1 January 1972
The most astonishing year in Irish chart history begins innocuously enough, with an old-fashioned waltz-time accordion ballad on the céilí wing of the country & Irish showband scene. Suffice it to say, Larry Cunningham won’t be doing any of the astonishing that lies ahead.
‘Slaney Valley’ ploughs such a similar furrow to Larry’s previous Irish number one, ‘Lovely Leitrim’, as to be effectively duplication of labour. His provincial Jim Reeves warbling croon that mixes Americanised pronunciations of words like “darling” with cúpla focal such as “a stór” and local-interest placenames, plus the trad accordion waltz, may seem a strange and unsavoury one-pot stew to the uninitiated or anyone who’s never seen Up For The Match, but this is what was playing big in the dancehalls of Ireland and the Irish Centres of Britain.
So, yes, ‘Slaney Valley’ in the context of 1972 is a throwback to a simpler, exclusively rural Ireland when farmhands and primary school teachers cycled their high nellies along country boreens to the Ballroom of Romance. Given what was actually happening in the north of Ireland at that time, and especially the imminent real-world event at the diametrically opposing corner of the island to the south-east and the Slaney, Larry’s pastoral accordion ditty feels like the same sort of Irish socio-cultural escapism that we saw in the mid-’60s when our number one singles shirked the issues raised by the 1966 Easter Rising anniversary and the incipient Troubles by retreating into a fantasy world of forever fighting the Black and Tans. Before the end of that same month, reality will come crashing into the Irish number one spot and figure there on and off for some time to come.
