Music with Eddie Rowley

JOE Dolan was Ireland’s answer to Elvis, a showband legend who became an international superstar with hits like ‘Make Me An Island’.

But his 82-year-old brother Ben recalls that in the early days back in the 1960s Joe and himself struggled to get their band on the road.

Ben, the business brains behind the group, decided at the time that they needed to splash out on a minibus in order to progress.

Joe, whose hits include ‘It’s You, It’s You, It’s You’, was then working as an apprentice printer with his local Mullingar-based newspaper, The Westmeath Examiner, while Ben was employed as a carpenter.

Money was tight, so for weeks Ben would save some of their earnings from gigs to pay for the band’s bus.

And he stashed the cash in a piano his mother had bought for Joe, who was the youngest in the family.

Ben eventually saved up €200, and a couple of weeks later he decided to go searching for a suitable minibus.

When he went to retrieve the cash from the piano, however, he was horrified to discover that a mouse had shredded it!

“It was just like confetti,” Ben recalls. “At first I thought it was Joe acting the balls and playing a trick. But then I realised it was obviously a mouse.

“So I had to start from scratch to get the money together. Meanwhile, Joe set a trap for the mouse and we caught the little fecker.”

Ben, who now tours the country with a tribute show, My Brother Joe, has a treasure trove of humorous anecdotes about his life and times with the late, great Joe who died in 2007.

And a new album, called Orchestrated, featuring a collection of Joe Dolan’s hits performed by the RTE Concert Orchestra with Joe’s unmistakable vocals, has just been released by Universal Music.