19 July 1973
Could a song like ‘Welcome Home’ get to number one these days? The quaint sentimentality and intravenous nostalgia, for sure—see the parochial ‘Killeagh’—but perhaps not the squarely middle-aged cabaret sound: I remember it being covered by light entertainment troupers and showband stragglers on Irish TV regularly during my ’80s childhood and it already seeming as outdated as horse-drawn carts. (Was there any ageing male Irish crooner on Live At Three who didn’t sing it?) Even for 1973, I can’t picture anyone who bought Slade and Sweet records also buying this, unless as a present for their nan.
At least Peters and Lee were from, and for, an older generation raised on the shared feel-good experience of pub and cabaret singalongs. That older demographic were most likely the don’t-normally-buy-music cohort who tipped this into number-one status, plus I can imagine it being covered live by any showband still hanging on in 1973 – a year when other family-friendly light entertainments like ‘Long Haired Lover From Liverpool’ and ‘Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree’ were also topping the pop charts. That chorus has a natural terrace-anthem swayalongability that you’d be cold-hearted not to appreciate. The verses hint at domestic heartache; the narrator seems to have had his homebird arse left by his significant other. Lennie Peters’ avuncular Engelbertian croon is easy on the ear without slipping into Humperdinckly unctuousness.
My generosity ends with the climactic key change, a move whose subsequent repeat deployment by Westlife reminds me that every schmaltzy ’70s pop hit we meet was squirrelled away by Louis Walsh as raw material for future Irish boybanditry. Still, we can put ‘Welcome Home’ with Elvis’s ‘The Wonder Of You’ on the enjoyably kitsch and cheesy side of ’70s cabaret singalongs.
