Joe Dolce Music Theatre – ‘Shaddap You Face’

28 February 1981

Not so fast. Yes, it’s a terrible record, but I’m going to cut Joe Dolce a break here.

First, his family is Italian. This may be a moot point and scant consolation for the millions of native and heritage Italians who probably had to put up with this as bantz for most of the ’80s, but it arguably (and I stress ‘arguably’ here) gives him some sort of cultural ‘in’ to this, which is not something you can say with much certainty about the Dolmio TV ads. Secondly, novelty hits are the fault of gormless radio jocks then, or influencers today, who think it’d be a jolly jape to push this every day until it cracks the charts. I doubt there was a Dolce masterplan behind this making number one.

Also, the same Mr Dolce had previously released a non-comedy, non-novelty single called ‘Boat People’ whose lyrics make a go of highlighting the violence, racism, and danger specifically faced by south-east Asian refugees at the time. If you check out ‘Boat People’ on Dolce’s Soundcloud page you’ll see its lyric sheet translated into Vietnamese. It’s for those same people to judge the merits of ‘Boat People’ but on the surface it at least seems a well-meaning effort to reach out to others and think beyond his own experiences, values we wouldn’t normally associate with someone who made ‘Shaddap You Face’.

Finally, the record that ‘Shaddap You Face’ famously kept off the UK number one spot is no great shakes; we’re not talking about some epochal ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ / ‘Penny Lane’ chart injustice. And that single actually made it to number one here in Ireland after Dolce, and we’ll see it next here too, so Midge Ure can just quit his bellyaching.

This is still irredeemably dreadful, though.