‘I came to the point of a complete breakdown’
Dana has gone from music to politics and back again. Both have had their share of hard lessons, she tells Craig Mclean
Dana Rosemary Scallon has been through, it’s fair to say, all kinds of everything in the half century since becoming the biggest teenage singing star in the world. “I lose track of the years,” she says quietly, sitting in the comfortable front room of her very comfortable home in the countryside in County Galway. And no wonder.
The terrible events of Bloody Sunday happening right on the London-born Irishwoman’s Derry doorstep; a soaraway pop career, a cancer scare and two unsuccessful bids for the Irish presidency. And now, at the age of 68, another – gentle – attempt at something like a pop career for the woman known to a generation as Dana with a new album, My Time. “I felt like I was finding myself,” she says tearfully.
But before all that, there was victory in the 1970 Eurovision Song Contest. The shy 18-year-old schoolgirl was a 100-1 outsider at the competition in Amsterdam, up against Spain’s Julio Iglesias and the UK’S Mary Hopkin, who was signed to the same record label as The Beatles.
“I was in awe of her – she looked like an angel,” sighs this elegant, well-preserved woman who worries about her (nigh-invisible) wrinkles showing in The Daily Telegraph’s photographs. “To be standing beside somebody you really loved, [it] was an unbelievable dream.”
In the end it was Hopkin who, backstage, convinced the momentarily distracted Dana that she had won with the syrupy-sweet All Kinds of Everything. The victory of the girl who had paused her A-level revision to take part was watched by 200million television viewers around the world.
“I was in total shock,” Dana admits, eyes-widening at the memory, though adds that the subsequent scrutiny was “very difficult”. Suddenly, she was a pop star, with a schedule to match, “sometimes you’d be in three countries in one day,” she recalls. Complicating things, her manager was trying to isolate her from her family.
“Eventually, I definitely came to the point of a complete breakdown. This wasn’t years afterwards,” she clarifies, “it was only about six, seven, eight months after. And I ran away. I just got up in the middle of the night, put on two coats, walked out into a completely dark, country road and got a lift to a friends’ house in Belfast.”
We’re talking in the comfortably posh villa Dana shares with Damien, her husband of 41 years, in the flatlands of the west of Ireland, an hour’s drive from Shannon airport. Her youngest son, one of her four children, is on hand with a colleague, filming footage for a documentary to mark next year’s 50th anniversary of her Eurovision victory.
Dana’s Seventies were hectic and international, so much so that she’s unsure whether she was at home in Derry on Jan 30 1972, the day of Bloody Sunday, when British Paratroopers shot dead 14 civilians on a protest march.
“That was right where we used to live. The people living above my mother, she knew very, very well. Terrible tragedies,” she says quietly in her soft speaking voice, “ongoing tragedies.”
She was a reluctant performer, but she had a talent that put her on the music stage. What, then, made her want to get political? Dana, from a mixed Protestant and Catholic background, replies that she “always had a heart for the underdog; for the person who wasn’t being listened to. So I had a profile and I could speak.”
Her five years in Brussels as an independent and member of the European People’s Party between 1999 and 2004 were “hard work” and “a steep learning curve,” she says. But sometimes her former life came in handy. One time she needed to urgently speak to a commissioner regarding road links in the west of Ireland, but his diary was always fully booked. Eventually she buttonholed his personal secretary with a note.
“And he stopped. ‘Are you Dana? Did you win Eurovision? What day and what time would you like to meet him?’ He didn’t even read my note. He was just a huge Eurovision fan,” she hoots. “I just thought, ‘Oh my God, is this a full circle or what?’”
Any sign of the alleged Brussels gravy train that has led us to three years of Brexit stasis? “When I was there they were in high gear, heading towards a federalised Europe. We had more legislation coming through than in the previous 30 years.”
As to which is the dirtiest business, music or politics, and her answer is unequivocal. “Politics,” she replies before I’ve even finished the sentence. “Showbusiness is competitive and can be very tough. But if you fall, somebody will help you up, because creative people generally support each other. If you fall in politics, they’re going to trample all over you. And as I was surprised to learn, it’s people in your own party who’ll be the first to trample on you.
“Definitely politics is a cut-throat, dirty business,” she concludes with feeling. As well as she might. She was on the receiving end of false accusations that, during her first abortive run for the Irish presidency in 1997, she was actually an American citizen, the result of she and her husband’s extended residency there earlier that decade, which she says “was proved to be a complete lie”. “I would really love that people could just judge me as the person – just a person – and the music.
“That’s been a really ... hard thing,” she continues.
And one made more difficult when you have a political career, and one characterised with robust views informed by Christian faith. Dana has spoken out against samesex marriage, and against abortion and reproductive rights. In an era when Ireland has a gay Taoiseach, and same-sex marriage has been legalised, has her position on that issue softened?
‘If you fall in politics they’re going to trample all over you… and it’s the people in your own party who will be the first’
“We’re all individuals and he’ll be judged as a Taoiseach. As far as marriage is concerned, I have gay friends who are married, I have gay friends who don’t believe that they need to be married. I just try to let people live their lives.”
We’re speaking a couple of weeks before Northern Ireland’s Stormont assembly voted to decriminalise abortion after a 158-year ban. But on that topic, Dana seems unwavering.
“I’ve always described myself as pro-life. It’s just a human rights issue for me. I don’t believe in the death penalty. I’ve seen the loss of life in war. And for me, every human being is precious. Whether that’s the unborn child, or the mother, or an elderly person. But I don’t see myself as anti anything. I see myself as being aware of the fact that every life is important and precious.”
Some things, then, remain unchanged. One of those is the purity of her singing voice. Anyone who was charmed by 18-year-old Dana singing All Kinds of Everything will be equally charmed by My Time.
“This record was like finding myself. And I just hope people will just let me be myself.”