What's another dancing leprechaun?

During the boom, the good-taste guardians abandoned Johnny Logan but his new Irish-themed variety show is a good-natured, if cheesy, spectacle. It's about time he was appreciated back home, writes DEREK SCALLY, in Berlin

A BEARDED MERLIN totters on to the sword-shaped stage in a packed Berlin arena to inform the attentive audience that there’s good and bad in life – never one without the other.

It's something to keep in mind as Excaliburroars into life. The touring spectacle that played Berlin last weekend is billed as a "Celtic rock opera" but the show, devised by French writer-composer Alan Simon, mashes up Riverdancewith the musical Camelotto create a variety show held together with a loose narrative of King Arthur and his enchanted sword.

The show’s form follows its function, namely to allow live performances from performers such as Alan Parsons, members of rock bands Jethro Tull and Supertramp as well as leading lights of Europe’s Celtic music scene.

There are love duets, horses and sword battles, not to mention a pneumatic enchantress called Morgana, who seduces Merlin with an acrobatic veil dance.

But when Johnny Logan appears to sing the opening number – in a flapping white shirt and tight black leather trousers – it’s clear who the audience has come to see.

Logan's hair is grey now, and he won't be slipping into tailored white suits any more. But the Irish Eurovision winner's powerful voice floats through the arena and, as King Arthur, he has the audience under his spell within seconds. The musical stage isn't new territory for Logan: he made his stage debut in the 1977 Dublin musical Adam & Eveand later donned the technicolour dreamcoat in Joseph at the Gaiety.

“But theatre was never really my thing because I’m not good in things where you have to stay five months or a year. I tend to lose concentration,” he says.

The stage spectacle Excalibur, now touring Germany for a month, complements Logan's own recording and concert work and suits him just fine. For an Irish audience member, the show is a tongue-in-cheek affair, opening in a vanished forest kingdom populated by Irish-dancing leprechauns in green and fairies in white.

Soon the airy, carefree dancing turns to an urgent, hard-shoe jig as their enchanted forest is invaded by a shadowy army of fierce-looking goblins on pogo stilts.

On one level, it’s beyond ludicrous: all that’s missing from the stage is Spinal Tap’s miniature Stonehenge. Yet the good-natured show is a likeable affair that has the audience entranced and clapping wildly in time.

Then Logan reappears and cranks things up to 11 with a song which sounds like a timely commentary on Ireland’s current plight. “See how our father’s land in desolation stands,” he sings. “See how our country falls under the heathen hordes across deserted moors.”

For anyone who hasn’t seen him in action lately, it’s easy to laugh off Johnny Logan with the same pejorative “big in Germany” label sported by David Hasselhoff.

Ireland’s self-appointed guardians of modern musical taste give a stern thumbs-down to Logan’s unashamed middle-of-the-road repertoire, charging him with the same, apparently unforgivable, offence committed by Chris de Burgh at the Gaiety last year: making audiences happy.

Yet Logan carries on regardless with sold-out concerts and multi-platinum records in Scandinavia and across continental Europe, markets that cater for much wider musical tastes than at home.

That narrow music market focus in Ireland squeezed Logan’s career here. Doing their bit, too, were Celtic Tiger good-taste guardians who excised from our national memory the pride at Logan’s multiple Eurovision wins. With little fanfare, they were scooped up and dumped down the memory hole containing other embarrassing transgressions from Ireland’s pre-prosperity past, such as the Catholic church and Blue Nun wine. Bereft of the familiar and unsure of what they should adopt in their place, nouveau riche Irish were easy bait for international snake oil salesmen.

For outside observers, Ireland’s blind embrace of property, Cava, goose fat and fast fashion – just because the banks, MS, Nigella Lawson and Grazia said so – seemed just as provincial and childlike as what went before – except that it left the Irish farther than ever from the comfortable and familiar. But now that the Celtic Tiger has been shot, stuffed and mounted, the time has come for some clear-eyed reflection.

Like him or not, Johnny Logan remains a successful, popular performer and his winning Eurovision entries – self-penned and otherwise – are indestructible pop songs that remain a part of our collective past.

Though he acknowledges it with a laugh, it’s clear Logan is still hurt by sniggering about his career in Ireland.

“It’s not just sniggering, it’s venomous sometimes,” he says of the music and entertainment scene in Ireland.

Yet, latest album Irishman in America– a lively collection of drinking songs – went double platinum around Europe, selling more than 300,000 copies. His upcoming album, The Nature of Love, introduces six new songs and revisits his Eurovision wins in their original arrangements, 30 years after he first hit gold with What's Another Year?As Excaliburcloses in a blaze of pyrotechnics and a roar of approval from thousands of Berliners, it's clear Logan is in his element: a remarkable performer with a striking voice that is better than ever since he underwent vocal cord surgery and quit drinking.

“I’m not getting younger and I always try to give my best,” he says. “I’d love to work in Ireland again. We have a huge diversity of talent in Ireland for such a small country.”

In Europe, people either love Johnny Logan or pay him no heed and mean him no harm. The only ones who still take the time and energy to deride him are the Irish, which says less about the singer and more about his fellow countrymen’s insecurities about their recent past.

Worth remembering, though, is how, 30 years ago this year, a young man gave a huge dose of self-confidence to a small, broke island in choppy economic waters.

Now that Ireland has come full circle, it’s time to listen again to Johnny Logan and, at the very least, give the man the respect he deserves.