Those were Mary’s days
QUESTION
What became of Welsh singer Mary Hopkin after she was beaten by Dana at the 1970 Eurovision Song Contest?
AFTER appearing on ITV talent show Opportunity Knocks, Welsh folk singer Mary Hopkin was spotted by fashion model Twiggy, who phoned Paul McCartney.
He signed her to The Beatles’ new Apple record label and the single Those Were The Days was a massive hit in 1968. It was a sixweek UK chart-topper and was only kept off the US Number One spot by The Beatles’ Hey Jude.
Hopkin’s 1970 Eurovision entry for the UK, Knock, Knock, Who’s There?, was beaten into second place by Ireland’s entry – Dana’s All Kinds Of Everything. Hopkin later admitted she loathed her song. ‘I was so embarrassed about it. Standing on a stage singing a song you hate is awful,’ she said.
This was followed by two minor hits: Think About Your Children, which reached No. 19 in the UK in 1970, and Let My Name Be Sorrow, which got to No. 46 in 1971.
That year, Hopkin married US record producer Tony Visconti, who became famous for producing David Bowie and T. Rex.
She left the music business to raise her two children, cutting ties with Apple a year later. However, she continued to make music and recorded a BBC TV special on July 29, 1972. Signed to Good Earth, her single If You Love Me reached No. 32 in March 1976. She and Visconti divorced in 1981.
Hopkin has continued to produce music sporadically. She joined 1980s group Oasis with Peter Skellern and Julian Lloyd Webber, and their self-titled album reached No. 23 in the UK charts.
In 1990 and 1999, she toured with The Chieftains, going on to release Valentine in 2001, Retrospective in 2008 and Now And Then in 2009, which largely consisted of unreleased old recordings. She recorded new material for 2013’s Painting By Numbers.
On August 30, 2018, she brought out an EP that included a new version of Those Were The Days to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
Tim Mickleburgh, Grimsby, Lincs.
QUESTION
Were there any fashion labels of note operating in this country during the early part of the 20th century?
DURING the early years of the 20th century, many fashion labels existed, but they tended to reflect the names of stores, rather than the products themselves.
Dublin and other cities had large department stores. In Dublin city centre, they included Arnotts, Brown Thomas, Clerys, Lee’s, Pim’s and Switzers. They all promoted a wide range of women’s fashions, but the labels were generic to those stores, rather than to the items themselves.
Women tended to buy corsets, hats, gowns and whatever other clothing and fashion items they needed by the name of their favourite department store, rather than by fashion label.
However, there were signs of brand names, as we know them today, emerging.
The Blackrock Hosiery Company was renowned for its underwear, which it sold under the ‘Rock’ label, while another Dublin firm, McCreas, marketed its collars for men under the unfortunate brand name ‘Bullet’.
Probably the best-known fashion name of the time was that of Smyths in Balbriggan. The firm was founded in 1780. By the start of the 20th century, its hosiery was known in many export markets.
Indeed, the open work stockings the company made had been favoured by Queen Victoria and the Tsarina of Russia. Smyths of
Balbriggan had become a fashion label renowned for its quality.
Other manufacturers became synonymous with their products.
Ireland once had a substantial shoe-making industry. Firms included Winstanley’s in Dublin, which started in 1875 and lasted almost a century. O’Callaghan’s Shoes in Limerick lasted even longer, starting in 1830 and surviving until 1966.
Another famous firm whose name was its fashion label was the Dublin company Thomas Elliott & Sons, which made silk and poplin products from 1872 until it went out of business in the 1970s.
In the early years of the 20th century, the City Woollen Mills in Dublin made a product called Rialto Serge. These were the days when serge was a very popular product. Rather unusually, this brand was promoted as a fashion label in its own right.
Big-name fashion labels had been slow to develop in Ireland, despite the revival of interest in everything Irish in the early 20th century.
The creations of noted fashion labels, as we know them today, such as Burberry coats, tended to come from London or Paris and could only be afforded by a small section of the population.
Fashion labels for men were even less prominent. Kennedy & McSharry, a men’s outfitters in Dublin city centre that closed towards the end of 2012, used to sell a brand of coats for men called Peltinvain. But that fashion label has long since disappeared into obscurity, as has the shop itself.
While fashion labels were slow to develop, a century ago, brand names in food were becoming much more recognisable.
Brands such as Bovril, Cadbury and Jacob’s were all well known and are still going strong today.
It wasn’t until the Fianna Fáil government came to power in 1932 that the imposition of tariff barriers encouraged the development of local industry. That meant more fashion labels being made locally.
Charles Worth opened a dressmaking shop in Paris in 1858 and became the first designer to put labels inside his clothing. It was a revolutionary step, but only for the rich, and it took another 80 years before the idea became universal in Ireland.
Tom Burrows, Co. Dublin.
QUESTION
Why does the TV volume vary from programme to programme and channel to channel, from barely audible to deafening?
BROADCAST media over air, satellite or cable distributes programming as received from programme makers. The quality of sound can depend on the recording media, sound engineering and mixing. International TV standards organisations have established an algorithm to measure the perceived loudness of programmes.
However, within these parameters, programme makers can play about with sound modulation, manipulating the amplitude, frequency, phase and pulse duration of the carrier wave. An orchestra playing a waltz and a heavy metal band thrashing out a song at the same audio power level will give you a sense of sound modulation.
Advertisers have been accused of manipulating the audio modulation of commercials so they are much louder than programmes. Films shown on TV can be an issue because they have been mixed for the cinema.
Modern flat-screen TVs are so thin that there is not enough interior volume to produce sufficient sound, hence the popularity of stand-alone sound bars.
Paul Smith, Basingstoke, Hants.