Joe Dolan - in his own words

Joe Dolan has been singing professionally for over 25 years. He reached No 3 in the UK charts in 1967, and he had other hits which topped the charts in countries throughout Europe.His popularity spread even as far as Russia, and in 1980, he played to packed houses during a month-long stay there. And things just keep getting better.'The seventies were the glory years, and the eighties weren"t bad, and the nineties are looking good,' he told the Westmeath Examiner over a cup of coffee, as he looked back over a career which developed as he served his time as an apprentice printer in the offices of this very newspaper.New albumWe caught Joe just before he left for London, and arranged to see him play one of his two nights in Cricklewood. He was taking a break from recording a new album at his own studios in Mullingar, and was as his fans will never see him onstage: out of the white clothes, unshaven, and enjoying a cigarette.Joe turned out to be an interviewer"s dream. He"s easy to talk to, and he tells his life story in exclamation marks. The first one came when he told us his first job was sweeping floors in the Westmeath Examiner!Straight out of school, he was employed to keep the 'Examiner' offices tidy. And on Thursdays, there was a break from cleaning when he got to go around the shops delivering the newly-printed Examiner.'I spent nearly twelve months at that,' he says, and eventually, he began training to become a compositor. The apprenticeship should have lasted seven years, but Joe was allowed to do it in five on account of having been at the Technical School in Mullingar. And around the time he began to spend his days studying printing, he began to spend his nights and weekends playing music.'There was a lot of us who used to knock around together, a bunch of guys. We would go out to our house, and on Sundays there, everybody would play a little bit of something, while everybody could play nothing. We used anything that would make a noise!'First guitarThe first guitar he got to play was very basic - but of a type which was to come into vogue thirty years later - although Ben Dolan, Joe"s brother, then a carpenter, didn"t realise that when he made it.'He did a great job on it, but he didn"t put any frets on it! He was a long way ahead of his time, because it came out only a few years ago that fretless bass guitars were all the go. On Ben"s, you had to bar with your index finger. I started with that guitar.''Where is it now? Goodness knows'.Joe and his friends got their first chance to perform publicly when they attended a friend"s wedding. It was an extremely impromptu introduction into life as an entertainer: the wedding had come to a temporary standstill because the musicians were on a break.'So a few of us got up together, ad as they"d say today, we "jammed". We just played whatever we could play, and it went down very well, and we thought: "Ah, these are all friends, and they"d say that anyway". But then we got serious about it, and we stayed together, a few of us, and played a couple of local things, maybe in the Greville Arms, or in St. Loman"s. Then after that I decided: "This is not sounding bad at all", and we got in other guys from different parts of the country, and then decided to make a record.'Leaving the Examiner'I went on to qualify as a comp, and on the first week of my full wage packet, or shortly after that, I left the "Examiner", and started taking it seriously. I could have gone to Dublin to work in some printing works, because at that time there was new technology coming in, but I decided I wanted to spend a bit more time at the music.'Kevin Cadogan was the manager of the Examiner, and he was very good to me at that time. We were playing gigs in Donegal and places a long way away, and I was invariably late for work on a regular basis, and he never once said a word to me except we were doing some posters on a particular machine, Paddy Cole (from St. Brigid"s Terrace) and myself. Paddy was also a comp, and he used to play sax with the late Dinny Hughes, and Kevin came down and caught the two of us hammering away on the machine.'I had two little sticks and I was playing drums, and Paddy was playing an imaginary saxophone, and when Kevin came, Paddy split, and Kevin said to me: "There"s a lot going on, and I"ve been very lenient". And he said: "You"ve got to make your mind up: the printing or the music". I didn"t tell him at that time, but I had already decided! I"ve met him on several occasions since and we laugh about it.'Leaving the printing, Joe was, he says himself, 'dead cock-sure of myself', and he had absolutely no fear.'I was a qualified printer, and I had my card, so if in six months" time it didn"t work out, I could have applied to any place for a job and I would have had a job.'Before it got to the stage of having to go back looking for a printing job, Joe, along with Tommy Swarbrigg, Joey Gilheaney and some other guys from Mullingar, formed 'The Drifters', and they went ahead and made a second record, and they began getting bookings to play more dates around the country.'We were very typical of the showbands, copying everything in the charts. We didn"t write anything for years. At that time, it was unheard of to do that. We were very good doing what we were doing, and as you know, if something is going well, the last thing you want is to change it. It wasn"t for years that we got into doing original stuff, and we have been doing it since. I co-write a lot of the stuff.'The Drifters started doing original material with an album of original songs, and from that, they released 'Make Me An Island' which brought the band its first taste of international stardom.'A lady called Joey Nicholls from a music publishing company called Shaftesbury came to one of our shows, and she talked to us after it, and said she had some songs in London that might interest us, so we gave her some records, and she brought them back, and rang a few days later to Seamus"s office (Seamus Casey, his manager), and she was very interested, and she had two guys interested in writing for us.'Make Me An Island 'knocked me out', Joe recalls. And it had a somewhat similar effect on the record-buying public. It reached No 3. in the British charts, and it made No. 1 in Holland, Belgium, France, Germany, South Africa, Australia and Spain, and in South Africa, it was 'huge'.'That started us off,' says Joe.After that, there was 'Lady in Blue', which was seven weeks at No. 1 in France, and big in South America, 'but you don"t get any money out of South America', and there were other big hits such as 'More and More', 'Sweet Little Rock and Roller', which was later re-recorded by Showwaddywaddy; 'It"s you it"s you it"s you', and 'Crazy Woman' which was a big hit in France.To RussiaThe band had played their first gig abroad in 1967, two years before the release of 'Make Me An Island', and from then on, they were always on the road, travelling to gigs not just at venues throughout Ireland, but in Britain, and even further afield as well. One of their high points came in 1980, when they made a month-long trip to Russia.'We were bowled over by the enthusiasm of the Russian people,' Joe says. 'They knew our records, even though there are no record sales in Russia, and we were amazed that they knew the songs - and we were doing our own songs.'It"s quite simple though really. We get, even though we"re a little island in the Atlantic, the BBC, and they were listening in to foreign stations, which they weren"t supposed to be doing at the time. And probably they had tape recorders, and would tape the songs. We were there a month and did three places. We were 3-4 days in Hishney, which is in Moldavia; and then up to Moscow for a week, and then eleven days in Leningrad, and the place in Leningrad was an ice rink, and was a huge big place. They took out one thousand seats out of the top of the auditorium to build the stage, and there were nine thousand people there each night.'When Joe himself seeks entertainment, musically, he will listen to anything.'I listen to everything, from Pavarotti to the Sex Pistols, and there isn"t any type of music to which I"d say "turn that off",' he says.It"s a well-known fact that he is an avid golfer, but perhaps not so well known is the fact that he is also a keen snooker fan. Although he"s "terrible at it", he plays it sometimes, and he loves watching in on T.V. But it will never take over from golf as his favourite sport.'Golf is a total passion. I am a member of Mullingar Golf Club, and my clubs are always in the boot of the car.'