Danny Doran recalls his ‘Song for the Millennium’

Danny Doran presents a copy of his Song for the Milleniun to best selling author Alice Taylor who took part in the last of the series of the 'Books Across The Border' community centre at Newry Library.

It has been 25 years since the turn of the Millennium of the 20th Century into the 21st and local musician Danny Doran has reminisced about his award-winning ‘Song for the Millennium’ from that exciting time.

“The Newry and Mourne council ran a competition for the 'Song for the Millennium' which had to be about south Down and south Armagh,” he explained.

“The competition was held in the Canal Court Hotel with 10 different songs all in contention. The prize was £1,000 which was a lot of money 25 years ago.

“I have the song on CD but the council never really pushed it at all. It was a song about Newry and if they had it pushed it, they could have sold copies in England and Australia to Newry people who had emigrated. But it was left to me to push it, and anything we sold, we gave the proceeds to charity.

“It was all done by local people. Max Cunningham from Luv Bug (Ireland’s 1986 Eurovision entry) allowed me to use his studio and the cover photograph was a painting of the Town Hall which was done by Cora Harrington.”

However, whilst Danny did enough to convince the judges that his song was a worthy winner of the prize, he says that some people weren’t too pleased with the outcome.

“I used a line from Jonathan Swift 'high church, low steeple, dirty streets, proud people,” said Danny.

“People said that it was no way to depict Newry by saying it had dirty streets, which they thought related to beer cans and crisp packets, but the line 'dirty streets' come from no cement roads, it was all muck and gutters.”

Danny’s song may be a quarter of a century old now, but his 2002 hit ‘Bring home the Bacon’ was recently brought into the public eye by former boxing world champion Barry McGuigan, who sang the song on ITV’s ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here last autumn.

“Recently, Barry McGuigan was on 'I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here,',” said Danny.

“Barry is a good friend of mine from years ago, because I played with his dad. I wrote a song years ago called 'If you don't bring home the bacon, you'll get treated like a pig' and Barry sang it in the jungle whilst on TV.

“He was on Loose Women then afterwards and they showed his highlights, which included a clip of him singing that song.”

​Danny Doran recalls his ‘Song for the Millennium’

Danny Doran recalls his ‘Song for the Millennium’