Each week we will highlight one artist from Paddy McCarthy’s regular Music And Entertainment Guide for your reading pleasure. To read the full weekly guide, visit our ePaper.
As you can see this week in our Music Page I like to give you the inside scoop on old and new entertainment with most of it Irish connected. Here we go with a man that was bigger than Frank Sinatra in England and Ireland and came all the way from Waterford, Ireland. His name is Val Donnican.
Doonican was born on 3 February 1927 in Waterford, Ireland the youngest of the eight children of Agnes (née Kavanagh) and John Doonican. He was from a musical family and played in his school band from the age of six In 1941 when he was a teenager his father died, so he had to leave De La Salle College Waterford, to get factory jobs fabricating steel and making orange and grapefruit boxes
He began to perform in his hometown, often with his friend Bruce Clarke, and they had their first professional engagement as a duo in 1947. Doonican appeared in a summer season at Courtown Harbor, County Wexford.
He soon featured on Irish radio, sometimes with Clarke, and appeared in Waterford’s first-ever television broadcast. Then he played the drums in a band on a tour through Ireland.
An Irish singer of traditional pop, easy listening, and novelty songs, who was noted for his warm and relaxed style he found popular success, especially in the United Kingdom where he had five successive Top 10 albums in the 1960s as well as several hits on the UK Singles Chart, including “If the Whole World Stopped Lovin'”, “Walk Tall” and “Elusive Butterfly”.
The Val Doonican Show, which featured his singing and a variety of guests, had a long and successful run on BBC Television from 1965 to 1986, and Doonican won the Variety Club of Great Britain’s BBC-TV Personality of the Year award three times.
Doonican died at a nursing home in Buckinghamshire on 1 July 2015, aged 88 His daughter Sarah told The Guardian: “Until 87, he was as fit as a flea. It was just old age, I’m afraid — the batteries ran out. RIP.