A Star Is
Born
Michael Valentine Doonican
was born on 3rd
February 1927, the youngest of eight children. He became
known as Val because,
growing up in Waterford on the South East Coast of
Ireland, there were too many
Michaels, Mikes and Mickeys around for him to be
instantly identifiable.
Val often talks about the
great happiness of his
childhood – his ‘Special Years’. However, his family
were poor and he
shared a room with his three brothers: his four sisters
slept on the other side
of a partition wall and his parents in the living room.
When Val was still
young, one of his sisters contracted TB, forcing her to
move into their
parents’ room, and Val’s father to move into a shed at
the end of the
garden. This eccentric arrangement continued until Val
was fourteen, when his
father died, but enabled him to spend a great deal of
‘quality time’ with
his dad.
Many of the young Mr
Doonican’s favourite
moments arose from long country walks with his father,
who would walk down the
road, book in hand whilst the young Val foraged in the
hedgerows, occasionally
returning to his father’s side in order to take a sweet
from his pocket. They
would pick watercress to make sandwiches and boil up
baby potatoes, making the
most delicious meals Val had tasted. However, there were
also darker times
waiting for his father to leave the pub barely able to
stand and having lavished
most of his weekly wage packet on alcohol. In fact,
despite working in many bars
and nightclubs, Val remained virtually teetotal until
middle age.
When Val was fourteen, his
world was shattered by
his father’s death from cancer of the throat and mouth.
Val felt unable to
attend the funeral, and shortly afterwards felt
compelled to leave school in
order to help support the family. He had been a
reasonable scholar, but left
without qualifications and had to take a job assembling
crates at the orange box
factory where his father and older brothers had worked –
something which he
says would almost certainly have disappointed his father
greatly.
However, Val had been writing
and arranging music
from a very young age, harmonising his friends’ versions
of the songs they saw
performed on film by the likes of Gene Autry. Among
other achievements, Val took
part in Waterford’s first ever television broadcast,
together with his
faithful guitar. His first ‘professional’ engagement
came with his friend
Mickey Brennan at the Waterford Fete – singing ‘We’re
Three Caballeros!’
Almost inevitably, it would now seem, Val met up with
another musician, Bruce
Clarke, and left the factory to tour Ireland with Bruce
in a caravan. Val,
though, was earning his keep by playing house-keeper.
Eventually, Val joined a
band, this time as
drummer, despite never having played drums before! He
stayed with the
band for six months, despite being sacked for blowing
his nose during a set and
reinstated almost instantly because no-one else owned
any drum sticks. From the
drums, Val found a job – again with Bruce Clarke –
playing guitar and
performing general duties on the seafront in Bray,
County Wicklow. It was here
that he and Bruce were spotted by Niall Boden (an Irish
Terry Wogan of the
time!!!) and, with a bass player, given work on Radio
Eierann advertising
Donnelly’s Sausages to the tune of the Mexican Hat
Dance… a plug that he continued to sing at his concerts
until he retired!
Seventeen
Years To Become an
overnight success
In 1951, still touring
Ireland with Bruce
Clarke’s band, Val was approached by representatives of
the Four Ramblers and
invited to join them in England, where they are best
remembered for ‘Riders of
the Range’ on BBC Radio. They also presented Workers’
Playtime, their
salaries augmented by gifts from the factories whence
the broadcast was being
made. Looking forward to his first free products, Val
found that his 'Playtime'
debut was in a corset factory! It is not recorded
whether he made use of
the proffered samples on this occasion!!
His time with the Four
Ramblers introduced Val to
the joys of golf, honed his professional singing skills
and arrangements, and
led to the tour that was to revolutionise his life…
Val had bought himself an amplifier for his guitar, into which had gone most of his savings. Making a case to protect the amplifier, he used an old theatre poster advertising one Lynnette Rae, at the time more famous than Val, who was re-building her career after an operation for throat cancer (ironically, the disease that had killed his father). Having used her as his amp’s guardian angel, Val finally met Lynnette when both she and the Ramblers supported the late Anthony Newley on tour. For the first time in his life, Val fell in love. He and Lynn married in the early 1960s, and are the parents to two grown-up daughters, Sarah and Fiona.
Whilst on that particular tour, Anthony Newley held a birthday party. All the acts had to perform, but not in their usual roles. Thus, singers did impressions and comedy turns, with Lynn regaling the audience as an impressionist. The Four Ramblers did not have another ‘turn’ and Val stepped forward, guitar in hand, and perched on a stool and singing a couple of ballads and ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat.’ At the end of his performance, Anthony Newley suggested that his solo spot was more commercially marketable than the Ramblers act and urged Val to ‘go solo’.
Thus, he left the group and
started a more lonely
professional life as Val Doonican – solo singer.
And The
Rest Is History
Val secured a radio programme
on Wednesdays with
the BBC ‘Light Programme’ – the precursor to Radio 2,
and embarrassed the
announcers terribly with some of his song titles (well,
you try announcing the
next song as ‘Quit Kickin’ My Dog Around’ with a
straight face). This led
to him linking his own material at a time when regional
accents were almost
unknown at the BBC. However, Val’s surname was still not
known to his
listeners - the powers-that-be in Broadcasting House
having decided that the
general public would never remember a complicated
surname like Doonican!
Val continued to play cabaret
and occasional
theatre gigs but despite being a regular radio
personality, no recording
contracts were forthcoming for him. He was spotted at a
concert by Val Parnell,
who at that time arranged the acts for ‘Sunday Night at
the London
Palladium’, booked onto the show and performed an eight
minute spot that, he
says, changed his life. By the Monday, there were
recording contracts and TV
show offers flooding his manager’s office. Truly,
as Val said many
times, he was 'an overnight success after
seventeen years.'
Val recorded over fifty
albums,
sales of which register in the millions, and he his fans
live all over the world. He
charted many times with both singles and albums,
appearing on ‘Top of the
Pops’ to sing hits such as ‘Walk
Tall’, ‘The
Special
Years’, ‘What Would I Be’, and ‘Elusive
Butterfly’. His TV shows
ran for twenty four years, from humble beginnings
opposite ‘Coronation
Street’ on Thursday nights, which he says enabled him to
iron out the mistakes
without the pressure of a large audience, to being the
mainstay of the Saturday
night TV schedules for many years. Val’s Christmas Eve
shows became a national
institution and are fondly remembered even by those who
would not consider
themselves to be fans.
Val continued to tour and
perform until 2009,
but as he told the web site during his
interview,
he was fortunate enough to be able to pick and choose
his concerts during the latter years of his career.
Val passed away peacefully on
1 July 2015. He will be greatly missed by his many
friends and fans. Val is survived by his wife
Lynn, daughters Sarah and Fiona, and grandchildren
Bethany and Scott.