Displaced in Mullingar: Drinking his mug of tea in the chipper was the virtuoso of the reeking, heaving ballrooms, recalls Michael Harding

I was in Cavan town last week for my first bag of chips of the New Year. Every Friday I go there and dine on succulently battered cod in the Roma Cafe on Bridge Street, and think about Auntie Agnes, who had a ladies' shop next door, and my grandmother, who lived nearby. And Mr Donoghue, who once brought me to Bakers Bridge and taught me to fish.

Long before the Italians came to town, there was a chipper called the Central Cafe, a place of beautiful Formica and stainless steel, where the owner, a man with gold bracelets and black curling hair, spoke to his wife in a foreign language as he tossed the chips of potato in the boiling oil, under our noses. The Central Cafe was a kind of Paradiso in the middle of Bridge Street.

One night I stepped inside the tinkling door and saw Joe Dolan in the corner talking to another man. I was astonished. I could barely eat the plate of chips or the fried egg, which was my usual feast of fancy before the rigours of jiving around the sports centre for two hours with girls who worked in Lisdarn Hospital.

Joe wore no white suit in the chipper, just a brown overcoat. And he drank tea and spoke in mundane tones. He was not lit up in lights, or dressed in glitter. He was just having a mug of tea. But when he walked out the door, he said "how's it going?" as he passed by my table.

And I said, "Great, Joe! Great! See ya later!", as if by some ludicrous transfiguration I had entered the clouds on which Joe Dolan's feet floated, long before the time of the white suits. As if, from among the yokels cramming the smoky sports centre later that night, Joe might pick me out and say something like: "Nice to see you again, young fella, this next song is for you!" In fact, to confess the truth, I bragged to a girl from Drumavaddy that I had been in the company of the great virtuoso earlier in the evening. I did not say we were at separate tables.

Joe did do something special for me, and for thousands of other ordinary teenagers who were as dull as ditchwater with accents that would be scoffed at in any well-heeled society. Joe transfigured us in our ordinary lust, and in our shambolic indecency, as we rummaged behind the walls of country dancehalls for an intimacy as improbable as the boulevards of Pigalle.

In those days Joe sweated a lot, and often went backstage to change his shirt during a show. Not that sweating was unusual in the late 1960s. Everyone did it. The Macra na Feirme brigade regularly danced in shirts lined right down the spine with a wide stain of human perspiration. Girls wiped their brows with the back of their hands as they waltzed with farmers, who would press their lips to scented ears and whisper: "There's quare heat in here tonight." In the carnival tent in Lavey, I often swam in a heaving swell of culchies, well-scrubbed with carbolic soaps and Old Spice aftershave, hoping to penetrate the fog of unsubtle perfumes that hung in a cloud over the squashed girls, penned on one side of the tent like frightened geese.

I thought smoking Major was boldly sensual, as I quickstepped on floors sprung from beneath with tractor tyres. I had as much erotic style as a calf galloping through a haze of warble flies, with heels and straps and buckles spinning around me.

There were many nights when, as a jiving, lanky boy with a mop of unconditioned hair, I felt completely ridiculous.

But never when Joe was on stage; his arms outstretched, and his voice hitting high notes with a swanky confidence, and reminding me that "if you love her, you must tell her". I often went into the Central Cafe and sat in the same seat as Joe had occupied, and listened to his music on the jukebox because, more than anyone else, he made a gawky and inarticulate teenager feel great.

His voice from the jukebox of the Central Cafe reached out to a generation of lonely boys with pimpled faces. And we dreamed that we might have the pluck to sing like him, some dark night in the rain.

"Oh, this aching, breaking heart of mine is crazy over you . . . and I'm afraid, to let you know."