15 June 1967
When we saw and heard The Capitol Showband at number one three years earlier, with ‘Down Came The Rain’ and ‘Born To Be With You’, Butch Moore was their crooning singer and—as with all Irish showbands of the time—outdated ’50s pop was their game. Now here they are in 1967 with a new singer and a new (to them) sound of the then-profitable trad Irish folk ballad revival: bar-room vocals, mandolins, the whole shebang. Even in the timid and conservative Irish showband milieu, the times they were a-changin’.
Today we know ‘The Black Velvet Band’ more from The Dubliners’ version which comes out a few months after this. Their iteration has the considerable advantage of Luke Kelly’s scorching vocals and a more robust sound based on banjo, fiddle and legendary feats of porter-drinking. They also, crucially, are masters of the folk idiom, bringing out the song’s humour, bitterness, injustice and cruelty with oodles of expertise and charm. Johnny Kelly and The Capitol, by contrast, run perfunctorily through this like seisiún blow-ins. Their tepid version, less Luke Kelly and more lukewarm, notably puts the black-velvet-band-wearer on the same prison ship to Van Diemen’s Land as the narrator, a quaint Who Do You Think You Are? meet-cute to tell the grandkids in Australia.
Still, Johnny Kelly and The Capitol had their hit version first, got all the way to number one, and did so three separate times in 1967 to clock up a total of seven weeks at the top of the Irish charts. Even in matters of trad folk, the Irish showband scene and their record-buying public were continuing to show dubious, watered-down taste.
