Music
Why we have not won the Eurovision Song Contest for 20 years Shay Healy believes the answer is simple: ‘Until RTE gets a ‘‘real’’ song – not a plastic confection -- and the right singer, and returns to the original national voting system, nothing will change. The Eurovision Song Contest was not designed to find a song for Europe rather it was an experiment by Sergio Pilese and Marcel Benezon who were looking at the possibilities for live broadcasting. Sergio borrowed the concept from the San Remo Festival and Marcel approved it. But scarily enough they had no songs in mind, which shows you how close we came to not having a Eurovision. They were very pleased from an engineering point of view at what they saw in the first contest. The payoff was a technical coup. The first Eurovision in Lugano in Switzerland in 1956 was an instant success. There were seven contestants and the host country were very deserving winners on their own pitch. The history of Irish participation in Eurovision didn’t begin until 1965 when Butch Moore went Walking the streets in the rain and his habit of slapping his thigh while walking immediately highlighted him and lifted him out of the pack. Butch went on to achieve a sixth place finish. He had great success with the Capitol Show band but he eventually emigrated to America where he sang and had his own popular Irish bar. In 1966 Dickie Rock came fourth with Come Back to Stay. There was some sadness attached to both of these songs. Theresa O’Donnell, who wrote Walking The Streets in The Rain told me she never got royalties and it haunted her until her dying day. If it was today she would probably be set for life though we hadn’t yet reached the era of digital technology.
Our greatest Eurovision star, Johnny Logan pulled off the astonishing fete of winning the Eurovision as a singer, as a writer and as a writer performer.
We had to wait a long time after that until 1970 when Dana, a young girl on a stool, used her innocent Derry charm to impress upon the judges that Ireland were worthy winners. Dana became a very famous international performing star, but there was tragedy behind this song also. It was co-written by Derry Lindsay and Jackie Smith and sadly, Jackie got lost in a bottle and passed away early. Derry Lindsay went back into his print business, 3 Candle Press. I recall talking to him some years later and the only disappointment he had from it was that he was never included in whatever celebrations or nostalgia shows were going at the time, another forgotten writer. Come Back to Stay turned Dickie Rock into a national hero. He couldn’t walk abroad in public without exciting an instant pop-up crowd. My vivid memory is of a massive throng, totally blocking Moore Street, outside the studio that Dickie was recording in. Come Back to Stay
49 Senior Times l May - June 2020 l www.seniortimes.ie
was written by Roland Soper who would have liked to have sung it himself but instead the honours went to Dickie. We had to wait another ten years after our first success to win again in 1980. This time again youth was to the fore and a very young Johnny Logan sang What’s Another Year to victory and he memorably finished singing his reprise with the words Ireland I love you. Doesn’t that memory bring you back and did you notice, more specifically, that all three of those songs had orchestral arrangements and were played with a ‘live’ orchestra, showing off the songs in their best clothing. In the old performance days everybody was accompanied by an orchestra as backing for their song and our conductor for years was a very fine jazz piano player, Noel Kelehan who confidently set the tempo and the mood of the
