a great Thursday night in Sligo or a Friday in Cork. And if you didn't have 4,000 people, you weren't in there!
"There's nobody doing that nowadays. OK, they go along and do it at The Point - but they only do it once!"
Dolan is certainly not a participant, but there is still a sullen war going on. The demise of the showbands left a bitter legacy in some quarters, with only a handful of the former stars carrying on convincingly as stage performers. Dolan, however, kept himself in the frame through sheer hard work, some smart thinking and a voice that is hard to argue with. He recorded with Dustin, he released his versions of songs by Pulp, REM, Blur and Bowie and his good humour basically insisted that a younger generation treat him as more than just some kitsch relic of their parents' heyday.
So how is it that Dolan survived the ice age and didn't become extinct like so many of the showband stars? "There are two parts of that, to be honest with you," he says. "What happened is that drink took a lot of them. They'd wind up that they couldn't go on without half-a-dozen drinks. Now that's one thing I never did. I never drank before I went on stage. Ever. I'd drink as much as any man after I'd finished work, but not before. But I saw different people who couldn't get enough drink into them and you just can't do that. And the punters can tell.
"But the other part of it is that a lot of the bands didn't look for original stuff, original songs. And yes, we made the effort to do that and it paid off. I did Make Me an Island and suddenly I'm on Top of Pops."
DOLAN'S most recent album was a greatest hits collection with two new tracks, one of which was Robbie Williams's No Better Man. It's an appropriate choice given that Williams is a showband performer if ever there was one, although presumably not a patch on The Clipper Carlton. But what Dolan recognises in Williams is his relationship with his audience. He may be covering songs by everybody within earshot, but it's the route-one approach to entertaining the punters that they share. The big difference, of course, is that Dolan really is by far the better man. Sheep from the goats, men from the boys.
"Well, it's up to me to be as good as I can," he says. "I never shirk on anything. Even if I'm tired and have had a hard day, that's got nothing to do with the audience. You just have to perk yourself up and go for it. If I sense that people aren't enjoying themselves I don't blame them; I blame me. Because I reckon that the point of the music is entertainment. They like to sit back, hear something that they're going to like and have a bloody great time. I feel that if the people are not singing for me, then I'm doing something wrong. They used to call it 'send 'em home sweatin' but I call it 'send 'em home happy'."
Joe Dolan plays Vicar Street, Dublin, on February 19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd and 23rd