5 April 1965
Before Eurovision, what did Ireland do for national pop-cultural psychodrama? Whatever public interest or patriotic pride our first Eurovision entry may have whipped up in 1965, I doubt anyone anticipated its grip on the Irish imagination ever since. If anything, our recent trail of semi-final elimination has intensified our fascination and fervour; cue pained reactions on Irish social media of a type other countries bottle up for ignominious World Cup exits.
The gravitational pull of Eurovision on Ireland has also been felt in the Irish singles chart. Between winners, one runner-up, Irish entrants, an Irish national finalist and the musical accompaniment to an interval dance act, 27 Irish number one singles have come from Eurovision. (By comparison, the UK has only had nine Eurovision number ones: seven winners and two other UK entries. A Eurovision song hasn’t topped the UK charts since Gina G’s smashing ‘Ooh Aah… Just A Little Bit’ in 1996.) Add to that another Irish chart-topper each for Dana and Bucks Fizz, another two for Brotherhood of Man, two subsequent number ones for 1988 winner Céline Dion, and especially another 11 by ABBA. That’s a total of 44 Irish number one singles with Eurovision in their origin story, compared to 49 by my count for the combined forces of various ’00s and ’10s UK and Irish TV talent shows. (Both Eurovision and The X Factor are prime-time live TV music contests which aren’t Irish themselves but feature occasional Irish success, so their influence on Ireland’s pop charts and pop-cultural conversation has a symmetry which to tease out I’d need a lot more caffeine in my system.)
However, Eurovision’s arrival in Ireland’s pop culture, while commendably forcing us to engage with non-anglophone mainland Europe at least once a year, didn’t bring any significant transformation to Irish pop music itself. Our early entries are the same ilk of male solo romantic ballads in the ’50s US country-pop cabaret style of Dickie Rock’s 1964 Irish number ones, with the lush symphonica of live orchestras giving a patina of Sanremo sophistication. We’ll continue sending showband acts to Eurovision well into the ’70s. In that context, Dana’s folk ballad ‘All Kinds Of Everything’ is an outlier and an innovation – perhaps the only time that’s ever been said.
So, Ireland’s first Eurovision entry it will always be, plus only the second Irish number one single to have a writing credit for an Irish woman, Teresa Conlon, but ‘Walking The Streets In The Rain’ itself is unremarkable. Butch Moore croons his ’50s-esque ballad of watery moping but his laid-back style contains no trace of the lyrical heartache; he’s selling me the title but not the song. That said, Butch is presentable, projects an air of telegenic confidence, and crucially doesn’t make a show of us in front of the whole of Europe. We finish a creditable sixth out of 18 countries behind winners Luxembourg, who had astutely outsourced the job to a young French singer and a swinging ’60s French yé-yé romp by France’s greatest pop songwriter on the cusp of his masterpiece era. (Outsourcing our Eurovision entry is not something Ireland seems to have seriously considered. Would Irish people stand for it?)
Anyway, Butch’s small rain-soaked steps in the street were a giant leap for Ireland. We were in Eurovision now, like some actual modern European country, and unlike EEC membership there was nothing Charles de Gaulle could do to veto it. Thanks to Eurovision, generations of Irish people would learn how to count to twelve in French without eleven. Ahead of us lie years of victory, defeat, indignation, not voting for the UK but expecting the Brits to vote for us, semi-finals, You’re A Star, that feckin’ bloc voting, the annual trauma of revealing our national psychological need to be loved by people from other countries, and Dustin. We’d really no idea what we had let ourselves in for.
