THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:DANIEL O'DONNELL
TEN YEARS into his career, Daniel O’Donnell released a song that fell somewhere between a soaked- handkerchief waltz and an indictment of modern society. You may remember it, even if you don’t care to admit it.
Whatever Happened To Old Fashioned Love?was originally a swooning ballad penned by BJ Thomas, back when the Co Donegal man was cutting his debut single. But in Daniel's interpretation, there was not a hint of a question in his delivery, rather a sweet and resigned fatalism in his voice that made it clear that OFL, in so far as it ever existed, had vanished for good. The kids weren't listening but, like so many of O'Donnell's songs, the record proved a hardy bird anyhow. It peaked at number 21 on the UK charts, miraculous in a year when Ace of Bass provided the prevailing sound on the airwaves and in nightclubs. Through the steady flow of resilient and heart-tugging minor classics of yesteryear that O'Donnell has been crooning for a quarter of a century, there is something about that 1993 cover which seems central to his everlasting popularity. This was the year when the Dáil passed an act to decriminalise homosexuality, when the Charlton soccer revolution was about to have its last great shout and when the star of Kurt Kobain was burning furiously.
To whom was Daniel singing? The critics sniff that the O’Donnell sound ranks among the worst crimes in the jam-packed middle-of-the-road catalogue. But O’Donnell has been cast so far away – barred for life – from the gates of fashion that his followers cannot be labelled as the middle of anything. Daniel-heads are extremists. The O’Donnell audience – transatlantic in profile nowadays – is surely the most derided group in all of music culture. Their devotion to the Kincasslagh man has a cult dimension, and anyone who has seen the concert footage knows that he has the power to transport them to whatever dance hall, whatever lost paradise, they recreate under the spell of his stagecraft. The thing is, he is not just singing to the same groupies.
Many of the original crowd that followed Daniel’s first flush of success in 1983 have inevitably gone to the Grand Ole Opry in the sky since. As with the apparitions of Knock, a new wave of believers keeps on showing up. Year in and year out, O’Donnell has sent some home sweating and others with pacemakers in a state of high duress, but his act never failed to deliver. Now aged 47, he packs out the prestige venues in Ireland, England and the country music shrines of the American Midwest.
And he has subtly moved from being Margo's younger brother, Wee Daniel, to one of the music scene's great survivors. He has done this without once altering his sound, his message or his haircut. He has done this by standing serenely in the wake of a critical reception that has ranged from good-humoured parody to more vicious dismissal. The only time he ever showed an edge occurred during one of the more bizarre barneys in the history of Irish television, when feminist dinosaur Germaine Greer goaded him into a slanging match and was left as shocked as the national audience by the stinging speed of his wit. His latest album, Peace in the Valley, marks a whopping 41st and, in it, Daniel adds his unmistakable lilt to 15 gospel staples.
WHEN WE MEET, he is in Dublin briefly, to perform the album's title track on The Late Late Show. In a no-frills dressing room, he sits back and notes that Ryan Tubridy will be the fourth Late Late Showpresenter to interview him. Given that Gerry Ryan presented just the one show, it is a record that belongs to him and him alone.
"I never ever thought that it would come to this," he says, genuinely marvelling. "And to me, that is amazing," he adds in the famous sing-song, lachrymose tone. "I never take it for granted I will be on here again. It's not easy get on the Late Late, you know. And sometime they will say, 'well thanks, but no'. And when that day comes, I won't ask why. I have had much more opportunity than I ever imagined."
O’Donnell says this in the soft, deadpan voice that has made him a dream for impersonators, but there is no doubt that he means it. This, after all, is the son of a labourer who lived a life from a Peadar O’Donnell novel, working in Scotland and visiting the family seasonally before dropping dead of a heart attack at the age of 49, when the future singer was just six. Fragments of the man are all he has retained in his imagination, but as a late-afternoon lull falls in the corridors of RTÉ, he summons them without ceremony.
“I remember more about his death than his life,” O’Donnell says. “It was a huge trauma in the house. I don’t know if I was there when the priest came to say that he was dead or if I heard it so many times that I thought I was there. I am sure I was there. But I do kind of remember the sound of the hearse.
“Years ago, the hearse had a kind of churning sound. A strange thing to remember! All of the others were devastated. He was away working nearly all of the time. I remember one time going with him, and this other man, Jim Boyle, had a bread van – he has passed on too. But my father got a lift with him and I was with him in this bread van. That is the only thing I remember. Then he was going away to Scotland to work. At secondary school, when fellas were doing things with their fathers, I missed him. But my mother was very strong and made sure everything was fine for me.
“People say it was terrible being without a father. Well, that was it – there were others in the same boat. Personally, I think it would have been worse to be without a mother. Generally, I think a woman can do better with a family than men can – I shouldn’t generalise, I know, but I think that.”
You do not have to spend long with O'Donnell to figure out that he was reared by the kind of women on whom Brian Friel conferred heroism on theatre stages across the world: busy, warm, practical, tough women, with a salty line in chastening humour which the singer has inherited. Over the years, it became apparent that O'Donnell has a talent for the lightning, easy retort for which the hipsters who appear on Irish satirical shows would kill. To Gloria Hunniford, who tells him on (his) This Is Your Lifethat he's always liked the older woman: "Well, it's the experience I'm after." And after teaming up with Sinéad O'Connor for Celebrity Who Wants to be a Millionaire?and O'Connor, eager to press on for a bigger pot, gives him the doe's stare: "Ah, Sinéad, I wish I hadn't seen them eyes." "They are rather winning," agrees Gay Byrne, the host. And O'Donnell: "Aw for God's sake . . . when you are getting close to 40, they're not good to look at."
O'Donnell's great generosity to television interviewers is to permit them the illusion that they are leading him along. But he is always in control and invariably sharper, as he demonstrated to chilling effect during that infamous encounter with Greer on Miriam O'Callaghan's talk show, Saturday Night With Miriam. Just seeing O'Donnell and Greer sitting together was almost hallucinatory to begin with and, in hindsight, O'Donnell's world view was always bound to antagonise the Australian. So they went to war over the daftest of subjects – Daniel's mother's pancakes – and when Greer acidly informed him that pancakes weren't that difficult to cook, O'Donnell coldly replied: "Germaine, I think your pancakes might be a bit bitter."
That was three years ago and, thinking back, O’Donnell admits he was annoyed. “She knew nothing about me. I honestly knew nothing about her either. And I would be pleasant to anyone unless I had reason not to be. And if I had a bad experience with someone, I wouldn’t be inclined to run them down, I just would not be in their company again. But that night, I really thought I was being belittled. And whether people at home could see what was going on, there was a hundred people in the audience who could. And I just thought I am not putting up with this. I was singing for however long I was singing and I don’t have to prove myself to anyone. I achieved what I have achieved and I am content with that. So for someone to sit and belittle what I was talking about, I felt was the wrong thing. Plus, she had said her piece. I felt I was long enough in the tooth.
“At the end, I said ‘you don’t need me on this show and I need to be on it less, so you can scrap it if you like’. I think I was asked about how my mother would accept Majella and I said about the pancakes. The thing was, it was an in-joke – we lived beside Brendan Grace and, for her 90th birthday, he sent her pancakes. So she jumped in. And poor Lulu sat there saying nothing. I think in the end she was a bit shocked by it too. I never watched the show.
“People said afterwards: ‘Well, you did so well, you won out.’ But all I could think was: ‘What great thing is it to win an argument? What is it to brag about?’
“I just wish that show had never taken place. Even if it did show a different side to me, that I won’t lie down, that I have a bit of a backbone. Albeit to a woman, but I would stand up to a man too and I have done. So I don’t feel that it was any great achievement . . . I just feel it should not have been allowed to happen.”
Nobody should have been surprised by the toughness. In an odd way, O’Donnell followed his father to Glasgow seeking employment. After quitting college in Galway to spend two years on the road with Margo, he played his first solo gigs in Glaswegian venues that had no soft audiences: The Squirrel bar in the Barras, the Claddagh Club, the Irish Centre. For two years, he grafted under band names.
“Country Fever, that never caught, and The Grassroot, that never grew,” he says, flatly mocking himself. Several respected music promoters advised him to quit. Then he met Mick Clerkin of Ritz Records and, after a crisis of confidence in 1985, it was decided, as he diplomatically puts it, “to disperse the band”. The turning point for O’Donnell came the following year, when he headlined Donegal’s Milford Inn.
“The date was March 6th, 1986,” he says. “I had turned 24 on the previous December 12th. Some of my friends were married, some had good jobs; I had nothing. I think the fact that Margo had done so well held me back for a time. If you have education, you can have five in the one family being solicitors or doctors, no problem. But in the music business, you do need luck. And for that to happen twice in the one family seemed unlikely.
"But that evening in Milford, it was like switching on a light. The pirate radio stations had come into their own and My Donegal Shorehad become a hit. The dressing room was below the stage and I could hear the crowd above, and the place was shaking. It was the first time ever that I was afraid. Not nervous, but afraid. And the only time I was ever afraid. But that was it."
With that empowerment, all the sticks and stones in the world were not going to stop him from becoming Wee Daniel. The O’Donnell phenomenon took hold in the 1990s, and by the end of the decade he had headlined everywhere from Carnegie Hall to Sydney Opera House. At the beginning of this decade, he turned his attentions to the US and started from scratch, playing concerts for 30 fans in Branson, Missouri, the Vegas of country music. There were times he became dispirited, but his manager, Sean Reilly, was convinced there was a market out there. On the road, they met a young hopeful named Garth Brooks.
“He had just started,” O’Donnell says. “I remember Garth coming in and talking about how ‘awesome’ it all was.” Like homesteaders stumbling off track in search of water, they toured the Midwest until they got a break on a public service television show.
Then hundreds and finally thousands of Daniel acolytes came running from the prairie towns to Branson, as helpless to his charms as the women who flock to see him in Ireland and England. Now, he can sell out the big venues in Branson in advance and a television show over there is the next logical move for him. He tours for six months and spends the other six with Majella, relaxing by both his Donegal and his Tenerife shores.
It is no bad life and a far cry from the Barras.
I DEFY ANY Irish person who sets foot in studio four – the fabled Late Late Showhome – not to experience a fleeting thrill. Without the lights, the theatre looks a touch threadbare and dated, but what the hell. Many ghosts have passed through this big cavern.
O'Donnell runs through his rehearsal of Peace in the Valleywith the house band and it all goes as smooth as silk. Clint Velour and the boys have clearly been practising hard and, later, Velour tells O'Donnell: "It's a great tune. Didn't Elvis do it once?" They play it again and O'Donnell slips back into performance mode.
There are no secrets to O’Donnell’s musical taste. Asked whom he considers the most charismatic entertainer of them all, he instantly replies: “Cliff.” There are, he gently confirms, no surprises in his own music collection. For the record, he did drink once – hot whiskeys in Tenerife to ward off the flu. He believes he consumed too many.
“I must have,” he recalls mournfully. “Because they made me sick.”
His range of influence seems wilfully narrow, although he adores Loretta Lynn, whose material is fiercely dark. And he becomes rapturous when he recalls attending a Johnny Cash performance in Branson in the mid 1990s. “Oh, so brilliant,” he says. “I met him. June Carter was there too and some of the family. It was one of the best shows I have ever seen. Do you know what it was like? It was like they weren’t going manage. But they did! It was like they were that fragile and that frail that they might not get through the show. But it was incredible. It was so real.”
Is Daniel O'Donnell real? That depends on whether you like him or not. When he reviews his life in "showbiz", he thinks back to those first, clueless days of cutting 1,000 copies of My Donegal Shorein Big Tom's studios in Castleblayney in 1983. "I should have been singing pop music. This is what my generation was listening to then. This is when" – he pauses here to pick an 1980s icon from the dim recesses – "Boy George was top of the charts. But, see, I loved the music that I was listening to. People have often asked me if I never felt like rebelling or doing something different. I felt like I did rebel. But it was a quiet rebellion. I was never a follower. I was always very much an individual in respect of the music. I never think that, God, I must reinvent myself now."
And as he raises the rafters in the shadowy Late Latestudio – "There will be Sorrow! Sorrow!" – that seems a fair summary. The Donegal man is at once completely open and utterly inscrutable, but 25 years on, one thing is sure: no living Irish entertainer is as coolly indifferent to public opinion as O'Donnell.
Decades ago, the great theatre critic Kenneth Tynan set himself a simple rule: “Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy.” In a strange way, the showman from Kincasslagh has that very stardust.
BORN
Daniel Francis O’Donnell, December 12th 1961.
CAREER
As a solo artist since 1983, O’Donnell has record almost 40 albums and has sold over 10 million records to date. He has had 20 UK Top 40 albums and 18 albums in the US Billboard Top 20. He has won multiple awards, including an honorary MBE in 2001.
TURNING POINT
In 1992, O'Donnell recorded I Just Want To Dance With You,which led to his first appearance on Top of the Pops.
