18 November 1971
Taking an early lead over Brendan Shine in the race to be Ireland’s most prolific Irish chart-topper of the ’70s, here’s An Camán Dearg with his second number one of 1971. ‘Kiss Me Goodbye’ had previously been recorded by Petula Clark, for whom it was a US top twenty hit in 1968, and by Connie Francis as an album track. After Red’s previous chart-topper ‘Sometimes’ and Pat Lynch and The Airchords’ ‘When We Were Young’, it’s also the third Irish number one of 1971 written by my now-dreaded schlockmeisters-general Les Reed and Barry Mason, who had spent the latter half of the ’60s enabling the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck.
Sure enough, ‘Kiss Me Goodbye’ is maudlin cabaret melodrama that won’t leave a dry seat in the house. Its protagonist, in one of those contorted scenarios you only get in these gaseous romantic ballads or the beyond-our-reproach ‘Hold Me Now’, is being left behind by their beloved, who’s off to a new squeeze: “That man is your tomorrow / I belong to yesterday”. Anyway, says Red, how about one for the road? Posterity doesn’t record the response; perhaps the other person is already half a mile down that road, at top speed. If this is what our parents had to shift to in the slow sets of old, it’s a wonder any of us got born.
