31 July 1971
The showbands hadn’t gone away. What’s more, the ’70s bring a new wave of them, with more technically capable singers who’d probably have gone into musical theatre if Dublin had its own West End or Broadway. Instead, they work the cabaret angle, make the occasional tilt at getting selected for Eurovision, and become light entertainment recidivists on RTÉ. Even in my ’80s two-channel childhood, the likes of Red Hurley and Tony Kenny seemed to appear regularly on shows like Live At 3 and Play The Game, the latter game being charades. God, ’80s Ireland was bleak.
Back in the ’70s, Red Hurley had four number one singles and represented Ireland at Eurovision in 1976, making him second only to Brendan Shine as our biggest domestic chart star of that decade. This first one, ‘Sometimes’, is firmly in the retrograde ’60s showband style of dreary, melodramatic balladry. An extremely tenuous and debatable sop to modernity comes with its trace elements of Engelbert Humperdinck and Tom Jones, notably the half-crooning half-belting vocal and the reference to a grown woman as a little girl. Of course, I could be doing Red Hurley a disservice; maybe he owned actual pop records and even liked them but just didn’t want them to interfere with his work. And we have another three Red chart-toppers to come. God, ’70s Ireland was bleak.
