The man from Mullingar

BIOGRAPHY

BIG AS Joe Dolan was in Ireland, he was even bigger overseas. His 1975 single Lady in Blue, a flop here, sold two million copies in France alone. He had to record (You’re Such a) Good Looking Woman in Spanish – (Eras una) Mujer tan Singular – French, Italian, Portuguese, and German to cope with international demand.

But it was the old Soviet Union, in the dying days of communism, that provided arguably his greatest triumph. After an invitation from the ambassador in Dublin, he became the first pop performer to make a major tour of the USSR, where despite the ban on western music, locals already knew all his hits.

Among other venues, he played 11 sold-out nights in Leningrad’s vast Olympic Winter Sports Palace, singing in front of his 60ft-high painted portrait, and with 9,000 people standing to applaud every time he hit a high note; which, with his almost operatic voice, was often.

When the Berlin Wall fell and Eastern Europeans started arriving in Ireland for work, for many of them this country was synonymous not so much with Bono or U2 as with the man from Mullingar.

He was big in Vegas too, of course, although he found the long residencies a bore and, not for the first time, turned his back on big money in favour of life in Ireland. Yet his Leningrad epiphany – and his overseas experiences generally – had a longer-term effect.

Back on the ailing ballroom circuit in 1983, he played Glenamaddy (the Galway village immortalised by Big Tom) one freezing January night when only a few hundred turned up for the start of the show.

There would be 1,500 by the end and, as he had been doing for a quarter of a century, he sent them home sweating. But beforehand, frustrated at his lack of control over such events, he asked himself: “What the f**k am I doing here? They don’t care.”

After that, he turned his back on dancehalls. From then on, the focus was on sit-down shows, where people turned up on time, and listened.

With a foreword by Joe’s brother Ben, this book by Ronan Casey – son of Joe’s manager and a lifelong fan – lovingly charts Dolan’s rise from a talented multi-instrumentalist in The Drifters, through the realisation – his and everybody else’s – that he was the man audiences wanted to see, and on to the heights of “Driftermania” and his status as an unlikely sex symbol.

One of the book’s photographs shows an already-portly Joe being manhandled over the heads of a BBC studio audience as Jimmy Saville tries to save him.

Such things happened a lot. After his first Top of the Pops appearance, Dolan was flown back to Dublin for a midnight dash to the Olympic Ballroom, where he had the expensive crushed velvet jacket, bought specially for TOTP, ripped from his back in shreds.

Despite passing references to the singer’s reputation as a “hell-raiser” (he was banned for two years by Aer Lingus after a drink-fuelled confrontation with cabin crew), the book draws a veil over his private life, as the singer did himself. This is the “official” biography, after all. But for a man who was much loved, the apparent lack of a love life is odd.

In the early days, admittedly, an image of romantic availability was crucial to the Drifter brand. Thus in a 1969 interview, Dolan spoke of having recently been in love with (and almost engaged to) a girl from his home town, before declaring himself back on the market for casual dating but not for “a serious line”.

Elsewhere, more than once, he mentions that he does not like being “chased” by women. Only late in the book, by which time we have arrived in the 1980s, does “long-term girlfriend Isabella Fogarty” merit a passing mention.

Like most performers, Joe Dolan craved his audience’s affection. He told Gerry Ryan once that his greatest nightmare would be to perform Good Looking Woman live, stopping mid-chorus – as he invariably did – to let the audience sing “ . . . and nothing happens”.

He needn’t have worried. It was his health that deserted him first, not his audience. The book movingly describes his final show, last year, in Abbeyleix, when illness forced him to quit during a set.

He apologised profusely – “I’ve never had to do this in the last 40 years, but I just can’t go on”, and cried as he left. The crowd stood and applauded him out of the venue. When he died of a brain haemorrhage a few months later, at Christmas, more than 10,000 queued in the rain in Mullingar to say goodbye.

Frank McNally is an Irish Times journalist and writer of An Irishman’s Diary