23 December 1971
Duetting with yourself as a child: must be some modern-day AI jiggery-pokery, right? No, it’s Ireland’s Christmas number one of 1971!
How it’s done: ’70s showband singer Tommy Drennan had in his youth been ’50s boy soprano Tommy Drennan, of whom there was a 1953 recording of him singing ‘O Holy Night’. So, 18 years later, grown-up Tommy also records ‘O Holy Night’ and the two versions are spliced together. And as well as having such an idiosyncratic making-of, this is also Ireland’s first number one single from a Limerick act.
Alas, this version of ‘O Holy Night really is little more than a medley of the 1953 choir recording and a 1971 cabaret-style arrangement. To be fair, considering the labour of Hercules that was the clunky pitch-shift cut-and-shut in ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ just four years earlier, the studio technology of 1971 Ireland probably wasn’t up to lifting a vocal out of one single-track recording and dropping it into another. Small Tommy does the boy soprano stuff fine, but I’m disappointed than Big Tommy doesn’t have a crack at the Lanza-esque climactic octave-leap split in “di-vine” – the hallmark of a proper ‘O Holy Night’ and one that’s regularly shirked by milquetoast modern-day simperers like your Josh Grobans. Shoppers: make sure your ‘O Holy Night’ has the proper money note at the end!
