20 March 1970
The 1970 episode of Reeling In The Years shows Dana’s celebratory post-Eurovision homecoming, which includes a meeting with Ireland’s then-president, an elderly Éamon de Valera. Dana went on to try to emulate Dev by becoming a fundamentalist Catholic, then an Irish presidential candidate, and finally an American citizen. Still, Dana could claim to be a trailblazer: Ireland’s first Eurovision winner, Derry’s original TV pop hopeful, and the first Irish act to have a number one in the ’70s.
‘All Kinds Of Everything’ was Dana’s second crack at Eurovision, in fact. The previous year she had been runner-up to Muriel Day and ‘The Wages Of Love’ in Ireland’s national final, with a song called ‘Look Around’ – the same style of mature ’50s orchestral ballad that Ireland had heretofore sent to Eurovision before Day’s turn at Sandie Shaw-like swinging ’60s pop. Again, a pivot to folk ditty the following year as Ireland’s Eurovision entry, which then wins the thing, makes Dana an improbable pioneer, though as a hardcore Catholic she could well be an actual Pioneer.
There’s nothing pioneering in the song, though. In the same way that ‘The Wages Of Love’ was Puppet On A Shoestring, ‘All Kinds Of Everything’ is essentially a love-song angle on ‘My Favorite Things’ as if Maria—failed postulate nun and therefore a mere à la carte Catholic compared to Dana—were singing it to Von Trapp rather than his children. A metaphorical Singing Nun herself in later years, Dana here is Maria-like: folksy, unworldly, and child-friendly though not yet in the sense of limiting your reproductive rights to that sole outcome. Despite the unwitting horror-movie potential in “things of the sea”, “things of the sky” and “things of the night”, the song’s simpering stage tweeness (“Wishin’ wells / weddin’ bells”) and its amplification by the singer are comical to the point of ridicule. Maybe Dana was a forerunner of wee Daniel.
Despite its firsts, Dana and ‘All Kinds Of Everything’ aren’t trailblazers at all. We’ll win six more times, but Ireland’s Eurovision story will become less like The Sound Of Music and more a soap-opera mix of power ballad melodrama and national psychodrama. Twee folk with their twee folk remain a light entertainment staple, but Irish chart-toppers of the ’70s will mostly be hawking cabaret shlock and bubblegum pop like everywhere else. I wasn’t around at the time but I wonder if ‘All Kinds Of Everything’ wasn’t just immediately pensioned off to factoid and punchline the moment Dana left the Eurovision stage.
And yet, surprisingly, Dana will have a second coming, thanks to her timely pivot to performative religion. The end of the decade will see a wave of Papal-visit tie-in tat reach Ireland’s number one spot – including by Dana herself, who will also be the first Irish act to have an Irish number one in the ’80s. She even tries a third coming in the ’90s and ’00s as a religious conservative politician – first as presidential candidate, though our taste for fundamentalist Catholic US citizens as head of state had died with Dev, then sent once more by Ireland to the European stage. Our early glimpses of the ’70s charts remind us that, for all the changes in pop music and pop culture over the decade to come, Ireland’s ultra-Catholic social orthodoxy will remain the same and strike back harder in the reactionary ’80s of moving statues and constitutional amendments. It’ll take people like the first Irish act to have a number one in the ’90s—a radically different Irishwoman—before that will change.
