Joe Cuddy – ‘Any Dream Will Do’

9 May 1974

“Aha!”, the elders would say: “Joe Cuddy sang that!” This was a common reaction in the Ireland of 1991 to Jason Donovan topping the Irish charts with ‘Any Dream Will Do’. (Other reactions were also available.)

Joe Cuddy topped the Irish charts with it too. It was his second number one of 1974 and, as with Jason, his final number one. I don’t recall the Cuddy fandom raging against the Jason machine in 1991 to mobilise Joe’s version back to the Irish charts. That would at least have been briefly interesting and mildly entertaining, qualities you can’t ascribe to either version of this dreary, simpering song. Where Jason’s ’90s cover has the plastic keyboards of a school play, Joe’s iteration starts off with the lumbering rhythm of a cowpoke campfire ballad, before descending into the avuncular tones and altar-boy chorus of a novena mass. Joe’s version looks down on Jason’s version only in the way the bottom rung of a ladder can look down at the ground.

Astonishingly, the 2007 revival of source musical Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat saw another version of ‘Any Dream Will Do’, by a Lee Mead, reach no. 2 in the UK charts. I’ve given that one a miss, because see above. My dream is that no one else covers this insipid song and I never have to encounter it again.