7 November 1969
Here’s the final Irish single to reach number one in Ireland in the ’60s. You will be familiar with Joe, but I don’t know this song and I’m not aware of it being up there in his classic pantheon with ‘Make Me An Island’ or ‘You’re Such A Good Looking Woman’. (A popular streaming service seems to concur, listing ‘Teresa’ down in the 40s of his most-played tracks as I write.) You the Joe Dolan stan in your replica white suit, or perhaps even you the Joe Dolan hipster who rocks the open-neck large-collar shirt and sneers at the white-suit basic – whichever Joe gang you run with, you may already know ‘Teresa’ and have named at least one of your children after it.
As for me, I will apply my regular modus operandi and listen to it LIVE for the first time as I write this. Expectations? A girl’s name as the title suggests this a treacly sentimental cabaret ballad in the prevailing Engelbert style, something to which Joe’s anxious, tight-trousered voice isn’t suited but which meets the need for a shiftalong number for his next parish hall gig with the showband. If you’re new to this site or to the concept of pop music, that doesn’t bode well. I’m looking around frantically for clothes to iron or teeth to have extracted instead, but in vain.
[One listen later]
Oh no. What could be worse than a treacly, sentimental Engelbert cabaret ballad? A smarmy, schmaltzy ’60s Bee Gees cabaret-pop semi-ballad: ‘Teresa’ is that. Its lightly-swaying tempo is probably a bit too fast for the slow-set circuit, though I hear your old pair back in ’69 would have to be hosed down off the dancefloor and were even shifting to the national anthem. Joe turns in the solid, unimaginative work of a tradesman: make me a kitchen island. He’ll return to number one in Ireland during the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s—the only ’60s chart-topping act to do so—but the hip-swinging cult of Joe won’t be reliant on ‘Teresa’.
